Monday, March 11, 2002

A few days ago Chinese authorities turned the power of the state against a small home for the aged in a suburb of Beijing. This nursing home, this threat to order and stability in the People's Republic of China, provided shelter to nine men and women in their eighties and nineties, a blind man and a disabled man.

The leader of the home, himself a septuagenarian, had officiated at a small Christian service under a tent outside the house. And so police cut off the electricity, levied a large fine and threatened to cut off the water too unless the house evicted its residents and shut down.

You read such stories -- this one was reported in the New York Times -- and it's not so much the arbitrariness and petty cruelty that get your attention. Far greater numbers have suffered far more harshly at the hands of China's Communists.

What takes your breath away instead is the sheer insecurity of China's rulers. They bully a bunch of helpless old invalids, and you think: Why are they so afraid?

This is, after all, the world's most populous country, one of its oldest and greatest civilizations, by universal acclamation a rising power, with an economy that grows by an officially reported 7 percent or 8 percent every year. Yet its leaders seem spooked by shadows. The State Department's annual report on human rights in China, released last week, is dispassionate in its language, but from its dry recitations of detentions, tortures, exiles and house arrests a list of enemies of the state emerges that is breathtaking in its scope and in their mildness: Tibetan musicologists, elderly Catholic bishops, peacefully protesting relatives of Tiananmen massacre victims, American academics, muckraking journalists, Falun Gong [practitioners] who only want to practice their spiritual breathing exercises.

Of the three most monstrous totalitarian experiments of the 20th century, only one survived into the 21st without a change of ruling party. The Nazis were defeated from outside, the Soviet Union by internal rebellion. The Communists of China meanwhile held onto power by abandoning their ideology, permitting more personal freedom and ruthlessly suppressing any challenge, real or imagined, to their political control.

In some ways their efforts have succeeded. Recovering from the lunatic years of forced collectivization and Cultural Revolution, China has regained a large measure of normality. Freer to choose their spouses, their professions and their places of residence, millions of Chinese have responded by creating new wealth and finding areas of personal fulfillment where the state no longer interferes.

But in embracing greed as a motivating force without accepting an impartial rule of law as a moderating influence, China has opened itself to a danger that its leaders may not be able to control: corruption, described in a recent Post report from the northeast city of Shenyang as "the rot that has infected the Chinese state."

No political system is immune to graft, theft and influence-peddling; stories from democratic datelines such as Rome, Tokyo or Annapolis tell you that from time to time elected officials can compete with all but the most brazen authoritarian ones in ripping off the public. But those stories also tell you that, over time, the mechanisms of democracy -- elections, checks and balances, a free press -- tend to make the system self-correcting.

The same isn't clearly so in China. Post correspondent John Pomfret's report from Shenyang portrays Communist Party officials looting the public treasury without fear. A deputy mayor gambled away $4 million in public funds in Macao and Las Vegas. "Corruption in Shenyang involved almost every government department and ran the gamut from smuggling, to buying and selling official positions, to stealing farmland for big development projects, to rigging construction contracts, to basic theft from government coffers," Pomfret found.

But even when the crime became so uncontrolled that authorities in Beijing had to act, there was no clean sweep. Though some officials were fired, most of the party apparatus in Shenyang was untouched, while whistleblowers went to jail: a journalist, sentenced to nine years; a 71-year-old retired official, sent to a labor camp for two. In the end, there's no way to combine real accountability with one-party rule.

Which brings you back to the fear at the top. As China's leaders wrestle with corruption and other problems of development, such as unemployment, rising expectations, fraying social safety nets and rural poverty, they will continually struggle to justify rule by a Communist Party that no longer believes in communism.

One possible outcome is that they will lose control, and China will fracture in some way or become increasingly lawless; anyone even sketchily familiar with Chinese history can only shudder at that prospect. A second possibility is the development of something like national socialism, in which the party maintains its control by manipulating hyper-nationalism and foreign expansion: Shudder again.

If a third, more welcome option of political liberalization is ever to become imaginable, it will depend on a thickening of civic society -- on precisely the kinds of people that the party is continually silencing, and the kinds of organizations that it will not tolerate. Those who speak out on behalf of such victims are routinely vilified by China's government as unpatriotic and "anti-Chinese." But they are the true patriots, for they understand that China's hope rests in Christian preachers, environmental activists, union organizers and everyone else unafraid of bullies.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5779-2002Mar10.html