China rising, rising, rising
The Communist Party of China marks its centennial in July. In this dispatch compiled from travels before the pandemic, Satya Brata Das reflects on the country it shaped. A longer version appears in the book Us (Sextant, 2019).
Shanghai
In the wildly fashionable district of Xintiandi, the aromas and tastes are far more evocative of Paris or Barcelona than any classical face of China the imagination may evoke. This was once France, of course, the French concession that was forbidden territory to Chinese inhabitants, part of the terrible reckoning the English and French brought with them in a particularly brutal application of colonialism in the 19th century.
The Anglo French expeditionary force led by Lord Elgin — Sikhs and Tamils from India among them — looted and vandalised the cultural patrimony of China. On 18 October 1860, the British expeditionary force occupying Beijing set ablaze the Yuanming Yuan, the summer palace of Chinese imperium: after having stripped the compound of untold riches that continue to adorn the museums of Britain and France, and to fund the inheritance of the looters’ descendants.
This was a prelude to the colonial drug trade, the so-called Opium Wars in which the governments of Britain and France became wealthy (the rapacious equal of any Central American cartel warlord of the present) by enslaving millions of Chinese in addiction, fuelled by the opium poppies they grew on the Indian subcontinent.
That past is only evident in the utilitarian grace of the old industrial buildings and the occasional merchant’s house which bespeak a concerted effort to implant a piece of French prosperity on the other side of the world. On a balmy summer afternoon, there is a spattering of foreign faces amid the unending sea of Shanghainese taking the Sunday air with children in tow.
All the material bounty of western life is here: from the leg of authentic Iberian ham ($30 for 100 grams, thank you very much!) displayed prominently on a carving table fronting a tapas bar; next to a modern Thai bistro sporting the name and logo of the American bus line Greyhound (don’t ask!); to a pizzeria across the road with Roman, Florentine and Neapolitan styles of pizza listed separately on the menu and tankards of draught beer delivered directly in kegs from Germany and the Netherlands.
In between are a score of boutiques with designer offerings aimed at Shanghai’s
burgeoning upper middle class (the Tesla dealership is down the road, next to a Bose shop offering high-end audio); never mind that much on offer is absurdly beyond the means of a middle-class westerner. Even so, there is an incongruity here. Barely 50 metres away, across the road from a modern Canadian flagship, a lululemon boutique, there are two solid 19th century stone buildings that are completely immune from commerce. One can imagine a Michelin-starred restaurant in the space, or a collection of designer storefronts. But that will never come to pass.
In these buildings is a museum commemorating the birthplace of the wealthiest and most powerful entity on the planet today, an institution that has seamlessly married the wealth-generating capacity of capitalism to the robust social control of the authoritarian state: the Communist Party of China. It is perhaps an evolution completely beyond the imagining of its founders: the Chinese intellectuals (with a Russian and a Dutchman among them) who in these buildings on 23 July 1921 met to organise the Communist Party of China.
There is a striking portrait of a young Mao Zedong from those days, long before
he became the addled ruler in whose name a cabal of sinister revolutionaries launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the mid 1960s: a pogrom of educated and capable Chinese which fomented unprecedented chaos. The Mao of the photograph radiates intelligence and determination, the eyes piercing yet thoughtful, determined that the party with its embrace of Marxism and Leninism would free China from the feudal yoke of colonial masters working hand-in-glove with pitiless warlords.
It is difficult to conceive that the Mao of that era would recognise the Shanghai of today, a place of dizzying modernity and technological prowess that rose from the ashes of the Cultural Revolution and powered ahead with breathtaking rapidity in the years after Mao’s death. Indeed, as they met furtively in that windowless building in the French Concession, it is difficult to conceive that they could have foreseen the Xintiandi of today, let alone a China that bestrides the world as an economic colossus, investing $700 billion a year — roughly what the United States spends yearly on its global military reach — in the critical public infrastructure of countries whose resources it covets.
With no trace of irony, China’s leader, Xi Jinping sees this stunning evolution as the culmination of the socialist principles that underpin Chinese communism, and swears fidelity to the principles of Karl Marx (see what the party of workers can do when they control the means of production!). Indeed, Xi posits China’s progress as a rebound from the humiliation of the opium wars and China’s enslavement — of which the 99-year lease of Hong Kong was a by-product — even as a state-directed command economy churns out unprecedented wealth and an ever-rising standard of living that has pulled 850 million Chinese people out of poverty.
Indeed, according to the World Bank’s 2018 report Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018, which used economic data from 2015, fewer than one percent of Chinese — actually 0.7 per cent — live in absolute poverty: lacking the ability to feed, clothe or shelter themselves. The same report shows that in the United States, 1.2 per cent of people live in absolute poverty. Since Deng Xiaoping launched China’s economic reforms in 1981, freedom from want has become a reality for hundreds of millions of Chinese.
To put economies into a comparable perspective, the World Bank measures economic wealth using “purchasing power parity.” Conventional measures of economic output are based on a currency’s value relative to the U.S. dollar.
Purchasing power measures, or PPP, compare the purchasing power of the currency as opposed to its value against the U.S dollar. By this measure, China was the world’s largest national economy in 2017 and 2018, according to both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. China was followed in the top 10 by the United States, India, Japan, Germany, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, and France.
China further profits from its rapidly-developing economic alliance with some of these leading economies in a grouping called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) which coordinates policies and activities to build greater prosperity. This includes the New Development Bank (NDB) launched with $50 billion in working capital, led by the Indian banker K.V. Kamath, who intends to allocate up to 60 per cent of that fund for renewable energy projects.
In fact, China’s unstoppable pursuit of an “all of the above” energy policy, guided by state-led investments, makes it one of the world’s leading clean-tech innovators, even as it remains one of the world’s leading polluters.
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For all the technological marvels and the tangible gains of freedom from want, there is a distinct difference from the other Asian behemoth: the equally-polluted and equally challenged India, which has been demonstrably less successful in lifting people from poverty. The missing element in China is political freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to dissent. In the current iteration of Chinese governance, these are known as the roots of instability, a threat to the safe, peaceful and ever more prosperous life citizens enjoy.
To drive home the point, China’s media need to do nothing more than run daily articles from international media on the further impoverishment of the poor and marginalised in the United States, alongside the myriad reports on the inchoate actions of a reality-show huckster who gained the U.S. presidency in 2017.
And the fickleness of unfettered democracy is amply illustrated by straightforward reporting on the chaos of Brexit: where a deceitful referendum on breaking Britain from the European union was won by a bare majority, even though it is clear such a rupture will impoverish Britons and imperil their standard of living for decades to come.
The quotidian chaos of the American president, and the supine fecklessness of the British leadership, need no embellishment to reinforce the view that China’s political stability is far preferable to the caprices of democracy.
Furthermore, as I saw in Hong Kong in 2014 during the civil disobedience of the umbrella revolution, the band of determined protesters who still occupied central Hong Kong to claim a pure form of democracy (one that never existed under British colonial rule, and is nowhere to be seen in the largest democratic countries) are today considered troublesome Utopians in the face of surging Chinese prosperity.
Even though there is an abundance of motorbikes and scooters amid the luxury cars of Shanghai, one cannot readily conceive that the modern denizens of this city would swap the life they have for one infused with turmoil in the name of free speech and free assembly.
The fear of instability is a direct result of upheavals few of us in liberal democracies can imagine: first, the two decades of civil war, interrupted only by the existential fight against Japanese invaders, which finally ended in 1949. Followed by an even greater calamity: the cataclysm of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which began in the mid-1960s, where being smart and accomplished was a crime, and the so-called revolution of the common people reduced everyone to the lowest common denominator.
The apocalyptic darkness of the Cultural Revolution left deep scars. And led to continued repression of democracy movements that challenged the power of the state. Which is why the grand bargain offered by the Communist Party prevails. It is the social contract established after the military crackdown on the 1989 uprising demanding a freer polity in dozens of Chinese cities (culminating in the killing of protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square by elite security forces, after ordinary soldiers refused to shoot at their compatriots). It is simply this: don’t involve yourself in questioning the authority of the state, and we will give you an ever higher standard of living.
This social contract has one significant point of dissent: the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
In June 2019, mass demonstrations filled the streets of Hong Kong, protesting a proposed extradition law that would allow Hong Kongers to be sent to Greater China to answer serious crimes committed outside the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The legislation arose from the case of a young man accused of (and confessing to) strangling his girlfriend while holidaying in Taiwan, and stuffing her body into a pink suitcase. To the minds of the protesters, this would open the door for the Mainland to extradite any Hong Kong resident on any pretext. The Hong Kong government of Carrie Lam withdrew the bill, yet the protests devolved into anarchy.
On 1 July 2019, the 22nd anniversary of the territory’s return to Chinese control after 99 years of British rule, masked and helmeted rioters stormed the legislative council, defaced paintings, spray painted slogans, smashed the glass windows. Riot police withdrew in the face of the violence; returning later to clear out the crowds with tear gas.
One should imagine whether the police response would have been similar, if violent rioters stormed the United States Capitol, the British Houses of Parliament, or the Parliament of India. Even so, there were calls in Hong Kong for an investigation of police brutality. And a demand for absolute freedom of a type that exists in none of the world’s democracies.
Sadly for the millions of non-violent residents who want to secure continuing, meaningful participation in their own governance — at a minimum, to strengthen and protect their multi-party democracy and legislature — the anarchist outburst lends even further justification for future repression.
The choice facing those Hong Kongers who yearn for both economic well being and full democratic freedoms is fraught indeed. About a fifth of them live in poverty — a far higher proportion than their compatriots across the border in the Pearl River delta — due to astronomical housing costs and a severe shortage of affordable housing.
Many low-wage residents live in illegally subdivided flats, sometimes with two or three people sharing a six-square-metre space with barely enough room to move. The only thing preventing them from moving to neighbouring Guangdong province is to seek better economic prospects, they would have to give up the freedom of speech and freedom of assembly they treasure.
Life in Hong Kong became even bleaker for the protest movement on 21 July 2019, when white-clad members of the criminal underworld, the triad gangs that run most illegal activities, attacked demonstrators with batons. Protesters were beaten to the point of requiring stitches, while the police were slow to intervene: claiming their resources were stretched to the limit merely with the task of policing the mass protests.
Unlike the abrupt and reckless partition of the Indian subcontinent, the 1997 Hong Kong transition was scrupulously planned and executed: a half century of division, then full reintegration into China. The utterances offered by the departing colonisers — of course we shan’t give you the right to settle in Britain and certainly not a British passport, but not to worry old chap: China will be a liberal democracy by then, don’t you see? — close still another chapter of the corrosive incompetence of the British ruling class.
In a city-state gamed to support the interests of a wealthy elite, there appears to be no upper hand to be had for the exploited, low-wage workers whose only affordable housing option is a shared room scarcely bigger than a cage. It seems they must either put up with their lot, or trade their political rights for a significantly better quality of life in the modern and ever-wealthier Chinese cities all around them.
(By the spring of 2021, China moved to sharply curtail populist democracy in Hong Kong, paving the way for “patriotic” candidates. Capitalism responded with gratitude, billions of dollars of investment flowing into the Hong Kong stock exchange as the Covid-19 pandemic waned. But the clock is ticking toward 2047; and it will take a tenacious — and pragmatic — societal consensus if Hong Kong’s singularity is to be preserved).
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When the magnificent film Black Panther filled the screens with its exuberant fantasy in 2018, my social media overflowed with the declarations of connections who want to live in Wakanda. To which there’s a short answer. You can. It’s called the People’s Republic of China.
Wakanda, for all its breathtaking technology, provided no glimmer of democracy. An absolute monarch was expected to rule benevolently, the power system had its own arcane rules of succession, but there was no denying the attraction of life therein. To be an ordinary Wakandan, in Ryan Coogler’s film, was surely to lead a blessed life of comfort and privilege.
The feeling resonates in Shanghai. Although the broad levers of the economy are directed by the state, retail commerce is fierce and competitive: from street side stalls to dazzlingly fancy emporiums (the Gucci store on Nanjing Road is six storeys of luxury), the entire bounty of capitalist consumption is there to enjoy.
This framing of competition under the aegis of the state is broadly the Chinese government’s approach not just to the economy, but to socio-political organisation. Government-directed companies own hotels and real estate, even setting up rival companies within the same retail sector. Competition makes life affordable, even for those who long for luxury clothing and scents: the metro stop of the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum is overflowing with tailors who will replicate Gucci and other designer fashions for a fraction of the price (and it’s best not to probe too deeply into the provenance of cut-price scents).
On the two-kilometre-long pedestrian precinct of Nanjing Road, leading from the Shanghai Bund to People’s Square, the glitzy facades give way to side streets crammed with little restaurants, shops selling T-shirts and handbags, neighbourhood barber shops and hardware stores. Malls abound everywhere.
Towards the People’s Square end of Nanjing Road is the number one Food Hall, surely the most abundant food court of any mall I have ever seen, spanning four floors in a restored heritage building. From oversize lychees bursting with heady juice, to perfectly ripe guavas sliced and packed, one goes deeper to find every manner of Chinese and international cuisine on display.
Western consumer capitalism is everywhere. The lineup at the vast Apple store on Nanjing road is continuous, no matter what time of the day and night. Coming out of the western end of People’s Square, you will come across the largest Starbucks coffee shop in the world: a three-story circular building branded the Starbucks Reserve Roastery.
Yet it would be quite wrong to think that materialism and its absolutist focus on consumption is the only driving ethos for Shanghainese — where educated young professionals earn more in a week than their parents earned in a year in the pre-1990 economy.
Down the road from Starbucks on Nanjing Road West, atop one of the busiest stations on the Shanghai metro, stands Jing’An, a sprawling Buddhist temple complex, an anachronism amidst a forest of sleek glass and stone skyscrapers. All its statues and images — including the lions and elephants adorning the sweeping lines of the rooftops — are newly gilded, lustrous even under a cloudy sky.
I decide to return one afternoon in the summer of 2018 to the Jade Buddha temple, which I had last visited in 2016. The place is almost unrecognisable, in the span of only 20 months. In 2016, the 11th century jade carving of a reclining Lord Buddha had been in the upstairs hall of a vintage building within the temple. Now, it is in a grand pavilion of its own, the temple compound five times larger than it once was, with the addition of a restaurant, a residence for monks, and a tea house, within an easy walk of three major metro stations.
The spiritual vacuum left by the “godless” communism of the past has given way to not just the revival, but the restoration of Chinese faith traditions of Buddhism and Taoism. Approaching the temple compounds, the smell of incense cuts through the traffic fumes, and the temples themselves are havens of serenity in the midst of urban rush. There is a price for all this: an admission fee that’s a little more than the price of a hand-crafted reserve roast coffee, or the cost of a beer and bao in the mall.
One day over lunch near People’s Square, I have a chat about culture and religion with an octogenarian survivor of the Cultural Revolution, whom I first met in Canada as part of my work as a strategic adviser to leaders. A trained engineer, he emerged from more than a decade of hard-labour confinement on a rural Chinese farm to become a senior financial official in the Shanghai municipal government. The state-owned enterprise he served, was largely responsible for the dazzling development of Pudong, an iconic global skyscape of 100-storey towers in what was once a mosquito swamp, across the river from the Bund. He has a home in Xintiandi, and takes satisfaction in the China that emerged, like a phoenix of myth, from the ashes of the Cultural Revolution.
“My wife and I, we attend services at a Christian church,” he observes as we savour a classical Shanghainese dish, hóngshāo ròu, lacquered pork belly with quail eggs. Even in the senior ranks of the Communist Party, there is no contradiction between following religious practice and being a party member: so long as your faith does not challenge the primacy of the secular state. I ask about the Uygur Muslims in Xinjiang. “Ah, that is a different story,” he says in his lightly accented English, polished through decades of diplomatic and business interactions with foreigners.
What worries the Chinese state is the prospect that among the tradition-bound Uygur, allegiance to Allah supplants loyalty to the state. And after murderous attacks by Uygur separatists in Beijing in 2013 and Kunming in 2014, China took the course of mass detention and “re-education” that many of us bred in liberal democracies regard as a form of conversion therapy, if not outright brainwashing.
The practice of separating children from parents, infusing the young with a belief in the virtue of the state and the “backwardness” of their parents’ beliefs and traditions, is very much part and parcel of what is essentially cultural deracination. The physical and mental abuse imposed on those who resist being “re-educated” is, in effect, bludgeoning people into submission: the very practice Canada followed for decades in residential schools designed to take the “savage” out of every indigenous child.
China is fully determined to pitilessly eradicate any spark of Islamic militancy that would harness the power of religion to challenge the authority of the state. The ultimate aim is to “tame” Islam in China into a compliant cultural tradition, bringing the mosques into the same realm of state-sanctioned spiritual practice as the glittering Buddhist temples of China’s metro cities.
And this is the trade-off: as long as you are going about your daily life within the bounds of civility, as long as you shun the belief that your version of god evokes a loyalty stronger than your allegiance to the nation-state, as long as you accept that the state knows what is best for the common good and refrain from publicly questioning or criticising its actions, life in big-city China is thoroughly Wakandan.
Shanghai is one of the safest and most alluring places anywhere on the planet for both citizens and visitors: its gleaming, modern subway system spans hundreds of kilometres of track. Its high-speed trains make the 2,100 kilometre trip to Guangzhou in six hours and fifty minutes. This is the convenience and comfort that is the flip side of the surveillance state. Your fingerprints are scanned after you arrive at the airport; a digital match is made between your fingerprints, your Chinese visa, and your visage mapped with facial-recognition software. Days later at the railway station, there’s no need to produce your passport for ID, or even a print copy of the train ticket you booked online. You are in the system, and after a quick camera confirmation, here is your boarding pass. Shades of Wakanda, indeed.
Yet one step outside the law takes you down the rabbit hole: with no concept of the legal protections and judicial procedures found in the traditions of the Commonwealth and la Francophonie.
The tangible benefits of Shanghai’s state-driven prosperity vigorously challenge the western model of democracy. The Chinese model forces us to take an honest look at the “all things are possible” world of merit we worship — even as we turn away from the reality of gross inequity in everyday life; and the entrenched privilege bestowed by wealth, socio-economic status, and ethnic origin.
The Chinese model already is a preferred means of being and belonging for one sixth of humankind within China, and is envied by others beyond its borders. And even though we know that education affords the population the luxury of pursuing truth, I have to acknowledge that the truth as understood by Chinese citizens, within the Xi Jinping interpretation of socialism with Chinese characteristics, is the engine of a nationalistic pride that rightly affirms the emancipation of an ancient people from the ravages of colonialism.
I will take the warts-and-all democracy of Canada over the Chinese model, because I sincerely believe that the Canadian evolution of pluralism and democracy offers a kinder future for humankind and a better path to establishing the full enjoyment of human rights as a way of life.
In essence, this right to be human includes the agency, empowerment, and autonomy to state what I believe to be true; so long as my version of the truth does not wilfully incite violence nor hate. The right to speak freely and without hindrance, including the unfettered right and responsibility to challenge, with evidence, any “official” version of the truth put forward by governments and their agents.
Even so, I cannot deny the Chinese Communist Party’s signal achievement in turning the chaos of the Cultural Revolution into the prosperous and stable life its citizens enjoy today. Canada is a small population in a large geography. China and India are the world’s most populous countries: and the dozens of Indians I know who have travelled in China — including Indian software engineers and bankers who make up a Shanghai expat community thousands strong — look upon China’s achievements with envy, particularly when it comes to safety and cleanliness.
China’s blend of communism and capitalism is seamless, embodied in a shared ideology of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.” It even has its own app, called Xuexi Zhongguo (learn, and make China great). Launched in January 2019, the app registered 100 million users within the first 100 days. You earn points by answering quizzes, tracking policy, reading Xi’s speeches — and redeem them for discounts in restaurants, travel and retail stores.
In this iteration of socialism, if you look hard you can still find Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book that was the polemical rallying point for the Cultural Revolution. I found it tucked away in a corner in the bookstore of the Communist Party museum in Shanghai, next to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
