BEIJING: China's one-party state has survived as other communist regimes
crumbled by embracing capitalism to deliver new wealth -- but is turning
increasingly to nationalism in place of a coherent ruling ideology.
The Communist Party congress that
begins in Beijing this week to proclaim Xi Jinping as its new leader takes
place in a city replete with luxury sports cars and hotels, and a country with
a growing consumerist middle class.
The party still pays lip-service
to Marxist-Leninist rhetoric and trains its cadres in Maoist philosophy -- and
also in business management and high finance, injecting a gaping contradiction
into China's ideological mindset.
But any talk of political reform
to resolve that contradiction is in abeyance. And with public opinion ever less
willing to tolerate corruption, and factory workers and migrants increasingly
restive, the party is also cultivating patriotism -- to the alarm of its neighbours
and Washington.
"Faith in socialism has
become problematic, so the Chinese authorities are seeking other sources of
legitimacy, and of course nationalism is a dream substitute," said
Jean-Philippe Beja, a political scientist at France's National Centre for
Scientific Research.
"The Communist Party can
boast of having fulfilled the dreams of all the country's leaders since the
Opium War (from 1839): giving China its rightful place in the world," he
said.
"To maintain that, they must
assert themselves against their neighbours, beginning with Japan."
This year Japan, China's
perennial bogeyman, has found itself under verbal fire over five uninhabited
islands in the East China Sea, controlled by Tokyo but claimed by Beijing --
and Taipei.
Chinese authorities facilitated
mass anti-Japanese protests across the country that spiralled into rioting in
some areas and serious production losses at factories in China owned by the
likes of Toyota and Sony.
Winston Lord, a former US
ambassador to China who accompanied Richard Nixon when he became the first US
president to visit Beijing in 1972, warned of China's communists resorting to
xenophobia if the Xi regime feels threatened.
"If they don't make changes
in their economic and political system in the next decade, I think you could
see real instability, which could in turn lead to a more nationalistic and
aggressive foreign policy," he said in Washington last week.
Since the anti-Japanese upsurge,
Chinese media have repeatedly broadcast images of China's modern fleet -- which
as of September boasts its first aircraft carrier -- proudly sailing the waves.
The People's Liberation Army, the
largest military in the world, has seen its budget grow by double-digit annual
rates over the past 10 years, far exceeding even China's rocketing GDP
increases over the period.
The new leadership under Xi, the
son of a revolutionary general who enjoys deep ties with PLA commanders, is
expected to maintain the military's rapid pace of costly modernisation.
And as the Xi era beckons,
Beijing has also taken an increasingly assertive stance over its claims to
almost the whole of the South China Sea, risking confrontation with a number of
countries, some of them US allies.
Appeals to nationalism have
always featured in Chinese communist rhetoric. Official propaganda regularly
reminds readers of the era of China's "humiliation" by foreign
powers, from the 19th century until 1945.
But Hong Kong was transferred
from Britain to China in 1997 and Macau, Portuguese-held for centuries,
followed two years later, while the regime is utterly implacable in its hold on
Tibet.
It proclaims the re-integration
of Taiwan, ruled separately since the defeated Nationalists fled there in 1949
at the end of China's civil war, to be a "sacred cause".
But Roderick MacFarquhar, a
Harvard-based British specialist in contemporary China, warned the rise of
Chinese nationalism was a "double-edged sword" for the authorities.
"It is a very dangerous
weapon, as Chinese governments have known since 1919," he said, referring
to a nationalist furore after China was humiliated by Japan in the Treaty of
Versailles, which ended World War I.
Speaking at an event in Hong
Kong, MacFarquhar said China's rulers need to exercise "some caution,
especially vis-a-vis Japan".
"If you stoke the fires of
nationalism too much, then if you cannot fulfil what the nationalists who have
been aroused want you to fulfil, then their anger will turn against the
government of the day."
- AFP/al
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