OpinionAsia
The Earthquake in Sichuan: The Limits of Autocracy
26th May 2008
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Pundits and polemicists in the west worry that China's rulers have stumbled upon, like alchemists, a magical formula fusing autocratic politics with the almost infinite choice of a market economy to produce a system more effective than liberal democracy.
In their eyes, China is a state which manages to be gatekeeper, rulemaker and player to a degree thought impossible by the prevailing orthodoxies in liberal democracies.
The result is symbolised by gleaming skyscrapers of Shanghai and the confidence to build some of the world's most amazing buildings in Beijing. They leave many visitors, observers and investors in awe. The government's capacity to act and guide the economy looks impressive indeed.
China's economy is creating wealth at a torrid pace. Beijing's foreign reserves now amount to a staggering $1.6 trillion. Yet just three decades ago China was a pauper with barely a penny in the bank.
With wealth comes power. Beijing's diplomats are winning friends and influencing governments across the Third World from Jakarta to Kinshasa, Tehran to Lima. The scale and speed of China's rise probably exceeds even that of America in the late 19th century.
Little wonder that the China Threat looms large in the minds of some policymakers and parliamentarians in the west, India and elsewhere.
Some will see thousands of soldiers pouring into the mountains in Sichuan to dig out earthquake survivors as further evidence of the magic of China's autocracy. The zeal and determination of the government is beyond question and stands in stark contrast to the disregard and dithering of Burma's rulers following Cyclone Nargis.
Legions of Chinese soldiers certainly made for good television just as it they did earlier this decade holding up dykes when the Yangtze River was flooding.
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was quickly on the scene in Sichuan extorting rescuers to keep up their efforts and promising the government would help everybody. Indeed ‘Grandpa Wen’ was the man of the moment.
But this is not all what it seems. Why does a national leader need to run around a disaster zone giving out orders? Surely such matters are best left to experienced and capable officials whose job it is?
The Communist Party had to take the initiative. Playing down the disaster, as was the case with the Tangshan earthquake which killed a quarter of a million people in 1976, in a society well-wired with mobile phones and broadband internet and a competitive, and at times daring, media was not going to work. Nevertheless the failings are there.
For instance, China's military it seems has not been ordered by its political masters to spend enough on rescue equipment and training for disaster missions. Troops were nobly working under very difficult circumstances for the most part equipped with nothing more than their hands or shovels. Only after a few days did civil officials make a general appeal for cranes and other equipment.
Inadequate civil and military preparation and planning is a political failure given Sichuan's location at the juncture of grinding tectonic plates. But it is not the only one highlighted by the earthquake.
Survivors are asking why so many buildings collapsed more or less wiping out communities. Rubbish construction they mutter, no standards. They are probably right. They know how power and corruption warps the rules in their communities, about the cozy ties between developers, builders, apparatchiks and bureaucrats.
Of course some, perhaps many, of the buildings which collapsed may have been built before new earthquake building codes were introduced. Nevertheless the state surely had a duty to rebuild public buildings like schools and hospitals to earthquake resilient standards.
Public safety often seems to fall victim to parochial interests, especially out in the provinces far from Beijing. Despite orders from Beijing to shutdown dangerous coal mines and bring safety up to scratch at others, disasters are still frequent. Then there's fake baby food killing dozens of toddlers. Counterfeit medicines with no therapeutic benefit and which sometimes turn out to be harmful. The list goes on and on.
Ironically Chinese customs were reportedly closely scrutinising donations of medicines from abroad for fakes. But is anybody taking a close look at supplies of medicine made in China which are being sent to Sichuan?
The regime clearly should shoulder the blame for much of the tragedy in Sichuan. In a system of open political competition, the public would have an opportunity to remove a government which failed to enforce the rules and protect public welfare and perhaps even put the greater good above discrete corporate interests.
That cannot happen in China. And therein lies the fundamental flaw of China's political alchemy. The system which takes credit for growth, jobs and incomes is not owned by the public. It is bereft of the legitimacy conferred by the choices (or at least the illusion thereof) made by voters at the ballot box.
The Sichuan earthquake and the failings it reveals (the true extent and culpability for corruption in the enforcement of building standards may never come to light) are in themselves unlikely to spark political change in China.
But they will add a little more stress, a little more dust to the grit of anger which is slowly building amid the gears of society in China. Indeed to imagine that China's leaders have found a holy grail of liberal economics mashed with autocratic politics, as western polemicists and pundits increasingly do, is to forget how South Korea and Taiwan looked in the 1970s.
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