On the other hand (there’s always the other hand in China), the lessons learned by Beijing during the sars crisis in 2003 showed that old dogs can learn new tricks. The regime discovered how the rapid spread of information in the globalized economy can spell disaster. It has handled subsequent health scares well. But its continuing persecution of doctors and health officials trying to warn of widespread aids infections suggests there is still a long way to go. Even here, though, there’s improvement. Instead of execution, irritating critics merely face severe questioning or short prison terms. In China, you take progress wherever you can find it.
There was a lovely image being projected a few months ago about how contemporary China viewed itself and its relationship with the rest of the world. Typically, it came with a slogan. The party leadership always loved a good slogan, right back to the days when Chairman Mao modestly dreamed up “Sailing the seas depends upon the Helmsman.” In this case, it was “Peaceful Rise (Heping Jueqi).” As Robert L. Suettinger put it in the China Leadership Monitor, “the idea of China’s peaceful rise . . . as a responsible, non-threatening global power” looked set to become the official doctrine for the decade to come. It was the mantra of Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, and was cited in important foreign-policy speeches.
Promulgating such notions through elaborate propaganda campaigns is old stuff in New China. That notorious “Hundred Flowers Campaign,” for example, was designed to allow freedom of expression, but was “adjusted” to ensnare (and imprison) anyone foolish enough to take the slogan seriously. “Peaceful Rise” seemed exactly the sort of soothing foreign-policy objective designed to cool international concerns about the intentions of this emerging superpower. But recently, wily old former President Jiang Zemin and his cronies on the politburo have been downplaying it. Welcome to the freaky world of China-watching, in which the Delphic utterances of the leadership are picked apart by Western analysts, much as witch doctors inspect the feathers and dung of chickens for portents and prognostications.
The consensus among today’s China watchers is that “Peaceful Rise” has fallen victim to internal rivalries and concern about Taiwan and its reintegration to the mainland—especially with the re-election of the hawkish Bush regime. In any event, if you want to know the most pertinent reason the party general secretary (ideology) and the premier (government) have bowed to the president, just look at Jiang Zemin’s titles and responsibilities. For fifteen years he was chairman of the Central Military Commission in addition to being General Secretary of the Communist Party until 2002. And throughout his rise to power, he made sure his back was covered by the military. Ideology and government are all very well, but the People’s Liberation Army, as ever, still rules. That should be remembered.
So let’s do another projection for the year 2009. Let’s suppose that the Noranda deal didn’t happen, that the government of Canada took too many opinion polls and discovered that the populace was uneasy about Canadians getting into bed with a Chinese company reported to use forced labour, or dealing with a government that dispatched trade-union agitators to prison and condoned widespread corruption. And don’t assume human rights and business ethics were the sole issues as the debate unfolded. The whole notion of negotiating away our natural resources to an insatiable land entered the national debate, along with an undeniable undertone of xenophobic distaste, which ripped apart Canadians’ smug sense of their society as profoundly tolerant.
As the debate over the sale of Noranda heated up, the first signs of the bursting of the Chinese economic boom occurred. As with all major events in China, there was little warning. The exposure of corruption in Jiangsu province, for example, where a joint venture with a Japanese automobile manufacturer allowed local government officials to pocket tens of millions of Chinese yuans, led to rioting in the provincial capital of Nanjing.
At the same time, the growing gulf between the new affluence in the coastal provinces and abject poverty in the interior saw massive arrests of worker and peasant agitators, as well as the rise of traditional protest societies. These “China-first” sects reminded Western historians of the Boxer rebel groups, which so inflamed the final years of the Qing Dynasty in the early 1900s.
It was the moral dilemma of dealing with a corrupt and brutal regime that really did in the Noranda deal. In umbrage, the Chinese moved all their potential economic investment muscle out of the Canadian market, and no amount of appealing to the spirit of Comrade Norman Bethune by the prime minister could change their minds. The Canadian communist doctor, so lauded by Chairman Mao during the Cultural Revolution, was finally laid to rest as a talisman of Canadian-Chinese friendship nearly seven decades after his death.
But the tale didn’t end there. Downturn, as it tends to do, reversed into upswing. By 2007, the Chinese economic miracle was humming again and they moved their investments to Australia and the European Community, which took them up with alacrity. Crackdowns on dissenters lessened as more jobs opened up, and the first attempt at relatively free elections were held in Hong Kong and the New Economic Zone surrounding it.
The face of the resource industry had changed in Canada by 2008. Americans continued to gobble up the oil and gas business, symbolized in 2004 by the increasing foreign ownership of Calgary-based Petro-Canada. Closures and unprofitable operations in desperate need of modernization plagued the industry and its international prominence shrank. At the same time, nickel and gold discoveries in the Pacific Rim made a joke of Canada’s reluctance to deal with Beijing, since it was Chinese investment that developed the Pacific-based industry that has so outpaced the Canadian performance.
