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Introduction: China's Newest Face
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18938 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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2 / 1991 |
577 Words |
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The massacre at Tiananmen Square was tragic, but it was not a singular event in china's history. The Chinese have a long tradition of maintaining power through "the barrel of a gun," one that precedes Mao by thousands of years.
The Chinese have a more recent tradition (Since the early 1800s) of struggling to modernize. It has often been the battle between the new and the old that caused many of China's greatest crises. While science and technology were embraced by Mao to help China keep up with the world, democracy was rejected. More recently, when Deng Xiaoping opened China's doors for economic reform, political plurality was deftly shut out.
Now the end of the Cold War and the fading of the strategic triangle have forced China once again to reassess its place in the world. High hopes for continued international trade and a place in the emerging economic system have prompted Beijing to use the Iraqi crisis to plug into the new world order. China hopes, by becoming the "responsible citizen" abroad, to distract attention from its human rights abuses at home.
China's strategy seems to be working. International trade, after a short dip following Tiananmen, is booming. The European Community and Japan have normalized relations and Beijing now has more contact with the capitalist nations of Asia than with its former socialist brothers of the Third World. The Bush administration was so grateful for China's abstention on the UN resolution approving military action in the Persian Gulf that it renewed most favored nation status for the big dragon, conveniently ignoring the original reason (Tiananmen) for having dropped it.
And yet there are disquieting signs of economic problems and political unrest. Reactionaries and reformers continue to quarrel over China's policies and programs. Coastal provinces go their free-market way while Beijing preaches a more centralized economy. Where is China really headed? Which is the real face of China?
Despite its "all is well" image abroad, writes Pennsylvania State University professor Parris Chang, China's leaders are in the midst of a tremendous struggle for power. If the Old Guard continues to delay reforms, Chang writes, they will find themselves less able to govern. The success of the southern and eastern provinces' economic reforms have produced polycentrist tendencies that the government will find more and more difficult to counter, while stagnation, if there are no reforms, will continue to
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