Matt Schiavenza From the Dragon to the Apple- A Sinophile in New York

Cracks in the China Class Ceiling Case

This editorial in the LA Times by Ian Buruma has generated a bit of web discussion recently, but something didn't sit right with me after reading it.

Buruma begins the editorial by describing Hu Jintao as a 'dull' leader and how, in the context of recent Chinese history, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. He then says that while Hu's policies may be less harmful than those of Mao, their benefits extend only to a certain class:

This is not the story one might hear from unemployed workers in the rust belts of northeastern China, or from rioting farmers in Guangdong province who have been pushed off the land by greedy developers working in tandem with corrupt party officials. Nor is this view necessarily shared by the brave lawyers willing to take on some of those corrupt officials, or intellectual dissidents who still get arrested for arguing that Chinese should be entitled to basic democratic rights.

But it is the common line taken by people who benefit most from the current wave of fun, fashion and prosperity -- the new urban elite, some of whom are pampered children of Communist Party bosses.

Nobody denies that there are several thousand incidents of unrest each year in China, all of which successfully are quashed by the government. Yet to say that only the 'urban elite' have benefited from recent Communist Party policies is absurd.

First of all, the numbers of 'urban elite' within China has skyrocketed over the past thirty years precisely because of post-Mao economic policies. By conservative estimates nearly 400 million Chinese people have escaped poverty since 1978, and while not all of them have become prosperous city-dwellers a not insignificant sum of them have climbed up the prosperity ladder.

Secondly, while I'm aware that there is a bit of nostalgia every now and then for the Maoist period, few members of China's rural population would swap their life under the current leadership for the tumultuous days of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Bear in mind that in the 1950s China's rural population endured a famine that felled between 30 and 60 million people, the consequence of a misguided economic policy pushed through by Chairman Mao. The Cultural Revolution was hardly better- the numbers of lives ruined by Mao's crazy schemes cannot be quantified.

Buruma then compares China's autocracy unfavorably to India's democracy but fails to make any points associated with economic development. Oddly, he focuses his criticism on the Communist Party on disaster management with the reponse to the Sichuan earthquake as his prime example. By the way, I was in China for the earthquake, and nearly every Chinese person I spoke to about it praised the central government for its response. But I digress.

Even assuming that Buruma's point about the government's slow response to the earthquake were true, it still doesn't have much to do with overall economic development. How about the timely and effective implementation of the economic stimulus package and other development measures? Surely the absence of a parliamentary opposition expedited this piece of vital legislature, no?

I'm hardly an apologist for the CCP. I reject the commonly voiced argument that the Chinese people aren't ready for media freedom, or elections, or other liberal reforms. There's a good argument to be made that the Communist Party isn't the best government for China at present. Buruma just doesn't make it.