Livio Caputo

A sudden authoritarian change and a creeping economic crisis cast worrying shadows on the most populated country all over the world. For a country like China, traditionally obsessed by anniversaries, 1999 represents a crucial year: on June it will be 10 years from the Tienanmen square massacre, and on October 1st it will be fifty years from the founding of the Popular Republic. Two opposite signs events, that will arise passions from opposite factions of population. The Tienanmen anniversary, since it's a basic leg of the repression of the politic dissent, will give reformers the chance to reassert their demands and try to wring from the regime accordance about freedom of thought, association and mainly observance of human rights, since Peking, to meet the western pressures, has also undersigned the corresponding International Convention recently. The communist state founding anniversary by Mao Ze Dong will give, on the contrary, a chance to the marxism-leninism nostalgic, the rivals of the economic reforms, that is the “pure and harsh” of the party that in the last fifteen years had to beat a retreat. As far as China tries to reassert its “normality” and to find its definitive position in the global economy, it comes the day of reckoning in a country with a billion and three hundred millions inhabitants, still now formally socialist and featured by an unique party regime, but already in an advanced - and also very tumultuous - phase of transition toward the market economy: increasing difference between welfare and poor people, malaise in the country, open clash between the rich and a little dissipated coast provinces and those much more underdeveloped internal ones, troubles to keep the financial and commercial standard needed to get the so longed for admission to the Commerce world organization. And mainly, troubles to conjugate the lack of political freedoms with the existence of a economic freedom often trending to exceed into licence: it's enough to think that nearly the 20 per cent of Chinese importation come from contraband, with astronomical looses for the national revenue. The beginning of the year has been for Peking heralding of storm. In 1998, the western press has greeted enthusiastically a certain opening of the regime toward dissidence, marked by the travel to China of president Clinton, by the visit of the UNO High commissioner for human rights Mary Robinson and by undersigning the International convention on human and political rights. Furthermore the government had turned a blind eye to the attempt to record in fourteen towns the China democrat party, the first political opposition organization risen in 1949. After years or prison three historical dissidents was authorized to go into exile in the United States. Autohorities had also increased their tolerance toward publishing houses and investigation institutes beginning to show new ideas. Then, on January, almost unexpected, the frost. A tribunal condemns correspondingly to 13,12 and 11 years of imprisonment Xu Wenli, Qin Yongmin and Wang Youcai, three veterans of the historical “wall of the democracy” involved in the founding of the China democrat party, under the charge of subversive acts. A week later, ten years of prison have been inflicted by a court of Hunan to the trade unionist Zhang Shanguang, guilty of giving an interview to Free Asia Radio, a broadcasting station, financed by United States. At the same time, autohorities have intervened to limit the intellectual and academic activities exceeding into political dissent. In waiting of the 'correction of the ideological deviations” the party's propaganda department has ordered the temporarily closure of one of the more influent and courageous publishers in editing books not joining the chorus: the publisher Nowadays China. Its main fault, along with observers, has been that to edit a very incisive survey about corruption of the army and bureaucracy, and another one putting under indictment those who hinder the coming of the market economy. Both publications have had a sounding success, since they reached many citizens out of the narrow circle of students. By now, the tightening toward intellectuals does not seem generalized, and it keeps being sold numerous publications at the limit of orthodoxy. But it is possible that, if the general situation of the country gets worse, if the regime gets aware that the social steadiness, it already deems as the supreme good, were in danger, it will immediately put in work the stick. The China watchers are questioning themselves about the meaning of this sudden tightening. Some deem that last year's thaw was due only to the need to prepare the Clinton's visit, and that the current leadership does not have any will to go on with substantial openings. Others assign the provisions to the need of giving an example, in very troubled moment, when a sparked could be enough to start hostilities. Inklings of the storm is building up surely do no lack and the fact that the official press reports them proves that are to be considered seriously. Only in January, there have been the burst of a bomb on a bus at Liaoning (nineteen dead), violent clashes at Daolin between thousands angry farmers and army detachments (a dead and tens of wounded), another bus has burst at Changsha (37 wounded), a bomb in a skyscraper at Canton (two dead). For a country of the dimensions of China, it is not surely a chaos, but it is the same the sign of a very deep malaise, the social environment degradation inducing an increasing number of individuals to challenge the established authorities. But there's more : since some time it's catching on the habit, very few Chinese, to protest in squares and streets against the delays in paying wages, embezzlements done by local authorities, the delivers of courts, since deemed too severe, and the dismissals in the public sector so to limit its looses. To get things worse, it is recorded an unusual leap in the common crime statistics, in spite of the fact that, for a certain entity theft a Chinese citizen may end by finding in front of the firing squad. To try to calm the population's disquiet, the regime has committed itself into a great moralisation and fight campaign against corruption, involving the whole public administration and even the untouchable Army Forces, peremptory invited to gradually withdraw from the economic activities they were engaged in the last twenty years. But results till now have not been enthusiastic: China remains China, and very often the anti-corruption teams had let the corrupted corrupt them, officers have offered resistance as well as the army has, asking for an exaggerated indemnity for leaving its economic activities. On of the main reasons of malaise is indubitably the slackening of economy, affected by the Asiatic crisis. Government has announced that the target of the 8% growth in 1998 has not been reached by a hair's breadth, but watchers deem that (and it wouldn't' be the first time) numbers have been fixed for political reasons. To keep reliability with the west, China has not followed the other Asiatic countries in their devaluation policy, but supporting the yuan during the financial worst turbulence phase of the region was not painless: competitiveness of exportations has decreased, many industries on consequence have been affected so starting off crashes. Sounding one, worrying a lot the West, has been that of the Guangdong International Trust & Investment Corporation, a financial giant of Canton that had obtained conspicuous loans from many French, German, Switzerland and Japanese banks. These banks deemed that the Guangdong debts were warranted by the state, but Peking has invoked an almost unknown law on crashes and has rejected any indemnification requirement. The crisis has already had strong repercussions also at Hong Kong, where unemployment, almost unknown when it was a Britain colony, is now reaching pathological levels and the stock exchange is affected by continuous chaos. In Europe, there's the trend to “remove” the Popular Republic, given as foreseen its gradual - even if slow - evolution toward the market economy and an Asiatic form of democracy. Unfortunately it is not so: the China Planet, still so plenty of mysteries, is one of the main factors of unsteadiness in a world already so unsteady. And it is thoroughly kept an eye on its evolutions.

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