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A couple’s small victory is a big step for China
April 6, 2007 10:33 AM
Letter from China
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
April 5, 2007
SHANGHAI: A glimpse of China’s future popped up last week as furtive as a groundhog emerging from its hole.
To trust appearances, it is a future involving some significantly greater measure of pluralism. And because the evidence made its appearance in broad daylight, and not in the realm of shadows, this does not, as some would have it, have the feeling of a dream.
When exactly this future arrives is, of course, unclear, but this harbinger of recent days suggests that it is not so far off. What seems clearer are the hints about how this future will and will not take form.
The event was the remarkable battle of a homeowner against the city of Chongqing and powerful allied property developers, who had earmarked a large site for fancy redevelopment and excavated a huge ditch around what came to be known as the “nail house,” because of the couple’s success in stalling its demolition until they could achieve a shift in what old-fashioned Marxists often used to call “the correlation of forces.”
On the face of it, theirs was a hopeless task, two simple citizens against a mighty and murky alliance of an authoritarian state and big development money.
In reality, though, the couple was anything but alone. They won out in the end, receiving a handsome compensation for their property where so many others had merely been bulldozed - because not only did they realize this fact, in a society where people have been effectively atomized, but because they also figured out how to glue millions of discrete individuals together in sympathy for a cause not directed from above.
Crossing the river by feeling the stones, they figured out how to paste concerned elements of the ever-anonymous Chinese masses into one coherent picture, drawn together by common concerns, and for once animated by an active sense of citizenship instead of powerlessness and resignation.
None of this mobilization would have been possible without media to transmit the message, and Chinese journalists, both traditional and virtual, carried the ball, spreading the word far and wide, turning this into a truly national story. Not so long ago national stories existed only when the government wanted to launch a campaign or put across some message.
The victory was so unusual, and the imagery of the scene of their holdout so powerful - with the wife, Wu Ping, a stylish and skilled dramatist holding forth each day before street audiences and journalists (and vitally, to the foreign press as well) against the backdrop of a single house perched dramatically atop a thimble of earth, with her banner-writing husband holed up inside - that there is a temptation for giddiness.
Giddiness should be resisted. The Chinese state, which sees the growth of a more vibrant civil society as a threat, is strong. It is resourceful and it is committed to do everything it can, in the language of the Ministry of Public Security, to “consolidate the Chinese Communist Party’s ruling position.” This is in candid contrast to, say, the language of the kinder, gentler prime minister, Wen Jiabao, who speaks of democracy as a distant goal.
One thing is certain: that the Chinese media did not miss the importance of these events. In a front-page commentary, The Beijing News, for example, spoke of an “emerging age of civil rights.” Commentary like this would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
Other commentators who spoke with relief about how the Chongqing standoff had been resolved without violence showed how far China has come since what one blogger quoted by Hong Kong University’s China Media Project called “a replay of the situation back in those years,” a distinct if discreet reference to the bloody events of Tiananmen Square in 1989. At the same time, the fact that expressions of this kind of relief were so common, though, suggested how much further China has to go before fear is eliminated from public life.
Reading China’s future, like seasonal forecasts based on groundhog appearances, is a risky business. In light of events, a few directions appear relatively clear nonetheless.
China is unlikely to be delivered unto a new era by a Gorbachev-like figure. Indeed, since the Soviet meltdown, the leadership has policed itself vigilantly to prevent such a turn and, under President Hu Jintao, has, if anything, grown more conservative.
It seems unlikely to be delivered by China’s intellectuals, either. The country’s scholarly class is for the most part too cowed and too cosseted, too thoroughly co-opted by the system and by the country’s new affluence to make many waves.
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