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By William Pfaff
Events suggest that the long-overdue crisis of China's
China's crisis, as I have argued in the past, is that of political legitimacy. The legitimacy of the
All this makes for a history that cannot be dismissed. It remains relevant because it is recent -- the treacherous false freedom of allowing "a hundred flowers bloom" began in 1956 and ended 20 years later when Mao died. Deng Xiaoping assumed effective power in 1978. The actuality of this history demonstrates what could again happen. The Tiananmen Square demonstrations, and massacre, occurred in 1989, and the martial law then imposed was ended in January 1990, just 22 years ago -- two years before Bill Clinton became president, while Margaret Thatcher was still prime minister of Britain, and Francois Mitterrand the president of France. Why, it was only yesterday!
In his book of essays and poems, "No Enemies, No Hatred," the political dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate (2010) Liu Xiaobo has described the system that still governs China today, as it did under Mao Zedong. "In order to guard the power of its one-party dictatorship and the vested interests of the privileged elite, the Party keeps a tight grip on the appointments and dismissals of officials at every level. In effect it takes this power out of the hands of the people, where rightly it belongs, and turns it into an item of private exchange within the Party. The power of every official at every level comes not from below, from the people, but from above, from higher levels within the structure of private authority. This fact then establishes a pattern: the first priority of officials is always to serve the higher-ups (because, in effect, this serves oneself)."
The mechanism for determining supreme power is the
Now he has not only been disgraced and stripped of office, but his wife is being held on suspicion of involvement in the murder of a former family friend, Neil Heywood, a longtime resident of China. It is rumored that the illegal transfer abroad of large sums of money was involved in the affair, but mere money seems too insignificant to explain the rank of the people involved and the now-unsuccessful efforts of the British government to distance itself from the matter, Mr. Heywood being said to have once been a member of the
All very intriguing for us foreign devils following the affair in the sensationalist Western press, although not at all so for the Bo family, including their son at
China's Prime Minister Wen Jiabao again warned his government that it must end a culture of corruption lest this lead to the end of Communist rule. The warning is eminently justified with respect to a ruling body which has itself done little to deserve power, other than by being descended from the individuals who in the early and mid-20th century carried out the Communist revolution.
Not only is China experiencing grave scandals involving officials across the country, but foreign residents report a culture of graft at all levels of society. The country's long history is distinguished by xenophobic, nationalist, separatist, and peasants' and workers' revolts. The dynastic system collapsed in ruin in 1911, and since then China has seen not only Sun Yat-sen's, Chiang Kai-shek's, and Mao Zedong's nationalist and ideological movements and civil wars, but persisting sectoral revolts and warlordism, foreign invasion, and extensive civil unrest. China is a turbulent society, and foreigners are mistaken to take its recent economic success as a guarantee of political order, as most seem to do.
Twitter: @ihavenetnews
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Scandals in China Intensify Possible Communist Party Crisis | Global Viewpoint