A Troubled China Keeps Low Profile

In recent months, China’s diplomacy on the impending war in Iraq has been understated and its role in the brewing crisis on the Korean peninsula less assertive than the Bush administration would like. Its relative silence, however, should not be taken as a sign of complacency or acquiescence to U.S. global priorities. It is, rather, the outward expression of internal political uncertainty. The Chinese leadership is not saying much to the world because it is busy keeping its own house in order.

At the upper reaches of political power, China is still in the midst of a major leadership transition. Jiang Zemin retired as general secretary of the Communist Party last November and is expected to relinquish his post as president this spring. Hu Jintao, his successor as party chief and most likely as president, is still far from establishing himself in power.

On the way out, Jiang packed key committees with personal loyalists. He had his own political theory enshrined in the party constitution, setting the ideological agenda for the newcomer, Hu. And Jiang still remembers Mao Tse-tung’s famous dictum -- “political power grows from the barrel of a gun” -- and has held on to the chairmanship of the party’s central military committee, a key civilian overseer of the armed forces.

So, Jiang is out, but not really, and Hu is in, but not completely. This is, by historical standards, a good outcome for transfers of power in the People’s Republic. Without a routine electoral system of succession, the country has been beset, throughout its 54-year history, with violent and irregular leadership transitions. The bloodshed in Beijing in 1989 was the most recent example of the kind of turmoil associated with governmental change in China.

The current unfinished political changeover inspires caution in the Chinese political elite. These men (there are only five women on the high-ranking 198-member Central Committee of the Party), including the outgoing Jiang, are prudent survivors. They rose to power because they had carefully swayed in the shifting political winds.

Pragmatic incrementalism is their style of policymaking. At this time of political ambiguity, they are likely to be even more circumspect. With his political base still unformed, Hu will not take a bold stand on Iraq or North Korea. To do so might open him up to assault from Jiang partisans eager to limit his power. He will, instead, muddle through with the rest.

At most, he might support an abstention on a U.N. Security Council resolution on the Iraq war. And on North Korea, he will maintain the current policy of pursuing low-profile negotiations while occasionally issuing measured criticism of Pyongyang’s apparent nuclear breakout.

Pressure on the leadership is also surging up from Chinese society. Although economic growth has transformed east-coast provinces and cities, large tracts of the hinterland have not benefited from the new prosperity.

While the young nouveau riche conspicuously consume in Shanghai and Beijing and Guangzhou, some 200 million people are mired in absolute poverty, barely subsisting on the equivalent of one U.S. dollar a day. Hundreds of millions more struggle with very meager resources. Official corruption makes matters worse, as rapacious public officials impose capricious taxes and fees on the powerless poor.

The underprivileged, however, have found the courage to fight back collectively. Unemployed industrial workers in China’s rust-belt northeast, peasants in inland provinces, miners in the northwest and underpaid public-sector employees across the country have taken to the streets or petitioned their grievances to the government.

A recent article in the reliable Hong Kong political journal Cheng Ming reports that, since last November, incidents of public protest have become more frequent and noticeable. December seems to have been particularly volatile.

In that month, about 5,000 disgruntled miners shut down the city government in Pingxiang City, Jiangxi province; in the northeast province of Heilongjiang, nearly 6,000 unemployed workers petitioned the party committee of Qiqihar City; and tens of thousands of peasants in 15 townships in the northwestern province of Shaanxi held demonstrations against exorbitant taxes.

These reports do not get much play in the Chinese or worldwide press, because of the news blackout imposed by Communist Party leaders on information relating to worker and peasant unrest, but they certainly fit the pattern of increased urban and rural protest in the last decade.

A more visible example of the seething anger of China’s disadvantaged is the trial of two labor organizers in the northeast city of Liaoyang. Yao Fuxin and Xiao Yunliang led about 30,000 workers in a protest last March against corrupt company officials who were skimming employee pay for themselves. The two were arrested and charged with subversion in a trial that lasted just four hours on Jan. 15. A verdict has yet to be announced, although close observers expect a guilty judgment and long prison sentences. Clearly, the government is fearful of an explosion of popular discontent over economic inequality.

Domestic dislocation and social tension born of economic inequality have been growing in China since serious reform efforts began in the late 1970s. But the problems may now be reaching a stage where the Communist Party must worry about wide-scale disorder and, ultimately, political challenges to its grip on power.

Indeed, the Cheng Ming article states that the threat of broad civil disobedience is being taken seriously by the top political leadership. Fresh from his inauguration as party leader, Hu himself has reportedly had to take time to issue instructions to local party members warning them not to let protests escalate to unmanageable proportions.

It is hardly the time, then, for foreign policy adventures that could deflect resources and attention away from pressing domestic demands. Iraq is remote and unimportant to most Chinese.

A dalliance there would be hard to justify to a national audience. Stable world oil prices are very much in China’s interest, but if the U.S. is willing to bear the risk of breaking Saddam Hussein’s power and opening the petroleum spigot, then why should Beijing take any chances?

Korea is close and historically salient. But the medium-term threat of nuclear proliferation in the region, including possibly Japan, is less pressing than the immediate problem of North Korean refugees pouring into China and exacerbating an already dire unemployment problem in the northeastern provinces. Thus, Chinese leaders struggle to seal the border, repatriate illegal immigrants and work quietly to diffuse the larger military-diplomatic crisis. The greatest dangers, it seems, are much closer to home.

Some might speculate that creating an international diversion could help the Chinese leadership by shifting political attention away from domestic problems. And a more aggressive stance toward Taiwan, which for the People’s Republic is as much a matter of “domestic” politics as it is a foreign policy issue, could prove to be popular with many Chinese citizens. But, at present, Hu and company appear to be heeding other advice.

In the 3rd century BC, an ancient Chinese political philosopher, Han Fei Tzu, who we might call China’s Machiavelli, warned rulers not to be distracted by foreign entanglements: “Neither power nor order, however, can be sought abroad -- they are wholly a matter of internal government.” Perhaps this best explains China’s recent foreign policy silence.