Column

Chinese leaders are in general dour-faced men given to making mind-numbingly tedious speeches about “harmonious society” and “scientific development”. Prince Charles, whose own personality is far from scintillating, famously referred to them as “appalling old waxworks” — and it’s entirely possible that they took his comments as a compliment.

Sombre gravitas and a dyspeptic facial expression are perhaps necessary ‘soft skills’ among China’s top leaders, and it’s well known that if you’re looking for someone to be the life and soul of a party — even if it’s the Communist Party — you don’t invite Chinese leaders.

All that changed on October 1. For a few brief moments at the spectacular National Day parade in Beijing, Chinese President Hu Jintao allowed himself to break out into a beaming smile and waved enthusiastically — and generally conducted himself with the same graceful decorum that a kid might exhibit at a candy store.

It happened at the precise moment when China’s newest ‘weapons of mass destruction’ — a ‘fembot’ army of eye-candy soldiers in pink dresses and white, calf-length go-go boots — goose-stepped their way past the grandstand on Tiananmen Square. The gush of male hormones among those assembled nearly drowned out the patriotic exertions of the brass band.

Nothing symbolises the dramatic changes sweeping across China today better than that scene in particular, and the parade in general. As the country with a too-often-invoked “5000 years of civilisation” completes 60 years as a modern nation-state, there is a youthful spring in its step, a pulsating raw energy that’s born of a new-found confidence and a bring-it-on, we-can-do-anything manner. (Incredulously, Beijing’s famed ‘weather modification’ bureau even did the impossible by transforming the city’s weather overnight — from a cloudy and hazy tinderbox to a glowing sunny day with the bluest of blue skies!)

The confidence doesn’t just come from organising a well-choreographed parade or an eye-popping show of grandeur (which it was): After all, the erstwhile Soviet Union too excelled in that kind of a thing, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-il could perhaps top this show — if he could only round up sufficient numbers of adequately nourished people in his impoverished Hermit Kingdom.

China’s gung-ho mood of the moment comes from the realisation that a unique planetary alignment that foretells its ascendance on the geopolitical stage is fairly near at hand. Already, China’s steroids-boosted economy, which is seen as pivotal to lifting global economic growth at a time when it’s down and out, is the object of unvarnished veneration around the world. China is additionally acquiring a central role in influencing and defining the resolution of global issues of the day — from climate change to the Iran nuclear crisis.

The dramatic economic collapse of developed economies at precisely this juncture accentuates China’s rise even more starkly. And as if to underline its power-projection capabilities, China rolled out its nuclear-capable ICBMs, which can reach as far as Europe and the US, at Thursday’s parade.

Additionally, China retains enormous economic leverage over the world’s pre-eminent power, the US — with its hoard of US Treasury bonds, which keeps the US ‘in debt’ to China; in fact, that’s the more lethal ‘nuclear bomb’ that China wields, and perhaps the theme deserved a float all to itself at the parade.

For all the pomp and pageantry of the event, however, it wasn’t a “people’s” show: The laobaixing — the ordinary folks — were kept away and advised to watch the proceedings from their homes on television. The supreme irony of this, of course, is that China owes its status as the world’s manufacturing superpower, and its gleaming cities with their designer buildings, to its ‘dirty, unwashed masses’— principally, the armies of migrant workers who work at factories and in the construction industry.

Yet, for all the income disparities that wrack China, for all the political disempowerment that the poor manifestly face, for all the social burdens they have borne, they feel today that they’ve been a part of the China story, that they have contributed through their blood, sweat, toil and tears.

Not every aspect of China’s rise, as has been well chronicled, is worthy of emulation. But particularly as seen from India, there is one big lesson from watching our neighbour grow: It’s about finding pride in getting the job done. Whether it’s organising a parade of mini-skirted fembots, laying out spanking good infrastructure, or the more onerous task of nation-building, China’s ability to shock and awe the world is underwritten by millions of Chinese people subsuming their individual selves in the greater common good.

And despite the fact that China’s Communist Party isn’t democratically elected, it derives popular legitimacy from the sheer dynamics of delivering and ensuring prosperity for larger numbers. Care for this Chinese takeaway?

The writer is DNA’s East Asia correspondent