The October 1 National Day parade in Beijing may have been splendidly choreographed to project China’s eye-popping power on the world stage, but the extent to which it was stage-managed ironically reveals the country’s internal fragilities, says former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Susan L. Shirk.
“Except for those in the parade, the ordinary people were not permitted to come out on the streets,” Shirk, who served in the Clinton administration during a testing time for Sino-US relations, told DNA.
Chinese leaders also disallowed parades in other cities, noted Shirk, author of Fragile Superpower: How China’s Internal Politics Could Derail its Peaceful Rise and professor of political science and director of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California.
“This suggests to me that the leaders didn’t want any spontaneous public displays, for fear that they might not be as supportive as the leaders would like,” said Shirk. “How extensively it was stage-managed shows that Chinese leaders are afraid to leave anything to chance.”
Referring to a spate of recent arrests that pointed to a “real crackdown on civil liberties in this entire year of important anniversaries for China,” Shirk reasoned that this reflected a “continuing anxiety on the part of the Chinese leadership about its popular support and the possibility of opposition.”
Chinese leaders, she said, “are nervous. That’s quite clear in the way they respond to even a small expression of discontent.”
In Shirk’s estimation, there are in China today “quite a number of discontents that generate protests... But the greatest risk in the system is that of the politics of political leadership.” If the leadership can stay united, she believes, “they can handle any kind of protests, but if there are open divisions in the leadership”, it could signal a weakness and bring people out on the streets.
Shirk’s observation on inner-party strains assumes significance in the context of a recent meeting of Chinese Communist Party leaders, which failed to make an anticipated annointment of the country’s next leader. Vice-president Xi Jinping, 56, was expected to be appointed vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission — the supreme military command — signalling that he would take over from President Hu Jintao in 2012; but a recent four-day plenum meeting of the Communist Party’s central committee concluded without that appointment.
“I thought it was interesting that at the October 1 parade, President Hu and (former President) Jiang Zemin were standing together,” Shirk said. “This was a clear effort to signify that there is unanimity at the top of the party leadership.” That, she reasons, is a “very important element” in China’s political stability. “I don’t know whether or not it’s true. But they went to great lengths to try to have the public believe it’s true.”
In her book Fragile Superpower, Shirk notes that although China is stronger economically and more secure internationally than it has been since the 19th century, paradoxically its communist leaders “have a deep sense of domestic insecurity.” China, adds Shirk,
may be an emerging superpower, “but it is a fragile one.”
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