Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (63 page)

If Iran were to make the transition from the present regime to a new form of government that could unite Islamic values and genuine democracy, it could once again assume its place as a model for the Muslim world. Just as the revolution in 1979 redefined Muslim global attitudes, so the Green Movement points the way forward for a model of truly democratic Islam. In this context, contemporary Iranian religious thinkers like Abdulkarim Soroush and Mohammed Mojtahed Shabestari—both closely linked with Iranian reformists—are already shaping political debates within the Islamic world.

The Green Movement also suggests that a secular future is not the only alternative to militant Islamism. It is probably unrealistic to expect that the solution to Islamic extremism lies in a complete rejection of religious politics and a full-fledged embrace of secularism. There is little indication that Islam is losing its attraction as a religion—just the opposite, in fact. In many parts of the world (including the United States), it is the fastest-growing faith. The challenge lies in reconciling Islam’s powerful ethical demands with the values of democracy and human rights. There are many indications that many Muslims are already in search of just such a synthesis. True renewal can come only from within.

In the late 1970s, the act of crossing the border at Lo Wu, between Hong Kong and mainland China, meant moving from one mental universe to a completely different one. Today it has become a matter of everyday routine. The watchtowers along the border are empty. There is still a fence along the Hong Kong side of the border to prevent unwanted immigration, but it presents no barrier to the tens of thousands of travelers who pass through the crossing point every day—many of them regular commuters (even including schoolchildren) equipped with electronic identification cards that allow them to cross through special gateways with minimal delays. The Chinese border guard who examines your visa when you cross over occupies a cubicle adorned with a button that allows you to rate the quality of his performance. The whole facility is a model of twenty-first-century efficiency—a world away from the bureaucratic somnolence that reigned here thirty years before.

The border guard hands you your passport, and you step across onto the mainland—or, to be more precise, the city of Shenzhen, which introduces itself as a warren of neon-lit shops offering everything from knock-off designer goods to toy helicopters to Mont Blanc fountain pens, all of it on sale right there in the same sprawling immigration building. Much of what you see was made here. Today, by one estimate, Shenzhen and the surrounding Pearl River delta boast a larger manufacturing workforce than the entire United States. Its factories churn out everything from exercise equipment to iPods; by 2005 Shenzhen boasted the world’s fourth-busiest port and one of its biggest stock exchanges. As you roam the city, you will marvel at the traffic jams, the infectious energy of the bustling crowds, the immense shopping centers selling the latest cell phones and computers. Within an hour’s drive of this place are factories that can turn out just about any electronic component you can imagine as quickly as you want to have it.
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Don’t forget to stop in at the Diwang Mansion skyscraper. (The last time I visited, it was still Shenzhen’s tallest building. But this is a city where no record stays intact for long, so that status can’t be taken for granted.) Buy a ticket and take the elevator to the observation deck on its highest floor, the sixty-ninth. As you step out of the elevator, walk to the windows and take in the view. Skyscrapers, apartment towers, and factories march toward the horizon as far as the eye can see, lost in the haze toward the provincial capital of Guangzhou (a.k.a. Canton). Buried under the buildings somewhere down there—probably in the vicinity of the central railroad station—are the rice paddies that American investor Tom Gorman saw when he visited the spot in 1979.

The view isn’t the only attraction, though. You can also admire the sixty-ninth floor’s exhibits, which are devoted as much to Shenzhen’s sister city, Hong Kong, as Shenzhen itself (there’s a mock-up of a famous Hong Kong street, for example). You can’t quite escape the impression that the organizers felt that Shenzhen’s startlingly brief history, as amazing as it is, simply doesn’t provide enough content for the entire floor. A time line on the wall compares major events in the lives of the two cities. Hong Kong’s starts in the year 1842 and wanders along solo through the rest of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth. The height of the line follows the growth of the city’s population, and so it rises steadily but slowly for 160 years. There’s a downward bump during World War II, when Japanese occupation drove many Hong Kongers away to the mainland, and then a dramatic rebound in the postwar period. Photos and text cluster at various points along the line, commemorating everything from the founding of the People’s Republic of China to the international fame of Bruce Lee in the 1970s. Still no Shenzhen, though.

Shenzhen’s visual history begins only in the year 1979. The population curve is sharp: an ascent of Everest compared with Hong Kong’s gentle upward slope. The key moments in Shenzhen’s chronology turn on factory openings and the inauguration of big buildings. The drama of the story comes less from some particular cultural or political accomplishment than from the sheer velocity of growth. Shenzhen’s population has still not quite caught up with Hong Kong’s by the end of the exhibition. But Hong Kong’s line has long since flattened out, whereas Shenzhen’s continues to climb. Hong Kong may be around for a while yet, the exhibition implies, but the future no longer belongs to it.

Walk around the corner, though, and you come across a remarkable sight: Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher are having a chat. The two life-size wax figures—Thatcher’s hair a bit too red—sit in armchairs against a backdrop photomontage: Beijing’s Forbidden City behind Deng’s head, Hong Kong behind Thatcher’s. Two pots of tea sit on the table between them.

A plaque in front of the tableau explains that it commemorates the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, when the two leaders finally agreed on the terms for Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. In 1898 the British signed a lease with the imperial government in Beijing that gave London control over the New Territories, directly to the north of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, for ninety-nine years. By the time the lease approached its renewal date, it was clear that the era of colonialism had passed and that the Chinese government was no longer willing to consider an extension of the arrangement. And if Britain could no longer control the New Territories, it could no longer hope to hang on to Hong Kong proper, either. It was time for colonial rule to end.

But there is, of course, a deeper logic to the visual union of Thatcher and Deng—though it is not mentioned on the commemorative plaque. It was these two figures who did more to promote the market-driven globalization of the late twentieth century than just about anyone else. Their ideological origins could not have been further apart—Deng the devoted Communist, Thatcher the dedicated Cold Warrior—but their rhetoric was often strikingly similar. Both spoke obsessively of the need to create wealth before it could be distributed. (“Socialism is not poverty,” as Deng used to say.) Both stressed the importance of proper incentives for performance. Both argued that a certain degree of inequality had to be tolerated. Both insisted that the state should withdraw from realms better left to the market. (And both, at various moments, sought the council of free-market economist Milton Friedman.)

They had different approaches, obviously. It was Thatcher who became the global embodiment of the Anglo-Saxon ideals of political freedom and unfettered
markets. Deng’s admirers enshrined him as the embodiment of what came to be known by outsiders as the “Beijing Consensus” (a phrase that Beijing officials are reluctant to use). It was an approach that married openness to internal and external market forces with the strength of the authoritarian state. In the Chinese model, a surge of private entrepreneurship—especially on the town and village level—went hand in hand with tight political control and an activist state-investment role. The result is a remarkable melding of public and private. The percentage of economic assets now in private hands in China actually exceeds that in some European countries. Yet the Chinese Communist Party still runs the banking sector, retaining decisive authority when it comes to determining who gets loans, and what they are used for. The Chinese themselves often evince confusion about where the private sector ends and the public one begins.

China’s success is often treated as something unique, an extraordinary outlier the likes of which the world has never seen. This is not entirely true. As the experience of 1979 and the early reform period demonstrates, China’s economic reforms drew heavily on the experience (and, indeed, the investment capital) of its East Asian neighbors. Almost from the start, China received advanced technological know-how and substantial investment from Japan. Practical experience in manufacturing and considerable amounts of cash came from Hong Kong. Taiwan’s history of post-World War II land reform offered a vital precedent for the mainland’s efforts to boost private farming, and its experiments with export processing zones in the 1960s and 1970s spurred Deng’s interest in the Special Economic Zones. Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea all showed just how effective the combination of dictatorship and market-oriented economic development could be. There is little that Deng and his comrades did in the late 1970s and 1980s that had not been done by these countries before them; what was most radical about the Chinese Communist reformers was their willingness to imagine how a similar program of reforms could be translated into the context of a communized society. In this sense, the “Beijing Consensus” can be more accurately described as the “East Asian Model.” The real pathbreaker for all of these countries, indeed, was Meiji-era Japan, the first of the non-Western nations to embark on a conscious program of Western-style economic and technological modernization. (It was this precedent, by the way, that Deng repeatedly invoked in the late 1970s and early 1980s.)

What really makes China unique, indeed, is its scale. In 2011, Chinese gross domestic product per capita was around five thousand dollars, far behind that in these smaller, more advanced Asian economies. But because of its enormous population, the People’s Republic only needs to boost that number a bit in order to become the world’s biggest economy.

Deng and his colleagues changed China. The China they created cannot help but transform the world. The world does not catch cold when Singapore sneezes. And this is not just a matter of economics. China’s rise also has a direct effect on resource consumption, on geopolitics, on the environment. So we must all care whether China gets it right.

China’s triumph has been extraordinary. Yet the Chinese Communist Party remains strikingly insecure about its success, reacting with extraordinary speed and sensitivity to even the mildest signs of dissent. The leaders of the party insist that their policies meet with the overwhelming approval of their citizens. And this could well be the case (though it is hard to tell one way or the other in a country that has neither elections nor free media). Yet the CCP continues to respond to even the most minor challenges to its power with striking obsessiveness. The amount of money allocated to internal security has now surpassed the budget for external defense.
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Such behavior is not exactly the sign of a government that knows it enjoys the affection of its citizens. The Chinese state employs tens of thousands of people to scour the Internet for allegedly seditious content (which, in practice, often consists of reporting documenting the malfeasance of party functionaries). The Chinese Communist Party’s system for censoring Web content and influencing online opinions is regarded by experts as the most extensive and sophisticated operation of its kind anywhere in the world.

Less well known to the outside world is the extent to which the party has systematically studied the failure of Communist rule in Eastern Europe.
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Interestingly, the Polish example has loomed particularly large in this effort. This is partly a matter of timing. The early years of China’s economic reforms were roughly contemporaneous with the first flowering of Solidarity. But it is also true that the Polish example combined two factors that the party of Deng Xiaoping continues to follow with particular alertness. One is labor activism. The party tracks every strike and independent labor movement with extraordinary care, and it responds to them with a highly sophisticated divide-and-rule strategy, buying off some organizers while coercing others.
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At the same time, the party has gradually but notably expanded the legal space available for bargaining and legal recourse involving labor issues. There is clearly a recognition that China’s further economic development depends on ensuring a certain degree of flexibility toward workers’ demands for greater social justice. The second factor that worries party leaders, intriguingly, is religion. This might come as a surprise to those outsiders who tend to regard the Chinese as a ruthlessly practical people. But this is a simplification. The Communist Party knows, first, that religion can be a powerful source of organized opposition to central rule. One historical example that looms large in party thinking is the Taiping
Rebellion, the mid-nineteenth-century uprising triggered by the members of an unorthodox Christian cult whose leader—reminiscent of the organizer of the seizure of the Grand Mosque in 1979—declared himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. The rebellion turned into a civil war that took millions of lives. A more recent case is represented by Falun Gong, the twentieth-century amalgam of native Buddhist and Daoist teachings that ultimately turned into the best-organized mass opposition movement to Communist rule since 1949 before it was brutally suppressed in 1999.