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Text File | 1994-05-02 | 10KB | 196 lines

<text> <title> The Conflict Between Reform and Repression </title> <article> <hdr> World Press Review, March 1991 China: The Conflict Between Reform and Repression </hdr> <body> The 'open door' is still ajar, but little slips through By Peter Goodspeed. From the independent "Toronto Star." The Chinese call it "killing a chicken to frighten the monkeys." A police notice plastered on a brick wall in the heart of the largest free market in Guangzhou (Canton) announces the trial, conviction, and execution of two pimps in stark, simple words. They were sentenced to death, and a large red check mark at the bottom of the notice indicates that the executions were carried out. For thousands of vendors and shoppers hurrying about Qingping market, the poster is nothing out of the ordinary. But juxtaposed with the clamor of commerce in a society that has been transformed by more than a decade of economic reform, the scene captures two of China's hardest realities. The conflicting concepts of repression and reform are as common today as rice and noodles. Prosecutors in Beijing have placed intellectuals and student activists involved in the 1989 pro-democracy movement on trial for "counterrevolutionary activities." Amnesty International claims that another 700 people remain unaccounted for after being arrested. And the semi-official China News Agency says that up to 1 million people were arrested last year in a massive crackdown on crime and dissent that began with the run-up to the Asian Games, which were held in Beijing in late September. In November, officials in Beijing proclaimed a new law that bans the display of all unauthorized posters and slogans. Tiananmen Square has been reopened to the public, but is now fenced off with iron railings, and policemen stand near all of the entry points. Across the street in the Forbidden City, China's old Imperial Palace, a "ready reaction" unit of the People's Armed Police stands guard 24 hours a day, prepared to rush hundreds of troops into the square at a moment's notice. On the surface, by just about any measure, China today must be one of the most regimented and repressed countries on Earth. Communist Party officials, through the state security police, a system of neighborhood committees, and party-supervised work units, have the power to penalize just about anyone in matters dealing with pay, housing, marriage, divorce, childbirth, work assignments, children's education, and travel. Yet despite this, China is riding the crest of a decade-old wave of optimism. A dozen years of dramatic economic reform under paramount leader Deng Xiaoping have changed China and altered, perhaps forever, the lives of 22 percent of the world's people. Individual incomes have increased steadily, and farm production has blossomed, producing an all-time record grain crop of some 400 million tons last year. Consumerism is on the rise. In the past, the Chinese aspired to own "the four things that go round"--a bicycle, a watch, a fan, and a sewing machine. Now, they all have their hearts set on "the four big things"--a cassette recorder, a color television set, a refrigerator, and a washing machine. Everywhere in China, people claim that their living conditions have improved. They are eating better, living better, and enjoying consumer goods that previously were hopelessly unattainable. The success of Deng's reform policies has inadvertently weakened China's Communist Party. Officials and bureaucrats, who once presided over almost every aspect of people's lives, have had to yield some of their powers to impersonal market forces. Crime is rising, drug abuse is increasing, corruption is rampant, and religious sects are gaining more influence. The abandonment of Mao's rural commune system has weakened the party's hold on the countryside, where 80 percent of China's people live. China's scramble to modernize is also deepening divisions among the country's 30 different provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions, giving rise to a new and threatening economic warlordism. Individual provinces are setting up a maze of barriers to interprovincial trade and deliberately withholding crucial raw materials from the market. Some have banned the transport of pigs and coal to neighboring regions or demanded payment for their goods in foreign currency. Southern China's Guangdong Province, where Guangzhou lies, is definitely not like the rest of China. For the past 10 years, this area has been China's doorway to the world, the hothouse where now-deposed Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang launched his free-wheeling experimental Special Economic Zones in a bid to modernize China. Zhao's idea was to turn China's southern coast into a laboratory for economic change by setting up a series of special zones that would cater to foreign investors. Over time, the zones were supposed to drag the entire nation toward prosperity. Until the pro-democracy protests in 1989 led to Zhao's downfall, it looked as if the experiment was working. Guangdong flourished as never before under China's "open-door" policy. In the past 10 years, the region has absorbed nearly 60 percent of all of the foreign investment in China. It has created 5 million new jobs, accounted for one-sixth of China's foreign exports, and experienced economic-growth rates that exceed the best boom years in Taiwan or South Korea. Life is so good here, boasts Zhao Jiaxiang, Guangdong's provincial director of foreign economic relations and trade, that even shelters for homeless garbage pickers have color television sets. "In Guangdong," he says, "we have created so many opportunities for the people that each year we are inundated with people who come here looking for work. You can see them in the train station every Spring Festival [lunar New Year]. They come in by the thousands, because their relatives or neighbors who work here have gone home for the holiday and told them about Guangdong." Guangdong's open door has also drawn in new influences and strained old loyalties. Some observers claim that the entire province has been annexed by Hong Kong. The British colony is both teacher and banker to Guangdong, supplying it with managers, machines, and 90 percent of its foreign investment. Nearly 2 million people in the province are employed in Hong Kong-owned factories, while the colony's own industrial labor force totals only about 800,000 workers. People in Guangdong read Hong Kong newspapers, listen to Hong Kong's Cantonese radio stations, and copy Hong Kong's latest fashions. Even the province's telephone system is set up so that it is easier to call Hong Kong than Beijing. In the summer, clocks in the city of Shenzhen run a full hour behind those in the rest of China, because they stick with Hong Kong time instead of observing the mainland's daylight saving time. That sort of alien influence, with its threat of creeping "bourgeois liberalism," terrifies the hard-line communist leaders who have replaced Zhao in Beijing. They never trusted Guangdong's independent and enterprising ways, and now they are determined to reassert their authority and force the province back into line. A nationwide financial austerity campaign has been used to cut off much of the credit that Guangdong needs to continue to expand. More than 13,000 companies, 32 percent of the province's total, have been ordered to close or merge with other state-run or state-regulated firms. Without ever admitting it publicly, Beijing has also put Guangdong on notice that its free-wheeling days are over. From now on, government development policies are going to be directed at promoting industrial growth in other parts of China, most notably in Shanghai, where central planners want to inject new life into ailing state-run industries. Still, Beijing knows that it has to introduce its pol