Opinion: Dancing Around the “Chinese Wall,” and Other Musings From the Forbidden City

The LAT delegation got a rare glimpse of the government’s inner sanctum on Monday when we were granted an interview with Tang Jiaxuan, the Party Central Committee member who oversees foreign affairs, in the sprawling Zhongnanhai compound adjacent to the Forbidden City (a friend who is a New York Times correspondent here was green with envy that we’d gotten in). Our intrepid bureau chief, Mark Magnier, wrote a news story about the substance of Mr. Tang’s remarks, so I should just add that I have never been in a room with more chandeliers, and that the Communists are not above employing some glitzy sensuality to score points. The session was quite a ceremonial affair with our team asked to file in order of seniority. A corresponding number of ministerial underlings filed in, as if we were groomsmen and bridesmaids matched up. The sensual glitz, however, was provided by two statuesque women in traditional pink dresses who strolled the length of the room to open the proceedings, with perfectly synchronized movements, to distribute hot towels and then tea. OK, maybe you had to be there.... Before the meeting we also got a peek at the lake in the compound where Chairman Mao used to swim. ‘Can I come back to run around here in the morning?’ I asked, to nervous laughter. Crazy Americans.... On Tuesday afternoon, we spoke to journalism students at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua Journalism School. Dean Baquet told them a newspaper’s mission in America is to serve as an aggressive adversary to government, to keep it honest. He told the attentive audience about the time CIA director George Tenet called him to ask that a story not run, lest the LAT endanger national security. ‘I didn’t think he made a compelling case,’ Dean told the students, ‘so we ran the story.’ I added that in America, two major national newspapers (the LAT and NYT) editorialized against the decision to invade Iraq, and that this is not deemed unpatriotic in our society (well, I didn’t get into certain Fox News talking heads...). I explained to the students that Dean oversees news coverage and has nothing to do with our opinion pages, and that I conversely have nothing to do with news coverage. The main challenge was to get through this point without uttering the words ‘Chinese wall.’ I ended the session by asking the kids whether they believe -- by a show of hands -- that they live in a truly communist country. Only about five hands went up, and somewhat hesitantly at that. I told them it didn’t feel all that communist to an outsider (especially one who was in Cuba last month), what with all the rampant consumerism and private enterprise. And it’s no wonder these kids don’t feel like they’re living in Utopia -- they have to pay a steep tuition! Earlier in the day, Victor Yuan, a Beijing-based pollster who proudly wears a ‘Veritas’ watch plugging his alma matter in Cambridge, told us that his polls show only 3% of Chinese self-identify as communists. That’s fewer commies than Christians, who come in at 4%. Of course no one disputes that the Chinese government remains a ruthless, hardcore Leninist structure. The Communist Party retains all power, still fancying itself the all-knowing vanguard of the Revolution. It’s just that the Revolution has shed all its Marxist ideology, or at least its economic theory. And Marxism or communism minus the economic doctrine is like Christianity minus the resurrection. An ostensibly communist country with economic freedom begins to look suspiciously like Pinochet’s Chile. The Party’s bet is that no one cares about any of this, so long as it continues delivering 10% annual GDP growth, and hundreds of millions of Chinese continue emerging from abject poverty. According to Yuan’s polls, more than 80% of Chinese feel the country is on the right track. There is a palpable optimism here, and since a vast majority of the population is appreciative of how much individual autonomy they have gained in last few years -- in terms of being able to decide for themselves where to live and work -- maybe they’re not too eager to clamor for democracy writ large, especially if such clamoring would threaten the unprecedented stability that has proven so profitable. Still, as an American, I can’t help but hope the Party has miscalculated -- that in the end, all of this economic freedom will make its political totalitarianism an unsustainable anachronism. One cloud looming in the horizon is the growing inequality wrought by the new prosperity. Rural resentment aimed at city elites is a timeless theme in Chinese history, and one of the priorities for the new Hu Jintao administration is to address the inequality. Another intriguing issue identified by Yuan the pollster is the generational divide in China. Plenty of other places identify different generations with different letters -- Y, X and so on -- but in China kids in their 20s and younger represent a dramatic break from previous generations in that they are mostly products of the one-child policy. In how many ways will a generation dominated by only children -- ‘Generation S’ -- be different?