Tibet Riots A Meter of Beijing's Rot

By Sushil Seth

First Myanmar and then China. It is quite a coincidence that Buddhist monks in both countries have been leading protests against repression.

It is not surprising, though, that when all other avenues of peaceful protest are denied, people should turn to their church or monasteries for leadership.

It happened in communist Poland. It is happening in Myanmar and now in Tibet, where China exercises a stifling grip over the local population. (Xinjiang is also proving troublesome, though Beijing attributes the trouble there to Islamic terrorism.)

Poland, though, had a happy ending with the Solidarity Movement and the Catholic Church providing inspirational leadership.

And when the time was right and the Soviet Union was heading toward collapse, Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe reclaimed their freedom and independence.

Could this happen to China and its so-called autonomous regions, most notably Tibet?

The generals in Myanmar seem secure, with their international flank covered by China's support.

And the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) oligarchy seems quite self-assured that it is on the right track to make China into a superpower.

Beijing believes that with China's new international status it will be able to ignore or ride out any criticism abroad about its politics and policies.

The hosting of the Beijing Olympics in August seemed a surefire way of introducing a self-confident and powerful China to the world. But it is not all going according to script.

First, there is continuing criticism that Beijing is not opening up, as it promised, to international media, and is suppressing internal dissent before the Olympics.

Second, there is international condemnation of its indifference to the suffering of people of Darfur at the hands of the Sudanese government.

Sudan is a prime example of China's policy of fraternizing with unpalatable regimes to access their oil, gas and other natural resources.

Third, the eruption of Tibetan protests led by Buddhist monks has focused the international spotlight on Tibet. China has brought out the heavy artillery, reminiscent of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.

According to exiled Tibetan sources, there have been, at the time of writing, 80 to 100 fatalities from China's heavy-handed response to a popular movement against what the Dalai Lama has called "cultural genocide."

Tibet is proving again and again that Beijing needs to start a dialogue with the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan people to accommodate their aspirations as a distinct ethnic and cultural entity.

The CCP's one-size-fits-all approach of swamping outlying regions with Han Chinese and obliterating minority cultures is not conducive to creating a "harmonious society," a buzz word in the Chinese political lexicon.

The Soviets tried this and it eventually failed because the entire system was top-heavy with the Communist Party controlling levers of power within Russia proper and its outlying regions.

China's leaders believe that they have learnt from the Soviet Union's mistakes and are, therefore, doing things differently.

Late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) believed that former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika was a crucial factor in the Soviet Union's collapse. Deng wasn't going to make the same mistake -- hence the tanks let loose on students during the 1989 democracy movement.

Deng looked for economic growth to make China a powerful country. And the prerequisite for this was the CCP's monopoly of power to maintain and ensure political and social stability.

For him, the Western model of democracy was a recipe for chaos and disaster. His successors continue to follow him on this course.

China's guiding mantra is economic growth at all costs to build up the military capability to throw its weight around.

It is as if all China's problems will somehow be resolved once its economic, political and military power make it a force to be reckoned with.

It is as if all the humiliations suffered under Western tutelage and Japanese aggression will be washed away with China's rebirth as the new Middle Kingdom.

Only then might its communist rulers attend to issues of social equity and some form of political participation. But it is a decision the CCP will make on its own schedule.

But as the events in Tibet show, things have a way of getting out of control unless channels and institutions are created to involve people in their own governance.

It is not that the Tibetans are asking for separation. Indeed, the Dalai Lama is advocating only genuine autonomy, with China remaining the sovereign power.

But Beijing doesn't trust the Dalai Lama. They are waiting for him to die so they can appoint their own Dalai Lama, having outlawed the process of reincarnation as traditionally practiced in the selection of a new Dalai Lama.

It is the arrogance of the system and its leaders, whether it is in relation to Tibet or China proper, which is at the root of China's problems. This will be their undoing, as happened with the Soviet Union.

Beijing believes that by choosing economic growth as its priority it has managed to avoid the fate of the Soviet Union after Gorbachev sought to push relative political liberalism.

But it collapsed largely because it was too late for Gorbachev or any other leader to save it.

The rot that consumed the Soviet Union over the years had much to do with the lack of a connection between its political system (a monopoly of power wielded by the Communist Party) and the people.

Its leadership thought it knew best, and people had virtually no input into the decision-making process of a narrow cabal that was dismally ignorant, indifferent and brutal.

China and the former Soviet Union are not comparable in all respects, but their Leninist political system, where the Communist Party exercises a monopoly on power, is a common thread.

And if the Soviet Union eventually collapsed because its leadership had no use for political diversity and popular participation, China is unlikely to fare any better over time.

The developments in Tibet are a barometer of things to come. All of China is racked by social unrest, with thousands of reported and unreported incidents of popular protest every year.

According to official figures, there were 87,000 cases of social unrest involving 15 or more people in China in 2006.

And this despite all the machinery of repression available to the authorities.

Sushil Seth is a writer based in Australia.