<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/JC19Ad01.html>
China and India: Oh to be different
By Pallavi Aiyar
China had it all planned out. Or so it seemed. With the Beijing Summer
Olympic Games only a few months away, the flashy s****ts stadiums, the
world's biggest air****t and kilometers of extended subway lines
combined to serve as gleaming testaments to the country's dramatic
material progress. Efforts had even been made to transform Beijingers
themselves for their Olympic debut, from surly communists suspicious of
foreign barbarians into smiling, service-oriented folk welcoming
"foreign friends" to their city in English.
But as the events of the past few days have shown with protests against
Chinese rule of Tibet spreading from Lhasa to parts of Gansu and
Sichuan provinces, Beijing has been caught unprepared in its ability to
deal with dissent. It is this inability, moreover, that will prove to
be the country's greatest vulnerability going forward; its Achilles'
heel as it strives for great power status.
As Beijing desires the Olympics to demonstrate, much in China has
changed in recent years, often at a dizzying pace. The successes in
poverty reduction are an awesome achievement. Beijing in 2008, with its
slew of vertiginous skyscrapers, flood of fancy cars and array of malls
boasting the most luxurious of luxury brands, is a far cry from the
capital city of Mao Zedong suits and bicycles in the not so distant
past.
However, while much has changed, China's response to the events in
Tibet is also indicative of how much remains unchanged. The official
response to the protests in Lhasa and elsewhere, the most serious in
two decades, do not indicate the discovery by Beijing of "Olympic-new"
savvy ways of crisis control. Instead, the Chinese people and the world
have only been subjected to the same old tired responses officialdom
resorts to given any sign of discontentment among the Tibetan
population.
This is a response that essentially amounts to a denial of any
fundamental problem. The elements are familiar: a scapegoating and
vilification of the Dalai Lama, a refusal to grant any legitimacy to
Tibetan disaffection and an insistence on the myth of elemental
"harmony" among all "Chinese" people, including Tibetans.
This denial of legitimate differences is ultimately the greatest
difference between China and Asia's other major rising power, India.
Indians who visit Chinese cities are invariably awestruck by the
infrastructure. They look at the silken-smooth multi-lane highways with
barely concealed envy, no doubt comparing them to the pot-holed clumps
of tar more familiar as roads back home. They marvel at the relatively
orderly flow of traffic on the broad avenues, unobstructed by stray
cows. They remark on the absence of slums and beggars on the streets.
China has not only built cities that are almost impossibly modern from
an Indian point of view, it has also provided jobs and op****tunities
for upward mobility for millions of migrant workers from the
countryside.
China's economic achievement over the past 30-odd years has in fact
been unparalleled historically. However, a point usually unrecognized
by Indians impressed by China's glitter is the fact that so is India's
political feat.
China's southern neighbor's democracy is almost unique among
post-colonial states not simply for its existence but its existence
against all odds in a country held together not by geography, language
or ethnicity but by an idea. This is an idea that asserts, even
celebrates, the possibility of multiple identities. In India, you can
and are expected to be both many things and one thing simultaneously.
Your correspondent is thus a Delhite, an English speaker, half a
Brahmin, half a Tamilian, a Hindu culturally, an atheist by choice, a
Muslim by heritage. But the identity that threads these multiplicities
together is at once the most powerful and most amorphous: she is an
Indian.
India's great political achievement is thus in its having developed
mechanisms for negotiating large-scale diversity along with the
inescapable corollary of frequent and aggressive disagreement. The
guiding and perhaps lone consensus that forms the bedrock of that
mechanism is that in a democracy you don't really need to agree -
except on the ground rules of how you will disagree.
In direct contradistinction to China, India's polity has flourished
precisely because of its ability to acknowledge difference. The very
survival of India as a country, given the scope of its bewildering
diversity, has been dependent on the possibility of dissent.
India is a country of 22 official languages and over 200 recorded
mother tongues. In this "Hindu" country, there are more Muslims than in
all of Pakistan. The country's cultural inheritance includes
fire-wor****ping Zorastrians and Tohra-reciting Jews. With no single
language, ethnicity, religion or food, India is quite simply,
implausible; yet marvelously, it isn't. It is a country without a
language, without a center, lacking singularity except in being
singularly diverse.
In China, regular lip service is also paid to the country's own,
considerable diversity. During the National People's Congress' annual
session, for example, delegates representing China's multiplicity of
minorities swish around the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in
their "ethnic" dresses. Beijing regularly talks of the religious
freedoms enjoyed by the country's Buddhists, Christians and Muslims.
But in fact, the fundamental tenet of China's political philosophy is
not diversity but uniformity. This homogeneity does not only extend
itself to the tangible, such as architecture or the system of writing
alone, but also to thought.
Even in the modern China of the 21st century where there are more
Internet users than even in the United States, those who disagree with
mainstream, officially sanctioned views outside of the parameters set
by mainstream officially sanctioned debate, more often than not find
themselves branded as dissidents - suspect, hunted, under threat.
The insistence on "harmony" as the only reality and inability to admit
genuine differences in interest and opinions between the peoples of a
country of the size and complexity of China is ultimately the country's
greatest weakness.
Talk of political reform in China continues to be bound by the
"harmonious" parameters set by Hu Jintao, the president. The idea is
that everyone's interests and opinions are to be balanced and resolved
without conflict.
Oppositional politics with the clash of argument remain anathema.
Consensus for the good of the whole nation is the way forward, we are
told.
To imagine that these pious prescriptions will be adequate to address
growing tensions within Chinese society as it evolves and changes is
foolhardy. The interests of the laid-off worker and multinational
executive are divergent, as are those of the real estate developer and
the city-dweller about to have her home destroyed to make way for a
mall.
These are conflicts that need to be acknowledged so that effective
mechanisms for their resolution can then be identified.
As the recent protests have demonstrated, despite over 50 years of
suppression and "patriotic education", a strong strain of resentment
against Beijing's rule continues to simmer in Tibet. During this time
period the region's economy has benefited from Chinese-developed
infrastructure, literacy rates are also on the up and health care has
improved. Nonetheless, large swathes of dissatisfaction with Beijing's
policies persist.
For China's authorities to simply deny the reality of the problem,
blame all tension on an exiled leader and insist that the majority of
Tibetans couldn't be happier with the Communist Party's harmonious
policies, is self-defeating.
Given this stance whether or not the Chinese authorities react with
"leniency" towards the protesters, the damage to their reputation
internationally is assured.
Looking ahead to the Olympics and beyond, China would in fact do well
to look to India, the neighbor it usually scorns as poor and chaotic,
to understand the strength that acknowledging differences can provide.
Harmony is a laudable goal, but sometimes a little dissent is the mark
of a truly healthy society.
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Pallavi Aiyar is the author of the forthcoming book, Smoke and Mirrors:
China Through Indian Eyes, (Harper Collins, April 2008.)
===
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