Each night for the past few days, as I’ve made my way up the stairs to bed, I’ve had the strange urge to picture China’s leaders as they prepare for the hours ahead. They live just a few miles away from me, of course, another strange thought because they seem to belong to another world.
I imagine restless, wakeful nights interrupted by hissed disagreements on internal phone lines in the early hours of the morning. I imagine black Mercedes sweeping through the gloomy streets, emergency meetings held in secret, BBC and CNN footage shown in darkened rooms, flickering torchlight and tussling bodies casting shadows across silent faces.
I have no way of knowing, of course, whether any of this is happening. China’s government is one of the world’s most secretive. We do not know what goes on behind the closed doors of the leadership compound. There is no push and shove between political parties, no public dissection of policy by newspapers, no statement and counter-statement.
What we do know is that China's leadership have called in western diplomats at all hours of the day and night – one ambassador was called in at two am – to be shown footage of the damage caused by Tibetan rioting, and in particular the injuries suffered by Han Chinese.
In my view, the attacks on the torch rally as it makes its way around the world will have provoked profound anguish with the Communist Party and will be of significance far beyond the front pages of a day or a week. Wherever there is distress within the Communist Party, wherever splits develop, there is the potential for explosive political change.
Those inside the system who have struggled during the past few years genuinely to promote gradual change inside China, and who had hoped to push China towards more openness and perhaps even more responsive government will now be burying their heads in their hands. But those hands – to mix a metaphor – will be tied.
Government spokesmen have described the protests against the Olympic torch as ‘vile’ and ‘disgusting’. Their choice of words – and such words are carefully scripted here – indicates a leadership which, for the moment at least, is digging in defensively. China has suffered long periods of isolation in the past, it can afford no more – many people inside the government know that.
Several foreign correspondents in Beijing have been removed from China by their news organizations after being deluged with death threats and after detailed personal information has been published on the internet. One web site – a masthead shows the CNN logo riddled with bullet holes – invites people to add their names to an anti-CNN petition. ‘Every name is a bullet,’ it states.
The government is fanning the flames of anti-foreign nationalism even as it prepares to host the biggest ever one-time influx of international visitors, including thousands of journalists. If there is to be any hope of a saving the Beijing Olympics from disgrace, it will only come with the leadership’s courage to act in a flexible and enlightened way. The flames of nationalism – now symbolically linked with the Olympic flame – are dangerous and unpredictable. China is at this moment poised on a knife edge, and yet the leadership seems paralysed.
I suppose history is always messy. The pro-Tibet demonstrations around the world have actually been provoked by vicious ethnic rioting by Tibetans. These were not monk-led peaceful protests, although there had been such protests in the days leading up to the rioting, and the anger that exploded had been fed by decades of oppression under Chinese rule. In fact, little has changed since Beijing was awarded the Olympics. Tibet has been kept in a stranglehold since 1959, dissidents nationwide – in many cases whistleblowers on official abuses of power – have always been thrown into jail. It is as though the riots, violent as they were, simply reminded the world of the nature of Beijing.
China’s leadership can perhaps be forgiven for feeling aggrieved. It has been courted by presidents, prime ministers and CEOs for the past decade. Protests about human rights have become fainter as memories of the 1989 massacre fade. When violent riots broke out in Lhasa, Beijing made the decision not to send in the army with guns blazing. This was not 1989. The riots were riots, not peaceful protests. The suppression was not a massacre, although Tibetans say many have died.
I suspect China’s leaders felt they should be congratulated on their restraint. Western activists have seen the protests, however, as a clarion call to make the Olympics a time of reckoning. In response, China’s panicked leaders focus on the specifics – on cropped news pictures, on mislabeled photographs in newspapers – because they cannot address the fundamental fact that that there is no democracy in China, and that for the Tibetans this has meant particularly egregious abuses.
I find it hard to talk to Chinese acquaintances about these issues. There are some Chinese, of course, who understand the Tibetan situation, and others who I think must have their suspicions but who keep quiet (and who can blame them?) But many of those who will talk at length about abuse they themselves have experienced at the hands of the Communist Party are not sympathetic to the Tibetans. They do not see a continuum, they do not see that the Tibetans are simply at the most extreme end of what many Chinese nationwide have suffered. Instead, many Chinese think in terms of “splittism” because China’s leaders have nurtured nationalism (it is the refuge of many undemocratic regimes because it affords them the validation they otherwise lack). Propaganda is not always a river of pseudo-Marxist sloganeering, it can also take the form of tabloid jingoism. Decades of such jingoism, with no counter argument, no voice of reason, no opposition… try to imagine what that might create in your own country…
But the problems of Tibet mirror many of the problems in China at large. One of the triggers for the riots in Lhasa seems to have been rampant inflation, which is also the cause of angry complaint throughout the rest of the country. Many in Tibet say that their lives are not improving, even as the central authorities say otherwise. Just as in 1989, protests break out when people, whether Chinese or Tibetan, become frustrated by the fact that Beijing does not listen to them and does not respond to their concerns. China’s leaders have no need to listen, because they are not democratically elected. Just as China’s leaders surround the Olympic flame with a security detail, so they deal with protest throughout China, containing with force where necessary.