Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [108]
While the global economy was in great difficulty, and Western countries were in shambles, this was China’s opportunity of the century. An originally almost moribund top leadership had in a very short time transformed the social and political crisis caused by an economic meltdown into a golden opportunity. All of which made the rest of the world accept the idea of China’s ascendant prosperity. At the Party Congress the following year, the top-leadership transition proceeded smoothly. He Dongsheng admitted he didn’t do as well as he had hoped. His plan to be promoted to secretary in the Central Party Secretariat came to nothing, and he was merely promoted from an alternate to a full member of the Politburo; he was now an old veteran of three leadership changes. On the first anniversary of the “Action Plan for Achieving Prosperity amid Crisis,” He Dongsheng had wryly congratulated himself: “He Dongsheng, you did brilliantly.”
A century-old dream comes true
Fang Caodi and Little Xi were quite stupefied by this lecture, and they still had many questions they wanted to ask about that week of anarchy, but they were swept along by He Dongsheng’s monologue. He Dongsheng went to the bathroom, came back, drank another glass of water, and carried on speaking even more bombastically.
Fang Caodi and Little Xi didn’t deny that in the last two years China’s economic situation had been good, but they believed that the political situation had become much worse. China was moving further and further away from constitutional democracy. They complained that everyone seemed to be satisfied with the status quo.
“Everyone seems to be perennially happy,” said Little Xi.
Then Lao Chen spoke up. “I was one of those people,” he said. Before meeting Little Xi again, he’d thought that China’s present society was perfectly harmonious. Every day he was moved by his own sense of happiness. It was Lao Chen’s turn to hold forth now.
Not long ago he thought that Taiwan and Hong Kong were leading, and that mainland China was trailing behind, but now he felt quite the opposite was the case. Everyone used to criticize the mainland for being poor and backward, but then suddenly they started loudly proclaiming that China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy had arrived. For so many years intellectuals had said that the Western system was superior, and the whole world looked up to the United States, Japan, and Western Europe, but then in unison they suddenly changed their tune, and now the whole world was learning from or emulating China.
He Dongsheng interrupted and resumed his speech. He was still tied to his chair. His captors had no intention of unleashing him. “Of course there are some elements of misconception here that cannot withstand an empirical, item-by-item consideration,” he said. “For example, China’s per capita income is very far behind that of developed countries, environmental degradation is rampant, honest government is not to be found, human rights are not guaranteed, and freedom of speech is restricted. China has so many people, though, that its overall strength is always astonishing, and its rise is an incontestable fact. The Chinese media frequently report that in this area China is number one in the world, or in that area China is in the first rank. Not being completely clear about all that, the average Chinese person these days believes that China leads the world in everything.”
In the past, foreign manufacturers had complained that China kept the value of its renminbi artificially low in order to subsidize Chinese exports, and that this created unfair competition. Western labor organizations also criticized China for exploiting its workers to maintain the preferential cost of its exports, thus lowering the living standards of workers all over the world. Now that China no longer relies on depressing export prices, the renminbi can appreciate in value, and Chinese people can buy more imported goods and go abroad as tourists, or even purchase foreign businesses. Incomes have risen across the board, companies are making good profits, and