Will Hutton
THE WRITING ON THE WALL
China and the West in the twenty-first century
448pp. Abacus. Paperback, £9.99.

978 0 349 11882 6

Duncan Hewitt
GETTING RICH FIRST
Life in a changing China
320pp. Chatto and Windus. Paperback, £14.99.
978 0701178970

James Kynge
CHINA SHAKES THE WORLD
The rise of a hungry nation

Fifteen years ago, that master of political cunning Deng Xiaoping made his famous trip south from Beijing to Shenzhen near the Hong Kong border. It was the moment when he decisively outflanked the Politburo’s diehard believers in class struggle and the command economy, men whose “ossified way of thinking” he had challenged on assuming the leadership of China in 1976, and who had made a comeback after his crushing of the Tiananmen democracy movement. Now, under the Orwellian rubric of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, Deng decreed that it was time to let enterprise rip. Out went Mao’s “better Red than expert”; in came “it doesn’t matter about the colour of the cat, so long as it catches mice”.

The pent-up energies thus released generated an economic and social upheaval unequalled in history for scale and speed, as well as unpredictable and potentially unmanageable consequences. The take-off was almost vertical. Within months of Deng’s apocryphal injunction that “to get rich is glorious”, officially recorded national growth rates soared to five times their post-Tiananmen level, ranging between 7 and 12 per cent thereafter and scoring in double digits for each of the past five years. Industrial output and investment in infrastructure have surged faster still; after more than a year of official efforts to cool the economy, they rose in the first half of 2007 by 18.5 per cent and 26 per cent respectively.

China is now on the brink of becoming the world’s leading trading nation. Its relentless hunt for raw materials moves oil and commodity markets and increasingly roils international diplomacy, because Beijing has no compunction about doing business with repugnant but resource-rich regimes. It is also running giant surpluses, including a trillion-dollar stack of US Treasury bonds, which it is only now beginning to invest more aggressively. It is not yet true, as it has long been of the United States, that if China were to sneeze, the world would catch pneumonia: to put things in perspective, the China analyst Arthur R. Kroeber recently pointed out that the assets under management of a single American mutual fund, Fidelity, are equal to China’s entire foreign exchange stockpile. But China’s potential capacity to upset the international applecart already exercises financial analysts and other crystal ball gazers. The most cursory survey of the torrent of recent China books – typical is Ted Fishman’s China Inc.: How the rise of the next superpower challenges America and the world – conveys the breathless flavour of much Western commentary. This is amusingly counterpointed by bookshops in China itself, where shelves are stacked with “how to be a millionaire” books, the ghosted memoirs of its first tycoons, and the works, of all people, of the economist Milton Friedman.

Some of this Western commentary is thesis-driven. Will Hutton’s The Writing on the Wall reveals more about the author’s anti-American, or at least anti-Bush, prejudices than it does about China. Even so, he develops a reasonably valid critique of what ails the Chinese system. Deng’s socialism with Chinese characteristics, he argues, is an unworkable hybrid, where “Leninist corporatism” imperfectly apes market forces with the help of massive infusions of Western know-how, and the pluralism essential to a truly innovative and dynamic modern society is stifled. Correctives to the “China has it made” school are useful. More illuminating, however, are two recent books that largely eschew thesis, instead working through anecdotes of people encountered, and phenomena observed, to explore China’s national transformation.

Getting Rich First: Life in a changing China, by the former BBC China correspondent Duncan Hewitt, is a perceptive, detailed and entertaining exploration of the tumult that is modern China. Despite its predictably hyped title, James Kynge’s China Shakes the World: The rise of a hungry nation is a well-observed warts-and-all effort to produce a likeness of a rapidly mutating subject. Kynge tells flesh-creeping tales about the methods Chinese use to climb the value-added ladder and outperform the West not only as a cheap mass manufacturer, but at the quality end of the market. What the Italian silk producers in Prato initially took to be a welcome influx of Chinese labour, for example, turned out to be a predatory, piecemeal, decade-long enterprise that ended with those same Chinese apprentices taking their knowledge back to China and putting their host companies out of business. Kynge takes as given that China has established itself as the world’s factory, and that living with the consequences is going to be anything but comfortable. This is leavened by a sober account of the disorders afflicting Chinese development, disorders whose roots lie in the tensions between the market imperatives of growth and the Chinese leadership’s deep reluctance to relinquish control. Kynge has likened China to a lobster, with huge and prominent manufacturing claws but a feeble tail. It is an odd metaphor for so fast-moving a country, but one sees his point.

The contradictions are becoming acute. On the positive side of the ledger, when adjusted to take account of purchasing power, China’s contribution to global growth has for the past seven years exceeded that of the United States. That bald statistic does not take into account the benign worldwide impact of low inflation, held down in large part by the abundant availability of low-cost Chinese imports. Less benignly, however, China may already be the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. China depends on coal, the unwashed, sulphur-belching variety, to meet 70 per cent of its primary energy demand, and already burns more coal than the US, Europe and Japan together. Already China exports sulphur dioxide pollution as far as Los Angeles. This is just the start: the Chinese Academy of Engineering reports that, in the next fifteen years, China will need as much additional power from all sources as the US developed in the past half- century – even if its industries can be compelled to curb wastage so profligate that each unit of output consumes 50 per cent more energy in China than in India, and ten times more than in Japan. According to Zhou Shengxian, China’s top environment minister, industrial effluent has turned more than a quarter of China’s seven main river systems into “sticky glue”. Toxic fumes blanket its cities, and air and water pollution kill 500,000 Chinese a year, according to the World Bank. Effluents are destroying marine life in its great inland lakes and red algae infest its coastal seas. Rapid industrialization is everywhere a messy business, but here again China is breaking all records.

The environmental fallout from China is not the only issue that bothers the neighbours. What they hear from Beijing is much rhetoric about China’s “peaceful rise”; but what they observe is an intensely secretive, high-speed military build-up, as China converts the lumpen foot-soldiery of the People’s Liberation Army into a military machine capable of fighting and winning the high-tech wars of the twenty-first century, projecting air and sea power far beyond Chinese territory under doctrines designed by its military planners to master “the strategic configuration of power”. What China would do with such a military is anyone’s guess; it is doubtful that the leadership has thought it through. The paradox is this: China’s dependence on foreign investment and know-how, and imported raw materials, gives it the strongest of interests in economic integration and peaceable international relations – the ambitions of a status quo power. But its long-term compulsion is, by military as well as economic means, to alter the status quo and emerge as a major world power.

China’s leaders need this second strategic dimension of power more for domestic reasons than because of any coherent international ambition. The Communist Party is a fossilized anachronism in an increasingly affluent, sophisticated and cynical society: if it is to retain its monopoly of power, it needs the narrative of revived national greatness to buttress claims to legitimacy that will be more and more insistently contested in the years ahead. “Onward and upward with President and Party General Secretary Hu Jintao!” was the unwritten message on the moon-orbiting satellite China launched right after October’s Party Congress.

The 73-million strong Party dominates political life and much business activity, and is deeply entrenched in the theoretically separate government administration. It is above the law, with its own courts and disciplinary procedures. But as despots have discovered elsewhere, to be “monarch of all you survey” is not necessarily to have matters under control. Time was when the smallest deviation from the party line was unthinkably risky, but that time is gone. Provincial cadres may go through the motions of obeying edicts from Beijing, but in practice sidestep or ignore them. It is thus the weakness of China’s current crop of leaders, not their strength, that will make dealings with Beijing difficult. Deng’s successors are gripped by forebodings that the Party could be the victim of what they trumpet as its great success: China’s rise.

The quinquennial Party Congress is China’s big political showcase event, the moment when the new Politburo is unveiled and its policies for the next five years staked out; but what was above all striking last year was the Party’s determination to make this as much of a political non-event as possible. Its cyber-cops pulled the plug on at least 18,000 websites, bundled entire squatter settlements of lowly petitioners out of Beijing, arrested some activists and “advised” others to take a holiday – hardly a display of confidence that China is, as Hu incessantly intones, a “harmonious society”. Internally, the Party is rocked by furious controversy over the sustainability of China’s headlong rush to get rich; and that is precisely why open debate on China’s problems is deemed unaffordable. Behind the mandatory displays of unity, this was the most troubled Party Congress in years.

The reasons are not far to seek. China’s phenomenal advance has been socially, generationally and geographically lopsided. This Deng expected: he explicitly said that some people would have to get rich first, although it is doubtful that he anticipated the yawning gulf that would open up between China’s wealth-flaunting nouveau riche and the poor at their gates. The rich–poor divide comes as a rude shock in a society where most people over forty remember starting out earning roughly the same pittance as everyone else, with the state providing basic services for free. China’s income gap – most spectacularly between town and countryside, but also within cities – now rivals that of Victorian England and exceeds that of the US. An aperitif in a slick Beijing bar costs a month’s farm income. Illiteracy is rising because the cost of education is beyond the reach of millions, as is healthcare; rural and urban migrant families can be reduced by a single illness to poverty so abject that they cannot afford enough clothes or food. China has compressed into a few years an industrial revolution and the urbanization of a vast nation, all without the safety valves of political accountability, social security and a fair and accessible judicial system. The dramatic overall increase in prosperity sharpens the resentments of those whose lives are just as poor as before, and considerably more precarious.

China’s dash for growth is also more chaotic than Deng could have foreseen. What began as a controlled experiment, in the single “special economic zone” of Shenzhen, has become a free-for-all. Development zones, offering good infrastructure, preferential taxes and fewer controls, were a bright idea in the 1980s, when China needed to attract foreign investment and create regional hubs, but they have become a runaway national obsession: provincial-level development zones cover some 2 million hectares, a land glut far outstripping demand, and almost every locality has at least one of its own. The order has gone out to close “unauthorized” zones, but local cadres’ determination not to be left behind in China’s race to develop tends to outweigh fear of official censure. So they court investors by means fair and foul, offering them extravagant tax breaks to set up factories on sites often grabbed from residents with little or no compensation, and with tacit guarantees that miserable working conditions and safety standards, environmental degradation and sharp business practices will, between good friends and for the customary “considerations”, be leniently viewed. Corruption, China’s ancient curse, again gnaws voraciously at society’s guts, making millionaires even of low-level officials, “absorbing” a tenth of total government spending, and giving rise to bitter and often violent outbursts of popular anger, in demonstrations that are officially admitted to number some 1,500 a week.

Few of these are, as yet, directed against the central government. Beijing’s huge floating population of desperate petitioners – a phenomenon unchanged from imperial China – testifies to a pathetic, unrequited faith that redress can be found if you can only catch the ear of those at the top. But they make Beijing nervous. With the collapse of Maoism and, now, the brazen abandonment of Marxism-Leninism, for almost the first time in China’s long history there is no unifying ideology or belief system to buttress the Party’s systems of control. And these systems themselves are creaking: in the age of the mobile phone and the internet, society’s teeming discontents cannot be mastered merely by breaking heads.

Discontent is not universal, of course. To millions, particularly the savvy urban young, this sharp-clawed red capitalism has delivered the goods, not only in vastly better standards of living but in increasing freedom from the state controls that minutely regulated where their parents lived and worked, what they ate, what they learnt, and even when they married. The formerly inadmissible idea that people have choices has crept in as an unavoidable by-product of economic liberalization, and the intrinsically subversive idea that people also have rights is in consequence becoming harder for authority to deny. Spurring all these changes is tumultuous, headlong urbanization, China’s most dramatic example of deliberate national policy run amok. Deng’s early modernizations began in the countryside, but the shock of the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests prompted a compulsive switch to developing its existing cities, and creating enough new ones to accommodate a planned 300 million more people in the next decade or so.

China mastered the arts of a refined, complex and skilfully engineered urban culture long ago. Silk Road travellers carried back to the West awed accounts of cities like Song dynasty Kaifeng, whose population in the early twelfth century was said to be more than a million, including traders from all parts of the known world and a substantial Jewish community. Xi’an, Luoyang, Nanjing and Beijing were all in turn great imperial cities. It is too often forgotten in the West that before the nineteenth century, when China was left standing by the Industrial Revolution in Britain, then Western Europe and finally the US, and corruption leeched the lifeblood out of the imperial system, this was an enviably advanced and exceedingly rich society. But the heavily industrialized, chokingly polluted Great Wens of modern China have almost nothing in common with the symmetrical and carefully embellished cities of its earlier greatness. They are the melting pots of a pell-mell modernization that increasingly is eluding central control.

Duncan Hewitt observes that, before Tiananmen, high-speed urbanization was largely confined to the southern province of Guangdong and its capital Guangzhou (Canton), which was the first to build smart hotels and flyovers, permit small-scale private enterprise and experiment with supermarkets. When he first arrived in Shanghai in 1988, he found “a city with a decaying grandeur” that was “not apparently going anywhere in a hurry”. The odd creaking trolley bus was the only public transport, bicycles ruled the streets, stores were sullen state-run affairs, and, even with good political connections, those few able to afford a telephone waited years for a line. In the maelstrom Shanghai he lives in today, entire neighbourhoods vanish overnight.

Maoism had left Shanghai – the pre-revolutionary Pearl of the East, or its Yellow Babylon, depending on your perspective – a dilapidated relic of colonial exhibitionism, overlaid by the Communist grimness of mile upon mile of concrete six-storey housing blocks and industrial satellite towns. The one post-1949 architectural extravagance, in a city that had been famed for them in Settlement days, was the Stalinist House of Russian Friendship. The revolutionaries turned the famous racetrack into People’s Square, now the park where Shanghai’s new opera house and its marvellous (and privately funded) museum of antiquities stand, but in Mao’s time a PLA parade ground, incongruously surrounded by pre-war Art Deco cinemas. Ideologically, Shanghai was no backwater in the Mao years – on the contrary, it was the spawning ground for Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution – but economically it stagnated along with the rest of China. In 1986, the creation of a Shanghai Master Plan foreshadowed the city’s turnaround, yet in the late 1980s the future city of skyscrapers still existed only in paint – graffiti Manhattans daubed on ill-maintained walls. But when the city’s forced hibernation ended, with the key decision in 1991 to convert down-at-heel Pudong, across the Huangpu River from the stately old Bund, into China’s futuristic hub of trade and financial services, Shanghai burst into crude, aggressively mercantile, life.

Nine years later, there were 3,000 skyscrapers on its skyline with as many more in the planning works – a Manhattan, or rather a series of Manhattans, thrown up overnight in a colossal building binge that shows no sign of abating. Nearly 2,200 billion yuan ($275 billion) had been invested in spaghetti loops of flyovers, five light rail networks, eight tube lines, due to expand to twenty, and suburban railway lines. Flattening two islands out in the Yangtze estuary, joining them and linking them to the mainland by the world’s longest offshore bridge, Shanghai is building one of the world’s largest deep-water ports, while the new Pudong airport, linked to the city by the 300 mph Maglev “floating” train, is scheduled to handle 70 million passengers and 5 million tonnes of cargo a year.

No other city in the world has built so much, so fast – or so regardless of the economic laws of gravity. Banks are encouraged to lend to projects that yield no revenue, and keep lending to owners of buildings that stand empty. The Shanghai city government’s ambitions trump mundane considerations of affordability, let alone sustainability: the wholesale dispersal of economic activity across a 1.45-million-square- kilometre “multi-core, multi-axis” agglomeration of city, satellites and suburban cities, containing 400 million people, means that every mile of highway will have to double in size in the next ten years to stop greater Shanghai grinding to a standstill.

No city – until Beijing caught building fever too and laid waste the old walled hutongs that were its distinctive feature – has been demolished with less compunction. Streets and shop-houses have been obliterated, their occupants unceremoniously dumped in distant suburbs; the gridded, gated lanes of nineteenth-century shikumen houses are rapidly disappearing. For nostalgia, you have to head to the space between the Bund and the ex-racetrack, old European piles of stone lining streets where the sun barely penetrates and crazy loops of electricity wires above your head recall midtown Manhattan in the 1930s; or to the human-scale French settlement, where trees still shade Art Deco buildings, and bars and boutiques cater to foreign and Chinese fashionistas. Elsewhere, what first strikes the eye is giganticism. Shanghai’s official city population is 14 million, a number that excludes around four million “illegal” migrants without residence permits and therefore without rights to schools, medical care or pensions. The university city in suburban Songjiang, grandiosely laid out with imitation pyramids and obelisks, is to house no fewer than 800,000 students – this in a country where graduates are by no means assured of jobs.

The second great shock is Shanghai’s aping of foreign styles, coating “socialism with Chinese characteristics” in multiple veneers of Western architectural fantasy. Shanghainese like to tell you that the landmark eighty-eight-floor Jin Mao tower in Pudong, built by Chicago architects, pays homage to Chinese pagoda forms, but Art Deco is closer to the mark. That whole Pudong skyline looks as though someone has invited a bunch of architectural students to live out their wildest fantasies, in a jumble of incongruous styles; and yet Pudong is the most “planned” urban development in China. Official buildings can be still more startling; in the suburban city of Minhang, the district courthouse is a replica, two-thirds size, of the Capitol in Washington, DC – an odd act of homage indeed, since none but those judging or to be judged may cross its portals.

Western arches and columns and pediments, even caryatids and the odd recumbent British lion, thirty or more storeys above ground, crown the miles and miles of otherwise bog-standard residential tower blocks, embellishments that one Chinese architect disgustedly describes as neo-colonial. Shanghai’s millionaires live in new “Edwardian” houses near the zoo and flock to country clubs with coats of arms at the gates and golf courses within; well-heeled buyers can choose between Welwyn Garden City homes, detached Spanish villas, French chateaux and English cottages. These luxury development projects, as Hewitt gleefully observes, are marketed with such unabashed slogans as “Block of Wealth Land”, “Boss and Winner – be a world boss, be a Shanghai winner” and even “True Royalty by Blood and Right”.

Oddest of all, the Party bosses decided that a great way to advertise Shanghai as a “world city” was to create seven satellite towns each with a national “theme”. Anting, designed by Albert Speer, the son of Hitler’s favourite architect, is a miniature of German style complete with a Volkswagen factory. Thamestown, part of Songjiang New City, offers a Disneyland version of England where lath and plaster meet Georgian meets stockbroker belt, in squares, village green with pub, and a church where couples are offered the experience of “exotic marriage customs in which you can exchange vows in front of a pastor”. Spain, Italy, Sweden, Holland and Canada offer other lifestyle choices. Next off the drawing board is Dongtang, China’s first “eco-city” on Chongming, the largest alluvial island in the world which, ironically, is largely the creation of the destruction of watersheds further up the Yangtze River.

All this comes at a price: a Thamestown apartment would set you back between £250,000 and £350,000, by no means top of the mark for Shanghai but steep for suburbs thirty kilometres from the city centre, and steeper still when set against average Shanghai incomes of around £1,700 a year. Yet they sell, often for piles of cash that, given the non-existence of large denomination Chinese banknotes, are so mountainous that Shanghai’s housing craze has spawned a new career, that of “money-sitter”: heavy men paid literally to sit on banknotes whose value is then judged with a measuring tape.

Shanghai is China’s trendsetter, but where does the money come from? Is there solid wealth behind the glitzy façades, or is this history’s biggest speculative bubble? To ask about the public finances is to be met by successive evasions. The arrest last year on corruption charges of Chen Liangyu, Shanghai’s powerful Party boss, hints at part of the answer but does not begin to reveal the true picture. And this pattern of breakneck urbanization, driven by the twin imperatives of industrialization and rural impoverishment, and largely created and managed by unaccountable Party bosses, is repeated across much of China, as far to the south-west as Chongqing, a megacity in the making just upriver from the Three Gorges Dam, where hefty investment by government and state-owned banks has lifted growth to more than 14 per cent. Estimates that China accounts for half of all construction activity on the planet may not be wide of the mark.

This national building mania impresses foreigners; but to the Chinese it looks more and more like “irrational exuberance”. In speeches of clear urgency, China’s leaders have begun to paint a grim picture of a cavalier disregard of cost-benefit and risk-profit calculations, huge waste and bad bank loans. Wen Jiabao, the Prime Minister, has repeatedly read the riot act about “irrational economic structures and low quality and returns” and shortages of “top-notch proficient personnel”. China’s capital-intensive, profligate and environmentally destructive growth path, he told last year’s national conference of Chinese scientists, “is unsustainable and we absolutely must stop”. People like Wen do appear to understand that social as well as economic pressures make it urgent to rein in abuses before the tensions afflicting China’s “socialist spiritual civilization” become uncontrollable.

Chinese society is changing almost as fast as its urban skylines – and very much faster than its politics. Most troublingly for the Party, individualism has burst the dam of Chinese social constraints, ancient and modern, in some ways easing the process of constant adaptation but at the same time exposing the incompatibility of the Communist Party’s two great obsessions, stability and total political control. Hewitt is at his sharpest and funniest when depicting the interplay, or lack of it, between China’s Mao-era adults with their revolutionary scars, and their pampered, post-ideological “‘me’ generation” only-child progeny who drag them through IKEA branches telling them to chuck out their old furniture along with their awe of the Party’s edicts, and bewilder them with their wired-up lifestyle. His vignettes of modern art, changing sexual mores and youth culture in China are fascinating. Although he evidently finds the urban middle class more entertaining to write about than he does the people “left behind” – the countryside, where around 700 million Chinese still live, rates only one short chapter – the unlovely undergrowth is not neglected. But – and it is a “but” that applies to much else in a book that is more a series of descriptive sketches than a critical investigation – Hewitt is reluctant to get into the potential political implications.

The world inhabited by these “little emperors”, as they are known, may be wider and freer than their parents or grandparents ever thought possible; but the young are also faced, as older generations were not, by anxieties about soaring housing costs, school and medical fees, the single-child burden of supporting the elderly and, now, rising inflation. Ordinary people see how much richer China is, but most of them do not feel much richer – and, in Deng-era terms if not by comparison with the disastrous Mao years, they are not. During the five years on Hu Jintao’s watch, the share of national income going to households has fallen, according to the World Bank, even as people have seen living costs rise. If personal consumption has fallen, and it has, from 44 per cent of GDP to 36 per cent, then that is partly because wages have fallen even more sharply, from 52 per cent to less than 40 per cent. And people talk about their frustrations and fears as never before. China is in the grip of a new “cultural revolution”, a new culture of outspokenness welling up from below, in chatrooms, text messages, mass emails and perhaps 18 million blogs, demanding cleaner air and cleaner politics; championing environmental, consumer and, increasingly, citizens’ rights. But accountability is quite flatly against the interests of the bureaucrat-business mafias of local officialdom.

This is the Party’s existential dilemma. And in the past few months, indications have appeared of an ideological battle at the top of the Party, as fierce as the arguments about whether China’s “opening up” was “socialist” or “capitalist” that preceded Deng’s ditching, in 1992, of the stultifying orthodoxies of the command economy. On what Chinese analysts confusingly call the Left, there is open grumbling that the Party has sold out to capitalists, leaving workers and peasants in the cold, coupled with demands for a return to the egalitarianism and welfare systems of “real” socialism. From the “Right”, Deng-era reformers such as the outspoken and respected Li Rui are calling for political reforms to match China’s economic transformation – a “self-revolution” to open up the system. They argue that corruption, pollution and the lack of legal certainty cannot be addressed without “democratic socialist liberalization”; and they quote Deng, who although himself no democrat, asserted in 1980 that “whether all our reforms will eventually succeed hinges on the reform of our political system”.

There is no way the current leadership is going to listen to the Left. Nor is it prepared to countenance democracy other than as a management tool for the more effective, because more pragmatic, control of the Party machine. But they have grasped that if it is to avoid self-destruction, the Party has to be seen to govern for the good of more than itself and the cadres’ cronies. Both Hu and Wen spent much of the Party Congress lecturing the cadres that correcting China’s course is not a choice but an imperative. Lacking Deng’s authority, they, too, are using his words to make their point, reviving his famous challenge to the Party to “emancipate the mind” and “seek truth from facts”.

That challenge marked the start of market-based reforms. The cadres are on notice, relayed first by Qiushi, the Party’s ideological magazine, and taken up by the People’s Daily, that the Party is at an equally important crossroads today – that there must be “a fundamental change in the status quo” so as to spread the benefits of growth, provide decent education and social services, and create better opportunities for China’s “undeveloped productive forces”. The announcement, just before the Party Congress, that the vaunted Three Gorges Dam is on the brink of “environmental catastrophe” was deliberately timed; nothing could have better dramatized the new emphasis on “scientific”, meaning “sustainable”, development.

That stolid middle-of-the-roader, Hu Jintao, may improbably emerge as the accidental undertaker of the last remains of Marxism-Leninism in China. This is not what he says, of course; indeed, his Party Congress speech was thickly encrusted with references to Marx and Marxism. But the content of his “Four Unswervinglys” campaign, launched last June in a speech attended by the entire Politburo standing committee to underline its importance, points China down the post-Marxist path more firmly than Deng ever did.

The first “unswervingly” is to “emancipate the mind”; from which follows (second) “the building of a modern market system” by removing all obstacles that are “detrimental to our efforts to bring into play the fundamental role of the market”, while at the same time (third) turning China into “an innovation-based country” that “yields satisfactory economic returns, requires a low consumption of resources and causes less environmental pollution”, and respects “the rights and interests” of all social groups; and (fourth) aims at “well-rounded” political and cultural, as well as economic, development in which opportunity is broadened and people’s rights “are earnestly respected and guaranteed”.

How very David Cameron, you may mutter, sceptically noting that there is no such thing as “compassionate Communism”. Nor will China be a compassionate society until that Minhang imitation of the Capitol ceases to be a sick joke, and wrongdoers get locked up instead of the brave spirits who set out to expose their malfeasance. Yet a brief sample of Hu’s phrases reveals genuinely radical shifts. Class struggle is now an “incorrect concept”, to be replaced by “a people-centred approach”; policy must be formulated “against the backdrop of globalization”, with deep financial, fiscal and social reforms; “one-sided stress on a quantitative accumulation in our economy has resulted in insufficient attention to quality and efficiency”; “the invisible costs” require China to “change the country’s development pattern”.

Turn all this inside out, as the Chinese have long learnt to do, and what you see is an admission of what ails China unparalleled in its candour. The discrepancies between the world’s awed assumptions about China’s “unstoppable” rise and the anxieties voiced in its burgeoning think tanks and universities have long seemed odd, as has the blindness of financial analysts to risk factors that would, in any other country, strike them quite forcibly. The next five years will tell whether the cadres are too busy getting rich to listen, and reveal whether the centre is capable of enforcing its will on the recalcitrant. The will may not really be there, or at least not until Hu gives way to the next generation. But fear of those on high is diminishing. When Mao declared in 1949 that “the Chinese people have stood up”, it was a rhetorical flourish. In China’s sophisticated cities, and even in its protest-torn countryside, they are now not just standing up but shouting. In that sense, liberals like Li Rui have won the argument about democracy, even though it has yet to be joined seriously. The Party has no idea how to resolve these “contradictions among the people”, but conciliation is now officially “the country’s objective of struggle”, and it cannot be achieved without fashioning some approximation to the politics of consent by the governed. That, for China, is uncharted territory. Expect a lot of swerving on the road ahead.

Rosemary Righter is an Associate Editor of The Times.

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