PUBLISHED 20 SEPTEMBER 2012
The End of the Chinese Dream: Why Chinese People Fear the Future
Any day now, the Chinese political system will go into spasm and produce a new leadership. The backstory of the choices will remain largely unknown, despite astonishing recent glimpses of the infighting in what increasingly resembles the world’s biggest mafia organisation.
If the past is any guide, at the climax of the Chinese Communist Party congress, scheduled for this autumn, nine middle-aged men with implausibly black hair and tightly set expressions will march on to the big stage in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People to rapturous applause. These illuminati will be the new incumbents of China’s most powerful entity, the standing committee of the politburo.
At the end of their expected two terms of office, these men and their families will be fabulously rich. They will be alert throughout to the demands of supporters and wary of attacks by rivals. They will place their allies in key posts to guard against future reversals of fortune. Much lower down their list of concerns will be what the 1.3 billion people they rule might be thinking as they watch this change of shift at the top.
A tidal wave of China-related books inundates the bookshops each year but few of them interrogate what Chinese people outside the privileged urban elites really feel about the past five decades of economic upheaval, social rupture and ideological confusion or about the ruling party and the system it upholds. This is in part because, with more than a billion subjects, even the most conscientious effort can be criticised as too small to be useful.
Equally important is the reluctance of the Chinese authorities to allow foreigners to dig around in this sensitive territory. Gerard Lemos, whose book The End of the Chinese Dream is based on an extended exercise in opinion-gathering, and Hsiao-Hung Pai, whose book Scattered Sand is the product of thorough reporting among China’s most marginalised citizens, both show what can be discovered despite official obstruction.
It is a cliché of many western accounts of China that the double-digit economic growth of the past 30 years must equate to the greatest happiness of the greatest number: 300 million people have been lifted out of poverty; China is now the world’s second-largest economy; the majority of Chinese are living in cities for the first time in history. How could this not be happiness?
