A close inspection of China reveals a lot of revolting things. However, this observation is not so much conditions that would give an impression of revulsion to the viewer as it reflects the continuing signs of unrest as China undergoes the wrenching exercise of encountering modernization.
Beijing has always asserted that foreigners refrain from interfering with its internal affairs. However, China's opening to the outside world makes it hard for others to turn a blind eye to its domestic events. Whether the Communist leadership likes it or not, a variety of conditions in the Middle Kingdom will influence how outsiders view Beijing's current Olympic bid or its discussions over WTO membership.
On the economic front, restructuring and downsizing of its ailing state industry are taking place in a backdrop of declining rural incomes. On the social and political front, Beijing is locked in an often-brutal struggle with separatists in its Central Asian provinces as well as with practitioners of Falun Gong (
As usual, demands for greater autonomy or independence from non-Han minorities in the far-flung provinces are met with denunciations of "splitists"whose selfish acts threaten the motherland. Such threats are not taken mildly and considerable force is being used to suppress them.
Roman Catholics have long been targets of vitriolic bile with Beijing setting up its own patriotic version of the church. It appears that some unofficial Christian churches have been disbanded and their premises destroyed.
More recently, shrill and scolding attacks on Falun Gong are being mounted in a thinly veiled ruse that is one of the oldest tricks of Chinese despots. This is to portray any opposition to their heavenly mandate as an attack on the Chinese people. Thus, criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party are reduced to a fatuous equation of the expressions of an anti-Chinese conspiracy. It is hardly worth one's breath to denounce this as rubbish.
What is more is that there is a strong anti-foreign content in attacks on Falun Gong with the Legal Daily condemning Falun Gong practitioners as "running dogs of foreign anti-Chinese forces." Ironically, Beijing seems incapable of grasping that these childish attacks are counter-productive in its quest to serve as host for the 2008 Olympic Games and to join the WTO.
Even the most cursory examination of events in China reveals that the problems of social unrest that so vex the masters of Beijing as homegrown in nature. In short, China's revolting masses are responding to the revolting messes cooked up by the communist leadership that seems incapable of reining in its cadres or filling the spiritual vacuums that are being filled by a growth in sects and religious conversions. Perhaps more troubling, there are also signs of an inability to address the insecurities arising from industrial restructuring.
For example, groups of rural peasants and urban workers who are becoming conscious of their rights are confronting opportunistic and abusive bureaucrats. Most of the protests are in response to corruption, elitism and hypocrisy. It appears that Beijing's political and legal institutions are incapable of avoiding these conflicts. Much worse is that there is little success in managing or resolving them short of using force.Perhaps the most egregious sins are those of corrupt local Communist Party cadres who have been fleecing peasants by assessing excessive fees or levying taxes in a capricious manner.
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