| The Last Wall  | Can't escape the pun. Everyone is queuing up for an entry pass outside the Great Mall of China. And undoubtedly, it is a monumental achievement of our time, more specifically perhaps, of social capitalism. It was one of the longest marches in the history of nations, from the Yanan caves, from where Mao began his revolution, to Shenzhen and Shanghai, from where Deng began his own. The so-called Asian century, panegyrists are bound to argue, is a euphemism for the Chinese century. China is no longer the countryside, with due apologies to the Great Departed Chairman. China, as conventional wisdom goes, is the marketplace which is no longer managed by Marx or other phantoms from history. And the fastest growing bazaar of the Orient has the largest security apparatus to guard the gates-even to extend the domain. In awe and admiration, the world is waking to the new Thunder of the East. So let us too, we the other Asian weighed down by democracy. On the eve of the Chinese prime minister's visit to India, should we really be in awe of the People's Republic? Should we feel anyway inferior? Sinologists and seminar-friendly market junkies may not agree, especially at a time when the India-China relationship has become the most sought after chapter in geopolitics' comparative literature. The answers lie beyond the market, in a China where the so-called modernisation is a project propelled by paranoia, and where freedom is selective: buy and be happy. But beware of the state, which is still Leninist: the party is paramount; the enemy is permanently present, within and without. Hence the inevitability of an Eastern Gulag, one of whose prominent residents died a few months ago as an outcast: Zhao Ziyang, the party boss who sympathised with the martyrs of Tiananmen Square. The other side of the Chinese market is the Chinese prison, home to the deviants infected by "counter-revolutionary viruses". Necessary to keep the idyll intact-to make the shopping smooth. Chinese communism may have become an ideological translation of Chinese nationalism, but it has in no way created a civil society, which is not about shopping bags and confiscated minds. China is a tenuous balance between free market and controlled citizen. A role model for India? Freedom denied can't be an inspiration for freedom mismanaged, no matter how victimised we are by the tyranny of comparison. And we are learning to be winners our own way. |
