Many people believe that China will become the largest and most powerful economy in the world by 2050. Martin Jacques,a creative British Marxist,has just written a book When China Rules the World,in which he says that Middle Earth,as China regards itself,will dominate the world. China will dominate,he writes,because it has always been a single statecenturies before nation states came into existence in Europe. He also regards the overwhelming domination of Han Chinese (92 per cent of the population) as the reason why the communist state still commands loyaltythe Han see the Peoples Republic as continuous with the millennia old state. China,believes Jacques,will not become a Western type liberal democracy. It will chart its own path.
When I debated this issue with Jacques on July 3,I demurred,adding two caveats. One was not to project the present into the future uncritically and to point out that strong as the Chinese state was,it could not deal with peaceful protest of students in June 1989 and had to bring out tanks. No stable and confident polity needs to do that.
Now we have in Urumqi,the living proof of the fragility of the Chinese state. What happened between the local Uighur people and the immigrant Chinese was a communal riot such as India is well-used to. The Uighur had heard that some of their fellow ethnics had been victimised in Guangdong province and retaliated against the Han Chinese who had migrated to Xinjiang province. The similarity of this episode with Raj Thackerays fulminations against North Indian and their response to Marathi speakers in Bihar is uncanny.
But China did not have the usual democratic means to deal with differences. So there were 156 dead and over a thousand injured. The Hans attacked the local Uighurs and vice versa. As usual,outsiders were blamed,especially Raqiya Kadeer,who has exiled herself to the US after suffering imprisonment for building a prosperous business in Xinjiang. She is accused of plotting for Xinjiangs independence. Police and army personnel were used quite ruthlessly and so far,the suppression seems to have worked.
Chinese President Hu Jintao left the G8/G 20 summit in Italy. Maybe he could not face the shame of the police brutality covered by many TV cameras. Or perhaps he was more worried than he showed. But this must be an unprecedented embarrassment for him. The Chinese brazened through the protests about the Olympic flame. Tibet was in flames last year and this year it is Xinjiang. They are both large and sparsely populated regions at the western end of China. They were never part of the Han Empire. The Uighurs are Muslim and the Tibetans are Buddhist. Their religions make the Chinese Communist Party uncomfortable. Their languages have been downgraded if not suppressed. Their local culture is being set aside in favour of Han modernisation. Beijing has encouraged the Han Chinese to move to these sparsely settled regions (the 8 million Uighurs in Xinjiang are about half the population.)
The trouble in Xinjiang or Tibet pales in comparison besides the multiple problems India has faced as a nationin Nagaland and the many other parts of the North East,in Punjab with the Khalistan movement,in Jammu and Kashmir,the Martahi Manoos in Mumbai and the recent riots against railway examinations in Karnataka. The communal riots in 2002 Gujarat and 1984 Delhi have left much injustice to be redressed. But there is a way of dealing with many of these protests by a combination of force and democratic dialogue. China can deploy force but cannot have the democratic dialogue.
China is a strong but a frightened state. It is too rigid to deal with real differences. It can have a lot of infrastructure,make a lots of steel and cement. It may go on doing that for a long time to come. Yet,it could also lose out to dissidence. Like a Chinese vase,the state is strong but brittle. Whether it breaks up or reinvents itself will be a fascinating question to speculate about in the years to come.
