Hu did it – the WTO-column

(later also at Chinabiz)
The new central leadership is in charge for over two years and, with a discount given for SARS in their first months, media worldwide have been giving an assessment of what is has achieved. Giving such an assessment about China is both easy and hard. Easy, since in a huge and diverse country like China things can go very wrong and very good at the same time, so depending on once personal perception, it is fairly easy to pick some incidents that fit one’s own agenda, whether positive or negative.
Zhao Qizheng, the head of the information office of the State Council, complained in May that Western media focused too much on those things going wrong. Journalists and academics continue to be incarcerated for rather unclear reasons so it is all too easy to paint a gloomy picture of China’s recent development. By then blaming China’s president personally for rounding up people who have or report on dissenting views, it becomes very easy to frame China in the classic way as an evil force.
While I do think it is important to pinpoint those distressing incidents, allow me there to take a helicopter view and look at some really new developments that make the current leadership different from the previous one. In China, where all politics is local politics, pushing a new policy at a central level is hard enough. Former Prime Minister Zhu Rongji complained more than once that he was already happy when one out of three laws would have an impact in the whole country. My overview:

1. The move of emphasis from the larger cities, one of Jiang Zemin core policies, to the country side has had a major effect. Obviously helped by last year’s bumper harvest, the abolishment of agricultural taxes and other measures have improved income at the country side. Millions of migrant workers decided last year and this year that going to their poorly paid jobs in Guangdong and Fujian was not longer worthwhile, causing a major shock in the southern parts of China where low wages still define much of its economy. The abolishment of the largely symbolic “Go West” policies (read Paul French here) also symbolizes the current leadership is more familiar with the country-side, compared to their city-oriented predecessors.
2. Critics have been castigating the central government after it introduced the so-called anti-secession law earlier this year. While the jury is still out on how the new initiatives on Taiwan are going to work out, it signaled the end of the old policy that could have been called stagnant at best. For twelve years only rhetoric dominated Beijing’s lack of new policies, while now the government is taking an active approach. Again, a major change compared to the previous regime. My take on the anti-secession law was that the policy change started with a basic rhetoric move to accommodate conservative forces in China, before the government could move on in setting really new policies.
3. Last year’s dramatic change towards AIDS, according to all accounts still one of the more important ticking time bombs China still has to diffuse to survive. Premier Wen Jiabao’s visits to AIDS-patients have been most widely published, but the nationwide campaigns to promote safe sex have illustrated a dramatic change from previous efforts to hide the problem altogether.
4. A different attitude towards non-governmental organizations is also in the making. While most of them are technically by-and-large still illegal entities, they are included regularly in the list of organizations the government calls upon for help. By including NGO’s into the daily mantras of the state media, the society is being prepared for the introduction of what we know outside China as a civil society.

Those are four important changes I have seen emerge over the past two years and they define the strategic way I look at China. They define some of the important trends and present an undercurrent in the historic events taking place in China today.

Fons Tuinstra

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