The People's Republic of China (PRC) was declared on 1 October 1949. The authorities seek to hold an especially large celebration on every tenth anniversary. This is carefully designed to give the people the illusion of possessing strength and wealth - and to project the rulers' own vanity. This year's sixtieth anniversary will be the biggest yet.

Li Datong is a Chinese journalist and former editor of Freezing Point, a weekly supplement of the China Youth Daily newspaper

Among Li Datong's articles in openDemocracy:

"The CCTV fire: a voice without restraint" (5 March 2009)

"China: democracy in action" (19 March 2009)

"China's Tibet: question with no answer" (16 April 2009)

"Tiananmen: the legacy of 1989" (4 June 2009)

"China's civil society: breaching the Green Dam" (17 July 2009)
The celebrations over the last three decades have not always gone according to plan. In 1979 the damage wrought by the cultural revolution begun in the mid-1960s had not yet been repaired, and there was no money for major centrepiece events such as a military parade. By 1989, the reform and opening-up policies had brought some improvement to people's lives - cause enough, it was thought, for a splendid party. But in May-June of that year, the events of Tiananmen Square shocked the world, and China found itself more isolated than ever. Beijing was put under a strict military curfew, and the more flexible policies were set aside in place of noisy rhetoric about "opposing western peaceful evolution". It no longer seemed the time to celebrate, and the PRC anniversary events were low-key. For a while the Chinese believed they would never again see an extravagant and wasteful military parade.

In spring 1992, Deng Xiaoping's famous "southern tour" inaugurated a second round of reform in China. Deng himself passed away in 1997, bequeathing a mixed legacy of achievement and failure. His successor as party general-secretary leader was Jiang Zemin, a figure who combined commanding power with a love of performance. He decided to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the People's Republic in 1999 with a grand military display.

The problem of governance

The aim of that second round of reform was to establish a market economy - an aim achieved by a partnership between power and capital, with numerous state-owned enterprises sold off to the "able", creating a large cohort of capitalists. But many employees were forced out of work, with no social welfare to rely on - leaving them marginalised. Residential areas of cities and surrounding farmland were forcibly purchased at risible prices, and the rich-poor gap started to widen. The seeds of the social crisis that China faces today can be seen in this period, but there was not yet fierce confrontation. So the extravagant fiftieth anniversary celebrations went ahead - with the cost said to run to over RMB 100 billion ($14bn).

A dampener on the celebrations came in the form of an article entitled 50 Years of Trials and Hardships, by well-known liberal intellectual and former vice-president of the China academy of sciences, Li Shenzhi. The language was pointed: "1999 is not just the fiftieth anniversary of the People's Republic of China - it is the eightieth anniversary of the May 4th Movement" (a reference to the student-led protests of 1919 sparked by the unfair treatment of China embodied in the Versailles treaty which grew into a wider call for scientific advance, democracy, and social progress).

"The aim of the emancipation of the individual embodied in the demands of 1919 has today yet to be realised", Li Shenzhi continued. "1999 is also the tenth anniversaryof the June 4th incident which brought the Tiananmen protests to an end - a date that the authorities could use to declare an amnesty, in order to offer comfort to the victims and bereaved. This would restore public morale, lay the foundation for further reform, and also do wonders for China's international standing - thus improving the external conditions for reform. But those in power ignore this and the opportunity passes by."

It is a matter of record that Jiang did nothing for political reform. The seeds of social crisis planted during his reign have exploded, one by one, during Hu Jintao's leadership.  In 2008-09 alone, tens of thousands of people have been caught up in often violent protests.  There has been disorder in Tibet, Weng'an, Shishou, Urumqi and at the Tonghua steel mills, among many other incidents.

When public anger explodes, the authorities have no response but violent suppression. This crisis of governance is characterised by a loss of government credibility - particularly that of the authorities at the grassroots. A survey by the official publication Insight China found that government officials were rated as less trustworthy than sex-workers - surely the most devastating of verdicts.

The rot of corruption

The loss of government credibility is symbolised by two incidents. The first occurred on 17 July 2009, a million residents of Qi county in Henan province started to flee their homes. In only two or three hours, tens of thousands of vehicles flooded onto the roads, causing gridlock. Traffic police set up roadblocks and attempted to persuade drivers to turn back, but panic continued. The scene could have been taken from a Hollywood disaster movie, with the county left empty.

The reason? An accident with an industrial source of radioactivity - but there had been no leak of radiation and the situation was entirely under control. The local government did not view the incident as important and made no statement about it; but the public believed that government silence indicated a cover-up. The spreading rumours of an imminent explosion caused a spontaneous evacuation - with many public servants among those taking to the roads.

The second incident was the jailing for three years of a Hangzhou youth - the son of a rich family - for killing a pedestrian on 7 May 2009 while racing his car along the street. Many online commentators insisted the defendant was not the guilty party, but a stand-in; a bizarre belief, but one that earned much support, less because there was any evidence to support it than because people believe the rich can use their money to circumvent the law.

Such events are supplemented by constant tales of government untrustworthiness - which can seem exaggerated but often turn out to be true. For example, 1,500 people were arrested in a single crackdown on criminal gangs in Chongqing: the detainees included the deputy head of the city's public-security bureau (who had been in his post for a decade), the head of the justice bureau, other senior officials and several mega-rich businessmen. Many of these were local, or even national, "people's representatives".

The people cannot be expected to believe that only Chongqing is this corrupt. In recent months alone the vice-president of the supreme court, the mayor of Shenzhen, the party secretary of Zhejiang and the vice-ministry for railways have all fallen from office due to corruption.

The unavoidable clash

What of central government? The financial crisis has worsened China's employment concerns. Beijing has called for all levels of government to seek to combat unemployment, particularly among new graduates. The news provoked bitter humour among those affected: graduates responded to the publication of official figures on graduate employment by joking that they'd "been employed", internet-users reacted to the data from the statistics bureau showing increases in income by saying their incomes had "been increased". The public is dubious about any official and "authoritative" information.

Meanwhile, the record of a conversation with an "old comrade" has appeared online as the sixtieth anniversary celebrations approach. The identity of the source is not revealed, but the content suggests he must have been a member of the Central Political Bureau Committee, or higher. The article spread feverishly online; there were 300,000 hits within a few days. The source, speaking with particular authority, was frank in pointing out that sixty years of party rule have not been glorious - many of these years saw the people suffer at the hands of the ruling party. The party has turned its back on the commitments it made when it came to power: to "build a democratic, free, China". It has still not established basic political ethics.

The document sent shockwaves through the party. The analysis and the response to it reflect a crisis of credibility that is rare in the history of the People's Republic. At root, the cause lies in people's rising awareness of their rights and their desire to participate in politics - and the conflict between this and a closed, unsupervised and unfettered political system. This conflict is no longer merely theoretical; it is a living fact.

So the celebrations will take place against a background of fear that something will go wrong. There is tight security on a par with that for the Beijing Olympics, with three layers of monitoring to check people and vehicles entering the capital. Besides a large contingent of police and armed police, an army of 700,000 citizens has been mobilised to participate in security work - as if the country faces a dangerous enemy.

What air of celebration can there be? How long can these days of fear go on?

The fourth day of June - written as "6.4" in Chinese - never used to have any special significance. But in the last twenty years, since the events that culminated in the early hours of 4 June 1989 in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, it has acquired particular import. For the authorities it stands for resistance and turmoil; for the people it represents the democracy movement, and also suppression and slaughter. Li Datong is a Chinese journalist and a former editor of Bingdian (Freezing Point), a weekly supplement of the China Youth Daily newspaper

Among Li Datong's recent articles in openDemocracy:

"China: after the quake, the debate" (16 June 2008)

"China's leaders, the media, and the internet" (4 July 2008)

"China's digital nationalism: Kung Fu Panda under fire" (16 July 2008)

"The Weng'an model: China's fix-it governance" (30 July 2008)

"The Olympics: was China ready?" (22 August 2008)

"The Beijing Olympics: the last award" (29 August 2008)

"Death in Shanghai, law in China" (15 September 2008)

"China's power, China's people: towards accountability" (29 September 2008)

 "China's stalled transition" (19 February 2009)

"The CCTV fire: a voice without restraint" (5 March 2009)

"China: democracy in action" (19 March 2009)

There is a paradox in the commemoration of 2009. A rigorous clampdown by the authorities means that on the internet a search in China for reference to the Tiananmen events returns not one search result; yet in other ways the comparative silence of years past has been lifted. Some intellectuals even risked holding a "Tiananmen Square 20th anniversary seminar" - on the grounds that, as one attendee said, "if we stay silent, we become accomplices to the authorities' concealment of the crime."

But the biggest stir has been caused by the posthumous publication (in both Chinese and English) of the memoirs of the Chinese Communist Party's former general-secretary, Zhao Ziyang. An electronic version of the book is rapidly circulating among Beijing's intellectuals. Some compare its publication to that of the memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev after he was deposed as leader of the Soviet Union: both figures, after all, were reformers who lost internal party struggles and went on to dictate to tape memoirs which were published abroad after their death.

The hard debate

Such uncomfortable reminders have led an edgy Chinese government, aware of the potency of a "round figure" anniversary, to continue with the precautionary measures it started to put in place in early 2009. It has confined many "potential troublemakers" to their homes, and sent Zhao's former secretary Bao Tong on an enforced "trip". Some Beijing employers, responding to rumours of a "white memorial" on Tiananmen Square on 4 June, even forbade their workers from wearing white clothes that day.

The mix of fear and farce here is revealing. For two decades the government has prevented any record of the incident in the media, with the result that young people today do not even know who Hu Yaobang (the former party head whose death on 15 April 1989 sparked the first student protests) and Zhao Ziyang are. But the government officials themselves cannot forget, and every year impose severe measures nationwide to prevent real or imaginary "mishaps". It is the political elite, the "victor" of the 1989 contest of nerves and (in the steel), that finds itself sick with nerves.

It is left to the defeated - the former student leaders, the party reformers, liberal intellectuals and exiled democracy activists - to examine in retrospect the surge of public protest of these unforgettable weeks. Why did it fail? Why were the students and party reformers unable to communicate? Could the political deadlock have been broken, and everything ended differently? Can China's government and people ever be reconciled, and how? Such questions suggest that the "losers" have long moved past anger and onto rationality. Amid sometimes sharp internal criticism, they are deepening their understanding and drawing lessons.

The debate continues outside the circles of power. One conclusion is that the tragedy of 4 June 1989 was unavoidable, in part because of the effects of the the sheer longevity in power (in some cases almost five decades by that point) of the first generation of party leaders. Deng Xiaoping saw himself as part of a second generation, but in reality was an important member of the earlier cohort; before the cultural revolution he had been more powerful than Zhou Enlai.

A common characteristic of the first generation was familiarity with violence. Their political experiences - be it the war with the nationalists, or political struggles within the party - never considered compromise and mutual benefit. Differences were always irreconcilable, fights always to the death. When the party arrived at the pinnacle of state power in October 1949 that culture permeated society - including the education system. This culture inflected (and indoctrinated) too those who opposed the party, among them some of the university students demonstrating for democracy on Tiananmen Square for whom compromise was anathema and death in the pursuit of justice (even at the cost of bloodshed) could be glorious. 

The root of reform

In this absolutist environment, it is harder than it looks to identify the true architect of the decade of change and reform in China that contributed to the events of 1989. Deng Xiaoping's blueprints have not been found in the archives, nor any reform proposals he originated. His role in reform is more complex than is often recognised.

Deng Xiaoping had had a turbulent career. He fell from power (along with Liu Shaoqi) at the start of the cultural revolution in 1966, was reinstated in 1973 and established his authority within the party and society with a series of order-restoring "rectifications". But in 1976, he was again stripped of power by Mao Zedong following mass protests on Tiananmen Square, an event that became the political capital on which he would base his future rise. This political experience meant that by the time he acquired supreme power he had come to understand the need for urgent reform - albeit to maintain party rule.

The people were poor, and thirty years of communist government had only made them poorer. A public that dared to protest at Tiananmen was clearly running out of tolerance for its leaders. Deng often said that a failure to reform would lead to disaster; he knew the people had to get richer, and quickly. But he did not know how to make that happen, or what to do afterwards. Like Mao, he was no economist.

It was Zhao Ziyang, of the second generation of party leaders, who had both the best understanding of economics and the strongest ability to learn. In his time in Sichuan he had made a reputation for policies that increased industrial and agricultural output (a local pun on his name had him as the "go-to" man for grain). The historical evidence suggests that the real architect of China's reform was Zhao Ziyang, with Deng's contribution to history the provision of support.

Moreover, Deng's approval for economic changes was combined with consistent upholding of Mao's one-party rule. Deng, after all, had been part of the first generation of party leaders and shared its errors and even crimes. He maintained, for example, that the "anti-rightist" campaign was not an error but merely too wide in its scope (so wide indeed, that all but the five most prominent "rightists" were eventually rehabilitated). The Deng era also saw the end of the Xidan (democracy wall); the campaign against "spiritual pollution"; the denunciation of "bourgeois liberalisation"; opposition to the separation of powers; and violent suppression of peaceful public protest.

The long aftermath

Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang are emblematic of the second generation of party leaders. Their experiences taught them that there must be limits to the power of the ruling party - for example, that the party should have no role in "approving" works of art. They also knew that the public's rights should have legal protection. On different occasions in the mid-1980s, both Hu and Zhao said that the party must learn to rule even amid demonstrations and during periods of "small or medium disorder". This acceptance of public protest was one of the most important shifts in thought between the two generations - but unfortunately it was never consolidated.

The people paid for their protests in blood, but it was the party and the army that were most deeply damaged. No longer could they claim to be the "people's government" or the "people's army". No government can slaughter its citizens and escape opprobrium from the democratic world, and the atrocities committed then - despite the efforts to suppress their memory - will never be forgotten. Sooner or later there will be a reckoning for both the ruling party and political leaders.

A baleful legacy of 4 June 1989 is the habitual use of violence by local governments faced with difficult issues - there have been many subsequent "Tiananmens", large and small. Just as the party's culture of intolerance implanted itself into some of its student opponents in 1989, so official violence has to a degree generated a similar response from elements of the public. Yang Jia, who killed six Shanghai policemen, and Deng Yujiao, who killed a local-government official, received support and praise online. The inclination to meet violence with violence is growing. Tiananmen casts a long shadow.

China's Tibet has been given a new holiday to mark the passing of a half-century since the events it commemorates: Serfs' Emancipation Day. Several groups of senior politicians, including Hu Jintao - general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party's central committee - have attended an exhibition marking these fifty years of democratic reform in Tibet. The official media have decried the evils of

Li Datong is a Chinese journalist and former editor of Freezing Point, a weekly supplement of the China Youth Daily newspaper

Among Li Datong's articles in openDemocracy: 

"Xiamen: the triumph of public will" (16 January 2008)

"China's soft-power failure" (16 May 2008)

"China and the earthquake" (2 June 2008)

"China: after the quake, the debate" (16 June 2008)

"China's leaders, the media, and the internet" (4 July 2008)

"China's digital nationalism: Kung Fu Panda under fire" (16 July 2008)

"Death in Shanghai, law in China" (15 September 2008)

"China's power, China's people: towards accountability" (29 September 2008)

"China's stalled transition" (19 February 2009)

"The CCTV fire: a voice without restraint" (5 March 2009)

"China: democracy in action" (19 March 2009)

"serfdom" in historical Tibet, while trumpeting the accomplishments of today. China's foreign minister and prime minister have presented criticisms of the Dalai Lama's "independence stance" (one he has long since renounced) to reporters both foreign and domestic.

This orgy of celebration of the moment in 1959 when Chinese troops "liberated" Lhasa and sent the Dalai Lama and many of his followers into exile in India shows that the Beijing leadership has abandoned the policy of "negotiations" with the Tibetan figurehead, one it was forced by world opinion to undertake in the run-up to the Olympic games. The successful completion of the games is itself one reason for the government's tougher position; the western countries' search for help from China to survive the ongoing global financial crisis is another. China no longer need bite its tongue. The Tibet question is deadlocked. 

The hard line reflects widespread misunderstanding of the Tibet question; even those in China who do understand the issue seem not to know where the crux of the problem lies. After all, the Dalai Lama has abandoned calls for independence; repeatedly stated that Tibet is a part of China; accepted the rights of Beijing over foreign relations and national defence (including, naturally, the right to station troops in Tibet); and agreed to seek greater autonomy only within the framework of China's constitution and "law of regional national autonomy". So why does the Chinese government refuse to acknowledge even the basis for negotiations? What happened to Deng Xiaoping's approach - stated when he met the Dalai Lama's brother in 1979 - that "everything can be discussed, bar independence"?

An ideology against itself

The Communist Party had an entirely different stance on national autonomy before it came to power in 1949. It adopted wholesale as part of its ideology the idea of "national self-determination". This arose from the modern European idea of the nation-state, and was given its widest interpretation in Lenin's essay "The Right of Nations to Self-Determination" (1914): that any group with common cultural characteristics and regarding itself as a nation had the right to autonomy in its permanent homeland, and to found an independent sovereign state.

It is clear that for any empire this can end only in fracture. The Soviet Union made strenuous efforts to avoid this fate. It identified one hundred different nationalities, each of which on paper had the constitutional right to leave the Soviet Union; but sought to create the image of a happy socialist family in which all these national members were united by ideological belief in a higher, unifying goal. In reality, the "multinational family" was held captive by single-party rule, violent suppression and economic exploitation; not even autonomy was granted. 

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) followed closely the Soviet blueprint. In 1928 its sixth congress (held in Moscow) declared "only when we admit the right of nationalities to independence and separation, that all nationalities within China's borders can secede from China and form their own countries, will we be true communists." On 7 November 1931, the party founded the Chinese Soviet Republic in Jiangxi. Article 14 of the 1934 constitution of this republic reads: "The Chinese Soviet Republic acknowledges the right to national self-determination of minority nationalities within China's borders, to the extent that even minor nationalities have the right to secede and found independent countries." 

The party's years in power after 1949 saw it continue to learn from the Soviet Union by "identifying" - or inventing - nationalities. The five nationalities of the Republic of China - the Han, Man, Mongolian, Hui and Tibetan - had by 1986 become fifty-six. The arrangements for regional national autonomy were also adopted from the Soviets, although China's historical tradition of unification meant "countries" became "regions". This creation and strengthening of national differences meant that members of minority nationalities came to identify more with their ethnicity than their country. Even today not one single party secretary of a national autonomous region is actually of that nationality - the so-called autonomy is always under the leadership and supervision of a Han party secretary. If the party is so worried about fragmentation or loss of authority, what was the point of the system in the first place? 

A policy against movement

There are two issues at the heart of the "national autonomy" issue. The first is the relationship between different nationalities (for if the principle of national autonomy is accepted, this creates the possibility of friction and logically includes national independence). The second is the issue of political mechanisms that might become a route to self-determination (for the will of the majority of the nationality is a

permanent threat - since autonomy can only be founded on democracy, on voting for a leader and his or her policies). Both aspects of "national autonomy" thus pose difficulties for official policy: the first is incompatible with the ideal of a unified China that the party inherited and carries forward, the second is incompatible with the one-party political system.  

In this light, whatever the Dalai Lama does - proclaims himself a loyal Chinese citizen, refutes independence, or declares himself willing to achieve Tibetan autonomy within the scope of the Chinese constitution - the Chinese government cannot respond. It is bound by the contradictions of its official ideology to evade the question.  

The policy is stuck in another way too. It lacks any foundation to engage with the Dalai Lama's view of the Tibetan government-in-exile as the natural representative of the Tibetan people. For fifty years the party has been carefully selecting and training a Tibetan elite, many members of which have been educated in China or even Beijing before returning to take up government posts, and are bilingual in Chinese and Tibetan. Many of these are the descendants of past "serfs".

By contrast, those in the exile government have often never lived in Tibet, have been educated in India or the west, and speak fluent English but not a word of Chinese. Even in a free election the local elite may have the advantage - they would have arguments to persuade people not to hand over power to those "incomers". I suspect the greatest opposition to the return of the Dalai Lama is that rising Tibetan elite. Chinese control of Tibet relies on them; they are able to influence central policy on the region; they have a stake in power.  

The accumulated result is stasis. China's political systems and institutions of nationality mean that the Tibetan issue cannot be solved.

The fact that China is one of the world’s largest economies means that it is deeply affected by the financial crisis enveloping the globe. The Chinese media is full of bad news of a severe downturn: the stock markets crashing, property prices falling, car sales declining, businesses disappearing, 20 million migrant workers retreating homewards after losing their jobs, up to a million new university graduates struggling to find work.Li Datong is a Chinese journalist and former editor of Freezing Point, a weekly supplement of the China Youth Daily newspaper Among Li Datong’s articles in openDemocracy:

"Xiamen: the triumph of public will" (16 January 2008)

"China's soft-power failure" (16 May 2008)

"China and the earthquake" (2 June 2008)

"China: after the quake, the debate" (16 June 2008)

"China's leaders, the media, and the internet" (4 July 2008)

"China's digital nationalism: Kung Fu Panda under fire" (16 July 2008)

"Death in Shanghai, law in China" (15 September 2008)

“China’s power, China’s people: towards accountability” (29 September 2008)

“China’s stalled transition” (19 February 2009)

The government announced in November 2008 a huge stimulus package worth $586 million; and economists have prescribed their own solutions. But even the plan’s architects or these other experts don’t know what it will achieve or what 2009 will bring. As for everyday Chinese citizens, the issues are for many complicated to the point of being incomprehensible. They can only accept their fate, holding tight to their wallets and (if they are lucky enough to have one) to their jobs as they wait for the crisis to hit…and pass.

Meanwhile, their economic and social discontent multiplies – and looks around for an outlet.

A burning icon

Just after 8pm on 9 February 2009, one of the buildings at China Central Television (CCTV’s) new complex in central Beijing caught fire. The odd-looking towers and the other high-rises in the $730-million complex, designed by the modernist Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, are one of the trophy buildings of the 2008 Olympic games. The towers loom over one of the city’s busiest road arteries, allowing local Beijingers to point them out to visiting friends by their nickname – the “big pants”.

A fire in this prime news location is itself by any standards a huge news story– and there is no way it could be covered up. At about 9pm that night, I got a text message from an unknown sender: “The CCTV building is on fire!” But CCTV itself was silent on the matter, as if the incident hadn’t happened. It was a stark contrast to the official outlet’s relative openness when the Sichuan earthquake struck on 12 May 2008.

By early morning the news was all over the internet, complete with numerous photos and videos taken at the scene – though users were not allowed to add their own comments. But bloggers faced no such restrictions; and most of the views I saw expressed amusement at CCTV’s misfortune. I found out later that word of the fire had spread quickly, with many people rushing to the scene to capture images that were soon uploaded to their own blogs. Many photos show onlookers smiling, as if watching a firework display.

Indeed, as the facts behind the fire emerged, it became clear that an illegal firework display at the company marking the end of the lunar new-year celebrations had sparked the blaze; CCTV itself was the arsonist. This revelation was met by an eruption of mocking public comment. Meanwhile, on state instructions the official media remained silent; and most China’s intellectuals also stayed quiet, as if unable to say what they really thought about the huge damage to a “state asset”.

An independent voice

But one person did speak out with notable boldness and clarity. He was a young “post-80s” writer called Han Han, who posted on his blog an article entitled “Bash CCTV when it’s on fire”. That such a piece came from a “post-80s” figure might be thought all the more surprising in that the neologism describes those born in the 1980s who (it implies) care only about themselves. But Han Han is different.

There were repeated efforts to delete Han Han’s article, but it was widely reposted and in the next few days was to become famous. It says: “I tried to suppress my own ‘dark thoughts’ and to look at the incident with sympathy. However, I have to admit that I gloated over it as well.” The courage to confess to such feelings is a striking contrast to the sanctimonious intellectuals who preferred to wait and see which way the wind was blowing. But is Han Han just a child enjoying the show? Not at all – he is talking pure politics.

Among openDemocracy’s recent articles on China:

Robert Barnett, "Tibet: questions of revolt" (4 April 2008) Wenran Jiang, “Tibetan unrest, Chinese lens” (7 April 2008)

Wang Lixiong, "China and Tibet: the true path" (15 April 2008)

James A Millward, "China's story: putting the PR into the PRC" (18 April 2008)

Chang Ping, "Tibet: looking for the truth" (8 May 2008)

Emily Lau, "Tiananmen, 1989-2008" (4 June 2008)

Jeffrey N Wasserstrom, "Tiananmen's shifting legacy" (26 June 2008)

Kerry Brown, "China on Olympic eve: a globalisation of sentiment" (10 July 2008)

Jeffrey N Wasserstrom, "China's long march to modernisation" (7 October 2008)

Kerry Brown, "China's nervous transition" (22 September 2008)

Perry Link, "Charter 08: a blueprint for China" (5 January 2009)

Kerry Brown, "China in 2009: a year for surprise" (14 January 2009)

Wei Jingsheng, "China's political tunnel" (22 January 2009)

Kerry Brown, “China’s giant struggle” (5 February 2009)

Jeffrey N Wasserstrom, “China’s anniversary tempest” (24 February 2009)

“If you commit injustice, you’ll pay a price”. If you play with fire all the time, you will get burned”, he continues. “CCTV is a news outlet, but it has no journalistic ethics. This combination would be illegal in almost any other country. But here, it is not just legal – it represents the law. How many evil things has CCTV done in the past decades, such as supplanting truth with lies, manipulating public opinion, persecuting intellectuals, abusing facts, concealing wrongdoing, covering-up problems, and creating fake images of harmony?”

“So CCTV needs to take a look at itself – though it won’t. Today, an increasingly sophisticated public opinion and continuing social development have taken CCTV’s credibility from zero to negative. That is, if CCTV says something, we can assume the opposite. Yet even in this situation it has not gone bust – in fact, it is the national leader. This can only mean the nation itself has also lost its credibility.”

Han Han takes direct aim at the heart of China’s official media system. “This is the state of China’s media – the news we see is selected and filtered for ulterior purposes, as the script and the director require. . . The government needs to realise that mouthpieces such as CCTV, the People’s Daily, the Guangming Daily and Xinhua, operating as they do today, are in fact damaging its own image. Even a truth, spoken by these voices and sent out on a Xinhua wire, appears false . . . as younger people mature, they come to mock the content of these reports.”

A public beacon

The 26-year-old Han Han is an outstanding example of a new Chinese generation. He first burst onto the scene after entering a writing competition hosted by a literary magazine, and then abandoned traditional education and focused on his creativity. There is a huge market for his novels among his contemporaries; each sells hundreds of thousands of copies. The success of his books has made him a millionaire, dependent on nobody. The trappings include a racing-car, of which he has become an accomplished driver.

Han Han’s blog, criticising the evils of modern-day society and poking fun at authority, is one of China’s most popular. It received over 100 million visits in 2007, with thousands of readers and comments on each article – a response that even a large newspaper would be proud of.

After the Sichuan earthquake, Han Han ignored the risk of aftershocks and personally delivered food and clothes to the victims, saying this was merely his duty as a citizen. The initiative was characteristic of his independence: he doesn’t need a salary from a boss or the government, nor to hide what he thinks, nor does he care about criticism. He is that very rare phenomenon in China – fully authentic. After the CCTV fire, he spoke truths that many were thinking but could not say.

When discussing Han Han with my friends, we all agreed: hopes for change in China depend not on the appearance of a single wise and brave leader, but on the emergence of thousands of people such as “Han Han”.

The world sees two Chinas: one that can host a stupendous Olympic games and send astronauts on a successful space-mission, another that is inured to crisis and disaster. Much of modern China's predicament lies in the need to understand the reasons why the "second" China is so enduring and persistent - and what must be done to change it.

Li Datong is a Chinese journalist and a former editor of Bingdian (Freezing Point), a weekly supplement of the China Youth Daily newspaper

Among Li Datong's recent articles in openDemocracy:

"China: after the quake, the debate" (16 June 2008)

"China's leaders, the media, and the internet" (4 July 2008)

"China's digital nationalism: Kung Fu Panda under fire" (16 July 2008)

"The Weng'an model: China's fix-it governance" (30 July 2008)

"The Olympics: was China ready?" (22 August 2008)

"The Beijing Olympics: the last award" (29 August 2008)

"Death in Shanghai, law in China" (15 September 2008)Even before the glow of the great sporting events of August-September 2008 in Beijing had faded, a series of major incidents struck China:

• on 8 September in Shanxi, a wall holding back a reservoir of mining waste collapsed, causing a mudslide that killed 268 people

• on 20 September in Shenzhen, a fire at an unlicensed nightclub killed forty-three people

• on 21 September, a fire at a coalmine in Heilongjiang killed thirty-seven people

• even more shocking than the above, the Hebei-based Sanlu company's illegal addition of melamine to milk-powder left several babies dead and 50,000 with kidney-stones. An emergency-testing programme found that virtually all of China's well-known dairy brands contained the chemical. The result was nationwide panic, in which worried parents besieged hospitals and supermarkets were overwhelmed by customers seeking to return products. There were many arguments and even violence amid the overall confusion.

An unhealthy collusion

Indeed, it is arguable that food-safety is the most important of all public-security issues. A popular online post - entitled "China eliminates chemical illiteracy through food" - makes the point:

"Through rice we learned about paraffin-wax. Ham taught us about DDVP. Salted duck-eggs and chili sauce educated us about Sudan Red. Hotpot brought us knowledge of formalin. Silver-ring fungus and candied dates let us study sulphur dioxide. Wood-ear fungus told us of copper sulphate. And now, Sanlu is using milk-powder to teach the Chinese nation the chemical functions of melamine. . . When foreigners drink milk, they get strong. When Chinese people drink milk, they get kidney stones!"

The statistics compiled by Chinese netizens show that in the last decade there have been at least sixty cases of contaminated food - from pigs being fed detergents to turtles fed with contraceptives. China's role in international trade mean that some of these, including the milk-powder case, have wider reverberations. Each revelation, if and when it does come to the light, is in its own way a shock to Chinese people; but the abrupt shift from the intoxication of the Olympics to alarm about the toxins they and their children may have been consuming is an especially rude awakening.

China's rapid economic growth has now lasted for three decades - but it has still not been accompanied by the establishment of sound commercial ethics. Methods of production which increase profits but harm consumer interests are adopted wholesale while going unreported. But the problem is not just one of business practice, for in many areas the government offers protection for fake and/or poor-quality goods.

Some years ago, CCTV reporters acting on a tip visited a certain county, where they found the streets lined with shops selling sub-standard raw materials for food production to merchants from around the nation. Only after filming the scene did they inform the local industrial and commercial authorities of their presence - and within five minutes uniformed officials were on the street telling shopkeepers to close for the day, in order to conceal the evidence as far as possible. The profit-motive means that local government and traders in fake goods are on the same side - then and now, for the authorities in Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province, have played such a role in the Sanlu milk-powder case.

Among openDemocracy's articles on China in 2008:

James A Millward, "China's story: putting the PR into the PRC" (18 April 2008)

Jeffrey N Wasserstrom, "China's political colours: from monochrome to palette" (14 May 2008)

Susan Brownell, "The Olympics' ‘civilising' legacy: St Louis to Beijing" (23 May 2008)

Emily Lau, "Tiananmen, 1989-2008" (4 June 2008)

Jeffrey N Wasserstrom, "Tiananamen's shifting legacy" (26 June 2008)

Kerry Brown, "China on Olympic eve: a globalisation of sentiment" (11 July 2008)

Kerry Brown, "China changes itself: an Olympics report" (20 August 2008)

Kerry Brown, "China's nervous transition" (22 September 2008) A landscape of interests

The dislocated performance of the Chinese government, at all levels, is a prominent feature in all such public-safety incidents. To understand its behaviour is to get closer to addressing the heart of the food-safety and fake-goods problems.

The main purpose of government is to provide public order, infrastructure, a fair legal environment and safeguards for vulnerable groups. In the last thirty years in China, local government has acted rather as if it is the CEO of the local economy rather than the protector of the public interest; senior officials have given priority to economic development, and provincial and city officials have regarded negotiations with domestic and international investors as part of their job. Academics have described inter-provincial competition as one of the unique features of the Chinese economy, with cadres acting like the departmental heads of a large company - each vying to ensure his own department outperforms the others in order to win promotion.

This naturally leads local officials to protect large local companies - after all, they contribute to the wealth of the area and often form its main source of taxation income. The result is that the local government perceives it as being in its own interests to cover up illegal behaviour by these companies. Thus, Sanlu's annual income from milk-powder sales - amounting to 10 billion renminbi ($1.46 bn)- is one of the main sources of taxation income for the Shijiazhuang authorities; so when news of the scandal started to leak, the city government was able to keep a lid on it for a month. If not for the role of out-of-province media reports and the spread of the story online, the affair may never have come to light.

Another factor in these developments is the collapse in governmental ethics. In relation to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), for example, official supervision is often closer to extortion that forces firms towards bankruptcy. In Mao Zedong's era, many officials had joined the revolution out of genuine commitment to the nation and its people; the ethical standards of public officials reflected this. It is also true that at the time, officials earned a high income compared with the rest of society, so material temptations were less of an issue.

The new, post-reform generation of officials has grown up in a more stratified society which has turned the structures of morality as well as income upside down.A rich minority possesses more than one half of all society's wealth, and the officials are no longer at the top of the pile - they have become "poor". But they have found it easy to exchange the power they still hold for the privileges of the rich - even if ethics and compassion fly out of the window. So what if there's a little of something else in the milk powder, affecting even children's favourite sweets?

The people's right

If officials were elected by the people, if there was a free press watching their every move, if there was the deterrent of an independent judiciary - then the Sanlu and other incidents would be much less likely to occur. If and when they did, they would be much more quickly dealt with. The fact that none of these conditions exist makes recurrent tragedies inevitable.

But the exposure of recent incidents in the media has had one positive effect: central government has begun to punish those responsible. In the space of a fortnight, many officials - including the governor of Shanxi, the head of the administration responsible for supervising food-quality, and the party secretaries of Hebei and Shijiazhuang - have lost their jobs. The media have described this as a "storm of punishment". Yet even this response is far from enough: sanctions emanating from central government will not end corruption.

The real step forward, rather, would be if the principle embodied in the punishment - that those who harm public interests should be held accountable - becomes a principle of governance. The sacking of officials will not guarantee that their successors will work for the people; what will make the difference is an acceptance by China's most powerful leaders that their legitimacy rests on the people's decision and consent.

The Olympic and Paralympic games, and the Shenzhou-7 spacewalk, are signs of one China; the milk-powder affair of another. The first cannot put the second to rights. The party secretary of Hunan has bravely stated the only thing that can: "giving power back to the people". There is a long way still to go.