from TPDL 2000-Apr-11, from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, by Arthur Waldron:

The real China story

Had CNN and the press corps been on the spot as the story unfolded, it would undoubtedly have dominated the news: days of protest by 20,000 miners discharged from their jobs in China's northeast rust belt, protests that saw roads blocked, windows smashed and cars burned and that finally ended only when the People's Liberation Army fired shots. The story might even have forced the Clinton administration and its specialists to confront true issues in China: issues about the Beijing regime, its policies, its competence and its viability. But because China's media suppressed the story, we are learning of it more than a month after it happened.

The protests were at Yangjiazhangzi, just off the main railway line, roughly 250 miles from Beijing, but they could have been almost anywhere in today's China. Like tens of millions of other Chinese, the protesting miners were as angry about corruption as about poverty. What outraged them--along with the derisory severance pay offered--was a murky "privatization" about which they had no say, in which "parts of the mine were transferred to people believed to be friends and relatives of local power brokers" -- as was reported this week.

The story would also have provided an illuminating perspective on the China story that did occupy the headlines in February, when the protests were at their height: namely, Taiwan. In response to China's belligerent White Paper, pundits (and the administration) focused on the hoary mysteries of the one-China policy, the cross-straits military balance and the dangers posed by the looming Taiwan election, without even suspecting something else might be going on.

Some important lessons are to be learned:

First, China is nowhere near as transparent as it may seem. Yes, you can easily visit Beijing or dozens of other cities, move about normally and have candid discussions with a whole cast of Chinese interlocutors. But your hosts can still keep you blindfolded. Was there even a hint about the protests from China's leaders when Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott met them in February? Did our CIA know? I doubt it: Domestic social issues are not an administration or agency priority, and even Beijing journalists, a well-connected and resourceful group, took a month to discover the story.

Second, Taiwan is not the key issue in China policy. We hear regularly that "China" is "growing impatient" with Taipei or is "angry" about something the island's government has said or done. But protesting workers in Yangjiazhangzi could not have cared less about Taiwan (though they may be impressed if and when they learn that voters there could peacefully turn out the ruling party): Their anger was directed at their own government and its flagrant abuses. We must grasp that Beijing's increasingly hard line against Taiwan is at least in part an attempt to divert popular hostility away from itself and into channels of assertive and anti-foreign nationalism. The temperature of Beijing's rhetoric does not chart Taipei's various provocations and conciliations, as so many Americans believe, but rather China's domestic political state. It is probably no accident that Beijing's most recent cross-straits blasts came in February, perhaps as the miners protested.

Third, domestic reform is the key to China's future, and Beijing is flubbing it. More than 11 million workers will lose their jobs in state industries this year, according to official Chinese estimates. If even a small fraction of them react as the Yangjiazhangzi workers did, with protest, no amount of gunfire will be able to save the Beijing regime. This is the fundamental fact about China today, to be faced squarely by Chinese and foreigners alike.

But instead of attacking this challenge, China's leader, Jiang Zemin, is at the moment attacking his critics. In the past few days, for example, he has begun a purge of the elite Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to remove respected scholars who, in widely circulated articles, have argued the pressing need for genuine political reform. Those scholars are right. The Chinese president may rule out (as he did yet again last week) "bourgeois democracy" as unsuited for China, but in fact the only way forward now is to open the political system so that the workers of Yangjiazhangzi and the rest of China's citizens will have a decisive say about who rules them and what policies are followed. The continuing attempt to rule by force is leading to a dangerous dead end.

The West must face these facts. Upbeat assessments of the Beijing leadership and uncritical interactions with them--washed down with bromides about trade eventually bringing democracy and the Internet being the key to freedom--should no longer be acceptable. The protests at Yangjiazhangzi may well be the rumblings of an avalanche: It is time to pay attention.

Arthur Waldron is Lauder professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania and director of Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute.