Four important indicators suggest China is starting to move away from authoritarianism, writes Tony Kinsella
IN THE early afternoon of May 12th last a massive earthquake devastated Sichuan. Its sheer scale - 90,000 dead and missing, 240,000 injured, five million homeless - pierced our human consciousness, affecting us on several registers.
Bertolt Brecht in his 1943 play The Good Person of Sichuan challenges the audience to find a workable balance between good and evil. Sichuan today poses a related challenge to us all. What has been crushed, and what has been born?
The tragic, heroic, images from Sichuan have been striking in their portrayal of a society sufficiently similar to our own as to be instantly recognisable - the constant media coverage, the heroic efforts of the emergency services, the army, NGOs and over 55,000 volunteers from all over China. The tragedies, the small heartening victories as survivors were disinterred, the exhorting presence of political leaders atop heaps of rubble that had until recently been homes, offices, and most poignantly of all, schools, are the familiar horrific normality of catastrophes.
The very existence of those images speaks eloquently of our planet's political evolution, and is thrown into stark contrast by the uncaring paranoia of the Burmese junta. If Naypyitaw is the heartless face of dictatorship, has Beijing begun to assemble a democratic profile?
Four important indicators are certainly pointing in that direction: transparency, rule of law, media independence, and the development of civil society.
Natural disasters were state secrets in the bad old days of Helmsman Mao, like the 250,000-plus who perished in the 1976 Tangshan earthquake. The official New China News Agency was reporting the Sichuan earthquake less than 15 minutes after it happened. That afternoon the state CCTV dropped its schedule to deliver live coverage.
Prime minister Wen Jiabao, followed by president Hu Jinta, flew to Sichuan, inspected, encouraged, exhorted, apologised and threatened - live on television. CCTV news anchor Zhao Pu failed to contain his tears as he described the earthquake. A remarkable transition from the Tangshan statement of Mao's widow, Jiang Qing: "There were merely several hundred thousand deaths. So what? Denouncing Deng Xiaoping concerns 800 million people."
Beijing businessman Zhao Shuangying (48) walked into the headquarters of the Red Cross Society of China on May 15th to donate €10,000. "It's very simple," Mr Shuangying said, "I cannot go to Sichuan, so I came here to help." If he, and hundreds of thousands like him across China, did not have confidence in their country's legal system, they would not be propelling their country's economy forward at about 10 per cent a year.
Two days after the earthquake, bureaucrats at the central committee's propaganda department ordered Chinese media not to deploy any more journalists to Sichuan. This was likely more of a reflex action as Chinese and foreign journalists streamed into Chengdu and beyond. Obedience to such edicts used to be the norm.
One local editor advised his journalists: "If everybody pays no attention to this, then it won't really be a ban," and how right he was.
The Shanghai Securities News, a service of the state Xinhua Agency, wrote of the need to respect seismic building codes and called for an end to corrupt building practices - a courageous demand for political reform. Prof Min Dahong of the Chinese academy of social sciences observed: "This is a good opportunity to establish a system that will encourage the press to report in a timely and open manner."
Alexis de Tocqueville, impressed by the then activism of US public life, said in 1856 that "the health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens".
More than 55,000 volunteers have rushed, at their own expense, to Sichuan. Hao Lin, a psychologist, told his wife he was going to Guangzhou (Canton) before hopping on a plane for Chengdu and cycling into the disaster zone to offer counselling.
Li Xiaotang and 14 other young professionals from Shanghai met on the internet to organise their seven-hour journey to Feishui. She and her friends took a week's unpaid leave, and spent a month's salary each to fund their travel and purchases of food, medicines and mobile phones. Private citizens queued across China to donate blood, blankets, food, tents and more than €400 million. Dubliner Peter Goff has helped ship 16 tons of donated material through his Chengdu Bookworm café.
By de Tocqueville's measure, Chinese democratic society is in very bonny health.
The Peoples' Republic of China is far from full democracy, and its communist party still clings to political power with a firm, if increasingly flexible, and probably quite frightened, fist.
China seems embarked on its own version of the long, awkward and occasionally brutal road away from authoritarianism towards something more democratic. Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Pakistan, Mongolia and other Asian countries have already travelled further along similar routes.
New York Times columnist, Nicholas D Kristof wrote on Thursday last that he could see the Chinese Communist Party ". . . becoming a social democratic party that dominates the country but that grudgingly allows opposition victories and a free press".
Will the new China have a unicameral parliament like Sweden, or an appointed upper house like the UK? Will it be federal like Germany or the US? Or will it reach back into its three millennia of political history to develop something new?
In a reversal Brecht would have loved, it will be up to the good people of Sichuan to judge.