CHINA CRASHES INTO A MIDDLE CLASS REVOLT / THE FINANCIAL TIMES COMMENTARY & ANALYSIS ( VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING )

August 3, 2011 11:19 pm

China crashes into a middle class revolt

By David Pilling

When a student asked Sigmund Freud about the meaning of his cigar-smoking habit, the Austrian psychoanalyst is said to have replied: “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” By the same token, sometimes a train crash is just a train crash. But the recent high-speed rail accident in China is not one of those.

For many Chinese, the crash and its subsequent mishandling – including what looked to some like an attempt to bury the evidence – have been a revelation. An outpouring of anger has exposed a profound cynicism about how China is governed.


The death of at least 40 people on a high-speed rail line that had become a totem of China’s sleek progress towards wealth, modernity and national prestige is symbolic on many levels. If the trains are not safe, what of the banking system or the management of the economy itself? The tragedy has become a public relations disaster for a Communist party leadership dominated by engineers and technocrats. Just as Mao Zedong sought to create an industrial revolution by force of will in the Great Leap Forward, so China’s present leaders seem to think they can leapfrog technology through modernising zeal alone.


China’s high-speed rail network, built in less than a decade, is the world’s longest. Its trains were supposed to travel at speeds that would put Japanese technology to shame. Instead, the crash has exposed hubris, incompetence and corruption in a single, tragic crunching of metal. Perhaps not since Tiananmen Square more than 20 years ago has the Communist party looked so naked in the face of public contempt.

Certainly, previous scandals have exposed the rotten governance lurking beneath economic success. In the past few years alone, Chinese people have seen their children crushed by poorly constructed schools and poisoned with tainted milk. Both tragedies resulted from corruption and lack of regulatory control that the state subsequently sought to cover up by suppressing press stories and imprisoning the parents of affected children. The train crash is different in at least two respects. First, high-speed rail was explicitly a national project. The leadership took great pride in China’s ability to “digest” and “improve on” foreign technology. Officials had already laid out ambitious plans to sell the Chinese system to Malaysia, Brazil, the UK and the US.


The national endorsement has made it difficult to pin the problems on local officials. Even before the fatal crash, the government sacked the rail minister on suspicion of corruption. A subsequent decision to lower the maximum speed from 350km per hour to 300km was a tacit admission of dangerous technological over-reach. We don’t yet know the reason for the crash. But pushing the system beyond its technical capacity and cutting corners to free up slush money are plausible factors.


Second, many of the crash victims must have come from China’s new wealthy elites given the, much-criticised, high price of tickets. When school buildings collapsed in Sichuan in the 2008 earthquake, the victims tended to be the children of poorer families. Melamine-tainted baby formula affected a broader cross-section of people. But wealthy urbanites would have had the knowledge and money to buy foreign formula if they chose. That made it slightly easier to quash the story, particularly in an Olympic year when the country was in celebratory mood – or else!


Partly because the victims of this tragedy are members of the new middle class, it has been impossible to keep a lid on the story. Users of Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging site, have produced an outpouring of contemptuous comment. One posted photos of the rail minister’s fancy watch collection, an indication of his less than modest lifestyle. Weibo alone boasts 140m users, mostly from the urban middle class that the Communist party is supposed to have co-opted into its modernising project.


A middle class revolt is particularly dangerous for the Chinese leadership. It undermines a recent truism of Chinese analysis, sometimes referred to as the Beijing consensus. This contends, among other things, that people don’t worry too much about democracy, freedom of expression and free markets so long as they have a technocratic leadership capable of delivering economic progress.


The cult of GDPism appears no longer to hold. China grew at 10.3 per cent last year, and should clear at least 9 per cent this year. But while taxi drivers riot in Hangzhou over low wages, the revolt over the train crash has been over the more abstract concept of governance. China’s middle class wants a leadership that can contain corruption, ensure safety and not put pride above engineering principles. It wants, in the arresting words of a commentary in the People’s Daily – of all places – economic growth that is not “smeared in blood”.


The anger appears to breathe life into an old argument, all but abandoned in the face of China’s relentless economic progress, that a rising middle class will demand more accountability of its leaders. If that turns out to be true, then, alongside the people who tragically lost their lives on the tracks outside Wenzhou, the Beijing consensus itself may also have perished.
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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011