CHINA…IS DRESSING UP THE EMPEROR IN NEW CLOTHES…
(…while keeping his red underwear of single party rule)

Recent developments in China are slowly consolidating the reins of power into one pair of hands…those of its current President…Xi Jinping.

The announced new policy blueprint and security plan over the next decade is a further shift away from collective party leadership to the more –imperial- tradition of its past. Such a change of form and style is China’s way of dressing up the emperor in new clothes…while keeping his red underwear of single party rule.

It appears to be mostly a cosmetic exercise to gain a better PR image in the world at large, and this kind of shift is a natural progression for it. That is, given the enormity of problems it confronts with its social and economic matrix, it is attempting to continue to maintain the slow evolutionary and pragmatic balancing act model it has successfully used so far…to further liberalize its economic matrix while retaining absolute political control over it. It is a very tricky balancing act and it remains to be seen if it can continue to do so successfully.

Among other things it is also allowing a few more crumbs of personal liberties, such as easing its long standing one-child-only policy, closing some of its more extreme –labor camp – facilities, and doing away with the previous two-tier land ownership structure (with all of its abuses), and, establishing some semblance of due-process-at-law by requiring provincial and local authorities to present cases for prosecution to a formal judicial tribunal, rather than just by fiat of a single official. In some ways this seems to be a –Back to the Future – effort to apply China’s ancient tried and true imperial model of centralized authority with all functions of governance administered by a carefully trained class of civil service bureaucrats. The essence of all that driven by the mostly Confucian principles of social order and discipline above all else, rather than Leninist dialectic and communist ideology.

But no matter how well camouflaged such authority may be, it still remains what it always has been for the past 5,000 years of Chinese history: autocratic rule. While the Celestial dictates emanating from the Forbidden City in Beijing were once clad in yellow golden dragon robes, in today’s China, these are clad in crimson dragon robes instead. But the net results and effects…remain the same.

In some respects, because of that history, China has no choice but to govern as it does. While the recent decades of economic boom have papered them over, the deeply buried regional and provincial ancient fault lines of the Five Warring States era remain. Though long dormant, they’re still there. Without a strong central authority to keep them dormant, much like geologic ones, they could erupt with tectonic events of immeasurable economic and social impacts…if that authority becomes inefficient and weak.

Viewed from such perspectives, these shifts of policy are simply latter-day efforts to prevent such realities from happening

CENTURION