A story in “Beijing Youth Daily” on February 4th. The headline says: “Cairo: The two sides—Anti-Mubarak and Pro-Mubarak—Come to Blows.” The subhed is quite telling: “The conflict leaves at least 611 injured and 3 dead; the pro-Mubarak side wants to give the government more time for a smooth and steady transition; Egyptian military and police have not used violence.”
There are frequent analogies going around these days between events in Cairo and the rise and fall of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. “We cannot afford a Tiananmen Square in Cairo,” Senator John McCain said on CNN. One of the few who is well qualified to draw a comparison is Nick Kristof, who shared a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 1989 protests and crackdown in Beijing. Arriving in Tahrir Square yesterday, he wrote that the mood “reminds me, painfully, of the equally giddy mood at Tiananmen Square before the shooting started. Some of the regime’s moves—earlier curfew, buzzing protesters with fighter planes, nasty media—don’t seem conciliatory at all.” One of the few to frame the comparison in positive terms is the liberal Chinese activist-lawyer Teng Biao; when he saw the video of a lone Egyptian protester, standing before a truck fitted with a water-cannon, he wrote on Twitter, “‘Must see! Egypt’s Tiananmen movement, a warrior blocks a military vehicle!’”
But, within China, most talk is not about comparing Egypt to China’s experience twenty-two years ago. Rather, the focus is on comparing it to China of the here and now. Unsurprisingly, official China has taken a dim view of the events in Cairo and Tunis. Despite originating as a revolutionary movement, the Chinese Communist Party does not approve of mass, disorderly efforts to transform the status quo, no matter where they occur. The Chinese characters for Egypt and Cairo have been blocked on Chinese search engines—though they are still postable on Chinese versions of Twitter—and the state press has been broadcasting a steady stream of burning vehicles and other reminders of the perils of chaos. The headline in the People’s Daily Friday warned that “Malfunction” in Egypt “is Good for No One.” Today, the papers picked up the theme and conjured, for its people, the image of a stable state undone by people power. “If Egypt becomes chaotic, it will be like a second Iran and the world would face disaster,” according to the Global Times. American politicians are “hesitating” to support the revolt, it added, because “they are eager to open the door to Middle East democracy, beginning with Egypt, but they are not sure if there is a beauty or a demon behind that door.”
Should the Chinese regime be worried that the next Tahrir Square may be Tiananmen Square? My experience in both places tells me that the answer is no. I had an apartment in Cairo for two years before I moved to China in 2005, and I happened to be back in Egypt a year ago for vacation. Trying to pinpoint the level of discontent in a society is a difficult exercise. (Trying to measure contentment is no easier; when P.R. firm Edelman produced a poll suggesting that eighty-eight per cent of the Chinese people “trust” their government, even a strictly regulated Chinese newspaper couldn’t let that go unexamined, and it promptly poked holes in the findings.) But, in Egypt, frustration and rage always lay just beneath the surface. Until last week the dominant national characteristic was sclerosis. It was a nation in suspended animation, with an infrastructure, economy, and leadership that had not measurably improved in more than thirty years. For all of China’s problems these days, the simple fact is that the dominant sensation in China is the polar opposite of that in Egypt: China is a place of constant, dizzying, churning change. The results are hardly distributed equally, by any means, and a slice of the population has benefited unfairly through corruption and injustice. But, at the obvious risk of oversimplification, the lives of average Chinese citizens continue to improve fast enough that they see no reason to upturn the system.
So should the Chinese regime rest easy as long as the economy improves? Not exactly. As Fareed Zakaria rightly points out, Egypt and Tunisia were vulnerable to unrest not because their economies were ailing, but precisely because their economies had improved in recent years, which only accentuated how far the economic gains were outpacing political liberalization. “It is this revolution of rising expectations that often undoes a dictatorship because it is usually unable to handle the growing demands of its citizens.” China has secured the loyalty of a critical mass of its people by improving their lives on some important measures. Before too long, I suspect, maintaining peace will depend on extending those improvements to other parts of Chinese life as well.
Read more from our coverage of the protests in Egypt and beyond.
