Gong’s generation and are passed down in the form of whispered warnings: China has too many people. Memories of famine and political upheaval have shaped Ms. In private, many middle-class Chinese have voiced frustrations with, for example, Beijing’s handling of the growing trade war with the Trump administration. It is impossible to know how many Chinese disapprove of the system. For others, just the fear of repression is enough to keep them in line. Over the years, the party has expanded its repressive capabilities.įor some, like the ethnic minority Uighurs in Xinjiang, the country’s turn toward hard-nosed authoritarianism has meant the devastation of entire families, cultural and religious practices and ways of life. So, too, are the costs of rejecting the party’s bargain. The government has offered education as a path to social mobility, unleashed private enterprise by removing Confucian and Marxist stigmas against the merchant class and cultivated a potent brand of nationalism, blending pride and humiliation into a narrative of restoring Chinese greatness.īut for many Chinese, those incentives are only part of the calculation. Yet China’s leaders, and its people, have continued to look for answers, as the party crafts new ones that build on and reshape traditional culture without rejecting it entirely. The Communists sought to smash that culture through Marxist-inspired policies, but that ended in disaster. Gilles Sabrié for The New York Timesīack then, the blame was placed on a conservative traditional culture that emphasized hierarchy, discouraged individual initiative and rewarded knowledge of Confucian classics over more practical topics like mathematics and science. That’s just a warm-up before the start of class. Students read aloud from textbooks so they can memorize them. It resonates, in part, because China is still intent on addressing the questions that it asked itself one century ago, before the Communist Revolution in 1949: What made it so weak and held it back as the West advanced? And what did it need to do to get ahead? Gong and others to the state is more complicated.
It turns out that the unspoken bargain that binds Ms. China’s people still place demands on the party, but the old assumption that prosperity inevitably stirs democratization is being challenged. President Xi Jinping could be a ruler for life. Income levels have jumped, yet China’s authoritarian leaders have consolidated power. “I don’t care about the leaders,” she said, “and the leaders don’t care about me.”įor years, many Western analysts believed the Chinese people, having endured decades of hardship under Mao, would tolerate one-party rule in exchange for rising incomes and more social freedom until the day - or so the argument went - that a newly prosperous nation would demand political freedoms, too. Politics, she said, doesn’t matter in her life. Gong is proud of China’s economic success and wants a piece of it. In exchange, they stay out of politics, look away when protesters climb onto rooftops to denounce the forced demolition of their homes, and accept the propaganda posters plastered across the city. The government promises a good life to anyone who works hard, even the children of peasants. Gong and millions of other Chinese like her have an unspoken bargain with the ruling Communist Party. “He is our way out of poverty,” she said. If Qiucai does well on the college entrance exam, if he gets a spot at a top university, if he can achieve his dream of becoming a tech executive - then everything will change. Gong, 51, who dropped out of school, the future of her son, Li Qiucai, 17, is paramount. She hits him if he peeks at her cellphone. She washes his feet while he keeps his nose in English and chemistry books. to fetch well water and cook her son’s breakfast. In the dusty hillsides of one of China’s poorest regions, Gong Wanping rises each day at 5:10 a.m. Now it is an economic superpower - and the opposite has happened.īy AMY QIN and JAVIER C.
As China grew richer, the West assumed, political freedoms would follow.
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