To the extent that they have access to information, thoughtful Chinese, inside and outside the Communist Party, are analysing the implications for China of recent events in Egypt. What lessons should the country's increasingly worried, but outwardly successful, ruling elite take away?
Egypt surely vindicated Mao Zedong's familiar maxim that 'a single spark can start a prairie fire'. Based on their record, China's current leaders are likely to conclude that former president Hosni Mubarak's fall confirms the importance of quickly snuffing out the spark, as they believe Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues should have done when students began to gather in Tiananmen Square weeks before the slaughter of June 4, 1989.
A decade later, Deng's successor, Jiang Zemin, applied the 'lesson of Tiananmen' by cruelly suppressing the Falun Gong immediately after it assembled 10,000 adherents in front of Communist Party headquarters without the advance knowledge of the secret police. Tibet and Xinjiang are more recent examples of the party's use of such measures against minority nationalities.
Even the dominant Han nationality continues to be 'harmonised' by the police and their hired thugs. Despite three decades of spectacular national development, there is a rising tide of dissatisfaction among China's working-class citizens. Many feel deprived of the greatest benefits of their country's economic progress, unfairly burdened by the costs of developmental achievements, angry at government corruption and abuses, and lacking in freedoms to express their feelings and affect policy. Increasingly, they share the belief of a growing number of intellectuals, professionals and officials, including many party members, that political and legal reforms are urgently needed. Here we see many similarities to Egypt.
One of the major demands of the crowds in Tahrir Square was to end the frequently exercised power of the police to arrest anyone at will and often inflict torture. More broadly, the protesters, as The New York Times correspondent Michael Slackman noted, sought 'freedom, democracy, social justice, rule of law and economic equality'. The gap between rich and poor had become intolerable. People were no longer seduced by appeals to nationalism or pan-Arab ideology but focused on ordinary demands for improving life, and this required political change, change that did not come.
Egyptian experts said that Mubarak's emphasis on stability 'in the end proved the ultimate destabiliser'. As Slackman reported: 'Facing a police state that choked off competing ideas and ideologies, preventing free elections and manipulating the state media, the public found the only way to achieve its goals was on the streets.'
If China's leaders care more about the welfare of their people than maintaining the party's unfettered power, they should understand Egypt in a different way - as confirming the desirability not of rapid repression but of timely reform. This would be in the interest of their own self-preservation as well as social justice and political progress. They could not do better than to heed the admonitions of Chinese human rights activists whom they are viciously suppressing.