Chinese leader Jiang Zemin says that capitalists are the best communists; and, debunking Chairman Mao, Hu Jin-Tao calls Confucius the very spirit of China

Everything you always wanted to know about China, but didn't know whom to ask. China-watcher Prof. M.D. Nalapat reveals all at the last meeting

What does the average Indian know about China? That it is the most populous country in the world; that it is a good friend of our neighbour Pakistan; and that it is the place from where all kinds of cheap manufactured goods, whether toys, plastic goods, electronic items, kites or Ganapati idols, originate and flood the Indian markets.

The slightly more enlightened would call it a bully state with a massive economy; which manufactures goods produced at .slave wages.; and say that it is ruled with an iron hand by a Communist Party that has no compunctions about shooting down protesting students and innocent bystanders in the middle of its famed Tiananmen Square.

And those with greater knowledge would say that China is the fastest growing economy in the world; that Chinese goods occupy all the space on shelves in department stores and hypermarkets in the USA, in Europe and other countries; that it has the biggest military; and a missile system designed to challenge any city anywhere on the globe.

Prof. Nalapat makes a revelation . The social life of a young Chinese is the same as that of a young American in San Francisco or New York and definitely much more "social" than in parts of the American Mid-West (India is nowhere in the picture)

But very little is known about normal events, routine happenings and ordinary social life in China which has long chosen to stay behind what is called the "bamboo curtain".

Prof. M.D. Nalapat, Professor of Geopolitics at Manipal University, veteran China-watcher and guest speaker at the last meeting, threw light on several hitherto unknown aspects of the giant country while speaking on "The evolving social structure in China". Here are some of them, listed in random order, to offer a glimpse into today's China:

1.Economic reforms, which were introduced in India in the early 1990's, made their advent in China in 1978; in these 30 years, it has become one of the fastest-growing economies in the world;

2.Normally, the cost of a product depends on the cost of the inputs; but in China, it is the price of a product that determines the cost of the inputs, because the government controls the price of inputs;

3.The Chinese leader Jiang Zemin has said that the best form of communism is capitalism and that capitalists are the best communists!

4.Last year, 61 million Chinese travelled abroad and 43 million tourists visited China; thus, more than 100 million people crossed the country's frontiers in just one year;

5.More than 250 million Chinese own mobiles and over 200 million use the Internet;

6.Mobiles and the Internet have forced the government to stop being secretive and to desist from trying to suppress information; this, in spite of the fact that the Communist Party has a tight, vice-like grip over the country;

Thank you for your rare insights into life behind the "bamboo curtain". Prof. Nalapat at the last meeting with (from left) Vasant Manohar, Visiting Rotarian PP Mahesh Mathur, Mudit Jain, who proposed the vote of thanks, and Burjor Poonawala

7.About 90% of the members of the Politburo of the Communist Party are engineers; they know everything about statistics and numbers, but very little about "freedom" and "happiness";

8.Most of those in positions of power and authority today are youth leaders thrown up by the Cultural Revolution that rocked China in the 1960's;

9.Further, they are the pampered, spoilt "single baby" progeny spawned by the Chinese government's onechild policy of the last four decades;

10.Chairman Mao had said in 1949, when he took over China, that the sayings of Confucius were rubbish; now, Hu Jin-Tao says that Confucius was the very spirit of China!

Taking these and other factors into consideration, Prof. Nalapat said, the Party had a tough task on hand. It had to confront and answer three crucial issues:

(1) The increasing demand for personal freedom and personal space;

(2) the increasing liberalisation of the people.s attitudes which was bound to spill over into the political arena; and

(3) the religious space being sought by the people. And this was the real challenge before .a very ruthless, very organised and extremely capable party; the Chinese are opening up, they are becoming a formidable economic power and are well on the way to becoming the primary civilisation in the world; but how will the Party adjust to the new, emerging systems and challenges "that is the key".

Would it be an "adjustment" as in South Korea where dictatorship finally gave way to democracy? Would it be as in Taiwan, where, too, dictatorship gave way to democracy? This was the poser before the Party and its government.

Prof. Nalapat, who was introduced by Kamal Bulchandani, has been a regular visitor to China and Taiwan. He has lectured in Beijing and Xin- Hua Universities, as also the Academy of Military Sciences.

A former Editor (with The Times of India Group) and Executive Director of Matrubhoomi Publications, he had devoted special attention to security issues, covering the militancy in Punjab and Kashmir in the '80s.

In 1995, he suggested the use of the "business card" with Pakistan and the concept of a proxy nuclear state.

The transfer of Hong Kong to China in 1997 'ignited Chinese nationalism', engendering the belief that it could become the 'No. 1 country' once again

In 1997, Prof. Nalapat put forth his concept of .Hindutva. which held that every Indian was a composite of Western, Vedic and Mughal cultures, whatever his or her faith. And in 2003, he was the first to suggest that India, Russia and China form a partnership.

He favoured policies that allowed private initiative to create wealth for all, in a system in which tax levels were moderate enough to ignite the economy . rather than a tax system designed solely for revenue to feed a bloated state.

At the beginning of his talk, Prof. Nalapat pointed out that 2008 was the 30th anniversary of the launching of economic reforms in China by Deng Xiao-ping. Over the last 30 years, China had travelled a long distance and become a very different country.

Chinese civilisation, just like the Indian, Arabian, African, European or Judaic ones, was once a major force and referred to as one of the two premier civilisations in the world.

Its economy was also one of the biggest. In fact, as late as 1820, India and China together accounted for 50% of total global output. But it had been downhill ever since then.

China started its comeback in 1978, while India did so around the mid-1990's. But in civilisational terms, the Chinese were "at the top of the pyramid" for a very long time.

In fact, Prof. Nalapat said, while Samuel Huntington talked about the "Clash of Civilisations" and focused on civilisations in the Islamic world that were challenging the West, in his opinion the real challenge to Western supremacy or primacy would come from China and the Chinese civilisation.

The world was changing so rapidly that where earlier an automobile model lasted for 50 to 60 years, today it was good for five years or just five months. Computer programmes were evolving at a fraction of a second.

While in the past, in the mechanical and the chemical age, there were defined processes and set ways of doing things, the knowledge world of today was different; it didn.t follow hard and fast rules, it didn.t have clear boundaries.

"In fact, one reason why Indians are doing so well in IT and the knowledge world could be because our minds are a little bit more 'chaotic', a bit less disciplined than the minds of, say, Germans and Japanese who are not doing as well as we are in IT. Thus, the weakness of the past has become an asset of the present".

Recounting the major events since 1949, when the transfer of power to the Communist Party took place, Prof. Nalapat referred to the Great Cultural Revolution of the 1960's; the Reforms of Deng Xiao-ping in 1978; and the transfer of Hong Kong to China in 1997.

This last event "really ignited Chinese nationalism". It engendered the belief within China that it could go to the top once again, that the country could become the "No. 1 country" once again. This was a firmly-held belief, although most people did not express it openly and only talked negatively of such a prospect.

Before that, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960's "was set up to challenge authority"; for thousands of years, the Chinese people had had great respect for "the authority figure", for those who were older, for the rule of the state and of the government.

The Cultural Revolution changed all that. Young students started to challenge their professors and young union workers their seniors; there was a complete breakdown of respect for hierarchy and for those in power and authority. There was a complete blurring of the rules and of hierarchy.

Interestingly, almost all of those in power today were "leading cadres who were intellectually subject to the fervent of the Cultural Revolution". This predisposed them to the belief that there was no authority that could not be challenged, that there was no authority that one had to follow, that there was no one that one needed to respect - and that if one was strong and determined, one could get what one wanted.

Although the influence of family and friends in the personal and social lives of Indians was very important, in China, perhaps because of the Cultural Revolution, there was a much more individualistic streak.

In conjunction with this was the fact of the strict family planning programme in China which allowed only one child. Usually, this was a single male child. And in China, as in India, the male child was spoilt and given what he wanted.

(As an aside, Prof. Nalapat said that in India the girl child was much more solicitous towards the parents than the male child, despite the male child being spoilt and pampered.)

Thus, most of the teenagers during the Cultural Revolution were single male children; they felt that they could grab what they wanted and did not have to show respect for rules or for authority.

"In other words, a very assertive, a very aggressive personal attitude, translated into policy, when applied to large masses of people".

Around that time (the 1970's), Prof. Nalapat said, he had forecast that the world would see around this time (today), an increasingly assertive China. This had happened and there would be no change in the situation. On the contrary, "this is only going to expand as this cohort takes full control of the Communist Party".

It was here that the differences between India and China became clear.

Even though China had a very strong Communist Party which believed in authoritarian dictatorship, it also had a modern economy. It had a more modern and liberalised economy than India.

When compared with China, it could be said that "India is still a Communist country, whereas China is a country that has given up communism".

The number of Internet users in China had crossed 200 million this year. And the number of people who owned mobile phones would cross 250 million by the end of this year, or early next year.

"And the significance of this - 250 million using mobiles and 200 million using the Internet - is that no government, no authority, no party can control the flow of information. And as we all know, information generates activity, it generates public responses; information, as the old cliché goes, is power.

"The Chinese state discovered this in December, 2005, during the Sars epidemic. In the beginning it tried to hush it up. For months there was a denial about anything major taking place, even though those at the top in the government knew fully well that a very deadly scourge was taking place".

Thanks to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960.s, young students started to challenge their professors and young union workers their seniors; there was a complete blurring of the rules and of hierarchy. Prof. Nalapat kept members engrossed with his deep insights into the evolving social structure of China at the last meeting. At left is Kamal Bulchandani, who introduced the guest speaker

It was the Internet that forced China to remove the "bamboo curtain" and allow the free flow of information

But soon, Prof. Nalapat said, information about the Sars epidemic started appearing on the Internet. Doctors from affected regions sent emails and wrote on web-logs, thus sending news abroad.

And by April, 2006, it became impossible for the government to deny the epidemic and it had to come clean. It had to give daily briefings and allow media crews into the country. Thanks to the Internet, it could not prevent the flow of information.

This was a very important lesson for the Party leadership, a leadership that was extremely effective and efficient, but a leadership that was a dictatorship.

Thanks to Sars, the government's reaction was completely different when a devastating earthquake hit the country a few weeks ago. The government did not go into denial mode.

From Day One it allowed foreign news teams and the domestic media to go across the country; not only did it give daily briefings, it even went for twice-daily and sometimes four briefings a day on the earthquake situation. The lesson was well learnt - that in a country as wired and connected as China, it was not possible to control information.

This access to information was creating a new chemical dynamic and changing the sociological situation. In real life, a citizen was afraid of and under the control of the Communist Party. But in the Internet world, he/ she could be free, independent and autonomous.

"These habits of independence and autonomy gained on the web are translating into real life the way that they are in India (where some of the more extreme forms of behaviour include the banning of Valentine's Day parties. people who are doing that are treated almost like a joke).

"In other words, in this age of the Internet, it is no longer possible to have any kind of conformity across any society. If the Chinese couldn.t do it with their system, certainly India cannot do it with its system".

Prof. Nalapat said that another major change was that the government had to open up the personal space, if not the political space. The Party had stopped interfering and the personal lives and activities of the people were more uncontrolled than in India.

In fact, the social life of a young Chinese was the same as that of a young American in San Francisco or New York and definitely much more "social" than in parts of the American Mid-West (India was nowhere in the picture).

And all this in a country where, about five years ago, a person wishing to marry had to take the permission of his boss; where, 12 years ago, a person wanting to get married had to obtain the permission of his parents unless he was about 30 years old. Today, no permission was required, neither of the Party, nor of the boss, or of one's parents.

This had come about not because the Party wanted to cede control, but because it had become unavoidable. It had to do so in order to ensure that the floodgates of politics and political activity did not burst open in the face of its personal and individual restrictions.

Aiding and abetting the decision to open up the personal space was the fact that 61 million people had travelled abroad and 43 million tourists had come to the country last year.

This meant that over 100 million people had crossed the frontiers in just one year. This, obviously, had an impact on social behaviour.

"When you travel to Thailand, Taiwan or Europe, you see a different sort of behaviour. You cannot be told, as the people in the Soviet Union were told, that if you are in a capitalist country, then you are a .victim. or a .slave., that you are made to run by the capitalists. That.s not true and every Soviet individual who went abroad knew it.

"Now, more than 200 million Chinese people have gone abroad. So it is no longer possible to talk about (socialism and) the great .socialist. reality in China. It is, in fact, creating a situation where there is a greater and greater demand for the expansion of political space".

Prof. Nalapat said that there were no free elections in China. The only elections were on television shows! One of the popular programmes was "Super Girl", which was somewhat akin to "American Idol". Millions of Chinese were now voting for a "Super Girl" on their mobile phones. There was voting on many other shows as well.

"The people have got into the habit of voting. They like voting, they like participating. They like the fact that their choice is being accepted "and this is a fire that, in my opinion, is going to be difficult for them (the Party) to control".

A fallout of the new emerging trends was the fact that in 2007 private property was legitimised in China ("although it has not been fully legitimised in my state, Kerala!")

Shockingly, another top Chinese leader, Jiang Zemin, had stated that "the capital class are excellent communists. I'm sure Karl Marx must be spinning crazily in his grave with Jiang Zemin saying that the best form of communism is capitalism!.

Clearly, there was a race taking place in China today. It was a race between (the Party and) demands for freedom, a race between (the Party and) the need for a boundary-less knowledge economy, a race between (the Party and) the need to remove restraints in the knowledge economy.

Turning to his own concept of Hindutva, Prof. Nalapat said it was clear that Indians were Mughal, Vedic and Western, all rolled into one. There was no point in fighting with one another over religion because every Indian embodied the great elements of each religion. Further, moderation was an important part not only of civilisation, but also of progress.

If there was a lack of moderation and if there was civil conflict, then a country could not progress. This was now accepted even in China by its Chairman Hu Jin-Tao, who was now talking in terms of a harmonious society and about scientific development. He had stated that it was not just physical assets, roads and buildings but happy human beings that defined prosperity. Hence it was necessary to pay more attention to the environment and to stop pollution.

"Even if it slows growth a little bit, it doesn.t matter, because we want happy human beings. This is Mr. Hu Jin-Tao.s message to the people of China".

But it was easier said than done, Prof. Nalapat pointed out, because the increasing demands for personal freedom and the increasing liberalisation of Chinese attitudes across the board would naturally spill over into the political sphere.

And the people would ask, "if we can select our favourite female singer, or our favourite sportsman, why can.t we select our President and Prime Minister?.

Religious belief was also growing in China. The Communist Party, which insisted on a complete monopoly of faith in itself, had to address this issue.

So long as people only thought about making more money, buying more cars, bigger houses, larger property and so on, the Party could handle it.

But people no longer talked only about making money. More and more people were taking to religion, to Buddhism and to Christianity.

And the Party was just not able to handle these new issues of spiritual assets and moral property that were coming up. It was trying to push Buddhism by saying that it was politically less problematic than some other religions.

Will China make the great .adjustment. like South Korea and Taiwan, where dictatorship gave way to democracy?

Prof. Nalapat then made a revelation about one particular aspect of the new China that would have even Chairman Mao spinning crazily in his grave . Confucius was being revived in China in a big way.

When he took charge of China in 1949, Mao Tse-tung had said in his speech that Confucius was absolute rubbish. But now, Hu Jin- Tao had been heard saying . horror of horrors! . that Confucius was the very spirit of China!

A young woman had gone on television to state (.and anything important that takes place in China now takes place on TV . as in the US.) that Confucianism was .the basis for the new old civilisation of China..

But it was not going to be easy because there was a huge difference between the Communist Party, Confucianism, religion, faith, political freedom and so on.

.This is a huge challenge before a very ruthless, organised and extremely capable party. And the challenge is this. the Chinese are opening up, they are becoming a formidable economic power and they are well on the way to becoming the primary civilisation of the world. But what about the Communist Party and (its tradition of) control, its systems and so on?

.Is there going to be an .adjustment ., as in South Korea where dictatorship gave way to democracy? And also as in Taiwan, where, too, dictatorship gave way to democracy? .

Prof. Nalapat pointed out that the Chinese criticised the Taiwanese by saying that they had been electing .trouble-makers., hence democracy was bad. They had also been saying that Indian democracy was failing, hence democracy was bad.

But the fact was that in spite of the government (and due perhaps to the efforts of some of the members of the Rotary Club of Bombay), the Indian economy was doing very well in a democracy.

Therefore, China could no longer say that democracy meant a bad economy or that democracy meant .trouble-makers., because a strong ethnic Chinese who was highly regarded within China, Ma Ying-jeou, had become the President of Taiwan.

It remained to be seen how China responded to the situation.

As for the rest of the world, it was keen on a solution that suited not the Chinese Communist Party, but the Chinese people, the people of Asia and of the world at large, Prof. Nalapat concluded.

Answering questions, he agreed with PP Sandip Agarwalla that one of the biggest challenges before China was the lack of a legal system. It had only rules, but no laws.

But now changes were being made and an arbitration system for business matters had been put in place. In fact, some of its decisions were going against Party people, even Central Party people.

Sandip also asked, in the context of Hun Jin-Tao.s slogan (that everyone ought to be happy), about the Tibetans. happiness.

Prof. Nalapat said since happiness could not be defined in material terms, this could lead to a problem - because almost the entire Politburo (about 90%) of the Chinese Communist Party was composed of engineers.

"For them, it's mathematics, numerical estimates and statistics that count. The moral and ethical issues that cannot be statistically correlated cannot count. So I agree that it (Tibetans. happiness) is a major problem that they are battling with and whether they will succeed or not, I can't say".

What about Chinese assertiveness over the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh? a member asked.

Prof. Nalapat said the Chinese were challenging the US in Latin America, in Africa, Asia, everywhere. In fact, any country that was anti- US was assured of diplomatic backing from China.

The issue of Arunachal Pradesh was being kept alive as a lever for the Tibetan situation. China was extremely annoyed about the fact that the Dalai Lama was in India. It wanted strong curbs on him and on the Tibetans here; hence the Arunachal issue.

Way back in 1961, when the then Prime Minister of China, Chou en- Lai, came to India, he had favoured the status quo, saying "you keep what you have, we keep what we have". But India had rejected the idea.

And how do you do? Camellia Panjabi greets Prof. M.D. Nalapat, guest speaker at the last meeting. With them is Burjor Poonawala

China went to war with India in 1962, annexed Arunachal Pradesh (then known as NEFA or the North- East Frontier Agency) and after the war went back to its original position. So it was difficult to believe that China was serious about Arunachal Pradesh now.

Burjor Poonawala wanted to know whether it was true that China's exports had grown exponentially only on account of a highly underpaid labour force.

Prof. Nalapat pointed out that thanks to exports, China's foreign exchange reserves were now about $1.5 trillion.

He had written many years ago in the Far Eastern Economic Review that normally the cost of a product depended on the cost of the inputs; but in China the price of the product determined the cost of the inputs because the government controlled the price of the inputs very effectively!

But this could prove to be another fault-line, because it would not be possible to sustain such "controlled" costs and underpaid labour in an increasingly globalised economy.

Should have brought our cups along. Dr. Sorab Javeri tells Dr. Ramnath Nayak. At left is the ever-agile Abdemannan Kajiji

Asked about the pilgrimage to Kailash-Mansarovar being halted, the guest speaker said that it was on account of China.s paranoia about the Olympic Games. It was prepared to deny visas to 100,000 people just to ensure that one terrorist did not enter the country.

It was almost impossible to get a visa to visit China till October. "They have overreacted very badly. This is an example of utter stupidity, of the way an authoritarian state can overreact. Of course, sometimes our own state overreacts in this way. But Kailash-Mansarovar is because of the Olympics, not because of any change in Chinese policy".

Poonam Lalvani, sharing her experience at the China Economic Summit a few years ago, said it was difficult to find information about NPAs and other issues in that country.

Her group had studied productivity in the textile apparels sector in China and found that it was six to eight times that of India, perhaps on account of the differences in the two countries. systems.

There, the government had scrapped all old machines, trained the workers, given subsidies, brought in new machines and so on. Thus it was hard to compare China.s productivity with India where such things didn.t happen.

But then India boasted of the best human resources in the world and said that this gave the country a competitive edge. Yet, India was left behind. Did this have something to do with corruption and the parallel economy? she asked.

An attentive audience. Among those in the first row are Anand Akerkar, Shariq Contractor, Kirit Kamdar, Dipan Mehta and Jagdish Malkani

Prof. Nalapat said the Chinese system was as corrupt as the Indian one. India had a very strong regulatory framework in place, but many of the regulations had become outdated with the march of new technologies, new markets and new needs.

Besides, no regulation could keep pace with changes in the market, whether in terms of higher interest rates or barriers to expansion.

"There are more barriers to setting up an enterprise in India than there are in China. But the fact of the matter is that the Chinese are doing well because of a strong state and we are doing badly also because of a strong state. I think we need to weaken our state substantially; then, I' m sure, we'll be able to compete with China," Prof. Nalapat added.

The vote of thanks was proposed by Mudit Jain.