Comrade Wang Chen in XinjiangHappy Ending Is A Long Way Off
Being close allies in the world communist movement, from the world war period to the late 1960s, the People’s Republic of China cannot deny that it had imitated the Soviet management style over its nationality and ethnicity issues. The Soviet Union promulgated its Establishment Treatment in 1922. Two years later, the Soviet Constitution was passed. The Constitution recognized the right to self-determination for minorities, and, more importantly, the right to recede from the Union. In China, the Nationalist Government initiated the idea of regional autonomy as early as in the 1930s when the Chinese Communist Party gained control in some of its areas. Before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party once proposed to adopt the Soviet’s style of federalism. Under the ‘bad influence’ of the Soviets and their immature theories, the Chinese Communist Party proposed rights to self determination, the establishment of a federal state, and the establishment of self-governments of various ethnic minorities based on self-recognition with the rights to break away (‘tuo li’) from China. In 1938, in the 6th Plenum of the 6th CCP Congress, that is, after Mao resumed its leadership after the Zunyi conference, Mao explicitly proposed the Ethnic Autonomous Region system with a view to solve the ethnic problems.
Both the Chinese and the Soviets made one fundamental mistake. They did not foresee, or, alternatively, they turned a blind eye to the rise of nationalism. In China, we had Fei Xiaotung’s thesis of ‘duoyuanyiti’ which was, to a large extent, a modified version of han-nationalism and pan han-chauvinism. In the case of the Soviet Union, its downfall could be attributed to the Stalinist violent governance, as well as the effort of Russianisation.
As commented by today’s Mainland official-scholar aka establishment intellectuals, without hiding their sorrows, the disintegration of the Soviet Union was brought about by the façade federal nature of the Soviet Constitution, together with the abortive reform policy introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev as the last straw of the once mighty Soviet Empire. The Soviet leaders had underestimated the issue of ethnicity and had erroneously identified the issue as one of class struggle, thereby resorting to the cliché class struggle method with a view to solve the problem. On the other hand, the Chinese leader diagnosed the separatist feelings of the Uighurs, the Mongolians, and the Hong Kong peoples as something which could be defused with a huge injection of capital (RMB) into the locals.
In China, central-local relationships, including that between Zhongnanhai and Hong Kong, tends to be more personal, patronage based and less institutionalized, as compared to systems of structured democracy. It is the patronage, instead of the institution, that binds the centre and the periphery. Arbitrated political decisions of the central leaders and the black box politicking hassle between the central and the local bureaucrats always override the interests of the autonomous regions. There is no formal institutional dispute resolution mechanism, such as the Supreme Court in the United States. The PRC Legislation Law does not have any provision which empowers the Government to settle conflicts or inconsistencies that exist in different legislation of different provinces. Neither is there any provision specifically designed for solving conflicts between the central and the local governments.
The current nature of regional governance, namely, unitary and bureaucratic authoritarianism, not only fails to forge a united front of ‘Greater China’, but even precipitates discontent and antagonism towards the PRC state and the nation of China. Recently, there have been separatist movements in Tibet, Taiwan, and Xinjiang. In fact, this phenomenon had once been extended to the Hong Kong SAR quietly. The Hong Kong Independence Declaration was widely circulated on the internet a few years ago, though not surprisingly, the movement died down in this ‘uniquely patriotic’ city without mass support. Deng Xiaoping’s innovation of the ‘One Country Two Systems’ in the early 1980’s was a model designed for dividing sovereignty and autonomy (external autonomy and internal autonomy). The concept may be a great idea. However, similar to many other noble ideas in China, its interpretation and implementation could end up in great distortion. With the current CCP’s regional governance policy in a unitary and bureaucratic authoritarian polity, the happy ending in Canadian Quebec is still a long way off.
