Regime-Quakes in Burma and China

Regime-Quakes in Burma and China

by Naomi Klein

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080602/klein

When news arrived of the catastrophic earthquake in

Sichuan, my mind turned to Zheng Sun Man, an

up-and-coming security executive I met on a recent trip

to China . Zheng heads Aebell Electrical Technology, a

Guangzhou-based company that makes surveillance cameras

and public address systems and sells them to the

government.

Zheng, a 28-year-old MBA with a text-messaging

addiction, was determined to persuade me that his

cameras and speakers are not being used against

pro-democracy activists or factory organizers. They are

for managing natural disasters, Zheng explained,

pointing to the freak snowstorms before Lunar New Year.

During the crisis, the government "was able to use the

feed from the railway cameras to communicate how to

deal with the situation and organize an evacuation. We

saw how the central government can command from the

north emergencies in the south."

Of course, surveillance cameras have other uses too --

like helping to make "Most Wanted" posters of Tibetan

activists. But Zheng did have a point: nothing

terrifies a repressive regime quite like a natural

disaster. Authoritarian states rule by fear and by

projecting an aura of total control. When they suddenly

seem short-staffed, absent or disorganized, their

subjects can become dangerously emboldened. It's

something to keep in mind as two of the most repressive

regimes on the planet -- China and Burma -- struggle to

respond to devastating disasters: the Sichuan

earthquake and Cyclone Nargis. In both cases, the

disasters have exposed grave political weaknesses

within the regimes -- and both crises have the potential

to ignite levels of public rage that would be difficult

to control.

When China is busily building itself up, residents tend

to stay quiet about what they all know: developers

regularly flout safety codes, while local officials are

bribed not to notice. But when China comes tumbling

down -- including at least eight schools -- the truth has

a way of escaping. "Look at all the buildings around.

They were the same height, but why did the school fall

down?" demanded a distraught relative in Juyuan. A

mother in Dujiangyan told the Guardian, "Chinese

officials are too corrupt and bad.... They have money for

prostitutes and second wives but they don't have money

for our children."

That the Olympic stadiums were built to withstand

powerful quakes is suddenly of little comfort. When I

was in China , it was hard to find anyone willing to

criticize the Olympic spending spree. Now posts on

mainstream web portals are calling the torch relay

"wasteful" and its continuation in the midst of so much

suffering "inhuman."

None of this compares with the rage boiling over in

Burma, where cyclone survivors have badly beaten at

least one local official, furious at his failure to

distribute aid. There have been dozens of reports of

the Burmese junta taking credit for supplies sent by

foreign countries. It turns out that they have been

taking more than credit -- in some cases they have been

taking the aid. According to a report in Asia Times,

the regime has been hijacking food shipments and

distributing them among its 400,000 soldiers. The

reason speaks to the threat the disaster poses to the

very existence of the regime. The generals, it seems,

are "haunted by an almost pathological fear of a split

inside their own ranks...if soldiers are not given

priority in aid distribution and are unable to feed

themselves, the possibility of mutiny rises." Mark

Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, confirms that

before the cyclone, the military was already coping

with a wave of desertions.

This relatively small-scale theft of food is fortifying

the junta for its much larger heist -- the one taking

place via the constitutional referendum the generals

have insisted on holding, come hell and high water.

Enticed by high commodity prices, Burma 's generals have

been gorging off the country's natural abundance,

stripping it of gems, timber, rice and oil. As

profitable as this arrangement is, junta leader Gen.

Than Shwe knows he cannot resist the calls for

democracy indefinitely.

Taking a page out of the playbook of Chilean dictator

Augusto Pinochet, the generals have drafted a

Constitution that allows for elections but guarantees

that no future government will ever have the power to

prosecute them for their crimes or take back their

ill-gotten wealth. As Farmaner puts it, after elections

the junta leaders "are going to be wearing suits

instead of boots." The cyclone, meanwhile, has

presented them with one last, vast business

opportunity: by blocking aid from reaching the highly

fertile Irrawaddy delta, hundreds of thousands of

mostly ethnic Karen rice farmers are being sentenced to

death. According to Farmaner, "that land can be handed

over to the generals' business cronies" (shades of the

beachfront land grabs in Sri Lanka and Thailand after

the Asian tsunami). This isn't incompetence, or even

madness. It's laissez-faire ethnic cleansing.

If the Burmese junta avoids mutiny and achieves these

goals, it will be thanks largely to China , which has

vigorously blocked all attempts at the United Nations

for humanitarian intervention in Burma . Inside China ,

where the central government is going to great lengths

to show itself as compassionate, news of this

complicity could prove explosive. Will China 's citizens

receive this news? They just might. Beijing has, up to

now, displayed an awesome determination to censor and

monitor all forms of communication. But in the wake of

the quake, the notorious "Great Firewall" censoring the

Internet is failing badly. Blogs are going wild, and

even state reporters are insisting on reporting the

news.

This may be the greatest threat that natural disasters

pose to repressive regimes. For China 's rulers, nothing

has been more crucial to maintaining power than the

ability to control what people see and hear. If they

lose that, neither surveillance cameras nor

loudspeakers will be able to help them.

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and

syndicated columnist and the author of the

international and New York Times bestseller The Shock

Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (September

2007); an earlier international best-seller, No Logo:

Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; and the collection

Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of

the Globalization Debate (2002).

Copyright (c) 2008 The Nation