Shoe-throwing in China: What Are the Odds?

Atirar sapatos na China: quais são as possibilidades?
Já conhecíamos o “Índice Big Mac”, que parte da teoria da paridade do poder de compra, mas a Economist desenvolveu agora uma nova forma de medição da reforma política à qual dá o nome de “Índice do Atirador de Sapatos”, supostamente capaz de “prever onde se vai espalhar o cheiro do jasmim” [numa alusão ao nome que recebeu a recente revolução tunisina], nas palavras da revista semanal britânica. É dada particular atenção ao Norte de África e aos países do Médio Oriente, onde a ondulação da vox populi que derruba antigas autocracias paternalistas parece alastrar a cada dia.
http://pontofinalmacau.wordpress.com/editoriais-e-opiniao/

Shoe-throwing in China: What Are the Odds?
(Published in Portuguese in Ponto Final, Macao, February 18th 2011)
By Eric Sautede

We knew about its Big Mac Index probing into the theory of purchasing-power parity, but The Economist has now come up with a new form of political change measurement dubbed “The Shoe Thrower’s Index” which is supposed to “predict where the scent of jasmine may spread next”, in the words of the British weekly. A particular attention is given to Northern African and Middle Eastern countries where the rippling effects of the vox populi overthrowing age-old paternalistic autocracies seem to be widening by the day.
The interest of the index lies in its attempt to take into account societal and political factors, and thus ascribes a relative weight to the share of the population that is under 25, the number of years the government has been in power, the corruption and lack of democracy, the censorship, and the GDP per capita. Unfortunately, as for any index, both the criteria and the weighting are debatable: with the usual free-marketer bias, demographic numbers—basically being young!—account for far too much (40% of the index) and make up for the whole social challenges, politics is minimally made of longevity of regimes, freedom (lack of…) and corruption, and the economy, strangely enough for such a publication, strictly equates to the wealth of individuals, and weights a mere 5%…
What about the role of the state (efficient or not in its allocation of resources, as public accounts could tell us)? What about the unemployment rate? What about ideologies and the aspirations of well-educated and yet frustrated middle classes? Basically, the Shoe Thrower’s Index works for Yemen where the population below 25 accounts for 70% of the total, thus confirming the most recent news and the No. 1 slot in the Index, but it appears to be quite flawed for countries like Algeria (middle of the pack) or even Bahrain (bottom of the pack in the Index, and yet the theater of great turmoil in the most recent news, despite all odds!).
This shows again the limits of data journalism when it comes to understanding the social and even anthropological situation of any particular human society, and how this situation translates into political change. It should also serve as a reminder that there is no shortcut when it comes to drawing comparisons between very different entities. Yes, the scent of revolution is contagious and the ousting of Ben Ali in Tunisia in January and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in February have served and will continue to serve as emulating references for other socio-political movements in the Arab world and beyond. Is it enough to conclude that people’s power is rising inexorably in every single non-democratic country? What does it say of the aftermath?
In one of his luminous texts recently published, Olivier Roy, one of the world foremost specialist of Islam in the modern world, sees in the Tunisian and Egyptian political earthquakes a clear incarnation of “post-Islamist revolutions”. In the case of Egypt, Islamist movements have highly permeated the society and imposed more conservative practices, and yet they have lost their original political ambition and do not claim anymore to provide an ideology of substitution for an alternative socio-economical model—even in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or even the Nahda in Tunisia. All these “revolutions” taking place now are “protest movements”—people being fed-up of years of inefficient and kleptocratic rule. Roy notes also that from a sociological angle, these protest movements are supported by a generation of individuals that is at the same time more educated, has access to modern means of communication and information, is more pluralist and individualistic, lives in nuclear families with less dependent children, and yet whose social status has been eroded and has experienced years of unemployment and thus frustration in its aspirations. Finally, Roy observes that democratic demand in the Arab world will ultimately have to confront deeply rooted network of clientelism present in each and every regime. This is indeed a real anthropological question: Will this demand for democracy be able to entice complex networks of political allegiance at every level (army, tribes, political clienteles of all sorts)? What is the capacity of these “rejuvenated” regimes to manipulate traditional allegiances? How can these in turn be convinced that a democratic future is in their best interest? And how will a more social form of Islam adapt to the new situation?
Looking further away, several commentators have tried very hard to probe into the potential for the jasmine scent to spread to Asia, and especially to China. Parallels seem numerous: monopoly on power by the Chinese Communist Party since 1949, rampant corruption, rising unemployment among fresh university graduates and frustration among young migrants because of rigid residence status, censorship being challenged and regime shortcomings being exposed by digital social networks and blogs for which China has the highest number of users on the planet, etc. Add the slowing down of economic growth and inflation figures, and for some, this is a sure recipe for people’s power to raise its head once more…
Allow me to disagree: once again, it proves that the so-called objective indicators hold little truth if the context is not taken into consideration. First of all, because the Chinese state has got far more potent means of control than any of the regimes in Northern Africa or the Middle East—with the exception of Iran, in some respect, and Iran is resisting far better to popular pressure, despite Twitter or Facebook. Second, because the party-state can boast amazing results when it comes to economic prowess over the past thirty years. Third because popular nationalism exists in China and is somehow autonomous from the official discourse: people, in their vast majority, believe that “the peaceful rise” of their country puts an end to more than one and a half century of humiliation from the “outside” world (by the West, but also Japan…), and thus the legitimacy of the state is not only economic but also political. Fourth, because pragmatism has been the political motto of the past thirty years of reform and opening up, and even more so in the recent years: since 2002/2003, the Hu-Wen team has reoriented the priorities of the regime towards more socially-oriented public policies, where the concern for fairness is the guiding principle (social security for all, abolition of agricultural tax in rural areas, retirement schemes for all, revamping of the healthcare system, introduction of some flexibility in the one-child policy and also regarding the resident permit, etc.). Fifth, because urban middle-classes globally benefit from the regime that is in place and the population is today aging very fast—these are for sure two very conservative elements. Sixth, because in its own way, the Chinese Communist Party has managed to regularly renew the team that is at the helm of the most populous country on earth through its own due processes, and moreover, this has been achieved peacefully in the past twenty years. Seventh, the regime has been amazingly nimble in harnessing the digital information highways by treating netizens more like consumers than citizens, and for those who still insisted on challenging the state, well, local authorities could always be blamed! Finally (because I have to stop somewhere…), eighth, because the Chinese Communist Party has managed to eradicate all form of alternative source of power to its own rule: a Chinese court handed a 11-year prison sentence to Liu Xiaobo in December 2009 for co-authoring Charter 08 and more recently, the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng (famous for challenging the one-child policy) and his wife were badly beaten by local authorities in Shandong province while under house-arrest—these did not really trigger any movement of indignation. No equivalent to surviving independent unions in China, and certainly no Muslim Brotherhood…
The influential Chinese business magazine Caixin run by the flamboyant Hu Shuli is right, and courageously so, to print on its website on Saturday 12 that “It is autocracy that creates chaos, while democracy breeds peace. Supporting an autocracy is in reality trading short-term interests for long-term costs," but until February 11, no image of the Tahrir square could be seen on the Chinese internet and a search on Baidu returned no results: no chance was given for a comparison with past events on Tian’anmen square!