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Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping have passed on. For the first time in
China's Communist history, there is no emperor at the helm.
Deng's annointed successor Jiang Zemin is a bespectacled technocrat
who shed tears publicly while reading the dead leader's eulogy.
Jiang does not have the personality that made China's past leaders
commanding patriarchs.
Whether he will still grow into a titan like his predecessors
remains to be seen, but for the moment it looks like China has a
collective leadership, led by Jiang.
Lest this be seen abroad as a sign of weakness, China rattled
sabres loudly at the United States, this week.
In a strongly-worded statement on Tuesday, Xinhua poked fun at
human rights and democracy in the United States.
China said a country that had such a dismal track record for crime
and discrimination had no right to criticise others.
The leadership in Beijing seems to have decided that the best
defence is offence. If the United States can issue human rights'
reports such as its annual State Department survey about other
countries, China felt it had the right to judge Washington as well.
Washington made a swift reply to the Chinese statement on Tuesday,
saying that it didn't want to be lectured by a "dictatorship". The
mud-slinging has the potential to blow up into another one of those
periodic Trans-Pacific Sino-US rows.
What was surprising to many observers here was the harsh language
of the Chinese criticism, which called the United States a
"money-bag democracy" and said that it was "democracy for the
rich".
The timing of the anti-US statement seems to be a move to show the
world and the Chinese themselves that the new leaders are tough and
mean business.
The Chinese leaders, since the opium wars, have been deeply
suspicious of outside interference, and have felt especially
vulnerable during times of leadership transitions.
Deng's demise is the first change in leadership in 20 years since
the death of the great helmsman Mao Zedong in 1976, when China had
emerged from the chaos and the wreckage of the Cultural Revolution.
The Political moods of the country in 1997, however, are very
different from 1976, when the Gang of Four, the ruling clique of
radical Communists that Mao backed in his declining years, was
overthrown months after his death.
In 1976, people were sick of the ideological campaigns that had
physically and spiritually drained the country for nearly 30 years,
and were eager to see the last of the Gang of Four.
"People wanted to get rid of the Gang of Four back in 1976," says
one senior sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences,
"But now people are generally satisfied and want to get on with
making money and improving their lives.."
Indeed, stability seems to be the consensus goal for everyone in
1997.
Not only ordinary people desperately want stability, but so is the
current leadership, which sees it as a guarantee for long-term
rule.
The Peoples' Republic of China has come a long way from the mass
hysteria and common fear reigning over the people in the year of
revolutionary leader Mao's death.
Nothing illustrates it more eloquently than the radically different
funerals of Mao and Deng, last week.
Unlike memorial service for Mao Zedong, whose body lay in state and
was then embalmed and placed in a mausoleum in the middle of the
Tiananmen Square, Deng Xiaoping's funeral was stripped of all
sumptuous rituals.
Lee Yee, editor of the Hong Kong-based magazine The Nineties, has
an explanation for this: "In a way, it is a more important event
than when Mao died because when he died, China was a closed society
and didn't have much influence on the rest of the world. But now
there is huge economic exchange between China and the west, so it
is more important."
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