The Coming Chinese Crackup

The endgame of communist rule in China has begun, and Xi Jinping’s ruthless measures are only bringing the country closer to a breaking point

Chinese President Xi Jinping, front center, and other Chinese leaders attend the opening meeting on Thursday of the third session of the National People’s Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. PHOTO: XINHUA/ZUMA PRESS

By DAVID SHAMBAUGH in The Wall Street Journal March 6, 2015 11:26 a.m. ET


On Thursday, the National People’s Congress convened in Beijing in what has become a familiar annual ritual. Some 3,000 “elected” delegates from all over the country—ranging from colorfully clad ethnic minorities to urbane billionaires—will meet for a week to discuss the state of the nation and to engage in the pretense of political participation.

Some see this impressive gathering as a sign of the strength of the Chinese political system—but it masks serious weaknesses. Chinese politics has always had a theatrical veneer, with staged events like the congress intended to project the power and stability of the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP. Officials and citizens alike know that they are supposed to conform to these rituals, participating cheerfully and parroting back official slogans. This behavior is known in Chinese as biaotai, “declaring where one stands,” but it is little more than an act of symbolic compliance.

Despite appearances, China’s political system is badly broken, and nobody knows it better than the Communist Party itself. China’s strongman leader, Xi Jinping, is hoping that a crackdown on dissent and corruption will shore up the party’s rule. He is determined to avoid becoming the Mikhail Gorbachev of China, presiding over the party’s collapse. But instead of being the antithesis of Mr. Gorbachev, Mr. Xi may well wind up having the same effect. His despotism is severely stressing China’s system and society—and bringing it closer to a breaking point.

Predicting the demise of authoritarian regimes is a risky business. Few Western experts forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union before it occurred in 1991; the CIA missed it entirely. The downfall of Eastern Europe’s communist states two years earlier was similarly scorned as the wishful thinking of anticommunists—until it happened. The post-Soviet “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan from 2003 to 2005, as well as the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, all burst forth unanticipated.

The Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the site of pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989. PHOTO: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/GETTY IMAGES

China-watchers have been on high alert for telltale signs of regime decay and decline ever since the regime’s near-death experience in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Since then, several seasoned Sinologists have risked their professional reputations by asserting that the collapse of CCP rule was inevitable. Others were more cautious—myself included. But times change in China, and so must our analyses.

The endgame of Chinese communist rule has now begun, I believe, and it has progressed further than many think. We don’t know what the pathway from now until the end will look like, of course. It will probably be highly unstable and unsettled. But until the system begins to unravel in some obvious way, those inside of it will play along—thus contributing to the facade of stability.

Communist rule in China is unlikely to end quietly. A single event is unlikely to trigger a peaceful implosion of the regime. Its demise is likely to be protracted, messy and violent. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that Mr. Xi will be deposed in a power struggle or coup d’état. With his aggressive anticorruption campaign—a focus of this week’s National People’s Congress—he is overplaying a weak hand and deeply aggravating key party, state, military and commercial constituencies.

The Chinese have a proverb, waiying, neiruan—hard on the outside, soft on the inside. Mr. Xi is a genuinely tough ruler. He exudes conviction and personal confidence. But this hard personality belies a party and political system that is extremely fragile on the inside.

Consider five telling indications of the regime’s vulnerability and the party’s systemic weaknesses.

A military band conductor during the opening session of the National People’s Congress on Thursday at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

First, China’s economic elites have one foot out the door, and they are ready to flee en masse if the system really begins to crumble. In 2014, Shanghai’s Hurun Research Institute, which studies China’s wealthy, found that 64% of the “high net worth individuals” whom it polled—393 millionaires and billionaires—were either emigrating or planning to do so. Rich Chinese are sending their children to study abroad in record numbers (in itself, an indictment of the quality of the Chinese higher-education system).

Just this week, the Journal reported, federal agents searched several Southern California locations that U.S. authorities allege are linked to “multimillion-dollar birth-tourism businesses that enabled thousands of Chinese women to travel here and return home with infants born as U.S. citizens.” Wealthy Chinese are also buying property abroad at record levels and prices, and they are parking their financial assets overseas, often in well-shielded tax havens and shell companies.

Meanwhile, Beijing is trying to extradite back to China a large number of alleged financial fugitives living abroad. When a country’s elites—many of them party members—flee in such large numbers, it is a telling sign of lack of confidence in the regime and the country’s future.

Second, since taking office in 2012, Mr. Xi has greatly intensified the political repression that has blanketed China since 2009. The targets include the press, social media, film, arts and literature, religious groups, the Internet, intellectuals, Tibetans and Uighurs, dissidents, lawyers, NGOs, university students and textbooks. The Central Committee sent a draconian order known as Document No. 9 down through the party hierarchy in 2013, ordering all units to ferret out any seeming endorsement of the West’s “universal values”—including constitutional democracy, civil society, a free press and neoliberal economics.

A more secure and confident government would not institute such a severe crackdown. It is a symptom of the party leadership’s deep anxiety and insecurity.

A protester is pushed to the ground by a paramilitary policeman March 5, 2014, in Beijing before the opening of the National People’s Congress nearby. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

Third, even many regime loyalists are just going through the motions. It is hard to miss the theater of false pretense that has permeated the Chinese body politic for the past few years. Last summer, I was one of a handful of foreigners (and the only American) who attended a conference about the “China Dream,” Mr. Xi’s signature concept, at a party-affiliated think tank in Beijing. We sat through two days of mind-numbing, nonstop presentations by two dozen party scholars—but their faces were frozen, their body language was wooden, and their boredom was palpable. They feigned compliance with the party and their leader’s latest mantra. But it was evident that the propaganda had lost its power, and the emperor had no clothes.

In December, I was back in Beijing for a conference at the Central Party School, the party’s highest institution of doctrinal instruction, and once again, the country’s top officials and foreign policy experts recited their stock slogans verbatim. During lunch one day, I went to the campus bookstore—always an important stop so that I can update myself on what China’s leading cadres are being taught. Tomes on the store’s shelves ranged from Lenin’s “Selected Works” to Condoleezza Rice’s memoirs, and a table at the entrance was piled high with copies of a pamphlet by Mr. Xi on his campaign to promote the “mass line”—that is, the party’s connection to the masses. “How is this selling?” I asked the clerk. “Oh, it’s not,” she replied. “We give it away.” The size of the stack suggested it was hardly a hot item.

Fourth, the corruption that riddles the party-state and the military also pervades Chinese society as a whole. Mr. Xi’s anticorruption campaign is more sustained and severe than any previous one, but no campaign can eliminate the problem. It is stubbornly rooted in the single-party system, patron-client networks, an economy utterly lacking in transparency, a state-controlled media and the absence of the rule of law.

Moreover, Mr. Xi’s campaign is turning out to be at least as much a selective purge as an antigraft campaign. Many of its targets to date have been political clients and allies of former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin. Now 88, Mr. Jiang is still the godfather figure of Chinese politics. Going after Mr. Jiang’s patronage network while he is still alive is highly risky for Mr. Xi, particularly since Mr. Xi doesn’t seem to have brought along his own coterie of loyal clients to promote into positions of power. Another problem: Mr. Xi, a child of China’s first-generation revolutionary elites, is one of the party’s “princelings,” and his political ties largely extend to other princelings. This silver-spoon generation is widely reviled in Chinese society at large.

Mr. Xi at the Schloss Bellevue presidential residency during his visit to fellow export powerhouse Germany in Berlin on March 28, 2014. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Finally, China’s economy—for all the Western views of it as an unstoppable juggernaut—is stuck in a series of systemic traps from which there is no easy exit. In November 2013, Mr. Xi presided over the party’s Third Plenum, which unveiled a huge package of proposed economic reforms, but so far, they are sputtering on the launchpad. Yes, consumer spending has been rising, red tape has been reduced, and some fiscal reforms have been introduced, but overall, Mr. Xi’s ambitious goals have been stillborn. The reform package challenges powerful, deeply entrenched interest groups—such as state-owned enterprises and local party cadres—and they are plainly blocking its implementation.

These five increasingly evident cracks in the regime’s control can be fixed only through political reform. Until and unless China relaxes its draconian political controls, it will never become an innovative society and a “knowledge economy”—a main goal of the Third Plenum reforms. The political system has become the primary impediment to China’s needed social and economic reforms. If Mr. Xi and party leaders don’t relax their grip, they may be summoning precisely the fate they hope to avoid.

In the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the upper reaches of China’s leadership have been obsessed with the fall of its fellow communist giant. Hundreds of Chinese postmortem analyses have dissected the causes of the Soviet disintegration.

Mr. Xi’s real “China Dream” has been to avoid the Soviet nightmare. Just a few months into his tenure, he gave a telling internal speech ruing the Soviet Union’s demise and bemoaning Mr. Gorbachev’s betrayals, arguing that Moscow had lacked a “real man” to stand up to its reformist last leader. Mr. Xi’s wave of repression today is meant to be the opposite of Mr. Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost. Instead of opening up, Mr. Xi is doubling down on controls over dissenters, the economy and even rivals within the party.

But reaction and repression aren’t Mr. Xi’s only option. His predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, drew very different lessons from the Soviet collapse. From 2000 to 2008, they instituted policies intended to open up the system with carefully limited political reforms.

They strengthened local party committees and experimented with voting for multicandidate party secretaries. They recruited more businesspeople and intellectuals into the party. They expanded party consultation with nonparty groups and made the Politburo’s proceedings more transparent. They improved feedback mechanisms within the party, implemented more meritocratic criteria for evaluation and promotion, and created a system of mandatory midcareer training for all 45 million state and party cadres. They enforced retirement requirements and rotated officials and military officers between job assignments every couple of years.

In effect, for a while Mr. Jiang and Mr. Hu sought to manage change, not to resist it. But Mr. Xi wants none of this. Since 2009 (when even the heretofore open-minded Mr. Hu changed course and started to clamp down), an increasingly anxious regime has rolled back every single one of these political reforms (with the exception of the cadre-training system). These reforms were masterminded by Mr. Jiang’s political acolyte and former vice president, Zeng Qinghong, who retired in 2008 and is now under suspicion in Mr. Xi’s anticorruption campaign—another symbol of Mr. Xi’s hostility to the measures that might ease the ills of a crumbling system.

Some experts think that Mr. Xi’s harsh tactics may actually presage a more open and reformist direction later in his term. I don’t buy it. This leader and regime see politics in zero-sum terms: Relaxing control, in their view, is a sure step toward the demise of the system and their own downfall. They also take the conspiratorial view that the U.S. is actively working to subvert Communist Party rule. None of this suggests that sweeping reforms are just around the corner.

We cannot predict when Chinese communism will collapse, but it is hard not to conclude that we are witnessing its final phase. The CCP is the world’s second-longest ruling regime (behind only North Korea), and no party can rule forever.

Looking ahead, China-watchers should keep their eyes on the regime’s instruments of control and on those assigned to use those instruments. Large numbers of citizens and party members alike are already voting with their feet and leaving the country or displaying their insincerity by pretending to comply with party dictates.

We should watch for the day when the regime’s propaganda agents and its internal security apparatus start becoming lax in enforcing the party’s writ—or when they begin to identify with dissidents, like the East German Stasi agent in the film “The Lives of Others” who came to sympathize with the targets of his spying. When human empathy starts to win out over ossified authority, the endgame of Chinese communism will really have begun.

Dr. Shambaugh is a professor of international affairs and the director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His books include “China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation” and, most recently, “China Goes Global: The Partial Power.”

WHEN OPIUM CAN BE BENIGN
Feb 1st 2007

China's Communist Party, reconsidering Marx's words, is starting to
wonder whether there might not be a use for religion after all

"DEVELOP the dragon spirit; establish a dragon culture," urge large
green characters at the high school in Hongliutan, a poor village at
the foot of a range of bleak loess hills. Though dragon can be a
synonym for China, it is a god known as the Black Dragon that is being
invoked here. Without funds from the Black Dragon's hillside temple, in
a gully behind the village, the school would not exist. Nor, most
likely, would the adjacent primary school and the irrigation system
that brings water from the nearby Wuding River to the village's maize
and cabbage fields.

Many local governments in rural China are mired in debt. Recent central
government efforts to keep peasants happy by abolishing centuries-old
taxes have not made life any easier for these bureaucracies. With their
revenues cut, rural authorities have found it ever more difficult to
scrape together money for health care and education. So they are only
too happy to allow others to share the burden of providing these
services--even the Black Dragon, whose 500-year-old temple was
demolished by Maoist radicals during the Cultural Revolution in the
1960s. Now officials in Yulin, the prefecture to which Hongliutan
belongs, give the temple their blessing.

The revival of the Black Dragon Temple's fortunes is part of a
resurgence of religious or quasi-religious activity across China
that--notwithstanding occasional crackdowns--is transforming the social
and political landscape of many parts of the countryside. Religion is
also attracting many people in the cities, where the party's atheist
ideology has traditionally held stronger sway.

The resurgence encompasses ancient folk religions and ancestor worship,
along with the organised religions of Buddhism, Taoism, Islam (among
ethnic minorities) and, most strikingly, given its foreign origins and
relatively short history in China, Christianity. In the face of this
onslaught, the party is beginning to rethink its approach to religion.
It now acknowledges that it may even have its uses.

In Hongliutan the party appears in retreat. It is not the party
secretary Zhang Tieniu who holds sway. Mr Zhang was the youngest party
chief in the prefecture when he was appointed last year at the age of
32. But in a culture that reveres age, some villagers refer to him
dismissively as a "lad". The man in charge in Hongliutan is 64-year-old
Wang Kehua. Mr Wang happens to belong to the village's main clan. He is
also the village's elected chief (a post which in most villages is
subordinate to that of party secretary). More to the point, he controls
the temple and its money.

It was Mr Wang's idea to rebuild the temple in 1986, a decade after
Mao's death. Mr Wang, who had become one of the village's wealthiest
men by wheeling and dealing elsewhere, donated some of his own money
and organised villagers to add theirs. It was a promising venture.
Historically, the Black Dragon Temple had a reputation extending far
beyond the village. The dragon was renowned in the parched semi-desert
of the north of Shaanxi Province, 600 kilometres (370 miles) west of
Beijing, as a bringer of rain. If the temple was rebuilt, people would
come, pray to the dragon--and spend money.

Mr Wang does not, however, speak of commercial motives. In the bare
concrete-walled room he calls his office, he describes how, one after
the other, the half-dozen villagers who had destroyed the temple in the
1960s fell victim to the vengeful dragon in subsequent years. The man
who had broken off the head of the Black Dragon's effigy (the god is
worshipped in a human-looking form, as shown in the picture above) had
his head blown off when a factory boiler exploded. Another bled to
death after accidentally chopping his foot with an axe. One was crushed
by a donkey cart. Their offspring also suffered ill fate. These events,
says Mr Wang, convinced him of the power of the dragon and of the
importance of reviving its worship.

The temple has no clergy. Visitors are mainly drawn by their belief in
the dragon's power to tell the future. Many want to know whether
business ventures or marriages will succeed. Mr Wang asked the Black
Dragon whether the divinity approved his appointment as temple chief.
It did. The dragon's responses are given in the form of obscurely
worded classical poems written on pieces of paper issued by a
70-year-old villager, Chen Yushan, clad in his blue padded Mao suit. Mr
Chen offers his interpretation of what these poems mean. An
entrepreneur who is told his business will be successful, and who then
enjoys financial success, is quite likely to make a big donation to the
temple.

TURNING A BLIND EYE
Officially, the party regards folk religion as superstition, the public
practice of which is illegal. But in many rural areas officials now
bend the rules. In Yulin prefecture, with 3.4m people, there are 106
officially registered places of worship and many more that are not
officially sanctioned. Most are not part of the five mainstream
religions (China regards the two Christian traditions, Catholicism and
Protestantism, as separate) that the party recognises. But Yulin has
allowed the Black Dragon Temple to affiliate itself with the
government-sponsored Taoist Association. This gives it a cloak of
legitimacy. So too does an arboretum that Mr Wang has planted with
temple funds (at the dragon's request, he says, but it also helps him
show officials how the village is contributing to government efforts to
stop the desert encroaching).

Local officials themselves benefit from the greater tolerance. For all
the party's dictatorial ways, government officers are often fearful of
triggering unrest by enforcing unpopular policies that are not all that
vital to the party's interests (hence the increasingly patchy
implementation of population control). Demonstrations in an official's
jurisdiction can do far more damage to his career than turning a blind
eye to popular religion--so long as such activity does not directly
challenge the party.

There are also more tangible rewards. In his book "Miraculous
Response", Adam Yuet Chau of the School of Oriental and African Studies
in London says that temples applying for official registration
typically have to treat local officials to banquets. Officials, he
adds, support temples that pay them respect and tribute. They also gain
financially from taxes levied on merchants who do business at temple
fairs. Policemen invited to maintain order at these occasions are paid
with cash, good food and liquor.

In the view of local officials, Mr Chau argues, temples play the same
kind of role as commercial enterprises. They generate prosperity for
the local economy and income for the local government. This is
especially true of the Black Dragon Temple, which says it attracts
200,000 people to its ten-day summer fair (the Black Dragon himself,
villagers say, has also shown up in the form of an unusually shaped
cloud).

Evidence of China's religious revival can be seen throughout the
countryside in the form of lavish new temples, halls for ancestor
worship, churches and mosques (except in the far western province of
Xinjiang, where the government worries that Islam is intertwined with
ethnic separatism and keeps tighter rein). Officially there are more
than 100m religious believers in China (see table), or about 10% of the
population. But experts say the real number is very much higher.

This does not mean that China has embraced religious freedom. Some
religions--Tibetan Buddhism, Islam as practised in Xinjiang,
Catholicism and "house church" Protestantism, which involves informal
gatherings of believers outside registered churches--are still subject
to tight controls because of the party's fears that their followers
might have an anti-government bent. A seven-year-old crackdown on Falun
Gong, a quasi-Buddhist sect that flourished in the 1990s, is still
being pursued with ruthless intensity. Many Falun Gong practitioners,
as well as lesser numbers of followers of other faiths who refuse to
accept state attempts to regulate their religions, are imprisoned in
labour camps.

Within the party, however, debate is growing about whether it should
take a different approach to religion. This does not mean being more
liberal towards what it regards as anti-government activities. But it
could mean toning down the party's atheist rhetoric and showing
stronger support for faiths that have deep historical roots among the
ethnic Han majority. The party is acutely aware that its own ideology
holds little attraction for most ordinary people. Given that many are
drawn to other beliefs, it might do better to try to win over public
opinion by actively supporting these beliefs rather than grudgingly
tolerating them or cracking down.

Pan Yue, then a senior official dealing with economic reforms and now
deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Administration,
argued in an article published in 2001 that the party's traditional
view of religion was wrong. Marx, he said, did not mean to imply that
religion was a bad thing when he referred to it as the opium of the
people. Religion, he said, could just as easily exist in socialist
societies as it does in capitalist ones. He also singled out Buddhism
and Taoism for having helped to bolster social stability through
successive Chinese dynasties. Stability being of paramount concern to
the party today, Mr Pan's message was clear.

IN PRAISE OF HARMONY
His article angered party conservatives at the time: the party's
official stance is that religion will die out under socialism. But more
recently the party itself has begun to put a more positive spin on the
role of religion. Last April China organised a meeting of Buddhist
leaders from around the world in the coastal province of Zhejiang (it
did not, however, invite the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual
leader). The event was given considerable prominence in the official
media. The theme, "A harmonious world begins in the mind", echoed the
party's recent propaganda drive concerning the need for a "harmonious
society". It implied just what Mr Pan had suggested-- that the opium
Marx was talking about should be seen as a benign spiritual salve. In
October the party's Central Committee issued a document on how to build
a harmonious society, arguing that religion could play a "positive
role".

The party's change of tone coincides with its recent efforts to revive
traditional culture as a way of giving China, in its state of rapid
economic and social flux, a bit more cohesion. The term "harmonious
society", which in recent months has become a party mantra, sounds in
Chinese (HEXIE SHEHUI) like an allusion to classical notions of social
order in which people do not challenge their role in life and treat
each other kindly. It is, in effect, a rejection of the Marxist notion
of class struggle.

Officials are now encouraging a revival of the study of Confucianism,
a philosophy condemned by Mao as "feudal" and which can be
quasi-religious. Since 2004 China has sponsored dozens of "Confucius
Institutes" around the world, including America and Europe, to promote
the study of Chinese language and culture.

In the countryside the revival of traditional values has needed little
encouragement. Clan shrines, where ancestors are worshipped, have
sprung up in many rural areas, particularly in prosperous coastal and
southern regions. The revival of clan identity (in many villages a
substantial minority, if not a majority, of inhabitants have the same
surname, which they trace back to a common ancestor) has had a profound
impact on village politics. Those elected as village leader often owe
much of their authority to a senior position in the clan hierarchy.
Control of the ancestral shrine confers enormous power. It is often
clan chiefs, rather than party officials, who mediate disputes. The
shrine will lend money for business ventures--so long as the recipient
has the right name.

WHERE CHRISTIANITY IS A FEMINIST ISSUE
Ironically, the growth of clan power has helped to fuel the growth of
Christianity in some parts of the countryside. In a village in the
eastern province of Shandong, the wife of a former party secretary was
a Protestant who attended prayer meetings with her female friends.
Their religious enthusiasm was apparently fuelled by the subordinate
role of women in the clan. A married woman is expected to revere only
her husband's ancestors but is excluded from his clan hierarchy. The
fast growing house-church communities often disapprove of ancestor
worship, thus attracting women who feel fettered by clan strictures.

The parlous state of China's health-care system has also given a
powerful boost to religion. Falun Gong owed much of its success in the
1990s to claims that it could heal without the need for medicine
(cash-strapped state-run hospitals usually sell medicines to patients
at inflated prices in order to boost their revenues). In the village of
Donglu in Hebei Province, about 140km south of Beijing, Catholic nuns
have set up a three-storey clinic where they offer ophthalmic, dental
and pediatric services for what they say is a fifth of the price of
government-run clinics or private ones run for profit. A picture of
Jesus is pasted to the wall in the operating theatre.

An apparition of Mary is said to have occurred in Donglu in 1900 when
local Catholics were fighting off an assault by members of the
fanatical Boxer cult trying to destroy their church. This has made the
village a site of great devotion for Catholics. Every May for the past
decade, the police have cordoned off Donglu to prevent thousands of
Catholic pilgrims making their way to the village to celebrate the
feast of Mary. Many of the pilgrims are loyal to an underground church
which claims closer ties with Rome than the state-approved Catholic
church. Yet for all Donglu's sensitivity, the local government appears
content to let Catholics run the hospital, which is a key public
service.

Chinese officials are even urging religious organisations to learn from
Hong Kong, where religious groups run many schools and hospitals. In
late November, Ye Xiaowen, the head of the State Administration of
Religious Affairs which oversees the five officially recognised
religions, said that religious groups had helped reinforce social
stability in the former British colony with their contribution to
public services. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who
visited China in October, wrote afterwards in the TIMES that there was
now a sense in China that civil society needed religion, with its
motivated volunteers. During his trip he remarked on an "astonishing
and quite unpredictable explosion" in Christian numbers in China in
recent years.

The party still mouths its alarmist rhetoric about what it says are
foreign efforts to use religion as a means of undermining the party's
grip on power. Yet the appointment of Pope Benedict XVI, following the
death in 2005 of John Paul II who was seen by China as a more die-hard
anti-communist, has encouraged tentative efforts by China to restore
the ties with the Vatican that were severed in 1951.

Last month the Vatican decided to appoint a commission to handle
Chinese relations. But progress has been far from smooth. On November
30th, much to the Vatican's annoyance, China's state-backed Catholic
church appointed a bishop without the Vatican's prior approval for the
third time that year. Since 2000 China had done so only with the
Vatican's tacit assent. In August, however, China released a bishop
loyal to the underground church, An Shuxin, who had been arrested a
decade earlier after leading celebrations of the feast of Mary in
Donglu.

An even more tentative rapprochement is under way with the Dalai Lama.
Since 2002, China has held five rounds of talks with his
representatives, most recently last February. But China retains
profound fears that the Dalai Lama's real intention is to separate
Tibet, and adjoining areas, from China (see article[1]).
Notwithstanding the government's suspicions, Tibetan Buddhism has
acquired a certain chic in Chinese cities in recent years, with some
urbanites regarding it as spiritually more pure than Chinese-style
Buddhism, which has strong links to the government.

Within its own ranks, the party knows that some members practise
religion even though this is against the party's rules. Falun Gong
claimed many adherents among party members in the 1990s. In the
countryside, party secretaries routinely take part in religious
ceremonies. Mr Wang at the Black Dragon is not a party member, but in
other villages in the region temple chiefs double up as village party
bosses. If the party is still trying to keep its members atheist, it is
fighting a losing battle.

One result of allowing religion to play a bigger role in providing
education could be that the party finds its efforts to inculcate its
ideology among the nation's youth becoming ever more frustrated. In
Hongliutan, the temple-sponsored middle school attracts many boarders
from the town--a reversal of the normal flow of village pupils to the
towns. Thanks to the temple's sponsorship, the middle school's fees are
half of what they would be at a government school, teachers say. With
this sort of discount, the popularity and influence of the Black
Dragon, and other such spiritual beasts, seems certain to spread.