If you’re in Beijing this week, there are some things that you may not find. Balloons or ping-pong balls, CNN on the TV in your hotel workout room, taxi windows that roll down and dissidents.

These are not random shortages. They are targets of a government crackdown aimed at preventing the slightest disruption of its 18th Communist Party Congress, which has the task of approving new leaders for the world’s biggest nation.

The party is fearful of balloons and ping-pong balls because they could carry unwelcome messages. Foreign news channels might feature stories that don’t fit the government narrative.

Since a passenger might roll down his cab window to throw out anti-government tracts, drivers have been told to remove the cranks. Dissidents have been arrested or exiled from the capital so they can’t spread subversive complaints.

That’s not all. Among the other things that you can’t do in Beijing at the moment, reports the Los Angeles Times: “Attend an outdoor concert. Do your homework online. Buy a knife in a supermarket. Buy lunch from a food cart. Run a marathon.”

Authoritarian regimes may look eternal and impregnable, but this one seems to be feeling fragile. One big reason is that the party is about to install new leadership ― with President Hu Jintao, the chief leader for the past decade, expected to give way to Vice President Xi Jinping.

Malcontents and skeptics will not be allowed to intrude on the party’s business. But the leaders’ tightening control leaves no doubt how much they fear their own people.

Another reason for the nerves lies in the unseemly internal turmoil that came into view earlier this year. One party heavyweight, Bo Xilai, was ensnared in a lurid scandal that included charges of corruption as well as the conviction of his wife for the fatal poisoning of a British business associate. He awaits trial, but the episode was embarrassing to the party, not to mention possibly destabilizing.

The hierarchy is also anxious about the spread of protests by citizens fed up with graft, cronyism and abuse of power. Time magazine reports an expert estimate that there were 180,000 such incidents in 2010, and that the number has probably doubled since then. The rulers in Beijing watched the Arab Spring bring down fellow autocrats in the Middle East, and they do not intend to let anything similar happen at home.

They have succeeded in maintaining their monopoly on political power through an economic liberalization that brought about the transformation of China from poor and backward to an economic powerhouse ― while making a mockery of the official communist ideology.

Though that stunning achievement has helped the party retain power in the past, it is bound to undermine the regime in time. A growing middle class is generally a harbinger of democratic change ― as it was in South Korea and Taiwan. A population enjoying rising living standards, growing contact with the outside world and new means of expressing opinions, through websites and social media, will not be so easy to repress.

The new leaders who emerge from the party congress are expected to be in charge of China for the next 10 years. But if they were truly confident of their durability, they wouldn’t be scared of balloons.

(Chicago Tribune)
(MCT Information Services)