Early this year, a Chinese colleague of mine made a passing remark that I dismissed as a flight of fancy. He mentioned that the Chinese have a superstition about years ending with the number 9, and that superstition is that the nation always faces catastrophe in years ending with 9. Given the fact that the number 9 itself is actually considered lucky in Chinese culture (it's Chinese character 九 is pronounced "jiu," which is the same in all but tone to the character 久, which means "eternal" or "long-lasting" (Syau)) and the fact that I had never set much stock by numerology in the first place (notwithstanding my unease at China's obsession with the number 666), I laughed at yet another example of how primitive China's mindset really is. Of course, perhaps the joke is on me, because 2019 hasn't been great for me either, between being stuck in a backward Chinese hospital and a host of other headaches, but I digress.
To be fair, it was a rather new superstition, rather than a traditional one, and it stemmed from the fact that ever since the PRC was founded in 1949, every 10th anniversary has, indeed, seen a crisis come upon China. And now, I'm wishing I could find someone to confirm what this colleague said, because it does not look like 2019 will be an exception.
1949
1949 was the year the PRC was founded, and one would think this would be remembered favorably in China (at least, if one acknowledges that the Chinese are indoctrinated enough to think the PRC has been good for them). Yet, for reasons none I have met are willing to say, most Chinese elders I have spoken to always get wide-eyed and begin looking around nervously when asked about this year. I wish I could provide more details than that.
1959
1959 was the year when China, still steaming from their humiliating smack down in the 2nd Taiwan Straits Crisis (Halperin), decided to implement a series of "reforms (always a word that must be put in quotes where China is concerned)" seeking to surpass Great Britain as an industrial superpower. These "reforms," such as new theoretical agricultural methods that had no merit other than "the guy who conjured up this claptrap was Marxist so it must be good," caused the beginning of the Great Famine, which killed 45 million Chinese (Dikotter, 2).
This was also the year that Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev, realizing China's ingrained superiority complex coupled with the fact that Mao was "a madman, or at least a pathological narcissist, unilaterally abrogated the agreement that was to have provided China with an atomic weapon (Mosher, 84)," and threatened nuclear attacks on the heartland of his erstwhile Chinese allies (ibid., 85).
Perhaps most damagingly though, this was the year that the 14th Dalai Lama finally realized that the CPC's enforced Han occupation of his country was neither a temporary phenomenon nor a side-effect of Mao's "unification," but a permanent bid to reacquire a long-coveted "tributary" of the self-anointed "Central Nation." This led to the Tibetan uprising (Sun, Zhang & Li, 102) and the Dalai Lama's subsequent flight from Tibet into self-imposed exile (ibid., 118 & 119), and the beginning of international attention on China's brutality in Tibet (ibid., 124 & 125).
1969
This was the year when the nation China insisted was fading in power (the United States) put a man on the moon while most of China still didn't have electricity or running water, crushing Mao's rhetoric about Marxism being "the future."
Ten years after Kruschev threatened to nuke China, China (now armed with a fledgling nuclear program consisting of a few small missiles and even fewer warheads) decided invading the USSR to recover "lost" territory ceded to Russia more than a century prior in an "unequal treaty (Mosher, 85)," seemed like a wise move (Osborn & Foster). Again, this put helpless but arrogant China in the sights of the USSR's nuclear arsenal, but this time the USSR wasn't making idle threats. They didn't just discuss nuking China, they laid out a concrete plan. The Soviets were ready to launch as they informed Americans of their plan "to wipe out the Chinese threat and get rid of this modern adventurer (Osborn & Foster)."
And, as I wrote a few days ago, the only thing that saved China from annihilation with no hope of retaliation, was that America stood up in China's defense, a fact even China admits.
1979
Having flirtaciously invited a nuclear strike by their former ally in '59 and having only avoided one in '69 due to unlikely protection from a nation whose destruction they had sworn to see (the US), one would think China would have learned "America is not out to destroy you but the Soviets won't need much prompting to do so." Apparently though, China learns slowly. In 1979, China decided "since the Americans and Russians have both proven they're stronger than me, attacking a nation backed by Russia that just repelled America after 15 years of war sounds like a great idea."
This was the year the PLA invaded Vietnam. Now, considering that Vietnam was bloodied and battered by their long (and only recently ended) war with America and the bulk of their troops were away in Cambodia, this should have been an easy victory. And it was...
...For Vietnam.
The PLA got absolutely spanked, beating a humiliated retreat back across their border after less than 30 days of fighting (Pike). Of the 330,000 Chinese troops who invaded Vietnam (to be resisted by a mere 150,000 Vietnamese veterans), 26,000 were killed and 37,000 wounded by the time they came limping home (Mosher, 114). This led to the Sino-Vietnamese Wars (note the "s") which lasted well into the 1980's without China ever gaining any significant territory, exposing the outdated fighting style of the PLA and the dogmatic, Marxist-theory-over-combat-effectiveness mentality of its officers (Gao)...
...A mentality they still have to this day (Xi, 237 - 245; Xu).
For Americans, we can soothe our egos with this knowledge: it took the FULL power of the North Vietnamese Army AND the Viet Cong 15 years to convince us to leave. The PLA was decimated by a skeleton force and sent home in pieces in less than a month.
1989
I can say from experience that if you want to see an elder member of the CPC twitch and writhe nervously like a worm at the sight of the fishhook he's being sized up for, just utter the words "yi jiu ba jiu nian," meaning "the year 1989," anywhere within earshot of him. It's no hyperbole to say the very mention of the year induces panic attacks in the ones I've met. If there was a year in which the CPC felt that their "Mandate of Heaven" was on its last leg (read Three Kingdoms and you'll get the reference), it was 1989.
The Dalai Lama, viewed as a spiritual leader and freedom fighter in most of the world but derided as a "separatist" and "terrorist" in the self-styled "Central Nation," won the Nobel Peace Prize that year, and the reason he won the prize was for the very work China hated: the attention he drew to China's crimes against the Nation of Tibet (Nobel Peace Prize 1989). This emboldened the oppressed Tibetans, who launched yet another uprising (Associated Press).
The Berlin Wall fell this year, signalling to most of the world that the USSR, China's patron, prototype and role-model despite the bad blood between them by this point in history, was collapsing (Tomforde).
But most chillingly for the Party, it was the year the Chinese populace came as close as they have ever come to overthrowing the Neo-Mandarinate. "The theft of public assets, nepotism within the CCP, rampant inflation, and rising unemployment were all upending the grim, ideological certainties of the Maoist economic order (McGregor, 87)," leading to the Tiananmen Square Protests. China's National People's Congress clearly saw these events as interconnected; and in every one of them they saw the "dark hand" of the CIA {China's all-purpose bogeyman for everything from the Hong Kong Protests (Westscott) to the uninspiringly effeminate demeanor of China's pop-culture icons (Hawkins)}, cunningly manipulating the world with their insidious love of Human Rights and scheming to deceive people into rejecting their benevolent dictators (Mosher, 228). In their paranoid minds, the noose that was currently garroting the USSR was being tightened around their own necks as well, and the eeeeeeevil US simply had to be behind it all...
...somehow.
1999
1999 opened with minor headaches for China. There was the embarrassment of the crash of China Southwest Airlines flight SZ4509due to poor maintenance, killing all 61 on board (Aviation Safety Network, and Amnesty International's report that brought the regime's abuses of Uighurs in Xinjiang to the world's attention for the first time (AI Index)
But the biggest crisis for the PArty-State that year was a double-whammy for the CPC, beginning with the Falun Gong protest in Beijing (the largest in the capital since the Tiananmen Crisis (Daily News Staff). This by itself would not have caused much of a stir (the protest was utterly devoid of violence), but for a regime as fearful and inherently paranoid as the CPC, the fact that such a large number of practicioners of a single sect could so easily assemble in the capital without Zhongnanhai having any prior knowledge of it, especially a sect that already had valid grievances against the regime (Falun Dafa).
The second was the the US bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade during NATO's campaign over Yugoslavia, killing more than 500. The US, predictably, has repeatedly sworn this bombing was a case of mistaken identity. China, just as predictably, has repeatedly insisted it was a deliberate and premeditated act of terrorism (Mizokami). Regardless of which version of events is true (or, shall we say, which one is closer to the truth), in the eyes of the Chinese, it was another brutal reminder of the US's vastly superior firepower and reach, at the dawn of what they had long believed was supposed to be "China's Century."
2009
In addition to discovering (thanks to a nuclear test (McCurry and Branigan)and missile test (Sang-Hun & Sanger), neither of which Beijing was warned about) that they did not have as much control over their North Korean vassal state as they thought (and that China was officially the only nation in the world to share borders with 3 nuclear states), China had problems at home this year. This was the year China discovered that their "economic miracle" was dependent on their old rival, the US. As the GFC made its effects felt throughout the West (especially the US), demand for China's cheap goods plummeted (reduced further by public outrage over a 2008 food safety scandal where contaminated baby formula from China made 300,000 infants sick, hospitalizing 860 and killing 6 (McMahon, 167)), and unemployment in China reached epidemic levels (McMahon, xiii). China attempted to compensate for this with a trade agreement with other Asian nations, but protesters at the summit where this agreement was to be signed caused the agreement's indefinite postponement, much to Beijing's chagrin (Beaumont). Considering that China's entire "social contract" between the government and the People boils down to we'll accept curtailed liberties in exchange for growing prosperity," the fact that Beijing could not deliver on this promise of prosperity without depending on the nation they had consistently painted as China's eternal enemy was such a devastating blow that the Chairman at the time, Hu Jintao, never recovered from it. It was the resulting backlash against Hu Jintao and the Jiang Zemin faction that backed him, that led to the 2012 "election" of Xi Jinping.
This was also the year that China's western ethnic struggles became a multi-front problem, with pro-Tibet protests worldwide (FlorCruz), largely as a show of support for the Tibetans who protested in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics, as well as an Uighur uprising that left 140 dead in revenge for the death of an Uighur laborer at the hands of a Han colonist (Branigan).
Oh, and this was the year that the US President Barack Obama managed to do something right and announced the "Pivot to Asia" policy, meaning China once again would have to contend with a robust US presence in its backyard (Lieberthal), which meant its days of bullying its neighbors (or perhaps China would prefer me to call them "Tributaries") with impunity were at an end.
Like 1989, between domestic unrest brought on by economic weakness, and ethnic unrest brought on by the regime's brutality, this was a year when the CPC had reason to tremble.
And That Brings Us to 2019
Where do I even begin? Despite being the 70th anniversary of the PRC's founding (which the regime desperately tried to cast as an auspicious event, given the symbolic importance of the number 70 in Chinese culture), this year has been blow after blow for China. This year has hit China with two famine events: African Swine Fever and Armyworm. Taiwan is pulling farther away from Beijing's imaginary control as Tsai Ing-Wen hosts an openly pro-independence running mate (Channelnewsasia), as well as purchasing more fighter jets and weaponry from the US (Harold) and fostering deeper military ties with the US military (Chung). China's regional rival, Japan, has just enthroned a new emperor who is poised to take a far more assertive stance against China's aggression. The Trade War has exacerbated China's existing economic problems to the point where one economics professor at Peking University has even gone public (and been fired for) saying that China's actual GDP growth may be below 3% (Cho). Professors at Renmin University have given even more shocking figures, rebuffing the Party's official 6% figure by saying real GDP growth is already below 2% (Durden) or even negative growth (Chao).
Oh, and of course, there are the Hong Kong Protests, which are now in their 5th month and which have brought condemnation upon China from the rest of the world, and which have devastated Hong Kong's economy, as well as its status as China's "half-in-half-out" zone where the CPC could have the benefits of international economics while still isolating the danger of liberalization.
What could make this year worse for China?
How About Bubonic Plague?
I didn't believe this until I read it from multiple sources. Beijing authorities have confirmed first 2 (Wang) and now 3 cases of Bubonic Plague (that's "the Black Death" for those who study history more than medicine) in Inner Mongolia (spitting distance from Beijing) in the past seven days (Yan). So far it is isolated and Beijing's "experts" insist "the risk of the disease spreading further in the capital is extremely low and there is no need for panic (Wang)," the fact is that a virtually 100% fatal disease carried by rodents, in a city with one of the worst rodent infestations and worst sanitation I've ever seen, is scary as hell.
...But that will have to wait for my next article.
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