The JVP’s congratulatory message to the Chinese Communist Party over the latter’s centenary seems a tad disconcerting. This is the same party that rails against “Chinese colonisation” in this country, the same party that worries about the country’s ruling elite modelling itself on the Chinese state. Reading the message, one rubs one’s eyes: in around 430 words, it praises the CPC for its efforts to bring “modernity and prosperity” to the Chinese people, for saving them from the clutches of “feudal overlords” a hundred years ago, and for taking the lead in the fight against Western imperialism. As befits such hopeful messages, it concludes on a hopeful note, with its belief that the Communist Party will strengthen “coordinated work among the Left parties to lead the world towards Socialism.”
Clearly, more than a mere rift between rhetoric and practice marks the JVP’s attitude to China. Yet its message to the CPC should not be viewed in isolation: it’s a reflection of other parties and their Janus-faced responses to the China question.
All the same, it’s intriguing how oppositional outfits, despite their anti-China rhetoric, keep going back to China in one sense or the other. The JVP is a case in point: this is not the first time it has despatched a congratulatory message to the much maligned monolith that is the CPC. In 2017, for instance, it sent a message to the CPC’s 19th National Congress, in which it not only referred to Xi Jinping as “Comrade”, but lauded the party’s efforts at establishing a “moderately prosperous society in an all-round way.”
These sentiments are, no doubt, in keeping with the JVP’s Maoist roots. But they remain a far cry from the JVP’s present conjuncture; it’s no coincidence, perhaps, that while the party badmouths China’s leaders in the vernacular, mostly in Sinhala, it despatches, and publishes, its congratulatory messages to those same leaders in English.
Perhaps it assumes that the Chinese aren’t familiar with Sinhala, or that they are tolerant of opposition parties badmouthing them in public within the country. Whatever the reason, it must be acknowledged that ambivalent though its response to China may be, such ambivalence is hardly the JVP’s preserve. Champika Ranawaka’s 43 Senankaya, for instance, borrows many of its political ideas from China’s example, in particular the achievements of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms; Mr Ranawaka correctly, and lucidly, contrasts the latter reforms with the oligarchy and family bandyism that have come to pass for development here today.
As for the SJB, the anger at Sajith Premadasa’s refusal to give a direct answer to an Indian (WION) journalist over her questions about Chinese footprints in Sri Lanka is an indication of where certain critics of this regime want his party to go: down a petty, pro-West path, in line with the UNP’s policies during the yahapalana years. Mr Premadasa’s measured reply shows that the SJB, far from embracing those policies, is firmly rejecting them.
In fact, the only parties which seem consistent in their opposition to China’s presence in Sri Lanka are the TNA and the UNP; thus a TNA MP summons fears of “Cheelamism” against the Port City Bill, while sharing an image of what he alleges to be a Chinese worker in the north on Twitter (which he later takes down when it’s shown to be a Sri Lankan). Surprising as it may seem, the UNP, by contrast, is not too intense over China; thus none less than Mr Ranil Wickremesinghe praises Beijing for its “role in preserving peace”, adding that Sri Lanka “has also benefited in a very big way.” This represents a turnaround for the UNP, even though it does not detract from the China-bashing it indulged in not too long ago.
What distinguish the almost hysterical responses of these parties to China from the more rational, reasoned responses of every other party, including the SJB, are the lines of critique they take with regard to the regime’s dalliance with Beijing. There are, at present, two such lines the opposition can opt for: it can critique the politico-military-security risks the regime is opening itself to through its ever growing proximity to China, or it can critique China itself from a human rights, liberal democratic, Western lens.
The second line should be dropped and abandoned, and the first preferred to all other lines. This is not because we are, or should be, beholden to Beijing, but because Beijing’s political power and economic clout cannot, and must not, be ignored.
The logic of Sri Lanka’s critics of China is that we should look to the West for better values, such as human rights, the rule of law, and a free press. But to stake a country’s hopes on the fulfilment of these objectives, while foregoing on the more urgent imperatives of economic and national security, indeed of state and popular sovereignty, would be as short-sighted as thinking a country can plug itself to China’s meteoric rise forever.
There is much to learn from China, and not (just) in matters of security. Dayan Jayatilleka puts it best: “China is the role model of the Gotabaya regime only in the security realm, not the socio-economic.” Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, mistakenly assumed to have been on par with Western neoliberalism, provide us an ideal case study of how to liberalise an economy while liberating it from dependence on the West. Xi Jinping is demonised and vilified today, by the Western press, for the same reason Deng was viewed cynically, with much disfavour, by that press decades ago: because his reforms are bolstering Beijing’s prospects as the West’s, particularly the US’s, most formidable peer competitor.
It goes without saying that one must take such briefings with a pinch of salt. Only then can we come up with a critique of Sri Lanka’s tilt to China which pinpoints this regime’s failures without demonising the only all-weather friend we have.
That is why Dr Dayan J’s critique of Mangala Samaraweera’s barely disguised diatribe against China stands out. What is interesting about Mr Samaraweera’s piece, published in this paper last week, is that it inverts China’s political history against its present situation.
Samaraweera dwells at considerable length on the Opium War, the Nanjing Treaty, and the Century of Humiliation, and depicts all these as the backdrop against which Beijing seeks to dominate the world today. He cautions the present government against taking isolationist stances on the world stage and advises it against getting closer to China. There is a cosmetic critique of Western colonialism – which, he says, civilised savages (in what way, he does not say), but at a cost to the natives of the colonies – yet what he does with this important point isn’t so much as to critique Western colonialism’s successor, neocolonialism – as logic would dictate – as it is to raise the alarm about Bejiing’s imperial ambitions.
The question of whether China is dominating the world on Western colonial lines has been answered by several Western academics, writers, and journalists. Jacobin Magazine puts it in perspective in a recent piece: “China Is Not the Enemy — Neoliberalism Is.” The Socialist Equality Party, no friend of the Gotabaya regime, has noted the bankruptcy of propagating Western myths about Beijing’s ambitions when critiquing matters concerning symbols of Sri Lanka’s proximity to China, such as Port City. Much closer to home, Dr Dayan J distinguishes between China’s largely assumed colonial ambitions and its inescapable political influence, deconstructing Samaraweera’s interpretation of Cold War history.
These interventions show that it is possible to criticise the government without depicting a dependable ally (whose views on sovereignty, as Dr Dayan noted in an interview with Sergei De Silva-Ranasinghe in Policy Magazine, makes for much value congruency with Sri Lanka) as a fire-breathing dragon hell-bent on dominating the country’s political life; to put it pithily, a critique of the government’s proximity to China which places emphasis on the government’s agency rather than on Beijing’s supposed “sinister designs.”
The SJB, hopefully, is evolving on these fronts, throwing out what didn’t work for the UNP and embracing a new set of policies. The JVP should evolve on similar lines as well, but as I noted in my piece on that party a few weeks back, its confused response to China masks an almost schizoid attitude to politics. Perhaps the best summing up of this attitude would be that while the JVP, which sent those congratulatory missives to the CPC, is officially tied to a socialist worldview “under the guidance of Marxist-Leninist theory and practice” against the forces of “capitalism and imperialism led by the USA and its allies”, the JVP’s parliamentary outfit, the NPP, stands on a Kautskyist (an authoritative promulgators of orthodox Marxism after the death of Engels) social democratic base which does not shy away from attacking the very communist parties and allies it wishes well elsewhere.
The JVP’s problem is that it does not seem able to define itself. As things stand, it does not know where to stand. On China as on politics in general, it has lost the thread. Other parties have shown the way for the opposition, at least when it comes to China. If the JVP does not follow this course, it will lose itself. It should course-correct now.
The writer can be contacted at udakdev1@gmail.com