The immense political symbolism of the 18th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown on June 4 will surely not be lost on its leaders. For Tiananmen represents not so much a question of dealing with the country’s past as much as holding out a mirror to its future.

There is no denying that China’s ‘governance crisis’ is a serious one. Over the past decade, China has seen a rising graph of social unrest with several public expressions of anger in the form of protests, riots and strikes. Referred to as “public order disturbances” or “mass group incidents” Chinese official figures estimate that there were as many as 87,000 such protests in 2005. These numbers can no longer be dismissed as localised sporadic incidents but speak of widespread societal angst over corruption, layoffs, predatory taxation, a dramatic rise in inequality, environmental degradation and a crumbling social security system.

A governance crisis spells nothing short of a legitimacy crisis for the governing class and the reasons for anxiety are obvious. The ability to maintain and deliver economic growth and to successfully deal with the crisis of rising expectations that it generates has been and will be critical for the party’s continued viability. That the Chinese leadership takes this challenge very seriously is also clear.

Hu Jintao’s concept of a “harmonious society” now stands elevated to the highest rhetorical levels of importance in state policy. The Sixth Plenum of the 16th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China held in 2006 drew a direct correlation between continued prosperity and the need for social equity and justice. The Plenum passed a resolution for a harmonious society to be established by 2020 and called for “putting people first” as the first step towards building a prosperous society. It has set itself an ambitious agenda of fostering a “democratic society under the rule of law”, underlining the need for “maintaining social stability” and for “a stable and orderly society.”

The preoccupation with order and stability has been a fairly obsessive one in Chinese politics, with frequent appeals to the public to “consolidate the great unity of the Chinese people.” Wu Heping, spokesman for the Ministry of Public Security expressed the hope that public expressions of resistance would be mindful of “public order” and that the masses would “resolve problems in a harmonious and an orderly way.” The point however is, does China’s political leadership seriously think that a mix-and-stir version of dissent is possible? Are harmonious protests feasible? By placing its faith in what can at best be a fond hope and a risky policy calculation at the worst, China is clearly asking the wrong question.

The real question that China needs to ask is whether it can get the politics of social harmony right. This will essentially turn on whether the Communist Party is willing to be a force for change and address the tensions within state-society relations. This is not to assume that state-society relations in China are a perpetual conflict arena as they are often typecast to be. Far from being zero-sum or uni-directional as state-dominant theories would have us believe, their interface has proved to be a symbiotic and interactive one. The post-reform decades have seen a truly dramatic expansion of social organisations in China with their ingenious ways of creating an impressive organisational space to perform an array of vital social welfare functions. China’s vibrant environmental activism is a case in point with an estimated 2000 officially registered NGOs including Friends of Nature which have been relatively successful in engaging the state on the issue of environmental protection.

It is true that the social space that has been opened up is a carefully managed one, subject to numerous direct and indirect means of state control. The problem with such a controlled experiment in ordering social space is the contradictions it generates in the long run. The primary challenge facing the Chinese leadership will be to balance its phobic distrust of an erosion of its political supremacy with the compelling need to concede an increased sphere of public autonomy. This is not only a delicate balancing act but also a dangerous one with long term implications for political legitimacy and even survival. The ghosts of Tiananmen could yet return to haunt the country and the dilemma before the Chinese state is no easy one.

The writer is associate professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi