This is not good:

A fierce fire engulfed a major new building in Beijing that houses a luxury hotel and cultural center on Monday, the last day of celebrations for the lunar new year when the city was ablaze with fireworks.

The building was designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and is part of China Central Television’s new headquarters, an angular wonder of modernist architecture that sits astride the city and was built to coincide with the Beijing Olympics last year. The CCTV building was a hugely expensive trophy of Beijing’s pre-Olympics building boom, costing millions of dollars, and any damage is likely to be embarrassing for the ruling Communist Party.

The fire was burning from the ground floor to the top floor of the large building, the flames reflecting in the glass facade of the main CCTV tower next to the hotel and cultural center. The 241-room Mandarin Oriental hotel in the building was due to open this year. Flames were spotted around 7:45 p.m. and within 20 minutes the fire had spread throughout the building, dominating that part of the city.

The Times has a photo of the building on fire, and it looks like something out of The Towering Inferno.  It’s my understanding that the building was not yet occupied, which is somewhat reassuring (although it does not rule out any loss of life).  Here’s a screen shot from the Mandarin Oriental website:

The hotel is the building to the left, the one that looks like an inverted “L.”

This cannot be good news to the Chinese government, which is facing growing unrest at home and increased scrutiny abroad.  I’m not enough of an economist to know whether they’re in as much trouble as it appears, but it does look bleak.

I’m sure that this also will renew talk of whether China’s current rules enjoy the “mandate of heaven.”  Throughout Chinese history, inauspicious events — usually natural disasters — have been viewed as signs that the existing government no longer enjoys karmic favor.  This is the second time in a year that this question has come up — the first during the Sichuan earthquake last year.

Here’s what Salon’s Andrew Leonard had to say then:

The devastating earthquake in the Sichuan province of China — 12,000 dead and counting — is spawning the usual blogospheric chatter about the “Mandate of Heaven.” As in, has the Chinese Communist Party lost it?

Ever since the Zhou Dynasty replaced the Shang some 3000 years ago, natural disasters have been interpreted in China as a sign of heaven’s disfavor with whomever is currently in charge. The Tangshan earthquake of 1976, which killed hundreds of thousands, provided the most famous recent demonstration of this theory. A few months later, Chairman Mao died, setting the stage for the eventual ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping and a radically different approach to Chinese economic development. . . .

But there’s one problem with the formulation: Where’s that new dynasty waiting in the wings, ready to seize power from the discredited rulers who have failed to keep mankind in harmony with heaven and earth?

From the days of the Zhou, the theory of the Mandate of Heaven has been closely associated with the problem of establishing the legitimacy of the new government. New dynastic rulers arrive, point out the floods, famine, earthquakes and general distress that characterized the last years of the previous dynasty, and announce that obviously, the previous rulers had lost the Mandate of Heaven, as witnessed by all the destruction.

Leonard is right to say China doesn’t  have a “new dynasty” waiting in the wings.  But it does have significant discontent.  There is a small but growing democracy movement, and there’s been significant local unrest across the country as factory closures and layoffs have produced more than 26 million unemployed migrant workers.  Whether today’s fire further weakens the regime — or causes it to crack down even more harshly on the opposition — is still an unknown

And for those who dismiss the mandate as superstitious claptrap, keep in mind the question is not whether it’s true, but rather whether both the government and its citizens believe it.  Legitimacy for a government is hard won and easily lost.  The CCP has been on a tremendous roll for nearly thirty years (except for the Tiananmen massacre), and China’s citizens have accepted limits on civil liberties in exchange for significant economic progress.  Now that the boom times are, at best, slowing down to a crawl, that may change.

In the meantime, our thoughts go out to all those involved in putting out the fire and preventing casualties.

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