Little leaps forward? By Geoff Dyer

Little leaps forward?

By Geoff Dyer

The Financial Times: May 27 2009
Children playing in front of portrait of late Chairman Mao Zedong
Faded supremacy: Shanghai children beneath a mural depicting Mao Zedong. Since his time, decisions are made more by consensus among party leaders

Ever since China’s leaders sent in tanks and soldiers to mow down pro-democracy protesters in Beijing 20 years ago, the Chinese Communist party has faced a constant stream of predictions about its imminent demise. American President Bill Clinton was one of the most pointed critics, telling Jiang Zemin, Chinese president, in 1997 that China’s authoritarian system “was on the wrong side of history”.

This year has been no different. The global economic crisis has led to at least 20m factory workers losing their jobs, and would, according to some forecasts, undermine the legitimacy of the Communist party.

Yet 20 years after the Beijing massacre, the Communist leaders remain firmly in control. There is no coherent challenge to their rule and, although grassroots protests are widespread, the simmering discontent of 1989 is less evident today, especially in the main cities. Even the economy appears to have begun to recover more quickly than that of any other major country.

Opinion polls have to be viewed cautiously as respondents might be afraid to criticise the government openly, but they generally show a level of optimism that few nations can match.

“There is a lot of unhappiness, but surveys tend to show that hope is rising and people generally think the country is going in the right direction,” says Cheng Li, a Chinese politics expert at the Brookings Institution.

The apologetic tone that leaders once adopted on political issues has gradually been replaced by more confident claims about the benefits of a “China model”. Zhou Xiaochuan, head of the central bank, recently said indications China was recovering from the crisis demonstrated “its superior system” when it came to making important decisions.

From Russia to Venezuela, other countries have trumpeted a more authoritarian, statist approach in recent years, but it is China with its steamroller economy and rising international influence that poses the biggest challenge to the postwar march of democracy. Indeed, the fate of the Communist party – whether it maintains its tight grip on power or is forced to give way to more democratic forms of government – will be one of the defining stories of the century.

Just how has China managed to disarm the democracy movement? The basic outline of the approach is well understood – a mixture of wealth from a dynamic economy and repression. The state clamps down on signs of organised opposition and boasts an increasingly sophisticated propaganda machine, skilled at fanning the flames of nationalist sentiment.

Yet there are other explanations for the durability of the one-party state. Beneath its Leninist surface, the CCP has introduced a string of reforms aimed at boosting its ability to govern and adapt to a changing society.

Training for officials has been improved, including the opening of MBA-style colleges for party members. The CCP’s all-powerful personnel department has imposed rotation of officials to reduce scope for corruption and broaden experience, as well as enforcing retirement for older officials. In 2007 alone, about 200,000 local government officials changed positions.

Since 2002, private entrepreneurs – a potential source of opposition – have been allowed to join the party; in one recent list of the country’s richest people, one-third were CCP members. Although public debate on sensitive topics is still closely curtailed, the CCP has established stronger ties with intellectuals and professionals to solicit expert advice. New labour laws to strengthen workers’ rights, for example, were drafted with the help of academics. Some intellectuals were motivated to advise the Tiananmen protesters by their anger at being ignored: now, their successors give regular private briefings to top leaders.

While a small group of scholars openly supports democracy, other academics are trying to find ways to gauge public opinion without elections. Experiments are being conducted with focus groups, opinion polls and public hearings. The objective is not to pave the way slowly towards a more democratic system but to make the one-party state more effective and durable.

The CCP also seems to have established a more stable process for leadership transitions – the Achilles heel of so many authoritarian regimes. Hu Jintao was anointed the next leader a decade before he took over in 2002, which helped avoid a destabilising power struggle when he took office. For the next generation, the leadership has been selected five years ahead of time, with Xi Jinping expected to become president and CCP boss in 2012, with Li Keqiang as premier. Most importantly, these decisions were the result of consensus among senior party members, not the word of one dominant figure such as Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping.

In his book, China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation, David Shambaugh of George Washington University described the 10-year effort by the CCP to study the decline of the Soviet Union and learn survival lessons. Some conclusions were obvious, such as the need to avoid economic stagnation and military adventures overseas. But the CCP also decided to make its officials more professional and allow for dissent and debate within the party. “The lesson [from the Soviet experience] is clear: adapt and change or atrophy and die,” Mr Shambaugh concluded. “The CCP has clearly chosen the former option.”

None of this is to deny that there are clear limits on political discussion and activity – the CCP does not allow debate about its own legitimacy or any potential challengers. But the capacity for flexibility helps explain how the party has avoided becoming an ossified oligarchy in the eyes of many Chinese.

If the CCP has stifled calls for democracy by adapting, the other reason for its resilience has been the important changes in peoples’ lives that go well beyond the expansion in incomes.

Society can still seem highly controlled to many westerners, but petty interference by the state has diminished dramatically – especially for the urban middle class. The young have grown up hearing about how the authorities decided the length of hair and clothes to be worn. Even in the 1980s, getting married required the approval of officials from the “work unit”, the employer-based bureaucracy that controlled many aspects of private life. Getting tickets to the theatre or to travel often required official stamps. Large parts of that supervision, one of the underlying complaints of the Tiananmen generation, have disappeared.

Academic debate in elite circles has become much more open. The internet is another important part of that sense of liberation. Whether it really does allow a wide discussion of sensitive issues or whether, actually, the government’s extensive censorship efforts restrict discussions to safer topics is open to question. But young internet-savvy people genuinely believe their access to information has been greatly enhanced.

Foxshuo, a 22-year-old blogger from Wuhan in central China, says the government’s propaganda tactics – which range from blocking sites to paying students to make pro-CCP comments in chatrooms – are often fruitless. “Even though we have to use proxies or encryption tools, which can be a complicated process, we eventually get to find out what we want,” he says. “The internet environment is harsher than in many western countries, but westerners would be wrong to think that China has no freedom at all.” In other words, whatever the reality, the flow of information feels free to the young.

As a result of the effective combination of governance reforms and co-opting the rich and the middle class, few analysts believe the party will face a serious threat over the next decade.

Yet there are also plenty of reasons for thinking that the party will come under greater pressure to introduce deeper political reforms. For all the resilience the party has shown, its support at the level of ideas is shallow.

When asked if they support multiparty elections, the young will often sound sceptical but they are also quite likely to express strong support for much greater freedom for media and for civil society organisations. Opinion surveys bear some of this out. A study of youth attitudes prepared by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences found 61 per cent said they identified with “liberalism”. Surveys also indicate that most of the bright young people who apply for membership are mostly interested in the job opportunities that party membership might bring.

The youth are gradually shedding their image as an apolitical, materialistic “me generation”. The Sichuan earthquake last year exposed a deep vein of idealism that is not otherwise being channelled. On the campuses of the leading universities, environmental protection is becoming as important an issue as it is in the west.

Chart comparing China GDP and freedom criteria to other Bric countriesThe sense that the CCP has yet to win the political argument is reinforced by the frequency with which leaders use the word “democracy”. In his speech to the National Peoples’ Congress this year, Premier Wen Jiabao said: “We need to improve democratic institutions, enrich the forms of democracy, expand its channels, and carry out democratic elections.”

What they mean by “democracy” is different from what reformers seek or how it is practised elsewhere – usually some modest form of inner-party vote on specific CCP posts. But the fact that leaders feel the need to couch their words in the language of democratic reform is not indicative of a regime with solid intellectual foundations.

The country is a long way from creating the sort of institution that can channel legitimate complaints from citizens and counterbalance unaccountable political power. Important court decisions are still referred to party officials and the centuries-old petitioning system, where people lodge complaints to the authorities, is known for corruption and abuse.

For all the party’s success in blunting any challenge from the new middle class, it has been helped by the fact that the number of people whose income makes them genuinely comfortable is still relatively small. Car ownership in China – an important badge of middle-class status – is only 2-3 per cent. One popular idea among political scientists is that pressure for democracy really starts to build when gross domestic product per capita reaches $5,000-$6,000. Based on purchasing power parity China has reached this, although in nominal terms it is still barely half that level. This means the theory that a flourishing middle class will challenge the CCP is only just starting to be tested in China.

Moreover, the very flexibility that has helped the party survive means that the status quo is unlikely to hold. “If the CCP really is so resilient, it will have to adapt into something fundamentally different as society changes,” says Cheng Li at Brookings. China’s dissidents hope social changes will eventually propel political reform. “For now, the attempts to protect individual rights are dissipated and fractured,” says Bao Tong, a former senior official whose reformist views led him to be imprisoned after Tiananmen. “But if all those pieces can be gathered together, they will create a power that will influence China’s leaders.”

Additional reporting by Yang Jie

......................................................









June 4 1989: The day the tanks moved in

Tanks in Tiananmen Square 1989

On the night of June 3 1989, soldiers arrived at the scene of protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. By the next day they had cleared it and the army was in control.

Independent estimates of deaths range from 500 to several thousand. The government claimed no one was killed on the square itself, although this has been contradicted by witnesses. However, most deaths did occur elsewhere in the city, in particular around Muxidi to the west, where residents tried to block the soldiers.

Recently leaked documents say that in the days after the massacre, anti-government protests occurred in 181 places around the country.

PROTEST 20 YEARS ON

From jail time to a ‘cup of tea’ with the police

Liu Xiaobo is China’s latest democracy martyr. Late last year, he helped write Charter 08, a pro-democracy manifesto that organisers say has been signed by 8,000 people. He has been in jail since December 8, write Geoff Dyer and Jamil Anderlini.

The fate of Charter 08 illustrates the way China smothers its democracy movement to avoid any repetition of the Tiananmen protests. Promoting democracy is not illegal, at least within a circle of approved academics. Beijing University’s Yu Keping, an occasional adviser to President Hu Jintao, published Democracy is a Good Thing last year. But the state cracks down on sensitive discussions outside its control. Mr Liu was charged with “inciting subversion of state power”.

“There can never be harmony when there is a constant crackdown under way,” says Bao Tong, a prominent dissident. “China is stable but turbulent at all times under this government.”

Repression can be subtle. Tang Xiaozhao, a blogger, describes how after signing the charter she was invited to “have a cup of tea” by the police, who told her off for being naive. “What can you change by signing a document? It’s no use. It could only bring you trouble. I think you are not mature enough in politics,” she says she was told. A blocked promotion or a word with relatives are other methods of marginalising persistent critics.

Charter 08 has an impressive number of signatories given the risks. But some liberal academics declined to sign it because they thought it too foreign, modelled as it was on Charter 77, the anti-Soviet manifesto issued in what was Czechoslovakia by intellectuals such as Vaclav Havel.

Qin Hui, a historian at Tsinghua University in Beijing, says he approved of a lot of the ideas in the document but it did not “suit the characteristics of China’s special situation”. The implication is that future reformers must present their ideas as continuous with Chinese traditions and history rather than adopting an occidental blueprint.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009