Is Political Dissent Possible in China Today? (Part 3 of 3)

[Written for the Italian journal MicroMega's special issue on the Beijing Olympics, June 11, 2008; with minor modifications, Oct 8, 2008]


V. The Spirit of Political Dissent in Defiance

Ever since June 1989, the world has identified human courage and dignity in China with the “Tank Man” who stands alone in front of a long row of tanks to stop them with his defiant will. More than nineteen years later, another generation has grown up. Without easy access to information about the Tian’anmen pro-democracy movement and its tragic ending, has China’s younger generation forgotten that spirit completely, to show the world the achievement of the government’s effort to depoliticize the society? What does political situation mean to millions of ordinary people engaged in socio-political movements elsewhere in the world?

Ahead of the fifteenth anniversary of the Tian’anmen massacre in 2004, Shi Tao, a young poet and journalist born in 1968, sent an e-mail message using his yahoo account to a New York-based pro-democracy online journal. In it he passed information about the government’s preparation for potential political disturbances at the anniversary, which he had learned from a meeting where no note-taking was allowed. At the same time, he produced a series of touching poems full of painful memories and burning passion. In at least two poems, he predicted his confrontation with plainclothes police and his own arrest. It eventually arrived. Shi Tao was sentenced to ten-year imprisonment for “subversion,” with evidence supplied by Yahoo to the Chinese police.

If Shi Tao acted explicitly on behalf of his comrades at Tian’anmen Square fifteen years earlier, some others took up causes of political dissent more recently. Like Wu Lihong, the peasant environmental activist by Lake Tai in Jiangsu province, many of them started as volunteers in social welfare charity work, but eventually fell out with local authorities and then with the political system as a whole.

Chen Guangcheng, born in 1971, was from a village near Linyi City in Shandong Province. He lost his sight in his childhood but nonetheless managed to train himself as a legal consultant and an activist for local villagers since the late nineties. He was prompted into determined action in early 2005 after learning about the thousands of cases of brutality against peasant women by local authorities forcefully carrying out the one-child policy. By late summer, the National Family Planning and Population Commission took up the issue and publicly recognized Chen’s effort. However, the commission does not have any real power over local governments, even though its policies were frequently taken as excuse by local officials to bully peasants or extort extra incomes. At the same time when the commission said Linyi officials related to the issue had been punished, Chen was put under house arrest by local police.

Complicating the situation were foreign journalists. Beijing just started to give greater freedom to foreign journalists to go around the country. They learned about Chen’s activism and the Time magazine already published an interview with him in the summer. Next year, Chen was named one of the 100 most influential persons of the world in 2006, together with the filmmaker Ang Lee and China’s Premier Wen Jiabao. Beijing was obviously not pleased with the publicity. In the following months, Chen was tried for “damaging property and organizing a mob to disturb traffic” and was sentenced to more than four years in prison. His three lawyers were beaten by local thugs, detained by police and prevented to attend the trial. When decision was to be announced on his final appeal in January 2007, members of a German television station were also physically abused in Chen’s village. Summer 2007, Chen was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award in Manila, the Philippines, for emergent leadership. His wife was prevented from going to the award ceremony and put into house-arrest herself, together with a baby son not yet three-year-old.

While Chen was struggling, he and his wife were supported and cared after whenever they traveled to Beijing by a young couple, Hu Jia and his wife Zeng Jinyan. Born in 1973, Hu Jia had been an AIDS activist for years when he met Zeng. Ten years younger than Hu, Zeng at beginning was skeptical of the many tales Hu was telling her. She also had hesitation, uncertain if Hu should get himself into all those troubles with the authorities. Essentially, she was transformed into a determined activist by the experience of grieve anxiety, when Hu Jia “disappeared” for 41 days in early 2006 while police showed the ugly face of the state power. Here we see clearly that, with all internal contradictions, the Chinese education system is still capable of producing truly idealistic, courageous young people.

The years since they got married have not been an easy time for the young lady. Hu Jia was placed under house-arrestment for almost a whole year in 2006-2007. Both of them kept active networking with other activists and frequent writing on the Internet. While Hu was unable to leave home, Zeng attended training programs run by the Focus group in Thailand and the World Social Forum India in late 2006. Next year, she herself was named one of the 100 influential people of the world by the Time magazine. Bad omen. By the end of 2007, not long after she gave birth to their daughter, Hu Jia was taken away. He has since been sentenced to three-and-a-half-years into prison. Zeng herself has been under house-arrest for months by now, together with her infant daughter, helped mainly by her mother. When Zeng’s mother left Beijing earlier this year, police stepped up their surveillance and harassment. Neighbors and her baby’s nanny were all visited by police at home, checked with information of all their family members, and warned against letting their own babies to play with Zeng’s.

If anything, what shared by the case of Shi Tao, Chen Guangcheng, Hu Jia and Zeng Jinyan are the followings. First, they might start with charity works, but they all held clear political visions and explicitly raised political demands. Second, in raising sensitive political issues, they focused their attention on the disadvantaged social groups. Third, their cases, particularly Chen Guangcheng and the Hu-Zeng couple, infuriated the Chinese government and its security forces the most by their connections to the outside world, be it foreign media or foreign activists. It has become inherent to the CCP’s political culture that official hierarchy is more important than anything else. For the CCP, bringing in foreign factors for the purpose of adding on political pressure is the greater crime than challenging authorities locally. For it breaks the rules of its own game. Thus, the punishment received not only by Chen and Hu, but also their wives and their young babies. Beijing shows its real color in these cases, when it deliberately courted world capitals and easily dismissed international solidarity of today’s grassroots socialist movement, such as those represented by the World Social Forum India and by the Magsaysay award in the Philippines.

Here we may recall the environmental cases in the cities of Xiamen and Shanghai, mentioned earlier, when citizens’ “collective walks” took place, as if there was no political intention, no organizer, and not one single individual to be taken responsible. The question and challenge to social movement worldwide would be this: Do we believe in political dissent? Do we accept substitution of valuing political dissent by prioritizing cooperation with political establishment? Do we believe that, under whichever kind of situation, improvement of living standard is always more important than promoting political consciousness? Chinese people hold unrealized political potentials with great energy that has not been relished yet. We might see a very different China once the people can openly, freely pick up political topics concerning the world as well as concerning their own lives.

-- Los Angeles, June 11, 2008


[1] Wang Hui, Qu zhengzhi hua de zhengzhi: Duan 20 shiji de zhongjie yu 90 niandai (Depoliticizing politics: The end of the short twentieth century and the nineties), Beijing, 2008, p. 7, 14, 15, 55-56.

[2] E.g., see ibid, pp. 15-20. Wang Hui’s discussion on theoretical debates in 1979-1983 (ibid, pp. 21-22) raises more questions that are beyond the scope of this paper. For views differing from Wang Hui’s, for instance, see Cui Weiping, "Weishenme meiyou chunfeng chuifu dadi" (Why there was no wind of spring over the land), http://www.xschina.org/show.php?id=11741 , last visited on October 8, 2008; Sixiang (Reflextion), no. 6 (August 2007), Taipei, Linking Publishing.

[3] http://www.reviewing.cn/fact/2008/0606/article_520.html (in Chinese), last visited on June 10, 2008.

[4] http://ccdv.people.com.cn/GB/66982/5876850.html (in Chinese), last visited on June 10, 2008; and New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/world/asia/06pollute.html?ref=asia

Is Political Dissent Possible in China Today? (Part 2 of 3)

[Written for the Italian journal MicroMega's special issue on the Beijing Olympics, June 11, 2008; with minor modifications, Oct 7, 2008]


III. Changing Social-Political Landscape

The fact that Wu Lihong was honored in Beijing as one of the 2005 top ten national environmentalists itself indicates important social-political changes taking place in China. As the country moved from its previous practice of “socialist planned economy” to a “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics,” the central government under financial pressure in the early 1990s got rid, first of all, of its social welfare obligations, in education and public healthcare in particular. Not surprisingly, with rising living standard and the emergence of middle class and urban new riches, issues concerning the society’s general well-being were the first to gather voluntary participation and gain government tolerance. In other words, social diversification, brought about by three decades of reform, has made it possible for a “society” to practically prioritize its interest over the interest of the “nation,” whereas the “state” is relatively neutralized and the Party itself is forced to take a back seat in this kind of contest for legitimacy discourse.

The best example of such structural alternation will have to be the almost spontaneous, nationwide mobilization in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake, mentioned at the beginning of this essay. But the changes started much earlier, as can be seen in the 1999 prize-winning film, Not One Less, by Zhang Yimou. The credit roll at the end of the film includes explicit call for donations to support basic education in China’s poor rural areas. Shifting the burden of social welfare from the state to the shoulder of the society or even to that of foreign philanthropic organizations had not been a difficult transformation for the CCP government to adapt.

This is not to say that the State and the Party sat through these changes idly. From the start and up to this moment, they have been watching vigilantly. However, instead of mobilizing societal energy for the general good, their preoccupation has been predominantly against social organizations with political potentials. A careful look at the most-wanted lists issued immediately following the Tian’anmen crackdown will tell you that, in addition to influential intellectuals, most names there were previously unheard of at all, who became the top enemies of the state precisely for their direct involvement in organizing autonomous associations among students, workers and ordinary citizens. Similarly, Jiang Zemin, CCP’s former Secretary-general (1989-2002), launched severe persecution against the Fa-lun-gong sector after the religious group staged a surprise demonstration just outside Zhongnanhai, the housing compound of the CCP’s top leaders in central Beijing. Fa-lun-gong’s mobilization ability shown in the demonstration made it impossible for the CCP to give the crackdown a second thought.

The oppressive logic of the Party did not stop at mass organizations staging actual big demonstrations. Yang Zili, a young physics graduate from the prestigious Peking University, was sentenced to eight years for “subversion” in 2003, for the crime of writing critical political commentaries on his website and for organizing a small study group. Three of his comrades were imprisoned at the same time. Ironically, the name they chose for their little group was “New Youth,” exactly the same as the name of the iconoclastic journal run by the CCP’s founding general-secretary, Chen Duxiu, more than 80 years ago. The Party certainly knows its own history perfectly well - free political association could easily lead to mass mobilization and social movement, posing real threats to its hold of the state power. A few years earlier, the CCP views it as a must to crash on the dissidents who sought to establish a China Democracy Party in 1997; now, Beijing also sees it as necessary to punish young intellectuals like Yang Zili.

Not surprisingly, giving permission to NGOs to provide charity service to the society became delicately challenging at all levels. Similarly challenging are new communication technologies, such as the Internet, the mobile phone, and text-messaging. Together with the changing social-political landscape, described earlier, the society is opening up considerably for initiatives. Of all the issues, environmental protection seems to be the most powerful magnet, bounding together otherwise atomized city dwellers to fight against vested interests of developers, business owners, and government officials. When a big chemical plant with Taiwanese money was to start construction at the southeast coast city Xiamen and the municipal authorities announced tough rules against non-official mass rallies, the citizens text-messaged each other for “collective walk” in front of the city hall for three consecutive days last year. Under growing public anger, the project was eventually moved to a less populated rural setting (without further hearing on pollution threat to the rural community). Similar tactic was then adapted by Shanghai residents, in their fight against an unpopular infrastructure project with high-volume noise pollution possibilities. News about these events spread fast and wide on the Internet. “Collective walk,” thus, has since become a politically charged word for actions of civil disobedience.

As a matter of fact, environmental groups are mushrooming in Chinese cities, and so are volunteer associations of charity groups on various themes: rural education, basic healthcare, AIDS, homosexuality, natural disaster relief, and so forth. Many contributed at the earliest instance to the earthquake rescue and relief in May this year. Intellectuals and scholars working on rural problems have set up special training programs in selected countryside locations, recruiting college students to work together with poor peasants during school vacations. These new developments have loosened the nerves of the authorities so much that the Organization Department of the CCP’s central committee has launched a new program, starting from this year, to recruit 100,000 college graduates in five years to serve as local cadres at village level. It has no doubt helped to raise social awareness among college students.

Heightened social awareness among college students in recent years is also thanks to new trends in academic humanities and social sciences, hugely influenced by their American counterparts that emphasize cultural studies in themes and field-work in methodology. Urban wealth, commercial interest, tourism development, as well as increasing cultural exchanges, awakened general curiosity about China itself, its history, its geography, its many regional diversities in dialects, customs, cuisines, climates and cultural relics. One particular aspect of vibrant social life, benefited by cultural exchanges with outside world, is religious activities. Large number of college students now is Christian converts. Officially registered Christian churches claim more than 30 million members, but scholars’ estimations are about two or three times of that number. Increasing inter-communications with other East Asian countries have made equally important contributions to reviving interest in religion. Temples of Daoism, Buddhism, and other folk religions, built brand new or repaired from old ruins – possibly inflicted during the Cultural Revolution that vowed to sweep the world clean of all religions – in as many cities as villages, are receiving crowded visitors at traditional holidays, which often pose risk of stampede and required extra police force for safeguarding. According to the estimation based on two Shanghai professors’ research, China today has more than 300 million people who hold religious faith of one kind or another.

IV. The Tibetans

If the society is really so diversified, lively, and with high degree of social awareness, one might ask, why the Han Chinese reacted so strongly, uniformly, aggressively and rather chauvinistically (see below) towards the Lhasa riots in Tibet earlier this year? To understand this, we need to keep in mind a couple of points. First, growing social awareness, encouraged by economic development and tolerated by the authorities, is not exactly the same as political consciousness. Likewise, charitable work cannot supplant political demands from below. Distinctions such as these may be subtle, but they are never completely submerged into each other. It is the job of the cultural police to watch out that these boundaries are not to be crossed, on the Internet or on the streets. People need to feel good about themselves, a sense which charitable work could safely provide. Political questions, on the other hand, might easily make people uncomfortable just like the state could be challenged, probably unnecessarily. Talking about the rich-poor gap is ubiquitous by the Chinese nowadays, which is partly the bases for growing interest in charity work. Yet, talks about political rights for the poor are completely another matter. In this sense, the Chinese society has been indeed depoliticized to a considerable extent.

Second, similar to policy debates at the top, vibrant cultural life at the society level usually carries a trace of nationalistic rhetoric. As a young intellectual commented, the Chinese today believe that China is a “normal country” just like any other one, with its own distinctive cultural characteristics. We can do what other people are doing, but we prefer doing it our own way, be it charity work or Buddhism worshipping. Behind this thinking, anxiety over recognition by the “international community” is clearly visible. The fixed sight is on the West (or lesser partners of the abstract “West”), and the “China” or “Chinese culture” is to be defined by a collective “Chinese” that is, generally speaking, Han Chinese only.

Historically, the PRC did entertain the idea of Soviet-style ethnic republics, but for a very short period only. The same is true about ethnic equality in general. Before 1958, the PRC was actually very enthusiastic about identifying and developing minority nationalities within its territorial boundaries. Ethnographical teams were sent out and totally 55 ethnic “nationalities” were identified. At least 14 written scripts were created for 12 ethnic groups that did never developed one for themselves before, and many other scripts were reformed, regrouped, and experimented within the concerned population. These actions were generally halted by 1958 and further impeded by the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, for the sake of “speeding up and running directly into communism” that would no longer acknowledge ethnic differences anyway. Economic recession, understandably, went much worse in minority ethnic areas than in Han regions, due to severe cultural and linguistic damage. There was indeed a short period of beneficial ethnic policy in 1977-1985, which, unfortunately, slowed down to almost complete stop in the nineties, due to the central government’s developmental position that focused on economic growth and almost nothing else. By official statistics in 2005, ethnic minority was 8.41% of China’s total population, but 45% of the total poverty population nationwide. Of officially identified “poverty counties” across the country, minority ethnic autonomous counties, once again, took up 45% of the total.

On the other hand, though ethnic minorities are less than ten percent of China’s total population, they occupy 64% of the PRC’s entire territory. A large proportion of the 64% is historically Tibetan inhabited areas. Tibet is also along a very long stretch of China’s 22,000 kilometers of inland border with other countries. These are the hard facts of the “Tibetan Question” today.

Has Tibetan areas been experiencing “cultural genocide” as the Dalai Lama claims? “Yes” and “no.” “Yes,” because official documents issued by the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) government are nowadays mostly written in Chinese, often without Tibetan translation at all; Most governmental meetings are conducted in Mandarin Chinese instead of Tibetan; Recruitment examinations for civil servant positions are mostly conducted in Chinese instead of Tibetan; Elementary schools for Tibetan children in Lhasa have adapted to using Chinese as first language and Tibetan as the second. The main reason for such phenomena is the PRC’s top official appointment practice. The CCP simply couldn’t trust any Tibetans to be at the top of the TAR leadership. Its Party Secretary, the real boss of the region, has been taken up by Han Chinese one after another for decades. They were often transferred in short notice from other regions and did never feel the pressure to learn the native language.

In addition, with Beijing’s unceasing assault on the fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhism – a faith followed in varied forms by the majority of Tibetan population – is agonizing with its fragmented identity. With his charisma and international standing, whatever happens to him in the future, the fourteenth Dalai Lama is bound to become another legend in Tibetan cultural memory, just in the same way as one of his predecessors, the sixth Dalai Lama, a romantic poet fondly remembered in Tibetan folklores. Beijing’s pragmatic-thinking top leaders apparently have not registered this possibility. It is generally believed that the Chinese government is patiently waiting for the day when a reincarnation procedure will have to be enacted under its control inside China, in order to choose a successor of the current Dalai Lama. With this thinking firmly in their mind, whenever social unrests taking place in Tibetan areas, the authorities would jump upon all Tibetans, forcing them one by one to make public denouncement against the current Dalai Lama. Amazingly, or maybe not by accident, the method is exactly the same applied to all of the Chinese in the PRC during the Cultural Revolution. By so doing, instead of turning the Dalai Lama into its own political assets, Beijing has created a formidable windmill for itself to busy fighting against eternally. The political reeducation sessions forced upon every Tibetan inside China have been the most humiliating experience to the young, educated Tibetans living in Han Chinese cities in particular. Many of them actually have some spoken Tibetan only, unable to fully express themselves in the written language, let alone to keep that language’s beauty in some living, rejuvenating forms for future generations. This deeper sense of national humiliation has been simply reinforced by Beijing’s crude and cruel tactics against their fellow Tibetans remaining on the Roof of the World.

On the other hand, with more than 80% Tibetan population still living as farmers and going to rural schools or Buddhist monasteries that teach Tibetan as first language, there is no immanent danger of Tibetan culture disappearing from the world. On the contrary, with commercialization and loosened political control in East Tibet in particular, there have been more Tibetan periodicals in China’s Tibetan areas than ever before, much more lively than Tibetan print culture in the exile communities in northern India. Growing tourism, encouraged by Beijing with preferable policies and extra investment, has brought many Tibetan youth into closer contact with their traditions than, say, thirty years ago. They are creating lively cultural life in Tibetan cities and towns not just for tourists, but also for themselves. Like their Han counterpart, what in need is formal political recognition and protection of their rights. Unlike their Han Chinese counterpart, the younger generation of Tibetans keenly feel the need, longing for greater freedom to develop their national identity. For them, the Dalai Lama is mainly in this sense to be an important political symbol. Also in this sense, we may say, Beijing has been playing foolishly for unable to fully grasp the depth of the Tibetan Question.

Is Political Dissent Possible in China Today? (Part 1 of 3)

[Written for the Italian journal MicroMega's special issue on the Beijing Olympics, June 11, 2008; with minor modifications, Oct 6, 2008]

News stories from China often provide, to say the least, conflicting pictures about social political life in the country. For example, a series of incidents since early March this year has seen startling changing faces of the Chinese public. Authoritarian manipulations notwithstanding, political passion in the country has been undoubtedly running at its highest point since the 1989 Tian’anmen protests. In particular, the urban masses demonstrated enthusiastic support to the government’s heavy-handed suppression of Tibetan protests in March, to the world torch relay of the Beijing Olympic Games (to be held in August) in April, and to the victims of the May 12 earthquake – massively devastating – in Sichuan province. Thousands of volunteers rushed to the damaged areas to offer help. Meanwhile, an almost unprecedented press freedom followed at the heel of the earthquake, not only covering heroic rescue missions but also exposing man-made tragedies, such as thousands of children buried by the instant collapse of under-standard school buildings. The government’s quick responses to the school building controversy were only partly due to pressures from the parents. To be sure, public outcry played a much grater role in this case.

Does it mean political participation has become the norm of public life or political dissent against the government is publicly tolerable in today’s China? The answer will, perhaps, have to be “No” or at least “Not yet,” with some twist concerning China’s recent history.

I. Depoliticized Politics of the Party

Wang Hui of Tsinghua University in Beijing believes that, corresponding to China’s economic integration into capitalist globalization worldwide, the politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been depoliticized, turning the PRC’s previous party-state into today’s state-party. In this way, the CCP has lost its political vitality, if not yet completely its mandate as well, becoming highly dependent on the state’s power and its apparatus. Now the Party is deeply entrenched in developmentalism in both ideology and practice. The transformation, Wang Hui implies, is a betrayal of the Party’s earlier, more revolutionary tradition that saw vigorous debates – either theoretical or policy-oriented – engendering real mass politics. On the other hand, depoliticizing tendency is inherent to all modern political parties. To counter the tendency and retain the revolution’s political vigor, Mao relied on mass mobilization, such as launching the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The cause behind many human tragedies taking place at the time, Wang Hui argues, was exactly due to the Party’s depoliticizing tendency, manifesting itself most of all in the form of power struggles between political factions within the top leadership. [1]

Such an interpretation recognizes the historical significance of the Chinese revolution in general and its politicizing impact on the working class in particular, which has informed most cases of worker protest since the 1990s. But, the interpretation also clearly points to the fact that politics in Mao’s PRC was always the monopoly of the CCP, at least always nominally guided by the Party or by Mao himself personally. Mass political participation was promoted and rebellion against bureaucratization of the socialist state was indeed encouraged at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Experiencing the sudden collapse of established social hierarchy, the young and the active ones were prompted to “heterodoxy” thinking avidly, often in underground fashions. This has been another stimulating legacy of those years, often directly informing today’s social activism.

Above the ground, the Cultural Revolution soon had its own reversal; whereupon, in the last years of the upheaval, China’s social, economic and political orders were mashed together to the greatest extent possible, with almost the entire population organized into semi-military units of minimal social mobility, maintained largely through endless ideological campaigns. The practice lowered the level of administrative sophistication considerably, as well as sweeping away cultural, ethnic and religious differences mercilessly. The three decades of reform has seen the actual falling apart of this order. The Party’s depoliticization process since 1979 [2] is epitomized by Deng Xiaoping’s colorful expressions: “It doesn’t matter if a cat is white or black; what matters is the cat can catch mice;” “No debate” about what is socialism and what is capitalism; “Get rich is glorious;” and “Development is the irrefutable truth.” Deng might be determined to get rid of ideological debate inside the Party. However, this does not at all mean that he was ready to give up suppression of political dissent.

Political dissent was never a valued virtue for the ruling Party, within or without. Bapa Phunsto Wangye, founder of Tibetan Communist Party who helped to bring the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) into Tibet in 1951, lost his own freedom for twenty years when he spoke out, as a CCP member, against the Party’s Tibetan policy in the late 1950s. As for the Cultural Revolution’s beginning years mentioned above, its sense of liberation for young students, like its appearance of chaos in the country, came always with unmistakable boundaries imposed by Mao and his allied comrades. For even then, to engage in “unorthodox,” independent thinking could mean great personal risk, from long-term imprisonment to immediate execution. Of hundreds of thousands people who perished in the decade, three individuals stand out and are remembered with great admiration by later generations. Lin Zhao (1932-1968), Yu Luoke (1942-1970), and Zhang Zhixin (1930-1975), independent of each other, all met with death squad for their daring ideas at relatively young age.

By comparison, Deng and his successors in the Reform era have been much lenient to individual political dissenters. Yet, the government on the whole is no less vigilant against any potential challenges to their power and no less ruthless and brutal in suppressing challengers, imagined or real. This lies at the root of Deng Xiaoping’s decision to move huge amount of PLA troops into Beijing to quell the pro-democracy movement on Tian’anmen Square in 1989. The Tian’anmen Mother group, led by Ding Zilin who lost her seventeen-year-old son in the wee hour of June Fourth, 1989, has been fighting not only for obtaining the truth about their beloved ones missing in the crackdown, but also for mourning the victims freely, openly, and living a normal life without constant surveillance and harassment by the National Security police force. Fear of political challenge also determined Jiang Zemin’s heavy-handed persecution against the religious group, Fa-lun-gong, since 1999. Many Fu-lun-gong practitioners suffered police harassment and brutality for years. Nonetheless, manners of political suppression are undergoing significant changes. Nowadays, except in Tibetan areas (more later), the Party’s key concern is no longer to squeeze out personal confessions or physically wipe out the “unfit,” so much so as to silence the voice and destroy the courage.

II. Depoliticizing the Society, Coercively

Wang Hui’s account of China’s depoliticizing process explicitly concerns the CCP and the Chinese state, but only vaguely implying a similar process happening to the Chinese society as well. The logic seems to suggest that a depoliticizing and depoliticized politics internal to the CCP is identifiable with politics in China as a whole. If so, this would be a serious misreading of the reality. Since the end of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Chinese society has been continuously diversified, economically and politically. However, the society and its people did not take the depoliticizing, commercializing path without a fight.

In the Reform era, with Deng Xiaoping’s developmentalist guidance that shuns ideological debate, new slogans issued by CCP’s leaders, such as the “three represents,” “basing everything on humanity,” “relating to the people” and “building up harmonious society” are functioning figuratively than substantially in organizing social life. Policy debates are never based on these slogans but, indeed, hinged on ideological rationalizations, usually with one side emphasizing the centralized state in need to unify political and economic power, and the other promoting free market and private interests as the key to stimulate sustained economic growth. While nether side would touch on mass mobilization of the labor class any more, neo-liberal defenders are actually no less rhetorically concerned with a strong nation than their supposed left-leaning opponents. As political institutional reform has not moved much to anywhere, party cadres at all levels have been like a political commissar without reliable ideological compass except upholding “state interest,” almost completely relieved from the old pressure to cling to ideological correctness. At the same time, thanks to residue socio-political structure from the previous period, they sit like a judge or referee over the fast-changing society of diversified interests, while keeping firm grip of the greatest social, political and economic power over all other competing interests. The double-role of being the referee of one’s own performance has enabled Party officials to play with ideological discourses of the old and the new alike, all to their own advantages.

The situation has been classical for brewing official corruption and causing serious social conflict. All social groups naturally have eagerly looked for political expressions for their own interest. Rather than “automatically” depoliticized by smooth talkers of neo-liberal free-market principles, the masses were constantly mobilized into political actions by the daily social transformations in their lives. If their actions have not led to any sustained political movement with historical significance, it was mainly because rising social conflicts are often handled by the state ruthlessly at first, as if dealing with “class enemies” in the old days, before the government might gradually make policy readjustment or administrative reorientations to reduce tensions on the ground. A few well-covered examples might remind us how changes were brought about in Chinese society with political implications in the last decade.

Industrial restructure – a euphemism for privatization of state-owned or collective-owned firms – became one of the key programs in China’s reform since the mid nineties. The Liaoyang Ferro-Alloy Factory in Liaoning Province used to be a state-owned well-performing, profitable firm with thousands of workers in the eighties, and is still well-performing, profitable as a private firm today, owned by associates of former municipal officials, with less workers and worse working conditions. Between 1993-2001, corrupt officials managed to push the factory into filing for bankruptcy, with worker’s salaries unpaid for as much as for 22 months. Most workers were against bankruptcy filing, demanding transparency in auditing and approval by the worker’s congress. When all failed, they took on the streets in early 2002. Four of their leaders were arrested, but the workers persisted. The municipal authorities deliberately accused two leading old workers for unverified membership in the outlawed China Democracy Party. Yao Fuxin and Xiao Yunliang were sentenced for “subversion” for seven and four years, respectively. At the same time, the city diversified 20 million yuan to pay off all the rear pays to the workers within a year. In the same year following the workers protest, Premier Wen Jiabao visited the northeast Rustbelt three times, committing the central government to reviving the old industrial base there. Yet, economic demands may be met, but explicit political activism must be punished. To this date, Yao is still serving his term. [3]

One factor affecting the outcome of the Liaoyang case is the wide coverage by both domestic and foreign media of the worker’s protest, which put great pressure on Beijing to demand the municipal government find a quick settlement. Similar factors often come into play in social conflicts in the countryside, too. They often brought out similar outcomes as well, with leading individual activists punished while the general situation improved gradually to various degrees.

Wu Lihong was a peasant activist for more than a decade when he was named among China’s top ten environmentalists at the Great Hall of People in Beijing in late 2005. His hometown is by Lake Tai, the third largest fresh water body in China, and near Yixing City in Jiangsu Province, not far from Shanghai. Since the 1980s, the lake area had attracted legions of chemical factories that are big in both their contribution to local revenue incomes and polluting the once scenery lake. In his tireless effort, Wu documented more than 2,000 chemical firms by the lakeside and helped to close down some 200 big polluters. Yixing’s officials worked hard to turn the bad publicity into positive image-building, earning the city a title of “national model in environmental protection” in late 2006. Wu was not convinced. He was to go to Beijing for further petitions when dozens of policemen stormed his home and took him away in April 2007, accusing him for “extortion” and corruption. Yet, Yixing’s bad publicity turned to worse in a month, when the most serious algae scum in Lake Tai’s history occurred, threatening 200 million urban population with polluted drinking water. Government agencies at all levels jumped to the emergency, but the municipal authorities did not budge in Wu’s case. He was sentenced to three years in prison. Water quality continued to decline, according to official report, and new regulations taking effect this month are to subject chemical factories around Lake Tai to penalties five times higher than before. It is not clear if any of the Yixing officials being disciplined in any manner; or more likely if they collected credit for overcoming the public hazard. Clearly, neither the central nor the provincial government acted on Wu’s behalf to demand a fairer hearing than the 30 minutes allotted to him. Wu is still serving his sentence. [4]

Human Rights and Civil Rights: Before and After Tian’anmen

Presentation at “China and Human Rights: A Symposium”
Claremont McKenna College
Thursday, March 6 & Friday, March 7, 2008

Last week, China announced that it is ready to resume human rights dialogues with the United States, which have been interrupted for four years since 2004. These dialogues were initiated under US pressure in the aftermath of the 1989 Tian’anmen crackdown, and were something completely new for Beijing. To meet the challenge, Beijing issued its first White Book on human rights in 1991, insisting that China’s record had been excellent in all areas: political, economic, socio-cultural, labor and religious rights, rights of minorities, of women and minors, of disabled people, and rights in legal procedures. Complaining of interference of its internal affairs and of the ideological framework supposedly imposed on it, the government repeatedly emphasized how much social welfare had been improved under the CCP’s leadership. The then president Jiang Zemin’s notorious slogan, “human rights are the rights to survive,” was initially raised in this context.

A key conceptual issue in the White Book was its focus on protective conditions afforded to the populace by a government purportedly representing the collective in toto. Emphasizing its history as a Third World country, with numerous references to infringements and abuses of its sovereign rights by imperialism in the past, it argued in effect that rights accrued to individuals can never be evaluated universally and must be subsumed into collective’s overall interest in consideration.

Nowadays, the Jiang Zemin slogan is no longer propagated noisily by Beijing, but the same logic is repeated in almost all Chinese official utterances on issues relating to human rights. Viewed historically, it is undeniable that there is some truth in the argument. However, in the logical chain of this official line, an important link is missing, which is the individual’s authorization of the collective to act on her or his behalf; That is, the political legitimization of the collective entity itself. Officially, when being pressured, Beijing still invokes the revolutionary victory of 1949 as the basis of its legitimacy to rule and to deal with issues concerning the conditions of human life. It was exactly the question of humanism, however, that most effectively challenged the legitimacy of the CCP in the early eighties.

The Reform Era started in the late 1970s, as a direct response to the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. Intense reflections on that extraordinary decade had already been going on for some time, among Party cadres and dissidents alike. At the same time, underground literature, poetry in particular, ventured most daringly into the sphere of humanism, exploring the existential value of the individual being. By the late seventies, fictions rose to the same calling, when Dai Qing, another speaker in our afternoon program, started her writing career in the same vein. Works like Dai Houying’s “Oh, Human Being” increasingly held humanistic values and human dignity as the top criteria in critical reassessment of social practices under Mao.

Politically, exactly at the moment when the democracy Wall in central Beijing was in full spate, attracting large crowds in late 1978, the Party’s Central Committee suddenly changed course in the middle of a working session, turning its attention to redressing wrongs committed in previous political campaigns. Older Party leaders, such as Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping, laid their stress on the Cultural Revolution, from which they themselves had suffered. However, Hu Yaobang, who was younger, pushed the drive further, to redress the half million cases of those persecuted in the anti-Rightist campaign of the 1950s. Originally responsible for the anti-Rightist campaign, Deng Xiaoping could not have been pleased with this move. Hu Yaobang, without really adhering strictly to principles of justice, nevertheless appealed to humanistic values, emphasizing not only the human suffering involved in these persecutions, but also their meaningless waste of talents and creative energy. Thus, in the name of humanistic values and human dignity, the Party’s political practices were also assaulted.

Theoretical reflections soon followed, exposing the Party’s legitimacy crisis. Months after the Central Committee’s meeting, a number of reflective works inspired by humanistic perspectives hit the press, including an influential article by Mr. Gao Ertai. Cui Weiping has recently published a well-researched and well-argued article on this important intellectual development, known in China as the debate of “Marxist humanism and the question of alienation.” Attacks on the Party’s line in this wave of lively writing were sharply pointed. For example, Mr. Gao characterized the Party’s ideological operations in these blunt words: “The People in the abstract has become the God; whereas the people in the concrete have been reified as sacrifices on the altar for God.”

Faced with these external challenges and internal divisions, the Party first exploited them to its own advantage and then launched a counterattack in late 1983, when Deng Xiaoping and his ideological allies had consolidated their power at the center. As Cui Weiping has noted, the Party had by then already adopted the theoretical framework that it continues to employ today. Specifically, the Party’s ideologues separated the realm of historical explanations, where they maintained humanism had nothing to contribute; and the realm of ethical norms, where humanism was tolerable to some extent on a subordinate terrain. Wang Ruoshui, a comrade-in-arms of Mr. Gao in the debate, rebuffed this division, arguing that once humanism was compartmentalized in this way, it lost any significance as compass for social change, and that in the contrary China needed to reestablish the social purpose of seeking to realize the true essence of humanity in and for every member of the society.

In this vision the Party instantly detected a subversive danger. The campaign against “Spiritual Pollution” of humanism did not go very far in late 1983, due to Hu Yaobao’s intervention. But by 1987, Hu Yaobang was removed as the Party’s Secretary-General for permitting political dissent and student protest. Meanwhile, Wang Ruoshui was eventually kicked out of the Party. Wang, Mr. Gao, and couple of intellectual activists persisted, launching their short-lived journal New Enlightenment in early 1989. In mid-April that year, Hu Yaobang’s death triggered the massive pro-democracy movement centered at Tian’anmen Square.

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At that time, notions of human rights – as distinct from philosophical conceptions of humanism – were still quite marginal in China, even though some veterans of the 1979 Democracy Wall period, such as Ren Wanding, had been promoting them for years. Roughly speaking, the concept of “rights” entered China’s social life in the mid eighties, when Beijing became a member of the UN Human Rights Conference. Subsequently, Deng Pufang, Deng Xiaoping’s son paralyzed in the Cultural Revolution, started an unprecedented association for the disabled. Still, upholding “human rights’ (renquan) as universal and inalienable entitlements of the individual was generally considered a weak position in this period. For most Chinese, it was not until the nineties that this idea acquired real value and dignity.

Between the suppression of the humanism debate in the early eighties and the accepted dignity of human rights in the nineties, there was a tilting period. What held greater sway in people’s imagination was the idea of civil rights, which raised more directly the issue of citizen’s power vis-à-vis the legitimacy of the existing political order. In fact, to most participants of the nation-wide 1989 pro-democracy movement, civic rights were probably not clearly distinguished yet from the idea of political power. The two words in Chinese have an identical pronunciation, quanli, and the blurring of them involved more than just vagueness. For even if a distinction between them was made, the idea of quanli as rights leaned heavily towards the exercise of political power – or, so to speak, in positive liberty rather than the negative liberty of freedom from interference. Thus, individual labor rights could easily be understood as the collective power of labor and individual citizen’s rights as citizens’ collective social power. In a sense, it was this equation between rights and popular power that alarmed the power-clutching CCP the most, stoking its fear of social movements and civic participation to the extreme.

For the protesters of 1989, the intermingled understanding worked both ways. On the one hand, as Han Dongfang’s experience at the square testifies, fellow workers in many factories hesitated to join his autonomous union, partly because they could not yet fully grasp the distinction between an official union that make them the country’s collective master on paper and an autonomous union that would reclaim their individual rights and restore dignity to them. On the other hand, the notion of rights shed fresh and critical light on the issue of political legitimization in the PRC, empowering and emboldening individual citizens in political participation. Faculty and students at the China Politics and Law University made a famous large placard. Copied on it were passages taken from the PRC’s constitution, all concerning citizens’ rights. It was cheered at wherever it was held aloft in the huge rallies of those days.

The awakening sense in terms of civic rights went hand in hand with the belief of fighting for essential human dignity. One big banner erested at Tian’anmen Square had lines taken from a poem by Bei Dao, a leading poet in the underground poetry movement since the seventies. Translated roughly, they read like the following:

Never kneel down on the ground
To prove the height of the executioners
So that they may block the breeze of freedom

In the original poem, a few lines before these words, the poet proudly proclaims:

I am not a hero
At a time when there is no more heroes
I only want to be a human being

Contrasting an antihero “human being” to the executioners who, blocking freedom’s breeze, could order at will anyone to kneel down before them, the poet best captures the political gist embedded in the perceived human dignity in the Chinese 1980s.

The democracy movement of 1989 was crushed by force. But since the mid-nineties, human rights consciousness in China has generally increased, thanks in part to persistent foreign pressures. Human rights concerns, even if compartmentalized, have helped many suffering people on a case-by-case basis, me included, and are urgently needed to help many more. By the same token, we should admit that not all Beijing’s accusations that Washington has its own record of human rights abuses are unfounded; and these cannot all easily be answered by reference to differences in legal settings, either. In China or Darfur, in the US or US-occupied Iraq, the premises of any discussion of human rights are always, if I may say, political. Without political space for civic activism, and without procedural politics to ensure renewable political legitimization of the state, a society is ill prepared to take effective actions against human rights abuses. In this sense, to improve human rights situation in China, comprehensive political reform or even a revolution will have to be on the agenda.