[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]
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]
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