Why Beijing Has Reason to Worry
Members of the new Politburo Standing Committee wave to the press in Beijing, November 2012. (Carlos Barria / Courtesy Reuters)
Almost
three months after the Third Plenum of China’s 18th Party Congress, the
world is still trying to divine the country’s political future. The
plenum communiqué, a road map for planned reforms over the next few
years, raised as many questions as it answered. Chief among them: How
will China’s economy, its political system, and its society interact in
the wake of new reforms -- in harmony or with increasing friction?
As many commentators have pointed out, one major outcome of the meeting was the Chinese Communist Party’s decision to make market mechanisms “decisive” in the economy. The primary aim of such reforms, of course, is to prolong party rule. Since crushing the citizen and student movements of the 1980s -- culminating in the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square -- the CCP has depended on economic growth to ensure stability. To guarantee the party’s continued staying power, its leaders must have realized that it was time for a new growth model. But they must surely have also understood how much is at stake: The reform could dislocate large swaths of society, including migrant laborers, university graduates, and disgruntled civil servants. Government control of the economy has been a central pillar of its political authority; liberalizing China’s volatile market will require the party to walk a thin and perilous line.
Accordingly, the decision to free up China’s economy came alongside the announcement of a new “state security committee” -- a domestic and foreign security organization that will coordinate and oversee China’s national security affairs in ways comparable to the U.S. National Security Council. Headed by General Secretary Xi Jinping, the committee represents a further consolidation of power in the hands of China’s security sector and Xi himself. The move can only mean that Beijing is planning for a host of possible crises related to potential socioeconomic ills and ethnic tensions by bolstering its power to crack down on popular dissent.
That comes on top of other efforts to assert greater control over society. Last year, for example, Beijing tightened the noose around microbloggers with large followings on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo platform. Well-known bloggers such as Kai-Fu Lee (a venture capitalist) and Pan Shiyi (a business magnate) have recently had their accounts suspended or rebuked for irresponsible comments about air pollution, corruption, and government censorship. And this year, the trials of civil rights lawyer Xu Zhiyong and members of his New Citizens Movement also indicated that, although the party is intent on liberating the economy, it envisages no such liberalization for China’s restless civil society.
The party and its backers, moreover, continue to trumpet a neo-authoritarian model of governance. Last January, the Communist Party’s nationalistic mouthpiece, the Global Times, published an op-ed by the scholar Wang Zhanyang that praised Xi by counting China as “historically lucky to have a strongman during a nation’s transformation era.” He was referring to Deng Xiaoping, who paved the way for China’s economic opening in the 1980s. Yet the ideas for neo-authoritarian governance originally came from Zhao Ziyang, the former CCP general secretary who was put under house arrest in 1989 for his progressive reform ideas and sympathies toward the Tiananmen Square protesters. Zhao and his aides had looked to the developing East Asian markets -- among them South Korea and Singapore -- as models for a modern China. They even envisaged democratization after a period of strongman rule. But for three years after Tiananmen, Deng stepped in to perform the role of the neo-authoritarian, embracing economic reforms while dismissing political ones.
Now Xi plans to rebalance the economy while keeping tight control over society. It thus looks unlikely that he will usher in more inclusive politics at a later stage; the Third Plenum effectively erased any remaining hopes that he might undertake meaningful political reforms. As his hardball diplomacy with Japan and the Philippines suggests, Xi’s politics are of a bolder breed than that of his meeker predecessors, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin. Yet that style may come back to haunt him: His neo-authoritarianism is severely out of step with the social and technological transformations that are sweeping China today.
MONETIZING HAPPINESS
As many commentators have pointed out, one major outcome of the meeting was the Chinese Communist Party’s decision to make market mechanisms “decisive” in the economy. The primary aim of such reforms, of course, is to prolong party rule. Since crushing the citizen and student movements of the 1980s -- culminating in the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square -- the CCP has depended on economic growth to ensure stability. To guarantee the party’s continued staying power, its leaders must have realized that it was time for a new growth model. But they must surely have also understood how much is at stake: The reform could dislocate large swaths of society, including migrant laborers, university graduates, and disgruntled civil servants. Government control of the economy has been a central pillar of its political authority; liberalizing China’s volatile market will require the party to walk a thin and perilous line.
Accordingly, the decision to free up China’s economy came alongside the announcement of a new “state security committee” -- a domestic and foreign security organization that will coordinate and oversee China’s national security affairs in ways comparable to the U.S. National Security Council. Headed by General Secretary Xi Jinping, the committee represents a further consolidation of power in the hands of China’s security sector and Xi himself. The move can only mean that Beijing is planning for a host of possible crises related to potential socioeconomic ills and ethnic tensions by bolstering its power to crack down on popular dissent.
That comes on top of other efforts to assert greater control over society. Last year, for example, Beijing tightened the noose around microbloggers with large followings on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo platform. Well-known bloggers such as Kai-Fu Lee (a venture capitalist) and Pan Shiyi (a business magnate) have recently had their accounts suspended or rebuked for irresponsible comments about air pollution, corruption, and government censorship. And this year, the trials of civil rights lawyer Xu Zhiyong and members of his New Citizens Movement also indicated that, although the party is intent on liberating the economy, it envisages no such liberalization for China’s restless civil society.
The party and its backers, moreover, continue to trumpet a neo-authoritarian model of governance. Last January, the Communist Party’s nationalistic mouthpiece, the Global Times, published an op-ed by the scholar Wang Zhanyang that praised Xi by counting China as “historically lucky to have a strongman during a nation’s transformation era.” He was referring to Deng Xiaoping, who paved the way for China’s economic opening in the 1980s. Yet the ideas for neo-authoritarian governance originally came from Zhao Ziyang, the former CCP general secretary who was put under house arrest in 1989 for his progressive reform ideas and sympathies toward the Tiananmen Square protesters. Zhao and his aides had looked to the developing East Asian markets -- among them South Korea and Singapore -- as models for a modern China. They even envisaged democratization after a period of strongman rule. But for three years after Tiananmen, Deng stepped in to perform the role of the neo-authoritarian, embracing economic reforms while dismissing political ones.
Now Xi plans to rebalance the economy while keeping tight control over society. It thus looks unlikely that he will usher in more inclusive politics at a later stage; the Third Plenum effectively erased any remaining hopes that he might undertake meaningful political reforms. As his hardball diplomacy with Japan and the Philippines suggests, Xi’s politics are of a bolder breed than that of his meeker predecessors, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin. Yet that style may come back to haunt him: His neo-authoritarianism is severely out of step with the social and technological transformations that are sweeping China today.
MONETIZING HAPPINESS
Many Chinese leaders believe that soaring economic
growth is what allowed the CCP to regain the legitimacy it lost after
the political repression of the 1980s. That is why the government has so
successfully encouraged (if not compelled) the people to stay out of
politics and focus on making money. Today, a market-oriented party
dominates China’s formal political process and has been able to defeat
the political challenges that occasionally pop up from civil society.
Yet a number of trends suggest that this political
order could soon unravel. Popular perceptions of the party’s legitimacy
say nothing about people’s actual quality of life. Are the Chinese
happier today than they were before? In theory, rising living standards
should generate more life satisfaction. The evidence, however, suggests
that has not been the case. According to the World Values Survey, the
percentage of Chinese who describe themselves as very happy plummeted
from 28 percent in 1990 to 12 percent in 2000. And China ranked 93 on
the 2013 UN World Happiness Report, despite economically outperforming
many of the countries ahead of it. When the German political scientist
Christian Welzel and a team of researchers recently attempted to explain
why, they pinpointed what they called the government’s “monetization of
happiness” -- in essence, its efforts to peg popular satisfaction to
income levels. Although China’s average living standards rose over the
past decades, most citizens emerged from sustained periods of economic
growth as poorer relative to those above them, creating masses of
“frustrated achievers.” That is, even China’s middle and top earners
felt slightly less satisfied with their lives over time; although their
absolute wealth increased, their relative wealth diminished.
The new package of economic reforms is thus a huge
risk. If the property market implodes in the absence of government
controls, which is quite likely, the collective losses would be massive.
And China’s Gini coefficient, a key measure of inequality, is already
at an all-time high. Taken together, rising inequality, declining levels
of happiness, and the continued suppression of social activism could
translate into a major political challenge for Beijing. And there is
much to suggest that the Chinese would not be shy about making known
their dissatisfaction; in just 2011 alone, the country saw a staggering
180,000 protests.
With the rapid modernization of Chinese society and the
increasing use of digital communications, government crackdowns are
likely to prove counterproductive. Many Chinese now communicate and
monitor government activity using online networks beyond the state’s
control. And despite continued government surveillance and censorship,
social media use in China has continued to grow. Experts, including
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, see this trend continuing. And in the
event of economic decline, such technologies could surely mobilize
people to take part in large-scale demonstrations.
Meanwhile, the country’s civil society is only growing
stronger; according to official statistics, the number of registered
Chinese nongovernmental organizations has increased from a mere 4,446 in
1989 to more than 490,000 at the end of 2012. According to the Hong
Kong-based scholar Wang Shaoguang, there were already eight million
underground social organizations back in 2004.
If Xi makes the market materially more decisive in
Chinese society, then, he will be playing with a combustible mix of
absolute losers and frustrated achievers. If large numbers of
non-registered associations and urban advocacy leaders go offline in
order to avoid state surveillance, the state would, in effect, be
driving a phenomenon it desperately wants to prevent: the growth of a
shadow civil society. In Taiwan during the 1980s, a similar phenomenon
occurred. Underground social and religious associations then suddenly
came out into the open -- following years on the margins of official
society.
Instead of preparing the state for a potential
confrontation with society, Beijing should contemplate an alternative
route. To placate the public, the government must draw its critics out
from the shadows and into a public debate about rebalancing the economy
and the role of monetary success in Chinese society. Ultimately, this
path may prove more successful in securing a stable, prosperous, and
harmonious Chinese society than Xi’s neo-authoritarianism ever could.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140951/johan-lagerkvist/chinas-risky-reforms?cid=soc-facebook-in-snapshots-chinas_risky_reforms-022114
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