Casus Belle Époque

Brideshead Revisited (the Series) part two

2011-12-11T19:15:00.000-08:00

Chapter 6 - Julia

This introduces Julia in more depth. We are now post Oxford and so post Waugh’s gay phase so naturally he moves on to a female love interest for Charles. Julia is clearly Mary Lygon but Evelyn and she were only ever friends.

Charles has returned to Paris and receives an unexpected visit from Rex. Rex has lost Seb and some money. He may have been taking him to the place in Zurich recommended for ‘drying out’. Charles can’t help but catch up on family gossip that interests him including that the Marchioness (Lady Marchmain) is sick, perhaps dying and remorseful concerning the parting fleas in the ear she had inflicted upon Charles. Charles remains fairly unmoved. This is the spring of 1925, Charles having first met Seb in 1922 according to Wikipedia’s entry on the serial adaptation.

The rest of this part of the chapter fills in the story of Julia, her travails with Rex and the unhappy state of affairs of belonging to a family with both the reduced circumstances of most such families in the offing and a social stain. The narrator of the novel (Charles) recalls that most of the news he relays here was reported to him ten years later in a storm on the Atlantic (of which more later). Rex apparently relayed some of the nature of the family’s financial issues but also his ongoing interest in marrying Julia regardless. The marriage occurred despite Rex having to convert in order to marry her, “Bridey’s bombshell” that Rex was still married (or at least if he was divorced his ex-wife was still living so that Catholic Canon law would make any marriage illegal unless that marriage could be annulled) and the Marchioness’s disapproval (but it had to be celebrated with a protestant rite as the annulment couldn’t happen, only Cordelia was willing to support it so it was celebrated without most of Julia’s prestigious if partly stained family in attendance (a great issue for Rex who sought social prestige) and it turned out a bit of a shambles in any case).

Chapter 7 - The Unseen Hook

This reflects upon grace. The heading refers to a quote about grace in one of the famous Father Brown novels the Marchioness had earlier read to her family at Brideshead. The hook in this case is bringing the narrator back to the Catholic family.

Charles was brought back to London by what he saw as a duty owed his nation by one of his class to help out during the General Strike of 1926. There he wanders the streets seeking an opportunity to do just that and bumps into ‘Boy’ who is able to give him one. He learns that the Marchioness is dying, being cared for by Julia and Cordelia and seeking a reconciliation with Charles. He also hears from Rex that the family is searching for Sebastian (this probably partly explains why the Marchioness wants to see Charles). After some work at the strike Charles dumps ‘Boy’ in the evening at a party when he meets Anthony Blanche there and goes off for some fun with his old frenemy (sometimes called Antoine on account of his murky ethnic origins and louche disposition). Antoine fills him in on the time he shared digs with Seb in Marseilles. There’s also talk of time spent in Athens and Constantinople (before ‘Boy’ discovers them again). After ‘Boy’ leaves again the discussion returns to Seb and his time in Tangiers. Antoine appears to believe he is now in “French Morocco” and now with a German hanger-on. 'Boy' returns having rung the fire alarm for a lark thus breaking up the party (as the brigade arrives).

The call comes from Julia and he arrives for an appointment at Marchers. He is greeted by Willcocks the servant and Julia (the Marchioness is too ill and frail for the reconciliation) and sent in search of Seb for the family (Samgrass is finally in disgrace – perhaps he was finally seen as surreptitiously colluding in or enabling Seb’s alleged offences) with the hope that he, too, can be fetched for a reconciliation with the Marchioness. The Wikipedia entry says that ‘Boy’ gives Charles the news of where Seb is (Fez). He travels to the British Consulate at Casablanca and from there is conducted to Fez’s “native town” where the consul believes him to be. He first meets the German at Seb’s house who directs him to the hospital/infirmary of San Sulpice. He finally discovers Seb there and learns he has 'the gripe'. He also learns the Marchioness has died while he and Seb are in Fez. Seb plans to stay put in Fez so Charles arranges with the family for him to have a regular allowance with further sums permitted to be drawn in proved emergencies. Seb is expelled from the hospital for smuggling in and consuming drinks thus sabotaging his treatment with his alcoholism so Charles finally leaves him back at home in the “native town” with his finances newly organised and with his German friend, Kurt, and their servant boy.

Chapter 8 - Brideshead Deserted

This reflects upon material dissolution. The dissolution and destruction of great houses is important to Waugh but here he wants to undermine its ultimate importance by finally contrasting it as the novel goes on with what is really important for him, spiritual resolution.

Charles returns to Marchers and reports to Bridey and Cordelia and receives a painting commission from Bridey. Cordelia apparently reminds Charles of Father Brown's unseen hook (of Catholicism and of the previous chapter) at this meeting. The hook actually refers to the catching of a thief by Father Brown but Cordelia links it to the hook of grace that she says she believes will bring Seb (and Julia) back to the church. Little does she know, apparently, that Charles, too, is on the hook.

Then there is a ten year gap. We learn that Charles has become a successful and exhibited painter of great houses (he had apparently begun his glittering career by painting four scenes from Marchers for Bridey as commissioned all those many years ago, as it had been about to be demolished to make way for flats – Rex had reserved a penthouse much to Cordelia’s disgust (which she had registered at that meeting ten years earlier)) and is now about to return from the New World (principally Mexico, I think) where he has been painting something completely different which he is hoping again to exhibit (in London).

He returns to a wife (and child with another on the way, I think) in New York. We learn also that his wife has been as much of a catch as Julia would have been (or even more so as she is also a beauty as well as a glittering society hostess with connections in the art world). She is also ‘Boy’s sister but she has been unfaithful and been caught. The marriage is unhappy and part of the real reason appears to be that the agnostic Charles is still in love with the Flytes (or is it that mysterious Catholicism?)

Estranged husband and wife Charles and Celia finally cross the Atlantic together on the usual means of crossing in those times – a fine ocean liner. By chance (or is it? Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo to the tune of the Twilight Zone theme), Julia is a fellow passenger.

Chapter 9 - Orphans of the Storm

This returns us to the story of Julia and Charles (the orphans).

They met on the crossing and eventually spent many days together virtually alone as a major swell left the bulk of the passengers (including Celia) and perhaps a good portion of the crew bedridden on account of seasickness. They apparently finally have sex (or at least ‘made love’) on board. The hook is now thoroughly baited and we’re all at sea. Julia is still going on about her religion. They meet again in London and Charles has his exhibition there. He also gets whisked off to a gay bar by Antoine where he has strips torn off his artistic enterprise. Among other things he calls Charles a ‘louche little boy’ (I think) which may have been a compliment coming from Antoine. Samgrass is also at the exhibition. Charles also discovers from Antoine that everybody knows about his affair with Julia and gathers from Celia that she certainly does. With that in mind he heads to Brideshead where the cuckold Rex awaits (with his wife (and Charles’s lover and partner in his Brideshead assignation) Julia).

Rex, Julia, Bridey and nanny now all live together at Brideshead and Seb’s whereabouts aren’t known to them. Cordy is away nursing (the model for Cordy also did a lot of this nursing on foreign shores lark though in different locales and also incidentally loved the hunt (as Cordy did in the series) – in the case of the model she was still Master of the Hounds for a hunt when she died in 2005 just a year before all hunting in England of the traditional sort was banned).

Chapter 10 - A Twitch Upon the Thread

Here there is more on grace and yet again this refers to the quote from the Father Brown story related by the Marchioness all those years before. The twitch is ‘upon the thread’ of the aforementioned baited Catholic hook. It’s interesting that he makes the least likable character the most pious and also meaningful for the story considering that he became quite pious himself before writing this novel just before WWII that he wanted to serve as a Christian apologetic of a kind. I guess this just serves as a reminder that all humans are faulty (perhaps especially the pious ones). He was often regarded as an unpleasant person himself in his later years. He also knew this however and often asked people to imagine how much worse he would be if he wasn’t a Catholic (or perhaps if he wasn’t as pious).

Divorces are apparently amicably coming through after a couple of years and marriage seems possible for the two heathens. This episode is all about the fountain and it’s quite farcical. One minute at the fountain they are lovers discussing the magic of their affair and longing to be wed (secularly, naturally), the next they are inside and a ‘bloody insensitive’ remark by Bridey in the circumstances at dinner (per Charles – about them living in sin and hence that Bridey’s middle class fiancée Mrs Muspratt would be uncomfortable staying under the same roof as them in response to a suggestion by Julia that she come to Brideshead) stirs up Julia’s lapsed Catholic guilt so badly that she goes into hysterics and finally lashes out at Charles (back at the fountain again). Charles even remarks in the dialogue about the dramatic and farcical nature of the continual fountain scenes (there’s one final one) and that doesn’t go down especially well with Julia either. Julia’s baited hook is certainly being twitched but is it pulling Charles along with her? Not a bit of it! Not yet at any rate. Waugh wants to make them all suffer some more. They fight some more and make up some more but it’s a bloody business. Charles escapes back to Bayswater (Evelyn also as needed often escaped back to his father’s home from the rest of his life (and in his case also his mother’s – Charles’s mother had died but Evelyn's hadn't died so early)).

Then there are episodes of billiards being played with ‘Boy’ (his ex-wife’s brother) and time with Rex shooting the breeze discussing life before we return to the important stuff of Charles getting news of Seb from Cordy, who he hasn’t seen for twelve years and is newly returned from her ministrations in Civil War Spain. Cordy and Charles also visit nanny. Seb is apparently in Tunis and getting into absinthe. He’d lost Kurt in Greece and followed him to Germany before finally losing him again to a concentration camp and suicide.

Chapter 11 - Brideshead Revisited

This is the culminating chapter meditating on the results of grace, the responsibilities of grace and the return to Eden (not a material but a spiritual return).

It’s all very to the point but yet it’s drawn out because it’s about the death and final reconciliation with God of a sinner, Lord Marchmain. He has finally returned to England (with Cara, his mistress) now that his wife is dead and war is almost upon Europe and he is dying himself. He makes the sign of the cross (his very last ever gesture) when being given the last rites that killed him and everybody including Charles appears to be very impressed. Clearly Charles now understands why Julia needs to give marriage with him up (the very thing she most wants) for her God. Waugh’s own actual conversion apparently owed something to witnessing something very like this scene of a man irreligious in life returning to Roman Catholicism at the very last possible time in his life.

Finally we are returned again to the wartime re-acquaintance of Charles as a soldier with Brideshead and a final act of conversion in the chapel, now no longer a family chapel but a chapel being used by soldiers. Nanny is still there and Julia has been made the mistress of the house by her father but is away along with Cordy helping in the war effort. Sebastian has probably also died and Bridey and Mrs Muspratt are, of course, elsewhere too (either due to the war or Mrs Muspratt’s middle class sensibilities). Madresfield Court was never used by the army as it was being held in reserve should the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret be required to depart London due to the blitz (or occupation, perhaps).

So why is it a great novel? Because it was able to turn an autobiographical novel into a specious argument for Christianity while bring so many issues of the time into fine relief.

Brideshead Revisited (the Series) part one

2011-12-08T19:04:00.000-08:00

So that's China from me. Now I realise I'm two short of 200 posts so I'll fill in two posts just for the sake of getting to that (200) milestone. This one is notes I've made on why this series (based on a great novel) is such a masterpiece. Many of the notes are inspired by a great literary biography of Evelyn Waugh, Mad World, which has that novel at its centre.

The novel was subtitled “The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder” and that dualism of the sacred and profane is at the heart of the novel and the series. Waugh evidently wants his reader to prefer what is sacred while at the same time he never denies the pull of the profane. So here are the notes over two posts (divided according to the divisions in the series that from memory somewhat correspond with the chapters in the novel).

Chapter 1 - Et in Arcadia Ego

This heading (combined with the main heading) sets up the story as a history of an exit from (and then return to) some Eden.

Charles Ryder is in the army during WWII when he is stationed at a great house called Brideshead. Memories of his first visits there and his time at Oxford in the 1920s come flooding back. He had met the younger son (Sebastian Flyte) of the owner of Brideshead at Oxford. Flyte had in turn introduced him to the aesthete movement there (after he had already been there for at least a term mixing with a rather dour and dryly intellectual crowd) and eventually gone on to visit the house.

(Much more can be said concerning how Seb (my abbreviation only) and his group debauched Charles and the parallel with Evelyn’s own Oxford life and his several years in the thrall with the Lygon boys (Hugh, in particular, was the model for Sebastian – his older brother in the novel was clearly based somewhat on Hugh’s older brother) and their mostly old Etonian aesthete crowd (including two especial models for the (in)famous Anthony Blanche). I’ll just say here that the novel begins to reveal that there are two competing visions of Eden: a material aesthetic one and a spiritual one of material self-denial delivered by grace that requires a material death of a kind and that he is yet to understand.)

The first visit was to ‘nanny’ in an otherwise virtually empty house (except for a few servants, I presume). Contrasted with this new glamour for Charles is life upon his return to stay with his middle class father in Bayswater, London. After Sebastian injures himself during the vacation he calls on Charles who comes running back to the beautiful old house. There he meets Seb’s sister Julia (clearly based on Mary Lygon) for the first time and spends the summer aiding Seb in his recuperation. Nothing of the kind of these events ever happened between Hugh Lygon and Evelyn while Hugh was at Oxford with Waugh – Waugh was an Oxford pal only and never deemed suited to visit the great house in those years.

Chapter 2 - Home and Abroad

This is a rather innocuous heading but the abroad part (while still bearing a glamour for Charles) is also an indicator of exile. The main character turns out to be not Sebastian but actually the whole Marchmain family. The head of the family is in actual exile in Venice (based on the actual exile from England of the Lygon patriarch, Earl Beauchamp). He is the main character theologically speaking in this unashamedly theological novel so to note that there is a sort of masked exile here is to recognise the final theological point being made. More on that as the commentary proceeds.

This chapter further draws us in to notice the material nature of the aesthetic idyll of great houses and Oxford friendships and aestheticism by means of that summer at Brideshead with Seb and Julia. Charles also meet the older brother known only as Bridey in the novel (presumably his courtesy title as heir to the Marquis Marchmain was a lesser title that would have seen him referred to formally as Lord Brideshead – Hugh’s older brother also went by Lord Elmley for similar reasons although his father was an earl rather than a marquis) and a younger sister, the adorable and pious Cordelia (also based on an equally adorable younger Lygon sister), and the staff. Incidentally the family is Roman Catholic and ultimately inspired Charles’s conversion late in the novel but the family they were based on were Anglo-Catholic – Waugh himself became RC via a different route than this family albeit that he came to be as close with them as Charles came to be with the Flytes.

The visit with Seb’s dad Lord Marchmain in Venice and his mistress reveals more of the life of the aesthete and more great architecture and art (Charles is an aspiring (and putatively atheist) painter just as Evelyn too was an aspiring (literary) artist (but more likely agnostic in his early years)). The real Lord Beauchamp (father of the Flytes and the model for Marchmain) was apparently more interested in rent-boy gondoliers and servants rather than mistresses and ranged around Europe frequently summering in Australia but he truly was in exile from England between the wars (for the very reason of his sexual preferences).

Charles then drops off Seb at the family’s London townhouse Marchmain House (that they call Marchers just as the Flyte family called their London townhouse Halkyn House Halkers) and spent the final days before term commences back at Bayswater with his own dad. Incidentally the main Flyte house that Evelyn came to know (besides Halkyn) was in Worcestershire and was called Madresfield Court (known to the family as Mad) but they also stayed annually (when he lived in England) at Walmer Castle at Deal in Kent that Earl Beauchamp also possessed in his capacity as Lord Warden and Admiral of the Cinque Ports from 1913 as his ceremonial duties dictated.

Chapter 3 - The Bleak Light of Day

We are back to reflecting upon the Eden of Oxford and its aestheticism juxtaposed against the reality beyond (taught to us via Sebastian).

Seb is now being supervised at uni by Mr Samgrass, a ‘tame Don’ of Seb’s mother’s (due to alleged irregular performance of some kind, presumably). Evelyn also had several models of such Dons to choose from. We thus learn that his mother likes a little bit of meddling.

This may not have happened to Hugh Lygon but again the characters of the real and fictional mothers are eerily similar. Both were extremely pious and both were in the end in conflict with their spouses (and most of their children mainly because of the conflict with their spouses and their piety) but not their own families. According to Wikipedia, Charles also gets a visit from Lady Marchmain to implore him to be a good influence upon her son (and perhaps judge whether she might be able to enlist him in a little bit of spying for her, too).

We also meet Rex, a suitor of Julia’s who later becomes a minister in the wartime government, when he and Julia visit Seb and Charles at Oxford. A friend of Evelyn’s is a good model for Rex. Julia is to be in town for her ‘coming out’ (hosted by her mother at Marchers) and invites the boys with hilarious results. After leaving Marchers, deciding to skip the respectable coming out ball before it has really begun and attending a somewhat seedy nightclub (Ma Mayfield’s ‘Old Hundredth’ at 100 Sink Street – apparently there is no such address but there certainly were somewhat seedy nightclubs popular with ‘gentlemen’ in 1920s Soho in London) with ‘Boy’ Mulcaster (Lord Mulcaster to us, an Eton contemporary of Seb’s – Evelyn would have come into contact with any number of models for ‘Boy’), the boys drive drunk in search of another club, cause some damage and get arrested.

Rex is called and does well at smoothing things over with the police (while ‘Boy’ seems to be doing his best to have the opposite effect) but as Seb was driving he gets into the most trouble and it becomes big news. Samgrass assists in court as a character witness at the same time gaining himself some leverage over the family (and over Seb). I guess you could say Rex was playing a similar game giving himself a shot with Julia. The judge accepts the Don’s disingenuous suggestion that Seb is ‘unused to wine’ and is quite lenient. The audience of course is in on the fairly open secret among those in the know that Seb is well used to wine (as he and other Eton/Oxford aesthetes are also well known to be ‘used to wine’ (along with other pleasures)).

Charles and Rex (I think) get invites to the Christmas hunt and both attend (I’m sure at least Charles did). Back at Oxford later, life is bleaker still for Seb as he now has more supervision than ever from Samgrass (now along with senior local RC clergy, I think) and he begins drinking sullenly for the first time. His idyll is over and Charles appears worried that the supervision is the main problem.

Chapter 4 - Sebastian Against the World

More stress upon the reality beyond here.

At Easter at Brideshead Charles notices for the first time that Seb has been drinking alone a lot and is becoming an abusive drunk. Cordy (Cordelia – my abbreviation) notices too and childishly dobs to Lady Marchmain who we see at home here for the first time. The Marchioness represents the world beyond aestheticism, I guess. Most of the family go off to the chapel to pray (leaving Charles, Julia and Seb). Seb apologises to Charles for having abused him but it appears to Charles that he had better skedaddle off to Bayswater which he soon does (with a biography of Lady Marchmain’s brother Ned signed by Lady Marchmain – this kind of thing eats away at Seb making him think Charles might be becoming a spy for Lady Marchmain but Charles assures him that won’t happen).

Back at Oxford the boys are hoping for ‘digs’ of their own on Merton Street but Seb fears he may end up being forced to live with Monsignor Bell. Another Seb accident after a visit from ‘mummy’ seals the deal for his mother (and possibly Oxford authorities) and Seb chooses to go down rather than face the choice of being sent down or living with the Bellmeister.

Oxford in those times for Seb’s class wasn’t always really about getting a degree and then going on to any specially demanding profession – it was about growing up a bit with a bit of distance from one’s family. Younger sons didn’t really have the prospect of being able to run a manor but they didn’t really have to worry too much about earning a crust either. They could be supported from their older brother’s family estate, I guess. In this regard, Evelyn would also have encountered a fair few models for Sebastian.

Charles returns to Bayswater following a lonely term without Seb going down from Oxford himself and on to an art school in Paris (Waugh also went down although he may have graduated first (with a ‘3^rd’, I think)). He didn’t see Seb for a year but he reads in a letter from Lady Marchmain that he’s gone to West Asia under the supervision of Samgrass.

Chapter 5 - A Blow Upon a Bruise

This is a meditation upon the 'joys' of friendship when the love is tested.

Charles returns to Brideshead having been invited to New Year’s celebrations and Seb is back from the Levant with the ‘grass. Samgrass can’t produce any pictures with Seb in them claiming he was always holding the camera. It’s clear to Charles and probably others that Seb has escaped from Samgrass’s supervision at various times to go off on binges.

In discussions of Seb’s ongoing issues, Rex proposes he be sent to a successful sanatorium or doctor he knows of in Zurich that treats alcoholism (and interestingly, for some interpreters of the novel, sexual issues, since the model father and son for the father and son having most problems in the novel were apparently both what we would now call gay or at least apparently predominantly of that persuasion).

There is something of a dramatic scene for Charles at the house during which Lady Marchmain sends Charles away with some resounding fleas in his ear after learning he had given Seb drinking money while on the hunt and thus away from close supervision (along the lines of asking what did the family ever do to make him hate them so and that he and/or his actions were ‘callously wicked’ and ‘wantonly cruel’). He presumably expects never to return to that house or have anything further to do with that family (that isn’t to be the case, however, as we shall soon see).

Lady Marchmain later sends a letter of apology (I think) that fails to move Charles.

Was Democracy in China begun by farmers (and where is it now)?

2011-12-07T18:32:00.000-08:00

The rural protests mentioned in my last post (with aims I also mentioned in the last post) had been directed mostly at corrupt town governments but the village committee system tended to be trusted (and on the side of the people in the land compensation disputes) so this was what motivated the CCP to focus on the propaganda value of its further extension of democratic rights to people at least at that lowest, most trusted (village) level of government.

This process had begun with the 1987 Village Election ‘experimental’ Law. That law had provided for the election of 652,718 rural village heads, 652,718 Village Committees/Councils (VCs) and a smaller number of village parliaments/representative assemblies under 36,952 town/township governments, 1,464 county governments, 30 provincial governments and the central government every three years. The CCP hoped the elected villagers would provide a check upon corrupt town governments and as I mentioned above they did clash with some of those governments. On average around 2,000 people were represented by each VC. The CCP (in typical pseudo Maoist style) called the councils ‘mass organisations’. The VCs had the power to appoint local government cadres such as school heads and village council staff and oversaw the village's administrative budget and the budgets of schools, clinics, and village enterprises under the village’s control.

The electoral law and other laws concerning village government were amended in 1998 controversially in a number of ways to improve the powers available to village people. Ballots were made secret, villagers could nominate candidates (who were no longer required to be party members), there were required to be more candidates than positions to fill at elections and it became open for the first time to a VC once elected to appoint non-party members as cadres. There was also a new rule that villagers could formally petition for the removal of a village head under this electoral law.

The idea that even an elected village head might not be a party member was the main controversy within the party because it seemed to contravene at least one of Deng’s sacrosanct Four Cardinal Principles (especially the one about the party leading the government). The reformers in the Central government nevertheless prevailed in the argument within the party. They argued this liberalisation would help address breakdowns in law and order that had recently been occurring at the village level by providing ownership of government, enable incompetents to be replaced by younger, more able and better-educated leaders and would lead to improved compliance with state taxes, grain quotas and family planning regulations. The opponents (mostly in local government) argued that the wrong sort of people (gang or lineage leaders) might more easily get simple peasants to elect them by various manipulative means, village leaders being beholden to town governments for their appointments/elections was a more stable system, state quotas might suffer if villagers chose governments that weren’t as interested in enforcing them and finally, of course, the primacy of the CCP’s leadership status was threatened.

This controversy and the liberalisation/democratisation that came out of it attracted global interest as well as interest throughout China. Several foreign governments and NGOs as well as both foreign and local media organisations have noted it and reported on it with interest and encouragement (the EU, the Ford Foundation and the Carter Center are a few notable boosters for the changes).

One recent example of the media interest involved the Guardian. The paper picked up on a petition for the removal of the village head of “XXX Village”. Apparently the head had been found to be corrupt in a land deal and in this had apparently been in cahoots with a town government. The town government concerned simply chose not to accept this petition which had been correctly made according to the requirements of the new electoral law and the Guardian was there to cover that story (if not altogether accurately – the refusal had led to a series of events that had finally ended in the beating of a local democracy activist (witnessed by a Guardian reporter) which the paper in turn ‘beat up’ into a murder).

Now this tendency to democracy was also occurring in a post-danwei city environment. Under the Central and Provincial governments in this case were now City governments, district governments within the cities, Street Offices (governing sub-district populations of 25 to 50 thousand) and Community Residents’ Committees under them (now ‘self-governing’ ‘mass organisations’ with from 1,500 to 4,000 constituent households). The lowest two levels had been workplace based but were now residence based.

The lowest level received a democratic makeover in the mid 1990s after the lowest level in the countryside had (partly in response to the need to replace the danwei system that could no longer operate in the new world of private enterprise). The central government now sought to bring about “community building” to replace the danwei ethos and welfare system, create a sense of unity in newly diversified city lives and restructure the city spaces that had been planned with different ways of living in mind. The countryside had provided the model for this in several respects. All of this was about legitimacy but in the cities the lowest level remained largely an administrative level carrying out policies set out by higher levels.

Typically the newly settled populations covered by this lowest level are separately walled-in and gated so they are a bit like gated communities in the US with guards at the few entrance gates. They are called xiaoqu (small districts) and much of their building and running has been done by private enterprise in newly subdivided areas. The centre of the area usually contains the council offices, swimming pools, tennis courts, family planning centres, etc. In well-to-do areas, especially, the committees actually employ management companies to manage their areas.

Maoist style mobilisations and dissemination of health messages also began again at this level, guided from above. Staff members at this level were now paid for the first time, however, and this promised an improvement in professionalism, at least, at this level – the focus also began to be on local residence-based grassroots governance but both better and more complex versions than had ever occurred at the residence level. The plan was for “self-governance” or “autonomy (zizhi -自治)” China-style. It doesn’t really mean autonomy. It means governing oneself as individuals and as communities but within an established framework. Monitoring of the people in their homes also remained a feature of this level of government, especially, as they were often so far away from their newly private workplaces now. The welfare needs of the elderly, especially, also continued to be the responsibility of this level of government.

Volunteering in the community was encouraged (perhaps even occasionally coercively) without truly giving the residents a real say, so this was less of a democratic reality than rural residents now had. Files were kept on all the “good deeds” that occurred in the community. The hope of the CCP appears to be (if I view it charitably) that this is training people for self-government at a later time and improving their suzhi (quality). So they are getting an education in morality, manners, being democrats and living in the community cooperatively and successfully. In the meantime the government is hoping that a sense of self-government will help to maintain the public order it perhaps desires more and prevent unruly demonstrations and petitions to higher levels. It’s to be the friendly and helpful face of government for the people at the coal face.

Structurally, the committees follow the so-called “Shenyang Model” with input from both the local party and the elected local congress (in some cases the congress might simply be the whole community) and work of various kinds being done by staff, groups and volunteers at various geographical levels (xiaoqu, yard, building and section). The congress would typically meet annually and the party leader would typically also be the committee leader as it made sense to many communities to elect the powerful party heads to head the government too. Volunteers at the lowest levels actually did most of the real work of the committees apart from policing and there were specialist associations for the aged, youth, business people, etc. The committee members themselves were all paid.

It’s really about cost effectiveness and efficiency, law and order, productivity and stability rather than democracy and it’s also ongoing.

Ongoing Rural Issues and Responses

2011-12-06T20:05:00.000-08:00

In terms of legitimacy, one of the CCP’s biggest headaches has been rural restructuring. There was pandemonium as the CCP decentralised power. The local governments that assumed control (whose main role had been economic development) had a tendency to be stingy with resources and the cadres’ formerly pastoral roles turned coercive. This form of government was given names like ‘bureaucratic capitalism’, ‘corporatist’ and ‘clientalist’. It was all about attracting business locally and the additional decollectivist role was now to enforce the ‘three state quotas’: grain procurement, family planning and local taxes. This stingy environment led to a serious squeeze in poor areas on expenditure on education, healthcare and other important areas that was untenable in terms of legitimacy. ‘Extra’ charges (but never on business that was so courted) designed to ‘ease the squeeze’ were no more popular.

The township of Qipan in Hubei provides an interest case study of the issues faced and results:

Location - Hubei, mid-Yangzi basin;

Main Agricultural Activity - Rice paddy production;

Average Family Farm Size - 10 mu (1.65 acres);

1998 Average Income - 1,910 Yuan per capita;

1999 Value of Rice Yield - Y360/mu;

Inputs (seed, fertilizer, etc.) - Y170/mu;

Government Taxes and Charges - Y230/mu;

Net Loss - Y40/mu;

School Fees - Y600/year primary,

Y1,200/year junior high;

Health - 75% of the population can’t afford to see a doctor (no medical insurance possible);

Result - New Year 2000 approximately 25,000 (out of 39,000 population) or 75% (85% of the labour force) upped stumps together and abandoned the village to seek work in urban areas.

This illustrates the crisis in agriculture in many places rather neatly: the cost of inputs was too high; tax and fee burdens were heavy; the population to land ration was too high (farming was inefficient) and returns for agricultural products were too low. It was simply uneconomical in many places that were being farmed to farm small farms (especially when the city cousins were doing relatively so well).

It must be said however that inroads had been made into rural poverty. In the period 1990 to 2004 the percentage of the rural population living in poverty dropped in UN terms (given a Y2,900 adjusted poverty line as at 2004) from over 30% to 10% and in Chinese terms (an adjusted 2004 Y668 poverty line) from around 10% to around 3%. Nevertheless (for virtually the first time not being the result of famine) from 1995 the rural population fell (from around 850 million to around 750 million in 2004 while the overall population rose from 1.2 billion to 1.3 billion) as migration to cities intensified.

Within the countryside, as agricultural employment declined from around 1990 (to just over 300 million in 2004 from a peak of over 350 million in 1990) the slack was taken up somewhat by the growth of employment in the TVE sector (which had nearly 150 million rural employees by 2004 - up from around 30 million in 1990). A new ‘floating’ rural labour force now approached a sizeable 150 million extra people available (which had virtually not existed at all when Deng first came to power).

“Floating” was at first a pejorative used by the party because this group was unemployed and didn’t have the official hukou that would permit them to legally look for employment and accommodation in any city (they were not anchored). They were still officially in the countryside but were actually likely in the cities seeking employment in unregulated markets. Later the CCP was more accepting of (and less scathing in their remarks concerning) this group as it proved to be an economically useful and needed ‘reserve force’ of labour for the cities. This most vulnerable floating group typically carried their lives around in bags to the job queues. In the cities they were: numerous and poor so easily replaced; unrepresented so easily exploited; lacking the urban hukou so accorded few urban rights; and considered less civilised and so treated as second class citizens generally.

The CCP came up with a statement of the issues as part of attempting to find the solution to all of the above. They were referred to as “the three rural problems” or “the three problems (san neng - 三農)”. Here they are:

1) Agriculture - stagnation in productivity and efficiency, declining

incomes, high tax burden;

2) Countryside - surplus labour, land management and local governance

(village elections);

3) Peasants - low ‘quality’, poor levels of education and skills, health,

etc.

The campaign the CCP came up with was called “Building a New Socialist Countryside”. More private and public cooperation would be allowed.

The CCP reduced taxes and remarkably completely abolishing the State Agricultural Tax in 2005 for the first time in literally thousands of years. These were central measures that left local taxes in place for the time being. The central state also dramatically increased its infrastructure (e.g. water, roads and power) investment and spending in the health, education and welfare sectors. This was made possible by a major growth dividend. The local sector was streamlined and this eventually also led to reduced local taxes. Farmers were also giving new access to training in business practices and new technology.

After 1978 and Decollectivisation, land usage had become a problem as the average eastern Chinese family farm was allocated a mere ¼ acre block (800m²) – the size of a typical Sydney suburban block. There were now literally millions of tiny family farms in China. This was still inefficient (though productivity had been improved by the private system) so private shareholder cooperatives and companies were now permitted to be formed. People were also now allowed again to rent out their farms enabling others to increase their effective holdings and achieve better scale. To keep employment levels up, the government encouraged many farmers to shift to growing more labour intensive crops (such as fruit and vegetable for the Japanese market and food processing). The idea here was that China had an international comparative advantage in the cheapness of its labour (relative to the cheapness of its land) and just then also had a convenient abundance of unused labour in the countryside.

The government also noted that the price of land for agriculture was inflated by competition in its use for industrialisation, urbanisation and tourism (e.g. for resorts and golf clubs) and that lack of fair compensation to farmers for forgone land had produced the majority of all protests and protest movements directed against government policy. So this was virtually the main problem for CCP legitimacy in China. This farmers’ rights issue also raises issues of democracy that I’ll examine in the next post where I’ll also see what was in the CCP’s mind in that regard in the cities.

Globalisation and Legitimacy

2011-12-05T18:51:00.000-08:00

So what sustains party legitimacy in a globalised China of Jiang and Hu that is no longer recognisably Communist to many? Who runs China therefore and under what ideology if any? I’ll consider those questions in this post and in the next I’ll consider the very important question of what the key problems are in the vital countryside and the action the CCP is taking in attempting to resolve them.

Many in the West predicted that the CCP would go the way of the Communist parties of Eastern Europe. Evidently they saw the breakdown of Communist ideology as necessitating an end to the rule of Communist parties. I may ask why the CCP has alone been able to maintain its legitimacy but I should also allow that it may not be. Nevertheless it has remained in power and there must be a reason.

The CCP has given thought to this question and has come up with five basic reasons for its legitimacy:

1) It has fostered and maintained enormous levels of economic growth;

2) Consequently living standards have increased [although inequality has also increased markedly, of course];

3) Especially from the mid 1990s, it has tried to promote its aims as nationalist and in the national interest (they point to what they promote as a successful history);

4) They are able to maintain social stability in accordance with their ‘neo-authoritarian’ and ‘Asian Values’ philosophies; and

5) They are working on improving their ethical standards and stamping out corruption.

Perhaps the most promising of these bases of legitimacy in the medium term is the appeal to nationalism but it is a double edged sword.

The powerful ‘culture fever’ that erupted following the CR was partly about reasserting pride in China’s imperial past and national pride generally at China’s historical and ongoing global status and is a positive asset to China as well as CCP legitimacy. Yet pride in turn has depended upon the recent advance in living standards to a large extent and has been dampened by a sense of humiliation at the unfairness of US hegemony and the success of Japan. The expected return of Taiwan to the Chinese fold has become a symbol of the reversal of that humiliation and Taiwan is not necessarily expected to be the be all and end all of that process. Japan is still sometimes seen as an enemy and not sufficiently punished for various war crimes.

The CCP is ‘cashing in’ on these feelings of humiliation in order to promote the sense of unity that it feels is in its immediate interests. This can be seen as necessary to provide the ostensible raison d’être for a post-Marxist CCP government but here is where nationalism has become a two edged sword. The government can also be criticised for the pace at which it addresses the humiliation of a great nation or fails to sufficiently represent the national interest well enough generally. Examples of this problem of popular nationalism include the reaction to WTO negotiations in 2001 (where the CCP was accused of giving away too much) and accusations that China has been too soft on Japan over wartime atrocities.

The CCP’s reaction to the above potential threat to its legitimacy has been to learn the lesson of Tiananmen. Party thinkers in leadership tend to see the lesson as: cracking down hard and early on dissent promotes stability.

Their verdict on Tiananmen has remained unchanged in recent years (despite recent talk of a re-evaluation) as evidenced by the extended prison terms (11 years) meted out to various democracy activists more recently (such as those of the China Democracy Party) and not since commuted (the re-evaluation of the ‘incident’ is yet to materialise).

The approach to the Falun Dafa (Falun Gong) is another result of this reaction. Practitioners were declared an ‘evil cult’ in 1999 and suppressed following a sit-in protest of around 10,000 of them following a scathing editorial against the group. The protest saw them surrounding Zhongnanhai (the residential area in central Beijing near Tiananmen reserved for much of the CCP high leadership). The evil seems to be that it is a challenge to CCP ideology. The group is critical of much of what the current CCP government seems to stand for. Jiang was the main hardliner at the time when it came to cracking down on what is actually a fairly harmless breathing practice called qigong. For more on suppression of this group, go to the group’s own websites.

The other issues being cracked down on are ethnic in nature and concern the Tibetans mainly in Tibet and the Muslims (mainly Uighur and mainly in Xinjiang (called East Turkistan or Uighurstan especially by some separatists)). The “War of Terror” almost couldn’t have come at a better time from the point of view of the CCP. The Chinese government now feels it more or less has the cover it needs to crack down as necessary and it does crack down (whether real terrorism is involved or not) as necessary. Of course China hasn’t been alone in revelling in the cover provided. Russia and Israel are two other notable cases, not to mention the US itself.

Who is in power (if not Marxists) is another question. The year 2002 marked a changing of the guard when Hu came to power but also most of the Politburo was also replaced.

Jiang finished his term as Party Secretary in 2002 (relinquishing that role to Hu) but provided some of the answers to that question as he left this formal role with his Three Represents.

The CCP constitution was amended in 2002 so that the ideology of the party was now formally: Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory and the important Ideology of “the Three Represents (三个代表)”. This last was what the party now stood for (represented). It stood for the most advanced forces of production, the most advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the broadest mass of the people. The shift here was that this suggested it was no longer a party explicitly of workers; it could also be the party of their bosses, and of intellectuals and artists. It now represented ‘advanced elements’ (who by virtue of being that were now also the only people eligible to be members of the party – so you could also be a worker and not eligible) rather than revolutionaries – the revolution was now over. This really just formalised what had already become the practice.

The leadership as I’ve mentioned was also shaken up. Hu assumed the leadership although he was the second youngest of the nine Politburo Standing Committee members.

All but one of the group were also qualified engineers (predominantly from the one technology university that Hu trained in engineering at, Qinghua) – the outlier, Wen Jiabao, was a geologist (trained at the Beijing Institute of Geology). Wen’s case shows that it was possible to be mentored in the party by a discredited leader (Zhao Ziyang in Wen’s case) and still reach the second or third highest rank in the PRC. Only Hu was kept on from the previous group and he was also the only member remaining who had been mentored by Deng. Most had been mentored by Jiang. There’s a joke in China that Qinghua produces China’s leaders and Beida (Beijing University) produces its prisoners. Here’s the group:

Name	Age	Profession	University	Mentor
Hu Jintao	59	Engineer	Qinghua	Deng Xiaoping
Wu Bangguo	61	Engineer	Qinghua	Jiang Zemin
Wen Jiabao	60	Geologist	Beijing Institute of Geology	Zhao Ziyang
Jia Qinglin	62	Engineer	Hebei Engineering College	Jiang Zemin
Zeng Qinghong	63	Engineer	Beijing Institute of Technology	Jiang Zemin
Huang Ju	64	Engineer	Qinghua	Jiang Zemin
Wu Guanzheng	64	Engineer	Qinghua	Jiang Zemin
Li Changchun	58	Engineer	Harbin Institute of Technology	Jiang Zemin
Luo Gan	67	Engineer	Beijing Institute of Iron & Steel	Li Peng

So it’s a technocratic group that have been well mentored in the business of government in the new China and that embraces the new business elites (who might otherwise become an opposition). The training of the group is not in political change, it’s in technocratic problem-solving and that is their focus.

This currently suits the business elites with whom they are intimately linked so it’s not yet in the interests of the business middle class to challenge the political position of this type of problem-solving state. From the orthodox Marxist point of view it is also still possible to view the business class as powerful and imaginative allies provided they remain securely yoked to the benefit of the CPP dictatorship. The times in China are indeed still interesting for Marxists today. To paraphrase Sun Zi, the CCP is keeping its friends close and its (at least potential) enemies closer. And the policy is currently working as the potential enemies are currently being kept happy with the amount of (close) influence they are able to have upon reforms as they occur.

In 2006, the CCP launched the “eight glories and eight disgraces (八榮八耻)” campaign. This is aimed at promoting compliance among the population and it at least partly designed to be learnt about by rote by schoolchildren. This is how to be a good Communist today. Here are the eight of both:

1. It is glorious to adore the fatherland; it is a disgrace to harm the fatherland;

2. It is glorious to serve the people; it is a disgrace to disserve the people;

3. It is glorious to respect science; it is a disgrace to be ignorant and unenlightened;

4. It is glorious to work hard; it is a disgrace to be indolent;

5. It is glorious to promote unity and mutual help; it is a disgrace to be self-seeking;

6. It is glorious to be honest and trustworthy; it is a disgrace to be mercenary and profit-grabbing;

7. It is glorious to be disciplined and law abiding; it is a disgrace to violate laws and disciplines;

8. It is glorious to be willing to struggle; it is a disgrace to be sybaritic.

The next post will be on the rural issues that continue to plague China (and CCP responses).

Chinese Law, International Law and Relations and Human Rights

2011-12-04T17:48:00.000-08:00

So to condense the history of the above as it concerns modern Chinese history. Under the Qing dynasty the law was quite basic but serviceable and this law was basically continued by the first republican government and the Guomindang.

On arriving at power the CCP basically dismissed all of that law as a ‘tool of the ruling class’ and therefore as invalid and proposed to begin from scratch. Before the party could promulgate any law (and proposed laws weren’t prepared before they came to government) the early years of the PRC were effectively lawless as a result. The first two laws promulgated were the 1951 Marriage Law and the 1952 Land Reform Law and that was basically it. There was still no more general law beyond some nebulous concepts never clearly promulgated (except that what Mao said ultimately went). So obviously there was no possibility of a rule of law.

With the CR, even the law such as it had developed up until it began was swept aside by it.

Deng’s accession finally saw some systematic attention to this apparent deficiency. This was held to be (and was) vital to encouraging foreign relations and investment within China. A Criminal Code was enacted in 1980, various closed cases were re-opened, legal powers were formalised and centralised, more international involvement occurred and there was more local public education concerning the law. Finally in 1999 the ‘rule of law’ was formally explicitly enshrined in the Chinese law. Even then the reality was something different in practice.

The Chinese law is now in seven parts: the Constitution, fundamental laws, laws and administrative rules and regulations, other national regulations, provincial rules and regulations and local rules and regulations.

The Constitution is formally the product of the National Congress and the Congress also enacts and modifies fundamental laws. Regular laws may be enacted and amended by the Standing Committee of the Congress and administrative rules and regulations may be enacted and revised by the State Council. The other national regulations can be made by ministries or committees of the State Council, local rules and regulations are made by the National People’s Congress or its Provinces Standing Committee and provincial rules and regulations can be made by the People’s Governments of the Provinces themselves.

The law continues to have many grey areas (and guanxi relations (‘connections’ – if necessary fuelled by bribes of various kinds) continue to have the potential to override the law as ‘favours’ are done and repaid. In fact this kind of corruption is rampant especially at the local level). The definition of what used to be called the crime of counter revolution and now going by another name remains murky.

Harsh punishments are traditional in Chinese legal systems, Mao’s security system is not completely dismantled and Soviet models for the punishment of counter revolution in particular from the 1930s were also adopted and those factors all continue to have influence on the criminal law today. The Maoist prison system and the idea of ‘reform through labour’ also continue to influence the current penal set-up.

In the absence of effective legal remedies or opportunities to vote in an opposition in these circumstances, then, what remains is protest, boycotts and media publicity (both local and foreign). Courts are not independent either and effective lawyers have also been in short supply and so these other forms of shining a harsh light on corruption or unfairness are really the only true protections for the rule of law.

So China naturally in these circumstances has a rather bad human rights record and one of the major aspects of this is the large number of executions. The 1999 Observer Human Rights Record Index gave China’s as the 9^th worst record mainly due to the volume of executions. This is despite China having signed the 1986 UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. In 1990 the Deputy Chief Prosecutor admitted to 2,900 cases of perversion of justice or confession obtained through torture.

The massacre of 1989 is called an ‘incident’. China has signed further human rights agreements and also given further undertakings.

The earliest international human rights agreement China signed or at least voted for was a UN one on non-discrimination among other things. Although it was voted for by the Guomindang government in 1948 it has never been repudiated by the PRC government in any formal way. The declaration states that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.” (UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

The CCP still discusses human rights but now with the overlay of the Asian Values debate. The stress is on the collective right to speedy economic development over ‘individualistic’ freedoms and rights. The CCP also continues to remind others of the state of China’s and other states’ own rights of national sovereignty as it opposes the development of new international ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrines. This was first asserted internationally as an issue of international mutual respect and non-interference by Zhou at the Bandung Conference of Non Aligned Nations of 1955. If pressed by a government like Australia’s concerning its internal human rights record, however, China will happily discuss Australia’s record with respect to Australian aborigines. The 1991 White Paper on Human Rights states China’s current position.

China’s government is sensitive to how others view its record and to international pressure. Western political leaders for their part raise human rights issues to avoid being seen as “soft on China” and the recent US “Axis of Evil” view of the world has challenged China. Consequently the CCP prefers dealing with foreign companies to concerned foreign governments but China’s economy is expanding rapidly and consequently resource hungry so dealing with international concerns may be regarded as vital to China’s interests. It is now also able to use both its economic power and beneficence to get what it wants internationally more than ever. In return for assistance to some poor African countries, for example, China has been able to secure valuable contracts for many of the resources of those countries. Consequently, there are now no shortages of suitors attracted by the novel power of China especially among the poorest nations.

Since 9/11 China has been willing to discuss the issue of international terrorism internationally (partly as it is dealing with long-standing mainly Muslim Uighur and sometimes violent separatism movements mainly in Xinjiang some of which have international elements). The CCP government has agreed to support the US against terrorism hoping this support will be returned by the US overlooking China’s suppression of its Muslim Uighur minority. Internally, the CCP also likens various movements to international terrorist movements for propaganda purposes.

China’s main foreign policy aims may be seen broadly as preservation of national integrity, promotion of national economic development and promotion of security interests (especially in the Asia-Pacific Region). Among China’s current international concerns are Taiwan and the South China Sea and its territories. China claims Taiwan, various South China Sea island groups and much of the Sea itself as territory of China and much of the claim is in dispute internationally. China demands that countries that have diplomatic relations with it recognise its claims and especially its ‘One China’ policy that affects Taiwan in particular and regard its actions in the region as a matter internal to China (with mixed success). Oil found in the South China Sea region complicates this situation (as it is prone to do to situations). Water is becoming valuable in China and an international issue as evidenced by China’s recent willingness to trade land in its West (with, I think, Kazakhstan) for certain local water rights (in a little publicised move).

Asia (China’s neighbourhood) has been relatively peaceful for some time now and China recognises this relative stability is in its current interest, however, and generally strives to promote this. Nevertheless nationalism tends to provoke incidents with Japan (and to an extent with Taiwan). The worst recent incident involved the Senkaku Islands in 1996 and resulted from popular pressure on the Chinese government. The dispute continues to occasionally flare as both Taiwan and Japan also lay some claim to the islands. Again, oil reserves are possibly involved beneath the surface of this tripartite dispute.

The so-called ‘overseas Chinese’ have also played a major role in China’s international legal relations as China develops. Up to two million Taiwanese now reside on the mainland and China manages its relations with the Chinese-language press throughout the world. Some of the ‘overseas Chinese’ have also acted as agents for China in its ‘aid-for-resources’ business in Africa and there are also many Chinese in Australia, of course.

Australians dealing with China should beware! China is no longer in the mood to be patronised by the West and, as our second most important trading partner already and soon to be relatively more important, Australians must understand China. The China that can say No is a worthwhile text that reveals how far China’s self esteem has recently come. China now has wealth and self confidence. Australia moreover is capable of finding grounds for cooperating with China in multilateral forums.

Jocelyn Chey of the University of Sydney has spoken of how easily Chinese can be accidentally insulted by cultural insensitivity and how she has personally noticed examples of this since the late 1970s in organising film maker and student exchanges when memories of the CR were fresh in many minds.

A loss to Hong Kong in soccer was also apparently capable of provoking serious popular outrage in China in that era. China was surprisingly dangerous for foreigners for a few days after the loss including Professor Chey.

Professor Chey also remembers being told during wool trade discussions she had attended in China only six days after the event that evidence of the Tiananmen massacre that she mentioned having seen live on Hong Kong TV was a fabrication.

Her suggestion for dealing with the Chinese in commerce is to first remember the Chinese saying “the commercial field is a battle field”. She says Chinese people will respect you if they know which side you’re on and you remain loyal to that side and once again if you “don’t patronise them”.

Now a bit of Social, a bit of Political and a bit of Economic (post 1989)

2011-12-01T19:36:00.000-08:00

The leadership in the period we are now considering was as follows:

General Party Secretary Premier

1989-1997: Jiang Zemin Li Peng

1997-2002: Jiang Zemin Zhu Rongji

2002-2011: Hu Jintao Wen Jiabao

Jiang was the key to much of the social and economic happenings immediately following on from the events of 1989. Deng Xixian (another of Xiaoping’s names) had limited ongoing influence until his death in 1997. Firstly, Jiang engaged in economic restructuring and the impacts were predominantly felt by the new unemployed and the new migrant workforce. Zhu was also a particularly strong promoter of growth and reform and the current leadership has continued the process. Privatisation of housing was also continued.

Foreign trade and investment, rapid private sector expansion and state restructuring continued to be increasingly on the agenda. Integration with the global economy also proceeded and China finally joined the World Trade Organisation in December 2001. Utilised foreign direct investment that had been in the region of 5 to 10 billion US dollars at around the time of Tiananmen was in the region of 50 to 60 billion before the next decade had ended (it appears that only the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis kept it from being greater). Trade (both imports and exports) followed a similarly exponential-style trend as did GDP (it grew at 9.4% per annum in the period 1980 to 2004 and hasn’t really slackened since).

With that growth there was also increasing income inequality along several dividing lines. The greatest beneficiaries in terms of income growth and absolute income were the employed urban workforce and rural workers in the eastern provinces. Western province rural workers and the unemployed benefited least relatively and central province rural workers were somewhere in the middle on these relative and absolute income measures.

At 2004 the UN determined poverty line was 3,000 Yuan (Renmin Bi – People’s Currency (RMB)) per annum and while urban workers were averaging nearly 10,000 Yuan rural workers averaged just under the 3,000 nationally at 2,936 (the Chinese government’s official poverty line was 650 Yuan). Shanghai had the highest average rural income of the thirty traditional mainland provinces at 7,066 and Guizhou had the lowest at 1,722 RMB.

China’s Gini coefficient (an indicator of inequality) was 0.30 in 1980 and in 2004 it had grown to 0.45 (a coefficient over 0.4 is considered dangerous inequality for social stability by some authorities – Sweden’s is around 0.2, Australia’s is around 0.3 and the US’s is also around 0.45). The UN Development Programme concluded in 2004 that China was the 90^th highest level of equality of 130 countries assessed.

Now let’s consider what happened to the labour force especially in the SEZs and cities. With foreign direct investment came foreign management practices, knowledge and technologies. This was also guided, however, by what was deemed acceptable to the government so a new composite labour relations system developed. On the negative side was the inadequacy of the legal system and weakness of regulatory regimes.

It’s fair to say that enterprise managers came to have greater power over their workforces (with the power to hire and fire) and operational decisions along with discretion in setting wage rates and bonus rates and criteria. This, CCP acquiescence in it and the new labour contract system severely weakened the CCP-based trade unions. Also weakening the bargaining power of workers was the massive volume of retrenchments announced by Zhu from the state system (in preparation for the new competition from other sectors) and the large numbers of migrants from rural areas now competing for city jobs. The iron rice bowl (guaranteed life-time employment and the cradle-to-grave employment-based welfare system) unravelled especially from the mid 1990s.

On the plus side for workers able to demonstrate their value, the new competition among all the sectors (the state sector, the new Town and Village Enterprises (TVE) sector, the private sector and the foreign sector) for the now large pool of job seekers in a new job marketplace was quite fierce, regions and local governments competed strongly for the best workers, as well (though also for the best price possible as they also competed for investment) and the market was fairly free. On the whole, it was a major bear market, however, in the circumstances.

The state sector restructuring was overdue with local work units overburdened by over-employment, overly high wages and excessive and ongoing further iron rice bowl type obligations. It had been delayed as long as it had for fear of the political consequences. One third of all State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) were in debt. Only workers in some key sectors were able to avoid retrenchments. Some 60 million workers were laid off in the period from the mid 90s to 2001 in order to ‘save’ the sector.

The timeline below shows the development of the new urban and regional sectors:

1979: joint Chinese and foreign enterprises allowed;

1981: small-scale (less than 8 employees) private business;

1986: 100% foreign ownership of businesses allowed;

1988: limits removed from size of private businesses;

2001: in joining the WTO China agreed to progressively open banking, insurance, telecommunications and media sectors to foreign direct investment.

In the rural sector, Decollectivisation led to surplus labour of from 200 to 300 million people. The rural economy also became diversified as a result of the Decollectivisation. The Mao era hukou household registration system which had attempted to regulate migration and particularly to limit rural-to-city migration was relaxed from 1978 as it had to be in the circumstances but it was a gradual relaxation. Migration to cities was a rational decision for many because of the ‘pull factor’ of rural/urban income disparities.

Major changes had occurred in the macroeconomy in the first twenty years post-Mao. In 1980 the rural economy had produced 30% of China’s GDP and that percentage had halved by 2003 to 15% while the percentage produced by the services sector increased from around 20 to around 46 percent and the industry share reduced from around 50% to around 39%. That 15% rural production in 2003 was produced by 49.1% of China’s 744.23 million workers. The services sector was the most efficient in this sense requiring only 29.3% of the workers for its 46% percent contribution while industry was the next most efficient requiring 21.6% to produce its 39% share.

Non-agricultural employment trends show the speedy development of the rural-to-city-or-regional migrant labour market and TVE sectors between 1978 and 2004. The five other sectors that existed in 2004 were state, collective, small business, foreign and private and only the last three had increased employment numbers compared to 1978 though the state sector still employed around 60 million people and the collective sector nearly 10 million. In 2004 the small business, private and foreign sectors employed similar numbers adding up to a combined total of nearly 80 million and the migrant labour and TVE sectors each employed around 140 million.

So by 2003, only 20% of the 378.8 million actual non-agricultural workers remained in the labour sectors considered regulated, meaning exploitation was likely to be occurring at a high level. Figures of welfare insurance participation rates in the private sector weren’t especially encouraging. Those covered by aged pension insurance amounted to 33.7%, unemployment insurance 10.3%, medical care insurance 21.6%, occupational injury insurance 31.8% and maternity leave insurance 5.5%.

As far as unions were concerned at least 100 million (30% of the non-agricultural workers) were not even represented by the toothless tigers that were the officially approved trade unions. Independent unions were illegal and the official union director was frequently also the enterprise manager or party branch secretary (after the 4 June massacre around Tiananmen, people who had tried to form independent unions had actually been treated much worse than the student leaders of the demonstrations had been (and that’s saying something)).

In response to some of the issues that the restructuring raised mentioned above and others, Chinese people have recently taken to protesting en masse. Official Chinese statistics of ‘mass incidents’ show a trend rise in such incidents since 1993 from a base of under 10,000 incidents and almost exponential growth since 1997 so that by 2005 there were around 75,000 such incidents noted. So the social protest movement is keeping pace with the recent economic growth.

With all this, provincial differences and prejudices have remained a feature of the Chinese landscape in the new world of regional growth to the extent that recently provinces such as the central province of Henan have found it necessary to advertise throughout China to the effect that the province and its people aren’t so bad after all.

The 80s and early 90s (an overview of Deng Xiansheng's later years)

2011-11-30T18:30:00.000-08:00

In the 80s the children destined for the universities had been moulded by their schools to be ‘red’ and yet increasingly they were being influenced by Western ideas and dissatisfied with their low potential incomes in this period of a China in as much flux as in Mao’s time (if in the opposite direction in a sense). They began to question the idea of Communism itself, in these conditions. They began, too, to seek the changes that they wanted.

This is really what produced such a ‘culture fever’ (along with the stultification brought about by the so-called CR). Now was clearly the time to examine the culture. Now it was really possible, as free from repression as the Chinese had ever really been in China.

This was really, of course, mainly a phenomenon of the university system and this was still the system of the ruling classes. Fang told the students what they really thought they already knew (that the Communist system and Marxism were out-of-date) but he drew a wide following for doing it, all over China. He lectured on freedom and democracy all over. Meanwhile in the relative party centre Hu Yaobang proved to be a man of the people in a way most senior CCP officials of the time were not. He also sympathised more with both the plights and ideas of the masses than the others did.

In December 1986 many of the students of Hefei, Beijing and Shanghai declared in demonstrations that they had had enough and demanded freer elections (remember the 1980 experiment and its roll-back in 1986). This resulted in a number of incidents of beatings by police. In Shanghai alone more than 30,000 students had protested with the support of many of the local population and this probably should have given someone a clue.

In defiance of the threat of beatings, students in Beijing continued their protests until 1 January 1987 and marched on Tiananmen Square where the police were ready. They had apparently watered the square so that the resulting ice would be treacherous for the students and make it easier for the police to knock them over.

They duly knocked them over while Hu publicly defended them. For his trouble he in turn was duly (and publicly) ousted by means of a specially advertised Chinese Central Television (CCTV) announcement. The repression of others including Fang soon followed in an orchestrated campaign. At the centre Zhao, the other Deng ‘puppet’, took over Hu’s lead party role, then, leaving his premiership to Li Peng.

Zhao and Li then had plenty of economic problems to deal with and one measure meant to alleviate some of them, the new ‘one child’ policy, first announced in 1979, was causing problems of its own.

The policy was neither well received nor well enforced in this period in the countryside. Farmers still needed sons to provide for them in their decrepitude and it was not legal to abort girls. Nevertheless there was a degree of enforcement. Police sometimes escorted recalcitrant women (still trying for an elusive boy) to hospitals to have their fallopian tubes compulsorily tied.

With Decollectivisation and ‘opening’ had come rural unemployment together with the increase in wealth in the SEZs that furthermore were at first mostly concentrated in the south – the north was getting a somewhat raw deal. The ‘iron rice bowl’ in the cities was causing problems because it had the effect of being a disincentive for hard work. The final main issue was the inflation that became problematic in 1988.

The leaders were more frank about these problems than Mao had perhaps ever been but the people were unimpressed by mere candour. At the same time there weren’t really many legal protest avenues.

With Hu’s death in 1989 the Beijing students were finally moved to bring their concerns to the government in the only ways they knew how: demonstrating in the square and presenting a petition outside Hu’s official funeral that took place as I mentioned in an earlier post in the Great Hall of the People.

This petition idea of course hails back to the time of the emperors and is part of a centuries-old tradition. Untraditionally the petitions were snubbed although perhaps it’s reasonable to say that a funeral probably wasn’t an appropriate time or place to present a petition. Nevertheless the petitioners gave the petition-giving attempt quite a traditional flavour and the snubbing, regarded as arrogant by many, was therefore a spur to further righteous protest with more people involved.

On 26 April the party had been sufficiently irked to proclaim via a People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao) editorial that the student movement was ‘turmoil’ – there were shades of a suggested return to the CR and Red Guards in that accusation with all the attendant opprobrium hinted at. In the past this might have cowed the students but in their already heated condition this time it merely angered them. The police seemed powerless (or perhaps unwilling) to suppress this protest movement.

So protest continued and to add insult to injury, as far as Deng was concerned, the day before Gorbachev was due to arrive in Beijing to officially consolidate a ‘thaw’ in Sino-Soviet relations (and when the world’s press were gathered to record that auspicious event) some of the students began a very inauspicious hunger strike. Also students for all over China (not to mention many Beijing workers from all parts of Beijing) were beginning to descend on Tiananmen Square to amplify the public insult.

Zhao was conciliatory and in these circumstances that led to his own immediate ouster. He and other leaders had met with student leaders (including hunger strikers clearly impaired from their physical ordeals) but all of these meetings had ended up being confrontational, such was the mood of the times.

The mood for radical change never caught on in the countryside, however (however affecting the scenes of emaciated striking students undoubtedly were) and this was a key factor in allowing the party to have a free hand in dealing with the movement. The day after Zhao’s ouster, martial law was declared.

Although at first the PLA moved slowly the crackdown was ultimately heavy. It occurred on the evening of 3 June and the morning of 4 June. At least 2,000 supporters of the students were probably killed on the streets surrounding the square attempting to defend it. The students themselves were mostly able to flee and flee they did. Some of their leadership were able to flee the country and the other known leaders were ultimately arrested.

International initial reaction was quite swift. Governments around the world condemned the PRC government’s violent suppression of the movement. Many Western companies and governments scaled down their operations within China.

Deng’s reaction to the reaction was unrepentant, however. As he evidently expected, the international mood was soon able to be restored to more or less its former state quite rapidly as, internationally, China was as needed as it needed.

China was soon to enter a period of unprecedented growth with international support that Deng began to explicitly promote again as soon as in 1992 in his “Copy Shenzhen [SEZ]” campaign following from his tour of various areas he decided were worthy of being copied including the Shenzhen SEZ. His lead role indicated a return to power of the reformist faction that the events of 1989 had only briefly discredited.

The politics of Asian values were already in evidence as the government was able to draw on local prejudice and nationalist sentiment to assert that foreign human rights concerns were really disguised Western imperialism re-packaged. The added advantage was a new kind of regional solidarity now available after the end of the Cold War that was able to be nurtured based on defence against alleged Western threats (especially the threat of US hegemony in Asia) allegedly merely disguised as human rights activism.

In the meantime, Deng gave the following expression to his ongoing faithfulness to both socialist doctrine and Dengism that can serve as his last word in this history:

If we don’t persevere with socialism, don’t reform and open up, don’t develop the economy, don’t improve people’s livelihoods, then this can only be the road to death.

1989 – Causes and Effects (Part Two – Effects)

2011-11-29T19:20:00.000-08:00

The first effect of the movement (combined with the government attitudes I’ve mentioned in the last post) was, of course, that there was a massacre and a crackdown on the movement. What were the lessons learned and what was the aftermath of the crackdown, however?

The CCP learned the relative benefit of nipping any incipient protest movement quickly and decisively in the bud before it has the opportunity to elicit wider support. The party had allowed divisions at the head of the party to prevent decisive action being taken early enough and decided that this have been the prime cause of the undue magnitude of the eventual bloodshed required. The very early attention to the suppression of the Falun Dafa (or Falun Gong) movement can be viewed as a direct result of this new calculus.

At the same time the party also learned that it had lost the power to influence the views of large numbers of especially urban people merely by formally requiring them to think a certain way (if indeed it had ever truly possessed this power). In other words it would have to address concerns as they arose by correcting the problems (for example by rooting out complained-of corruption and dealing with inflationary pressures and relative poverty). ‘Dealing with concerns’ had the added benefit of further isolating such dissidents as proponents of the Falun Dafa and democrats.

Jiang Zemin was the man Deng brought in at this point to rebuild a grassroots party organisation that would be worthy of being listened to again. He also worked to make to economy work better (to isolate the democrats). The party was being conformed to the tastes of the leadership and not the other way around.

The rest of the world also learned something about China in 1989 and that was that this was not the end of history yet. China was not becoming like the West as quickly as some had imagined it was. They saw that an internationally engaged China remained illiberal for the time being and still lacked a basic concern for individual human rights in contrast to its recent more liberal image internationally. Deng had been named Time’s ‘Man of the Year’ in two separate years (1978 and 1985), to give an example of how sanguinely he had been widely viewed. The CCP was now again seen, then, as an unreconstructed authoritarian party and government by the Western mainstream media which had created the liberal benign image. Deng’s image was similarly tarnished although it must be said that many Western pundits had never actually bought what was now revealed to be the false image. He was now a dictator and China was uninterested in human rights. The mainstream media's pendulum had thus swung in the other direction and this view was perhaps equally unrealistic.

The other thing the West learned was that there was actually a large group of people in China possibly interested in something like western-style democracy.

The upshot of the crackdown internationally was that the West condemned it and China defended it. Until 1991 their official excuse was not an excuse at all but special pleading that it was an internal matter and thus no concern of anyone but the Chinese.

In 1991, however, an effort was finally made to publicly defend it. The party released a ‘white paper’ called Human Rights in China. In it the party made the claim that China was interested in human rights but that it had different priorities from the West. There were three strains to its formal argument:

1) Socialist - This strain has less credibility now than when it was written (when

China was still relatively less capitalist than it now is) and is therefore now deemphasised in the argument. The argument was along the lines that capitalist polities allocate rights according to class making equal rights in the West a bourgeois myth so rights under socialism are obviously more equal in reality making democracy and human rights guarantees unnecessary. The guarantee of the right to full employment was once a special pride of the CCP but such economic rights began to be eroded as early as in the 1979 labour market reforms. The problem with this argument was always that the facts never completely matched the theory in China in any case. There were always as wide disparities of income and opportunities in China as anywhere (the countryside was still especially poor at this time), which issues democracy, an independent judiciary and human rights guarantees might well be required to adequately address;

2) Developmental - These last two strands were of course the neo-authoritarian

arguments. The Chinese were not yet ready for political rights in this first developmental part. In the meantime, so the argument went, we are doing well at economic rights per the requirements of the 2^nd UN Covenant on Human Rights of 1966 (the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights), which are more important in this stage of development. These rights (deemed collective rights) included the right to education, healthcare, a decent standard of living, community and social services, employment, equal pay for equal work, the maintenance of cultural traditions and security. Development that required authoritarianism now would both support economic rights and permit political and legal reform later in support of rights deemed individual rights provided for in the 1^st Covenant (on Civil and Political Rights). Opponents of this strand of the argument regard this as unconscionable cherry picking of rights as they say all rights are equally important (and also depend on each other for their strength) regardless of the level of economic development. They also reckon China should commit itself to a time certain (based on any development criteria) when all rights would be protected, if they want to play that game (and don’t believe an authoritarian government would be the best authority to decide on any timing of this in any case – they would probably never decide on it, they argued); and

3) Asian Values - Or possibly Chinese or East Asian or Confucian values. It’s yet

again that idea that some rights are more equal than others but this time not for reasons of underdevelopment. This time it’s for reasons of culture and East Asian context. Lee Kwan-Yew in Singapore, Suharto in Indonesia, Deng in China and Mahathir Mohammed in Malaysia first raised this argument more or less together in the early 1990s. Lee was the earliest and strongest advocate followed in rough order by Mahathir, Suharto and Deng.

Human rights agreements and international campaigns were a new form of Western cultural imperialism in this strand of the new Chinese argument and for the other proponents of the Asian Values view of rights. Historical, national, regional, religious, social, economic and cultural contexts needed to be considered more than they had been in formulating the rights. This position (of emphasis on family, community, stability, authority and development and avoidance of the alleged morally and socially decadent Western worship of the individual) was supported by 44 Asian governments in the Bangkok Declaration of 1993. The arguments against were basically that this is moral relativism with no other purpose but to justify a clearly unsatisfactory status quo that keeps rulers in their current positions of power, modernisation had rendered a lot of the argument meaningless and modern conditions required modern solutions to address potential abuses of power and corruption. The problem for this argument in turn was that it was Western, hypocritical and contained unrealistic and arguably imperialistic expectations. Needless to say, perhaps, the debate is ongoing.

1989 – Causes and Effects (Part One – Causes)

2011-11-28T18:44:00.000-08:00

How then did the debates of the 1980s lead to the tragedy at Tiananmen in 1989 and is the debate ongoing or did it end there? Today the Chinese continue to debate how the international notion of individual human rights should apply in China if indeed it should at all (and that debate may be a more or less direct result of the Tiananmen massacre). This debate is mainly between China and some western countries but it also occurs within China. However first let’s go back to the 1980s and the various forces at work in that decade.

The reform faction was split in the 1980s and Deng’s inevitable occasional kowtowing to the conservative faction likely had this as its inevitable result. The period has been regarded as one of ‘bourgeois liberalisation’ by those who opposed the reforms. That meant China was looking too much towards western political as well as economic systems for answers to China’s problems. On the liberal wing was Fang Lizhi (now teaching in the US but then a professor of astrophysics and Vice President at a technology university in Anhui who also lectured about freedom and democracy to his students). His downfall was a cause celebre of the opponents of liberal ideas and consequently of those who believed in them. That was the way China was rolling. There was a heck of a lot of division after the partial liberalisation of the 1980 elections.

The 1986 elections proved crucial in cementing the divisions because the nature of their conduct constituted a real reversal of the liberalisation that had proved somewhat promising in 1980. They provoked Anhui students (many inspired by Fang) to demonstrate for more democracy and this movement spread to other cities including Shanghai (but apparently not Beijing) before it was suppressed. Troublemaking students were still able under the system that then obtained to be sent to far off provinces on work assignments as punishment and that occurred to some extent. Unfortunately for the authorities, however, the mere threat of that had the effect this time of simply spreading the ideas to the masses that had produced the discontent among the students.

Fang and others were scapegoated but the movement drew strength from that this time. Fang was given a research posting in Beijing (so, far away from his Anhui students but strangely closer to the centre of action than ever). He was also expelled from the party. Liu Binyan, an investigative journalist was also scapegoated.

This marked the beginning of a new ‘campaign against bourgeois liberalisation’ and it wouldn’t end until it had led to the fall of Hu Yaobang himself at the very apex of the party in 1987 (he was alleged to have been too sympathetic with and slow to suppress the original student protest movement). Hu, another prominent Xiangtanese, had argued within the Politburo against its suppression and it was evident that he did share some of its (and the students’) ideals. He was forced out as party general secretary and to write a traditional self-criticism and was replaced in that job by Zhao Ziyang, the Premier. That brought Li Peng into the position of Premier replacing Zhao.

Where did this now leave the party’s upper echelons? Deng, a cautious and old-school reformer, was still the paramount leader without portfolio but another perhaps more liberal reformer had been replaced for being too liberal. Li had obviously been vetted to ensure he wouldn’t be as liberal as Premier as Hu was as General Party Secretary.

Zhao had survived essentially because he was head of the ‘neo-authoritarian’ camp in debates concerning growth models and would be expected to carry this style of thinking into his new role. This camp in turn then had proponents among leaderships throughout East and South East Asia and based its ‘East Asian development model’ thinking on Confucianism. It had the basic ideas of subsuming individual interests into the collective interest of the society as determined by the authority (government should drive development) and that China was not yet ready for democracy as it interfered with the model’s social stability goal which would in turn interfere with the desired economic development goal.

Any protests, too, could potentially interfere with this economically valued stability and the Chinese (in taking the view that one role of government was the suppression of potentially injurious protests) were no orphans in their region. The stance was a combined cultural and economic claim that either or both of ‘Asian values’ (cultural claim) or the requirements of an underdeveloped economy (economic claim) required the suppression (by authoritarian government) of liberal democratic values in the name of these other social, political, cultural and economic values. On the other side were the ‘democrats’ who sought democracy now. And they were just the split views within the reformist faction. The Maoists were another story altogether when it came to authoritarianism.

So by 1989 what was it like to be a Chinese citizen?

As an economic citizen it was peachy keen in many respects. Freedom of choice quickly became substantially more evident both as a producer and as a consumer in the new market economy. Dynamism and pluralism existed here.

Intellectually, politically and culturally there was some room for debate but rights were limited and the neo-authoritarians were thoroughly in charge and not inclined to budge, believing as they did in what they were doing.

In the spring of 1989 three catalysts led to a feeling of the inevitability of righteous protest being in the air, however.

The first was the death of Hu on 15 April (so soon after his deposition for not completely suppressing a democratic protest movement quickly enough). That was followed on 4 May by the 70^th Anniversary of the establishment of the May Fourth Movement (a democratic movement) and on 15 May by the visit of the reformer Gorbachev (a believer in glasnost (‘openness’ – seen by many Chinese democrats as an introduction to democracy in a Communist system) as well as perestroika (economic restructuring)) for a Sino-Soviet Summit.

Hu had been a great hope of the democratic faction and his death was seen symbolically by some coming as it did so soon before a great anniversary regarded as so significant to Chinese Communism for so long by the CCP. Planning was well advanced for a variety of official celebrations of the anniversary. As well as being a crucible of the CCP, however, the May Fourth Movement had included calls for democracy. The Gorbachev visit was also intended to be and was seen as significant as it was intended to mark the first thawing of Sino-Soviet relations in nearly 30 years. The world’s media would be focused on Beijing for this significant visit making it also of special interest for protesters.

The first protests were by students outside Hu’s state funeral at the Great Hall of the People. This lit the touch paper for the protests on the latter two dates which took on lives of their own and the concept of hunger striking developed in mid May protests further galvanised and inspired the movement.

Given the above catalysts and inspiration, economic grievances also began to be aired by people besides democratic activists and students. People who admired the bravery of the hunger striking students began to notice that they perhaps had grievances worthy of protest, too, also related at least indirectly to the paucity of democracy. The economic reforms had produced great and apparent new disparities in wealth that weren’t appreciated by many people on the poor side of the disparity.

The division was between both the workers and their managers and between the public and new private sectors. It was not uncommon, for example, for a doctor in the state health system who had studied for many years to notice that s/he was receiving less income (potentially much less) that a street egg vendor. Also price deregulation and shortages in the market transition had led to an inflation rate of 20% that for many of the many poorer people hadn’t helped matters. The final concern with the reform was that the management of it had allowed scope for widespread corruption and widespread corruption there had been (families of CCP leaders were notably involved).

These issues were concerns especially in Beijing and other cities. Protests began to occur and gain widespread support in many cities. People hoped that democracy might produce both a more responsive and a less corrupt government that might fix these problems.