Globalisation and Legitimacy

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 alone has been able to maintain its legitimacy but I should also allow that it may not be for all time. 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 was 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).

1989 – Causes and Effects (Part Two – Effects)

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 had 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.