February 20, 2019
Dear Friends and Family,
Capitalism Works!! It is proven again as it has over and over in countries around the world. With the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, while China maintained an authoritarian government, they abandon socialism and instituted a capitalistic economy. The results have been astounding. In 1978, the average income was $200/year. By 2014, it was $6,000/year, a 3000% increase. With 1.3 billion people that is a tremendous amount of growth.
The chief architects of the change were Deng Xiaoping, Chairman of the Communist Party of China and Chen Yun, a fellow Party patriarch. Deng wanted the Communist Party to stay in control. His strategy to do so had two pillars: prosperity and propaganda. To achieve prosperity, he instituted economic freedom via free enterprise, but very tightly regulated. He vowed never to embrace “individual democracy” so as to maintain political control. Net, the government offered the Chinese people a bargain; prosperity in exchange for loyalty. Propaganda is the primary means to maintain control – good PR coupled with censorship can create a “group mind” and “manufacture consent” for the ruling elite.
The strategy is working. Prosperity abounds and per a 2008 Pew research survey 8 in 10 Chinese are very happy with the way things are going. (By comparison a similar survey was conducted in the U.S. and only 2 or 10 had such satisfaction).
The author of this segment’s excerpts provides some interesting insight as to the basis for the satisfaction via discussions with a couple of Chinese who had spent time in the U.S. This is what they said, “We accept all the values of human rights of democracy, but we are not willing to risk all that our generation enjoys (prosperity) to hasten the liberties we knew in America. Do you live on democracy? You eat bread, you drink coffee. All these are not bought by democracy. Indian guys have democracy and some African countries have democracy, but they can’t feed their own people. Chinese people have begun to think; one part is the good life, another part is democracy. If democracy can really give you the good life, that’s good. But without democracy, if we can still have the good life, why should we choose democracy.”
China is not without problems. The country has very limited and fragmented social nets today, particularly in rural areas, and the propaganda machine is at risk as more and more of the population has access to the Internet, social media, and become more aware of “global values.” So maintaining the propaganda and control is becoming increasingly difficult. Further, corruption is rampant throughout the government which greatly enhances the prosperity of Party officials and other government employees, but not of others. If that is not corralled, it will become a point of envy and disgust to the people. So, the Party has several challenges to meet if they are to stay in power.
The challenges include: how to effectively provide some safety nets, how to address the increasing wealth inequity, how to continue the rapid growth so as to keep increasing prosperity, how to curtail corruption, and how to censor the Internet and social media so as to maintain the effectiveness of the propaganda machine.
The authors view, Evan Osnos, is as follows: Over the long-term authoritarian states do not grow as reliably as democracies; they are fragile and they tend to thrive only in the hands of visionary individual leaders. In the short term, the Party could succeed at silencing its critics, but in the long term, that is less clear, especially if segment within the Party recalculate their own risks and rewards for loyalty and decide that they have more to gain by siding with the people.
Next:
The next segment continues researching today’s China, specifically with an analysis of their governance system.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Capitalism Works!! It is proven again as it has over and over in countries around the world. With the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, while China maintained an authoritarian government, they abandon socialism and instituted a capitalistic economy. The results have been astounding. In 1978, the average income was $200/year. By 2014, it was $6,000/year, a 3000% increase. With 1.3 billion people that is a tremendous amount of growth.
The chief architects of the change were Deng Xiaoping, Chairman of the Communist Party of China and Chen Yun, a fellow Party patriarch. Deng wanted the Communist Party to stay in control. His strategy to do so had two pillars: prosperity and propaganda. To achieve prosperity, he instituted economic freedom via free enterprise, but very tightly regulated. He vowed never to embrace “individual democracy” so as to maintain political control. Net, the government offered the Chinese people a bargain; prosperity in exchange for loyalty. Propaganda is the primary means to maintain control – good PR coupled with censorship can create a “group mind” and “manufacture consent” for the ruling elite.
The strategy is working. Prosperity abounds and per a 2008 Pew research survey 8 in 10 Chinese are very happy with the way things are going. (By comparison a similar survey was conducted in the U.S. and only 2 or 10 had such satisfaction).
The author of this segment’s excerpts provides some interesting insight as to the basis for the satisfaction via discussions with a couple of Chinese who had spent time in the U.S. This is what they said, “We accept all the values of human rights of democracy, but we are not willing to risk all that our generation enjoys (prosperity) to hasten the liberties we knew in America. Do you live on democracy? You eat bread, you drink coffee. All these are not bought by democracy. Indian guys have democracy and some African countries have democracy, but they can’t feed their own people. Chinese people have begun to think; one part is the good life, another part is democracy. If democracy can really give you the good life, that’s good. But without democracy, if we can still have the good life, why should we choose democracy.”
China is not without problems. The country has very limited and fragmented social nets today, particularly in rural areas, and the propaganda machine is at risk as more and more of the population has access to the Internet, social media, and become more aware of “global values.” So maintaining the propaganda and control is becoming increasingly difficult. Further, corruption is rampant throughout the government which greatly enhances the prosperity of Party officials and other government employees, but not of others. If that is not corralled, it will become a point of envy and disgust to the people. So, the Party has several challenges to meet if they are to stay in power.
The challenges include: how to effectively provide some safety nets, how to address the increasing wealth inequity, how to continue the rapid growth so as to keep increasing prosperity, how to curtail corruption, and how to censor the Internet and social media so as to maintain the effectiveness of the propaganda machine.
The authors view, Evan Osnos, is as follows: Over the long-term authoritarian states do not grow as reliably as democracies; they are fragile and they tend to thrive only in the hands of visionary individual leaders. In the short term, the Party could succeed at silencing its critics, but in the long term, that is less clear, especially if segment within the Party recalculate their own risks and rewards for loyalty and decide that they have more to gain by siding with the people.
Next:
The next segment continues researching today’s China, specifically with an analysis of their governance system.
Happy Learning,
Harley
SOCIALISM – SEGMENT 16
CHINA TODAY: THE ECONOMY – EXCERPTS
NOTE: All the excerpts in this segment are from Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos (2014)
INTRODUCTION: The crest of a transformation in China is one hundred times the scale, and ten times the speed, of the first Industrial Revolution, which created modern Britain. The Chinese people no longer want for food—the average citizen eats six times as much meat as in 1976 – but this is a ravenous year of a different kind, a period when people have awoken with a hunger for new sensations, ideas, and respect. China is the world’s largest consumer of energy, movies, beer and platinum; it is building more high-speed railroads and airports than the rest of the world combined. For some of its citizens, China’s boom has created stupendous fortune; China is the world’s fastest growing source of new billionaires. Several of the new plutocrats have been among the world’s most dedicated thieves; others have been holders of high public office. Some have been both. For most of the Chinese people, however, the boom has not produced vast wealth, it has permitted the first halting steps out of poverty. The rewards created by China’s rise have been wildly inconsistent but fundamentally profound: it is one of the broadest gains in human wellbeing in the modern age. In 1978, the average Chinese income was $200; by 2014, it was $6,000. By almost every measure, the Chinese people have achieved longer, healthier, more educated lives.
The Communist Party no longer promises equality or an end to toil. It promises only prosperity, pride, and strength. And for a while, that was enough. But over time the people have come to want more, and perhaps nothing more ardently than information. New technology has stirred a fugitive political culture; things once secret, are now known; people once alone are now connected. And the more the Party has tried to prevent its people from receiving unfiltered ideas, the more they have stepped forward to demand them.
The difference in life expectancy and income between China’s wealthiest cities and its poorest provinces is the difference between New York and Ghana. China has two of the world’s most valuable internet companies, and more people online than the United States, even as it redoubles its investment in history’s largest effort to censor human expression. But China, even overheated remains a poor country in which the average person earns as much as a Japanese citizen in 1970. Forty years ago, the Chinese people had virtually no access to fortune, truth, of faith – three things denied them by politics and poverty. Within a generation, they had gained access to all three – and they want more. The Chinese people have taken control of freedoms that used to be governed almost entirely by others – decisions about where they work and travel and whom they marry. But as those liberties have expanded, the Communist Party has taken only halting steps to accommodate them.
DENG XIAOPING: Deng Xiaoping has often been described as the sole architect of the boom that followed, but that view is the handiwork of the Party historians. Deng understood the limitation of his knowledge. On matters of the economy, his shrewdest move was to unite with Chen Yun, a fellow Party patriarch. As young revolutionaries, the elders had overseen the execution of landlords, the seizure of factories, and the creation of people’s communes. But now they preserved their power by turning the revolution upside down: permitting private enterprise and opening a window to the outside world. The strategy, as Chen put it, was to move without losing control. But Deng has his limits. The Party would never embrace “individualist democracy.” It would have economic freedom but political control. For China to thrive, there must be limits on “emancipating the mind.” The government was offering its people a bargain: prosperity in exchange for loyalty.
In 1992, Deng let it be known that prosperity was paramount. Between 1993 and 2005, state-owned enterprises cut more than seventy-three million jobs, sending another flood of workers off to find a new source of income. Chinese leaders kept their currency undervalued, which made exports cheap, and these soared. In 1999, China’s exports had been less than a third of America’s. A decade later, China was the world’s largest exporter. In 2005 China still had a quarter of a billion people living on less than $1.25 a day. Income began to soar at a rate never experienced in a big country. The last time I had been in China, per capita income was $3,000/year – equivalent to the United States in 1872. The United States took 55 years to get to $7,000. China did it in ten. In 1978, nearly 80% of the Chinese population had been working on a farm; by 1994 this figure had fallen to less than 50%. By 2007, 135 million rural migrants were living in the cities, most working on assembly lines.
WELCOME TO CIVILIZATION: Of all the upheavals in Chinese life, there was none more intimate than the opportunity to choose one’s mate. For centuries, village matchmakers and parents paired off young people of comparable social and economic status with minimal participation from the bride and groom. China’s one-child policy had exerted unexpected forces on marriage. By promoting the use of condoms on unprecedented scale, it delinked sex from reproduction and spurred a mini sexual revolution. But it also heightened competition: when sonogram technology spread in China in the 1980s, couples aborted female fetuses in order to wait for a boy. As a result, China has 24 million men who will be of marrying age by 2020 but unable to find a spouse.
The greatest shock to the marriage tradition came from an unlikely source: in 1997 the State Council restored the right for people to buy and sell their homes. Under socialism, employers had assigned city workers to indistinguishable concrete housing blocks. When the government restored the market, Chinese bureaucrats didn’t even have an official translation for the word mortgage. Before long, the world’s largest accumulation of real estate wealth was under way. Traditionally, young Chinese couples moved in with the groom’s parents, but by the 21st century less than half of them stayed very long.
Nobody coveted the cultural capital of an elite education more assiduously than members of the “Got Rich—First Crowd.” Many of them had come from nothing, and they knew that urban intellectuals considered them rubes. The size of China’s population made college admission brutally competitive. To create more opportunities, the government doubled the number of colleges and universities, in just ten years to 2,409. Even so, only one in every four aspiring college students was able to earn a place. After Deng opened China’s doors to the world, English fever took hold. Eighty-two percent of those polled in 2008 thought it was vital to learn English. (In America, 11% thought it was vital to learn Chinese). By 2008 an estimated 200 to 350 million Chinese were studying English.
By 2007 the top 10% of urban Chinese were earning 9.2 times as much as the bottom tenth, up from 8.9 times the previous years. Public protests, often staged by workers angry about unpaid wages or farmers whose land had been seized for development, soared to 87,000 up from 11,000 a decade earlier. The more that people became aware of the widening gap, the more desperate they became.
COMMUNICATION: PROPOGANDA, CENSORSHIP, AND THE INTERNET: The Central Propaganda Department, was one of the most powerful and secretive government agencies with the power to fire editors, silence professors, ban books and recut movies. It had control over two thousand newspapers and eight thousand magazines; every film and television program, every textbook, amusement park, video game, bowling club, and beauty pageant was subject to its scrutiny. The propagandists decided what ads could go on every billboard. In 1989 the department almost disappeared following the uprising at Tiananmen Square as some Party leaders were convinced that propaganda was growing impotent in the modern age. But Deng Xiaoping disagreed, and he made a fateful decision – the Party’s future survival, he declared, would rest more than ever before, on two pillars: prosperity and propaganda. The Party adopted his view that good PR can create a “group mind” and “manufacture consent” for the ruling elite.
Journalists were still expected to “sing as one voice,” and the Department would help them do so by issuing a vast and evolving list of words that must and must not appear in the news. When it came to the economy, they were not to dwell on bad news during the holidays, or on issues that the government classified and “unsolvable,” such as the fragility of Chinese banks or the political influence of the wealth. When Reporters Without Borders ranked countries by press freedom in 2008, China ranked 167th out of 173 countries.
Because the Internet had long ago exceeded what the censors could handle, the work of policing the Web fell to several agencies, including the Internet Affairs Bureau. The best the Party could hope for was to prevent an Internet conversation before it began – by automatically filtering sensitive words. Because political issues popped up overnight, the censors had to maintain a constantly updated glossary of taboo terms. In the event that these censorship efforts failed, the Party was testing a weapon of last resort: the off switch. To prevent people from communicating and organizing, the government abruptly disabled text messages, cut long-distance phone lines, and shut off Internet access almost entirely.
DEMOCRACY: Almost nine out of ten Chinese approved of the way things were going in their country – the highest share of any of the 24 countries surveyed that spring (2008) by the Pew Research Center. (In the United States, by comparison, just two out of ten voiced such approval). Prosperity and the strength of the Party had persuaded more than a few to postpone idealism as long as life for them kept improving. “We accept all the values of human rights, of democracy” Tan Jie told me. “The issue is how to realize it.” He said that he was not willing to risk all that his generation enjoyed at home in order to hasten the liberties he had come to know in America. “Do you live on democracy?” he asked. “You eat bread, you drink coffee. All these are not brought by democracy. Indian guys have democracy, and some African countries have democracy, but they can’t feed their own people.” Chinese people have begun to think, “One part is the good life, another part is democracy.” He went on, “If democracy can really give you the good life, that’s good. But without democracy, if we can still have the good life, why should we choose democracy?”
CORRUPTION: In 1992, when the government began to open up the distribution of land and factories for private ownership, the corruption boom was under way. If the effects were abstract at first, they soon became vivid. In case after case, the disasters that enraged the Chinese public were traced back to graft, fraud, embezzlement, and patronage. The schools that collapsed in the Sichuan earthquake had been compromised by kickbacks; the train that crashed in Wenzhou was managed by one of the country’s more corrupt agencies. In the case of the tainted infant formula that killed children in 2008, dairy farmers and dealers first bribed state inspectors to ignore the presence of chemicals. Then, when children fell ill, the dairy company bribed news organizations to suppress the story. Public servants – officially earning twenty to thirty thousand dollars a year – became such frequent shoppers at Gucci and Louis Vuitton that high-end boutiques in Beijing ran out of stock whenever the National People’s Congress was in session. Paying for power was so common the national authority on language was compelled to add a new word meaning “to buy a government promotion.” In some cases, the options read like a restaurant menu; the post of chief planner for a small town was sold for $103,000, the municipal party secretary was on the block for $101,000. Even the military was riddled with patronage; commanders received a string of payments from a pyramid of loyal officers beneath them. A one-star general could reportedly expect to receive $10-million in gifts and business deals; a four-star commander stood to earn at least $50-million. Every country has corruption, but China’s national legislature had a net worth of almost ninety billion dollars – more than ten times the combined net worth of the entire Congress. In a five-year stretch, China punished 668,000 Party members for bribery, graft, and embezzlement; it handed down 350 death sentences for corruption, and an investigator concluded, “At the very basic level, it appears to have prevented corruption from spiraling out of control.”
THE SPIRITUAL VOID: Mao’s Cultural Revolution destroyed China’s belief systems, but Deng’s economic revolution could not rebuild them. There was a hole in Chinese life that people named “the spiritual void” – and something was going to fill it. Officially, China recognized five religions – Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism – and believers could worship in state-controlled setting.
To live in China in the early years of the 21st century was to witness a spiritual revival that could be compared to America’s Great Awakening in the 19th century. The more people satisfied their basic needs, the more they uncovered the truth, the more they challenged the old dispensation. For new sources of meaning, they looked not only to religion but also to philosophy, psychology, and literature for new ways of orienting themselves in a world of ideological incoherence and unrelenting ambition.
XI JINPING: In November 2012 the Party set about cleaning up the capital for its most hallowed occasion in a decade: the Eighteenth Party Congress, a meeting of more than two thousand delegates that would culminate in the unveiling of the New Politburo charged with leading the People’s Party in the future. The man who would become president: general secretary of the Party was Xi Jinping. He said, “The greatest dream of the Chinese people in recent times has been to realize the great revival of the Chinese nation … No one will be well-off unless the state and the nation are well-off.
To remain the Party in Power, the Communist Party knew it must continue to allow people to prosper. It planned to build another hundred thousand miles of highways, and other 50 new airports, and more than five thousand additional miles of high-speed rail. But the new administration knew that ordinary people had more immediate concerts, and once it was in office, it vowed to boost the lowest incomes and allow depositors to earn more on their savings. Shortly after Xi took office, he acknowledged what many had come to believe; unless the Party declared war on its own iniquity, the public would focus more on the war than the iniquity. I was risky: for decades, party leaders had said, “Fight corruption too little and you’ll destroy the country. Fight it too much and you’ll destroy the Party.”
The Party had reasons to be nervous; it was trapped in a predicament of its own creation. It had recommitted itself to the suppression of heretical ideas and the maintenance of stability, but that approach was producing more heresy and instability. The Party was rightly convinced that China’s future depended on innovating ideas that would be felt around the globe, and yet it feared the reverse: absorbing “global values” was a threat to its survival. Chinese leaders were facing a choice: to continue growing, they could adopt a more democratic form of government, as South Korea did in the 1980s, or they could recommit themselves to authoritarianism. Historically, the latter approach was risky. Over the long term, authoritarian states do not grow as reliably as democracies; they are fragile, and they tend to thrive only in the hands of visionary individual leaders. In the short term, the Party could succeed at silencing its critics, but in the long term, that was less clear, especially if segments within the Party recalculated their own risks and rewards for loyalty and decided that they had more to gain by siding with the people.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
CHINA TODAY: THE ECONOMY – EXCERPTS
NOTE: All the excerpts in this segment are from Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos (2014)
INTRODUCTION: The crest of a transformation in China is one hundred times the scale, and ten times the speed, of the first Industrial Revolution, which created modern Britain. The Chinese people no longer want for food—the average citizen eats six times as much meat as in 1976 – but this is a ravenous year of a different kind, a period when people have awoken with a hunger for new sensations, ideas, and respect. China is the world’s largest consumer of energy, movies, beer and platinum; it is building more high-speed railroads and airports than the rest of the world combined. For some of its citizens, China’s boom has created stupendous fortune; China is the world’s fastest growing source of new billionaires. Several of the new plutocrats have been among the world’s most dedicated thieves; others have been holders of high public office. Some have been both. For most of the Chinese people, however, the boom has not produced vast wealth, it has permitted the first halting steps out of poverty. The rewards created by China’s rise have been wildly inconsistent but fundamentally profound: it is one of the broadest gains in human wellbeing in the modern age. In 1978, the average Chinese income was $200; by 2014, it was $6,000. By almost every measure, the Chinese people have achieved longer, healthier, more educated lives.
The Communist Party no longer promises equality or an end to toil. It promises only prosperity, pride, and strength. And for a while, that was enough. But over time the people have come to want more, and perhaps nothing more ardently than information. New technology has stirred a fugitive political culture; things once secret, are now known; people once alone are now connected. And the more the Party has tried to prevent its people from receiving unfiltered ideas, the more they have stepped forward to demand them.
The difference in life expectancy and income between China’s wealthiest cities and its poorest provinces is the difference between New York and Ghana. China has two of the world’s most valuable internet companies, and more people online than the United States, even as it redoubles its investment in history’s largest effort to censor human expression. But China, even overheated remains a poor country in which the average person earns as much as a Japanese citizen in 1970. Forty years ago, the Chinese people had virtually no access to fortune, truth, of faith – three things denied them by politics and poverty. Within a generation, they had gained access to all three – and they want more. The Chinese people have taken control of freedoms that used to be governed almost entirely by others – decisions about where they work and travel and whom they marry. But as those liberties have expanded, the Communist Party has taken only halting steps to accommodate them.
DENG XIAOPING: Deng Xiaoping has often been described as the sole architect of the boom that followed, but that view is the handiwork of the Party historians. Deng understood the limitation of his knowledge. On matters of the economy, his shrewdest move was to unite with Chen Yun, a fellow Party patriarch. As young revolutionaries, the elders had overseen the execution of landlords, the seizure of factories, and the creation of people’s communes. But now they preserved their power by turning the revolution upside down: permitting private enterprise and opening a window to the outside world. The strategy, as Chen put it, was to move without losing control. But Deng has his limits. The Party would never embrace “individualist democracy.” It would have economic freedom but political control. For China to thrive, there must be limits on “emancipating the mind.” The government was offering its people a bargain: prosperity in exchange for loyalty.
In 1992, Deng let it be known that prosperity was paramount. Between 1993 and 2005, state-owned enterprises cut more than seventy-three million jobs, sending another flood of workers off to find a new source of income. Chinese leaders kept their currency undervalued, which made exports cheap, and these soared. In 1999, China’s exports had been less than a third of America’s. A decade later, China was the world’s largest exporter. In 2005 China still had a quarter of a billion people living on less than $1.25 a day. Income began to soar at a rate never experienced in a big country. The last time I had been in China, per capita income was $3,000/year – equivalent to the United States in 1872. The United States took 55 years to get to $7,000. China did it in ten. In 1978, nearly 80% of the Chinese population had been working on a farm; by 1994 this figure had fallen to less than 50%. By 2007, 135 million rural migrants were living in the cities, most working on assembly lines.
WELCOME TO CIVILIZATION: Of all the upheavals in Chinese life, there was none more intimate than the opportunity to choose one’s mate. For centuries, village matchmakers and parents paired off young people of comparable social and economic status with minimal participation from the bride and groom. China’s one-child policy had exerted unexpected forces on marriage. By promoting the use of condoms on unprecedented scale, it delinked sex from reproduction and spurred a mini sexual revolution. But it also heightened competition: when sonogram technology spread in China in the 1980s, couples aborted female fetuses in order to wait for a boy. As a result, China has 24 million men who will be of marrying age by 2020 but unable to find a spouse.
The greatest shock to the marriage tradition came from an unlikely source: in 1997 the State Council restored the right for people to buy and sell their homes. Under socialism, employers had assigned city workers to indistinguishable concrete housing blocks. When the government restored the market, Chinese bureaucrats didn’t even have an official translation for the word mortgage. Before long, the world’s largest accumulation of real estate wealth was under way. Traditionally, young Chinese couples moved in with the groom’s parents, but by the 21st century less than half of them stayed very long.
Nobody coveted the cultural capital of an elite education more assiduously than members of the “Got Rich—First Crowd.” Many of them had come from nothing, and they knew that urban intellectuals considered them rubes. The size of China’s population made college admission brutally competitive. To create more opportunities, the government doubled the number of colleges and universities, in just ten years to 2,409. Even so, only one in every four aspiring college students was able to earn a place. After Deng opened China’s doors to the world, English fever took hold. Eighty-two percent of those polled in 2008 thought it was vital to learn English. (In America, 11% thought it was vital to learn Chinese). By 2008 an estimated 200 to 350 million Chinese were studying English.
By 2007 the top 10% of urban Chinese were earning 9.2 times as much as the bottom tenth, up from 8.9 times the previous years. Public protests, often staged by workers angry about unpaid wages or farmers whose land had been seized for development, soared to 87,000 up from 11,000 a decade earlier. The more that people became aware of the widening gap, the more desperate they became.
COMMUNICATION: PROPOGANDA, CENSORSHIP, AND THE INTERNET: The Central Propaganda Department, was one of the most powerful and secretive government agencies with the power to fire editors, silence professors, ban books and recut movies. It had control over two thousand newspapers and eight thousand magazines; every film and television program, every textbook, amusement park, video game, bowling club, and beauty pageant was subject to its scrutiny. The propagandists decided what ads could go on every billboard. In 1989 the department almost disappeared following the uprising at Tiananmen Square as some Party leaders were convinced that propaganda was growing impotent in the modern age. But Deng Xiaoping disagreed, and he made a fateful decision – the Party’s future survival, he declared, would rest more than ever before, on two pillars: prosperity and propaganda. The Party adopted his view that good PR can create a “group mind” and “manufacture consent” for the ruling elite.
Journalists were still expected to “sing as one voice,” and the Department would help them do so by issuing a vast and evolving list of words that must and must not appear in the news. When it came to the economy, they were not to dwell on bad news during the holidays, or on issues that the government classified and “unsolvable,” such as the fragility of Chinese banks or the political influence of the wealth. When Reporters Without Borders ranked countries by press freedom in 2008, China ranked 167th out of 173 countries.
Because the Internet had long ago exceeded what the censors could handle, the work of policing the Web fell to several agencies, including the Internet Affairs Bureau. The best the Party could hope for was to prevent an Internet conversation before it began – by automatically filtering sensitive words. Because political issues popped up overnight, the censors had to maintain a constantly updated glossary of taboo terms. In the event that these censorship efforts failed, the Party was testing a weapon of last resort: the off switch. To prevent people from communicating and organizing, the government abruptly disabled text messages, cut long-distance phone lines, and shut off Internet access almost entirely.
DEMOCRACY: Almost nine out of ten Chinese approved of the way things were going in their country – the highest share of any of the 24 countries surveyed that spring (2008) by the Pew Research Center. (In the United States, by comparison, just two out of ten voiced such approval). Prosperity and the strength of the Party had persuaded more than a few to postpone idealism as long as life for them kept improving. “We accept all the values of human rights, of democracy” Tan Jie told me. “The issue is how to realize it.” He said that he was not willing to risk all that his generation enjoyed at home in order to hasten the liberties he had come to know in America. “Do you live on democracy?” he asked. “You eat bread, you drink coffee. All these are not brought by democracy. Indian guys have democracy, and some African countries have democracy, but they can’t feed their own people.” Chinese people have begun to think, “One part is the good life, another part is democracy.” He went on, “If democracy can really give you the good life, that’s good. But without democracy, if we can still have the good life, why should we choose democracy?”
CORRUPTION: In 1992, when the government began to open up the distribution of land and factories for private ownership, the corruption boom was under way. If the effects were abstract at first, they soon became vivid. In case after case, the disasters that enraged the Chinese public were traced back to graft, fraud, embezzlement, and patronage. The schools that collapsed in the Sichuan earthquake had been compromised by kickbacks; the train that crashed in Wenzhou was managed by one of the country’s more corrupt agencies. In the case of the tainted infant formula that killed children in 2008, dairy farmers and dealers first bribed state inspectors to ignore the presence of chemicals. Then, when children fell ill, the dairy company bribed news organizations to suppress the story. Public servants – officially earning twenty to thirty thousand dollars a year – became such frequent shoppers at Gucci and Louis Vuitton that high-end boutiques in Beijing ran out of stock whenever the National People’s Congress was in session. Paying for power was so common the national authority on language was compelled to add a new word meaning “to buy a government promotion.” In some cases, the options read like a restaurant menu; the post of chief planner for a small town was sold for $103,000, the municipal party secretary was on the block for $101,000. Even the military was riddled with patronage; commanders received a string of payments from a pyramid of loyal officers beneath them. A one-star general could reportedly expect to receive $10-million in gifts and business deals; a four-star commander stood to earn at least $50-million. Every country has corruption, but China’s national legislature had a net worth of almost ninety billion dollars – more than ten times the combined net worth of the entire Congress. In a five-year stretch, China punished 668,000 Party members for bribery, graft, and embezzlement; it handed down 350 death sentences for corruption, and an investigator concluded, “At the very basic level, it appears to have prevented corruption from spiraling out of control.”
THE SPIRITUAL VOID: Mao’s Cultural Revolution destroyed China’s belief systems, but Deng’s economic revolution could not rebuild them. There was a hole in Chinese life that people named “the spiritual void” – and something was going to fill it. Officially, China recognized five religions – Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism – and believers could worship in state-controlled setting.
To live in China in the early years of the 21st century was to witness a spiritual revival that could be compared to America’s Great Awakening in the 19th century. The more people satisfied their basic needs, the more they uncovered the truth, the more they challenged the old dispensation. For new sources of meaning, they looked not only to religion but also to philosophy, psychology, and literature for new ways of orienting themselves in a world of ideological incoherence and unrelenting ambition.
XI JINPING: In November 2012 the Party set about cleaning up the capital for its most hallowed occasion in a decade: the Eighteenth Party Congress, a meeting of more than two thousand delegates that would culminate in the unveiling of the New Politburo charged with leading the People’s Party in the future. The man who would become president: general secretary of the Party was Xi Jinping. He said, “The greatest dream of the Chinese people in recent times has been to realize the great revival of the Chinese nation … No one will be well-off unless the state and the nation are well-off.
To remain the Party in Power, the Communist Party knew it must continue to allow people to prosper. It planned to build another hundred thousand miles of highways, and other 50 new airports, and more than five thousand additional miles of high-speed rail. But the new administration knew that ordinary people had more immediate concerts, and once it was in office, it vowed to boost the lowest incomes and allow depositors to earn more on their savings. Shortly after Xi took office, he acknowledged what many had come to believe; unless the Party declared war on its own iniquity, the public would focus more on the war than the iniquity. I was risky: for decades, party leaders had said, “Fight corruption too little and you’ll destroy the country. Fight it too much and you’ll destroy the Party.”
The Party had reasons to be nervous; it was trapped in a predicament of its own creation. It had recommitted itself to the suppression of heretical ideas and the maintenance of stability, but that approach was producing more heresy and instability. The Party was rightly convinced that China’s future depended on innovating ideas that would be felt around the globe, and yet it feared the reverse: absorbing “global values” was a threat to its survival. Chinese leaders were facing a choice: to continue growing, they could adopt a more democratic form of government, as South Korea did in the 1980s, or they could recommit themselves to authoritarianism. Historically, the latter approach was risky. Over the long term, authoritarian states do not grow as reliably as democracies; they are fragile, and they tend to thrive only in the hands of visionary individual leaders. In the short term, the Party could succeed at silencing its critics, but in the long term, that was less clear, especially if segments within the Party recalculated their own risks and rewards for loyalty and decided that they had more to gain by siding with the people.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 16_soc_china_economy.pdf |