China’s “Harmonious Society” ?

By Sushil Seth

Interestingly, President Hu Jintao’s “harmonious society” is not featuring as prominently in the official Chinese propaganda as it did a while ago. It is not surprising, though, considering that China is experiencing considerable social unrest in different parts of the country.

And it is not just due to the current economic downturn, which certainly is making things worse. The economic slowdown, for instance, has worsened the employment situation, sending millions of rural migrants back to the countryside where things are even worse.

The diversion of resources from the rural hinterland to develop an industrial economy had already created a wide gap between the countryside and the urban areas.

Apart from arbitrary local taxes and entrenched corruption among party hacks, people in rural areas had their land taken away (with little or no compensation) to make it available for the needs of the industrial economy.

The diversion of water for urban use and/or its pollution from industrial chemical wastes further damaged rural economy and living.

It was such pillaging of rural assets to subsidize urban economy, which forced millions of rural migrant workers to flock to the urban industrial centers in search of jobs.

And since these workers were not entitled to social and legal benefits of urban residency, they were easy prey for employers and virtually anyone else powerful enough to screw them.

They were paid abysmal wages (and that too held in arrears in so many cases), with little or no recourse to any legal process.

That they still came in millions to work in urban ghettoes is a sad commentary on the state of the rural economy.

This is how China’s economy became internationally competitive, making it the factory of the world.

Commenting on the axis between the Party elites and developers, Zhao Ziyang (who was deposed as Party general secretary for opposing the 1989 Tiananmen massacre and then spent rest of his life under house arrest until his death) reportedly said (Zhao Ziyang: Captive Conversations by Zong Fengming]:

“The government seizes land from the people, pushing the price down to a minimum, then hands it over to developers to sell it at a huge mark-up…”

The result is: “…we now have a tripartite group in which the political elite, the economic elite, and the intellectual elite are fused.”

And it is, “This power elite [which] blocks China’s further reform and steers the nation’s policies toward service of itself.”

But popular resistance has been building up for a number of years now. In December 2005, for instance, a riot in the southern town of Dongzhou against plans to build a power plant on land taken without compensation, resulted in the killing of 20 people fired on by the security forces.

Lately, there have been instances of protests organized across some provinces, as in the case of taxi drivers’ strike against the high cost of renting their cabs. And many more which go unreported.

The cumulative economic and social pressures over the years, and the desperate need for some political outlet to air their grievances, is starting to even fray the tripartite bond between the “political elite, the economic elite, and the intellectual elite” of Zhao Ziyang’s description.

The most telling example was the signing of the Charter 08 last December by several thousand Chinese intellectuals and others seeking the end of one-party rule and its replacement by real democracy based on freedom, respect for human rights, equality and rule of law.

As usual, the Chinese government tends to further tighten the system to suppress dissent, while obfuscating the issue of political freedom with platitudes.

Its recent example is the so-called 2-year human rights action plan (National Human Rights Action Plan of China, 2009-2010) to make government more responsive to popular concerns about governance.

But the document is silent on the question of freedom, an independent judiciary and political plurality by way of competing political parties to challenge the monopoly of the ruling communist party.

The document focuses instead on improving the situation within the existing system of one-party rule.

The point, though, is that in theory the Chinese constitution already incorporates democratic provisions. But, in practice, it doesn’t work like this because the party interprets it to suit its own power imperatives.

The question then is: why would anyone believe that the new action plan (notwithstanding its specified 2-year duration) would work any better than the much comprehensive constitution of the country?

As an example, all the provisions of the constitution are easily nullified through the system of administrative detention without trial, imposing sentences like “re-education through labor”.

The arbitrariness of the system under one party-rule, where everything goes if the party or its minions so decree, has slowly built up resistance within the populace to corruption and capriciousness of the powers that be.

Li Datong, a Chinese political analyst, recently told a visiting scholar in Beijing, “The government has been skilful in convincing the middle class it’s futile to protest… but you only need one spark for that to change.”

Whether the present economic crisis would provide that spark is difficult to say. What one can say is that it certainly is another building block, and a significant one at that, in the growing social unrest in the country.

Because the political system is so top-heavy and unresponsive, there are no built-in safety valves to let off steam through mass protests. And there is very little transparency and accountability.

In a recent investigative reporting of China’s mining disasters with workers killed all too often, the New York Times quoted Hu Xingdou, an economics professor at the Beijing Institute of Techonolgy:

“We don’t have the grass-roots democracy; we don’t have independent labor unions; we don’t have checks and balances, we don’t have any system of official accountability.”

Hu’s observation sums up what is wrong with China in essence.

Which means that unless the political system develops grass-roots democracy, it will remain prone to periodic sudden shocks.

And in the absence of institutional democratic shock absorbers like popularly elected assemblies, a free media, independent judiciary and rule of law, China will remain a punters’ game.