The Fight for China's Future

Civil Society vs. the Chinese Communist Party

Willy Wo-Lap Lam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429581717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

The Fight for China's Future throws light on the quintessence of 21st century Chinese politics through the prism of the struggle between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and China's vibrant intelligentsia and civil society.

This book examines Xi Jinping's 24-hour, multi-dimensional, AI-enabled police-state apparatus and explores the CCP's policy towards civil society. Through exclusive interviews with activists from different provinces, it analyzes the experiences and aspirations of key stakeholders in Chinese society, especially intellectuals, human rights attorneys and Christian worshippers. Providing an examination of recent global trends in relation to CCP policies, including China's relationship with the U.S., it also goes on to explore the possible trajectories of future change.

Featuring an assessment of Xi Jinping's leadership style and the opportunities this has given certain groups to promote the rule of law, media freedom and other global norms, this book will be invaluable to students of Chinese politics, society and culture.

1

INTRODUCTION

The civil society versus Xi Jinping’s police-state apparatus

Introduction:
how a hard-authoritarian state squeezes freedom of thought and the public sphere

In its late 2017 report on the global development of the public sphere in more than 100 countries, the World Alliance for Citizen Participation (CIVICUS) downgraded China’s rating from “repressed” to “closed.” CIVICUS deplored the “continued escalation of the assault on basic civil freedoms under Xi Jinping.” The Johannesburg-based watchdog noted that “China has since 2015 relentlessly pursued its critics through mass arrests of lawyers and activists, the shutdown of websites promoting peaceful dialogue and the deployment of security forces [against dissidents and NGO groups].” It suggested that the already besieged civil society in China would be further circumscribed by new laws on NGOs and on state security.¹

Although the CCP administration’s suppression of intellectuals, rights attorneys, house church worshippers and other civil-society participants has been widely commented upon, this chapter attempts to elucidate the peculiarly Chinese characteristics of the battle between hard authoritarianism on the one hand and civil-society crusaders on the other. Up until the early 2010s, the leadership under ex-President Hu and President Xi had won plaudits for its economic success from opinion makers, even in democracies such as the United States. Yet economic problems including massive debt, poor industrial performance, lackluster consumer spending and overdependence on government input to stimulate growth have come to the fore. Hong Kong-based labor NGOs reckon that the number of reported strikes – probably just a portion of the total figure – surged from fewer than 200 in 2011 to 1,256 in 2017. The estimated annual cases of “mass incidents,” or protests and demonstrations, were 180,000 in 2010, the last year when figures were available.² In an apparent effort to preempt disturbances that could come in the wake of an economic downturn, the party-state apparatus has put together a high-tech police-state apparatus that has left little room for maneuver for intellectuals and other civil-society affiliates.

However, the unexpected events of 2018 have not only further exposed weak links in Xi Jinping’s bid to attain the proverbial “long reign and perennial stability” for the party and for himself, they have also given an opening to intellectuals, human rights attorneys, house church campaigners and the NGO community in general. Xi, who has changed the Constitution to enable himself to rule for life, has failed to tackle the challenges posed by President Donald Trump on both the economic and geopolitical fronts. While the Xi leadership has repeatedly succumbed to American pressure on the trade front – such as agreeing to buy more American products while curtailing tariffs on U.S.-made autos – it has failed to prevent the bilateral fracas from deteriorating into a full-fledged Cold War. More significantly, the fervent disciple of Chairman Mao has refused to pick up on the threads of Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms despite strong support for liberalization coming from the great majority of Chinese who are beneficiaries of Deng’s dispensations. Moreover, the bulk of Trump’s complaints about Beijing’s economic policy are precisely targeted at the Xi leadership’s insistence on the Maoist credo of strict party control over the economy.

The paramount leader is in no danger of losing his power. However, his perceived failure to rectify the economy – and in particular his inability to avert a head-on collision with the U.S. – has resulted in criticisms emanating from different sectors of the party and the populace. They include princelings (kin of party elders) close to the Deng Xiaoping clan; pro-market cadres, particularly in the central government; private entrepreneurs; and members of China’s estimated 400 million middle class who are nervous about a decline in their standard of living.³ Members of the civil society, particularly intellectuals, journalists, professors, jurists and rights attorneys, have piggybacked on these anti-Xi sentiments to press their case for universal values such as rule of law and respect for human rights (see Chapter 5).

Increasingly bold calls for reform in the public sphere, however, are being ruthlessly crushed by the CCP regime. The chapter argues that an integral goal – and signature policy – of the party since the days of Mao Zedong has been to emasculate the freedom of individuals and to crush non-party-affiliated social groupings. Explanations will be given as to why it is second nature for party leaders to nip potentially destabilizing forces in the bud. As “core leader” Xi gets ready to mark the centenary of the founding of the CCP in 2021, he is following time-honored tradition by denying anti-establishment forces any platform to operate anywhere in China. Both Mao and Xi consider society – especially arenas having to do with ideology and thought – as a front or combat zone over which the party must have total control.⁴ Despite the fact that, after 70 years, the rule of the People’s Republic seems well entrenched, the party leadership is obsessed with taking out perceived rebels, saboteurs and myriad enemies through never-ending skirmishes on the Chinese battlefield.

Herein lies perhaps the biggest paradox of Xi’s China. On the one hand, the Xi administration waxes eloquent about the fact that party members and citizens alike boast a “fourfold self-confidence” – self-confidence in the path, theory, system and culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Xi exudes confidence that the CCP will remain China’s “perennial ruling party.”⁵ At the same time, Xi, who became what his critics call “Emperor for Life” at the 19th Party Congress of 2017, is paranoid about the most infinitesimal challenge to CCP authority. As the Chinese proverb goes, the supreme leader seems to see “an enemy soldier behind every tree and every stalk of grass.” The most convincing explanation seems to be that the party – which portrays itself as always “great, brilliant and correct” – has too many things to hide. Intellectuals, as well as NGO activists, have laid bare the core causes behind party-initiated disasters ranging from the Great Leap Forward to the Tiananmen Square massacre: the top leadership’s total refusal to share power with disparate sectors of society. Also exposed to all Chinese are the glaring imperfections of the “China model,” or what Xi called at the 19th Party Congress “Chinese wisdom and the Chinese blueprint.” Moreover, the CCP is paranoid about the possibility that social or religious groupings could metamorphose into alternate centers of power that are comparable to the Solidarity Movement and the Catholic Church in Poland.

The sections below delineate the CCP’s multidimensional measures geared toward subjugating the individual and compressing the breathing space of the civil society and public sphere. The brutal and despotic policies of zuigaotongshuai (“Supreme Commander”) Xi will be compared with the relatively tolerant approaches of ex-Presidents Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. The party’s post-Orwellian, artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled police-state apparatus will be examined. This chapter ends by looking at how civil-society groupings are fighting back. An assessment will be made as to whether NGO pace-setters are poised to make contributions toward political liberalization despite Beijing’s relentlessly escalating repression.

The subjugation of the individual

How the party crushes individualism

A widely circulated 2015 article entitled “How many people with conscience has God left in China?” has summed up the plight of Chinese who don’t want to become a cog in the machinery of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Not since the late Qing Dynasty – when Chinese intellectuals started their “self-strengthening movement” as well as a quixotic quest toward democracy – have the Chinese been so disappointed by their dictatorial rulers. The anonymous article, which is a collection of quotations from famous personages, cited intellectuals as telling how the party-state machinery had tried to reduce them to minions and serfs of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”⁶ For Zhou Ruijin, a prominent member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the social contract between officials and ordinary folks has been sundered. “Officials think their mission is to rule and manage people – and there is no concept of service,” he noted. “They think that if you are disobedient and do not follow instructions, they can lock you up.”⁷

Well-known novelist Zhang Kangkang went further regarding the party-state apparatus’s determination to brainwash citizens into submission. Zhang argued that the party “could, if need be, transform everybody into the same type [of people]. They are a highly efficient machinery and they have for the past few decades been churning out a product called slave.”⁸ Zi Zhongyun, a ranking expert on America studies who was once Mao Zedong’s interpreter, agrees. Zi was convinced that the mission of China’s most prestigious institutes of learning was to “to recruit the most talented students and then to destroy them […] This is a heinous crime against heaven and earth.” Zi expressed fears about the “degeneration of the [qualities] of the Chinese race.”⁹

For several years before the Tiananmen Square crackdown, Deng Xiaoping and such of his liberal disciples as former Party Secretaries Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang tried to liberate the minds of not only officials and intellectuals, but also ordinary Chinese from the yoke of stultifying Maoism. The very notion of “thought liberation,” which was the rallying call of then-General Secretary Hu Yaobang (1915–1989) and such of his colleagues as President Xi’s father, party elder Xi Zhongxun (1913–2002), presupposed that all citizens were entitled to their own way of thinking – and that they should be free to absorb whatever is best in both the Eastern and the Western traditions.¹⁰ Hu and Deng – at least before the latter turned conservative by the mid-1980s – supported the slogan of liberal intellectuals: “Practice is the sole criteria of truth.” Hu, who was sacked from his position of general secretary after the first wave of the student movement in December 1986, even went so far as to say that “Marxism cannot solve all the problems of today.”¹¹ For President Xi, however, truth is what the zhongyang, or the central party leadership symbolized by himself, says. And party members, and by extension well-educated professors and professionals, cannot wangyi (“make groundless criticism of”) the zhongyang. ¹²

Dangxing versus individualism: intellectuals as cogs in the socialist machinery

Much of the CCP’s dogma about the relationship between intellectuals and ordinary citizens on the one hand and the party-state apparatus on the other is encapsulated in Mao Zedong’s idea that individuals are no more than humble servants and serfs of the party machinery. Following Marx and Lenin, Mao indicated that every person has a “class nature” and a dangxing (“party nature”). The goal of the party-state authorities is to ensure that citizens – particularly those who belong to “black categories,” such as capitalists and bourgeois-liberal intellectuals – should undergo self-transformation and thought reform until they have totally subsumed their individuality under a bona fide “proletariat class nature.” Mao also noted that not only CCP members, but all Chinese, should acquire the requisite dangxing (“party nature”), meaning that their thoughts, goals and aspirations should all dovetail with the party’s requirements.¹³

In his “Talk at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” of May 1942, the Great Helmsman argued that the triumph of dangxing would “curtail [the phenomena of] ‘individualism,’ ‘heroism’ or ‘anarchy’ among less committed party members.” The corollary of this insistence on “pure upon pure dangxing” is that every par...