Growing numbers of Chinese go online, unafraid to say they deserve
better leadership
A recent Chinese internet meme
lacerated what is widely seen as a lame excuse for why China’s leaders have
been so slow to enact political reform.
The ever-sharp social media blog
Tea Leaf Nation says it all started when Professor Gong Fangbing, at China’s
National Defense University, wrote an essay for a People’s Daily website,
arguing that the reason the Communist Party hasn’t yet embraced democracy is
“largely because of insufficient preparation of theoretical backing.”
Gong posited that the party,
despite being in power for 63 years, hadn’t developed theories to move it from
a revolutionary party to a ruling party that could, maybe, eventually, share
power.
The responses, gathered by Tea
Leaf Nation from Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, were scathing: “Now I get
it. The Chinese soccer team didn’t win the World Cup because of insufficient
theory,” scoffed one user.
“Lunch is delayed due to
insufficient theory,” tweeted another. “Due to insufficient theory,
constipation continues,” wrote a third.
And attorney Yuan Yulai added,
“It’s only natural to conduct democratic reforms and return power to the
people. If you steal something, you return it to the owner. Why does that need
theoretical proof?”
It is a question that’s getting
harder for the Communist Party to answer. And as the party prepares for the
Nov. 8 opening of a party congress that will announce a new generation of
leaders, a growing chorus of voices from unexpected quarters is saying political
reform is long overdue.
Deng Yuwen, deputy editor a
newspaper put out by the Central Party School, The Study Times, has criticized
President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao for having “created more problems
than achievements” – by having failed to reform the system. And that was even
before The New York Times came out with its exhaustively researched
investigative report about the US$2.7 billion it said Wen’s family has amassed
in the time he’s been a senior leader.
Deng, in an essay published on the
website of the business magazine Caijing and promptly taken down by censors,
suggested that the Chinese people and the party seem to have increasingly
divergent ideas about what reform is. Deng offered his own view.
“The essence of democracy is how
to restrict government power; that’s the most important reason why China needs
democracy so badly,” he wrote. “Over-concentration of government power without
checks and balances is the root cause of so many social problems.”
Among those problems, he said, is
China’s growing wealth gap, with many of the wealthiest being Communist Party
officials, their relatives and close friends. The 70 wealthiest members of the
National People’s Congress were found by Bloomberg News Agency last year to
have an average net worth of $1.2 billion. Each.
The party’s response to growing
resentment of such inequality, not to mention snide online commentary about it?
Party cadres – and their families – have been ordered to reduce conspicuous
consumption of luxury goods, especially in the run-up to the Party Congress.
But that’s barely a beginning, in
a year when reports are coming out about the families of top leaders amassing
fortunes, when one of the Communist Party’s former stars, Bo Xilai, had his
spectacular fall from grace, when the son of Hu Jintao’s effective chief of
staff crashed a black Ferrari in the wee hours of a March night, killing
himself and badly injuring the two young women – one Tibetan, one Uighur – who
were in the car with him, in various states of undress, according to the South
China Morning Post.
Ironically, it was just a couple
of weeks before that crash that Xi Jinping, the likely next head of the party
and president of China, gave a speech at the Party School, about the importance
of “maintaining the purity of the Party.”
“The Party’s capacity to govern,
steer reform and opening up, develop the market economy and respond to the
external environment will all be challenged, and we will be faced with the
growing danger of losing our drive, underperforming, becoming alienated from
the people, lacking in initiative, and corruption,” Xi said.
Xi is still an enigma when it
comes to how he really feels about political reform – how much, how fast, and
what kind. He’s played the game to rise as far as he has in the party. But his
father, Xi Zhongxun, was an ally of China’s reformist leader Hu Yaobang in the
1980s, and was the only senior leader to protest when Hu was ousted by senior
leader Deng Xiaoping for moving too fast with reforms.
Interestingly, Xi is said to have
paid a visit over the summer to Hu’s son, Hu Deping. A Reuters report quoted
sources who knew of a written summary of Xi’s remarks to Hu, circulated among
some retired officials. In it, Xi was quoted as saying “the problems that China
has accumulated are unprecedented” and “we must seek progress and change while
remaining steady,” according to Reuters, quoting sources who knew of a written
summary of Xi’s remarks circulated among some retired officials.
Even if Xi proves more open to
allowing political reform than the outgoing leadership – not a high bar --
there’s still the question of whether he’ll have the clout and persuasive power
to push such reforms through a system whose elites have proven adept at
protecting their privilege.
And while an increasingly
well-informed public, fed-up with corruption, inequality and injustice, is
increasingly demanding a better deal from its government – the party is still
trying desperately to control the conversation.
That was true even as state-run
media were trumpeting the news that Chinese novelist Mo Yan had won the Nobel
Prize for Literature. The Propaganda Department put out the following
directive, says the US-based website China Digital Time. It gathers such leaked
circulars from disgruntled Chinese journalists and publishes them online in a
section called Directives from the Ministry of Truth:
“To all websites nationwide: In
light of Mo Yan winning the Nobel prize for literature, monitoring of
microblogs, forums, blogs and similar key points must be strengthened. Be firm
in removing all comments which disgrace the party and the government, defame
cultural work, mention Nobel laureates Liu Xiaobo (serving an 11-year prison
sentence for calling for a multi-party democracy in China) and Gao Xingjian (a
Chinese novelist in exile), and associated harmful material.
Kind of annoying for the censors,
then, that Mo Yan himself had barely taken the time to bask in the party’s
congratulations for his award, when he turned around and called for Liu Xiaobo
to be released as soon as possible.
The party continues to scramble
to keep up. The popularly acerbic blogger Han Han, in his book, This
Generation, sums up the growing tension in China this way: “The main
contradiction in China today is that between the growing intelligence of the
population at large and the rapidly waning morality of our officials.”
A growing number of Chinese
people aren’t afraid to say they deserve better. Some are impatient to see if
their new leaders have the vision and courage to lead the change that’s needed
rather than be unwillingly pushed forward by it. Few are holding their breath.
Mary Kay Magistad
Business & Investment Opportunities
YourVietnamExpert is a division of Saigon Business Corporation Pte Ltd, Incorporated in Singapore since 1994. As Your Business Companion, we propose a range of services in Strategy, Investment and Management, focusing Healthcare and Life Science with expertise in ASEAN. Since we are currently changing the platform of www.yourvietnamexpert.com, you may contact us at: sbc.pte@gmail.com, provisionally. Many thanks.
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