Google

What struck me most about the whole Google-China thing was the surprise some people expressed that the e-mail addresses of human rights activists were being hacked at all. I mean, how many of the activists thought for a minute that their accounts were safe? No one who does that kind of work trusts their phones, their computers, anything (see, for example, Marquand's story about journalists' experiences with hacking in China).

Google should get a lot of credit, but not for saying enough is enough to a particularly egregious problem that the company alone had been suffering in silence. They should get credit for finally stating something blindingly obvious, for finally acting as if something everyone else had put up with for ages was not, actually, normal.

The sharpness of China's reaction---Google's decision was on the cover of the Chinese-language, paper edition of the nationalist Global Times the next day; the English-language China Daily followed with a deceptive "point-counterpoint"-style piece on Google the next day, if I recall correctly---was surprising for me. But maybe it shouldn't have been. Stating the obvious is sometimes a big deal.

Chen Yun

I've begun reading Prisoner of the State at last. The person who has impressed me the most so far in it--and I'm only about halfway through--is Chen Yun. He comes across as one of the more principled characters with whom Zhao Ziyang tangles.

Comrade Chen is famous for resisting the excesses of Maoist economics, arguing for light, consumer-oriented goods when the country was going all out for steel (at least that's what I recall from history textbooks... someone correct me if I'm wrong). But he clearly wasn't a market zealot. Throughout Prisoner of the State, which is centered on the 1980s, Chen calls for restraint, blocking lucrative deals with foreign companies but grudgingly going along with other of Zhao's schemes when the logic of reform is inescapable.

In other words, Chen really meant what he said to Mao and to Deng alike: private enterprise has its role, but it is a secondary role to government. Agree with him or disagree with him, Chen kept true to his own experience and instincts, at a time when it paid off big time to toe the prevailing line. And when it was dangerous not to do so.

In contrast, I find myself repeatedly uncomfortable with Zhao's market fever. Of course, the market must have felt refreshingly bold only a little over a decade after the Cultural Revolution. But was ceding a large section of Hainan to a private developer, as Zhao tried to do, really so visionary?

Some people are revered by later generations not because they were always right, but because they took the right stand at a crucial moment. Zhao certainly did this when he refused to assent to the martial law declaration in 1989. For that he deserves all our respect.

More democratic now or then?

I've been reading Anita Chan, Richard Madsen and Jonathan Unger's expanded edition of Chen Village Under Mao and Deng. Throughout, I've been struck by how incredibly participatory governance in rural areas was during the Mao era.

Of course, it was a participation driven by the great tidal waves waves of mass campaigns, each of which left behind new victims in addition to the pitiful villagers of "bad" class backgrounds, who were hauled out and made to pay for their pre-revolutionary crimes again and again and again with every movement. And freedom of opinion, while unleashed in a devastating way during the Cultural Revolution, was on the whole much more restricted than today. The book vividly depicts the fatigue that constant mobilization created in ordinary people, a fatigue that ultimately overwhelmed their faith in the Party in many instances.

But compared to the unaccountable rural officials, opaque finances and land battles one reads of every week these days in the Chinese press and in books like Zhongguo nongmin diaocha or the research of Yu Jianrong, the battles of Maoism seem remarkably evenly fought, with leaders rising and falling, agricultural brigades and teams forming the centers of lively debates, and farmers jumping on evidence of corruption.

Those aren't particularly original insights, I suppose, but they've pushed me beyond my skepticism of calls for further privatization of land to think about what kind of arrangement, exactly, would be best for China's farmers. Yes, village elections should be strengthened (and matched by livelier People's Congress elections at the township level, as well as direct elections for township chiefs). But how to ensure that production, too, is guarded by laobaixing?

ALSO: On an unrelated topic, I haven't read the whole of the Washington Post's take on the battle over healthcare reform within the Democratic Party, but I must say---and, again, this isn't fair having not read the whole article---that the opening strengthens charges that the paper tends to see everything as a beltway power battle in need of "moderate" compromises, rather than as real issues. I mean, really? Baucus and health reform groups should be natural allies and are hurt by silly efforts by "outsiders" to impact legislation? Huh?

The New Left--what a relief

Popular online forums give the impression that ideology in China is sharply divided between "liberals" who champion political liberties but uncritically praise the U.S. and free markets, on the one hand, and, on the other, "leftists" (more accurately described as populist nationalists or fascists) who lash out at foreign critics, while maintaining an ambiguous stance on social justice, waffling from social darwinism ("the weak must suffer for China to get ahead") to outrage at the arrogant rich.

It is therefore refreshing to read the essays of Chinese thinkers who espouse a more true leftism, with nuanced views of the country's socialist past, salvaging successes from the Mao era like rural health care but not whitewashing the brutality of the Cultural Revolution; concerned about the corrosive effects of commercialism and social stratification; and driven by a real passion for democracy--but adamant that democracy must be truly popularly based, not a game for the well-educated.

Wang Hui, the editor of Du Shu, in particular, makes powerful arguments. He describes as self-serving those liberals who champion freedom of speech and rule of law but seem unexcited about local elections and positively hostile to the idea of greater democracy on factory floors.

Wang is clear that markets are not "natural" but the result of decisions, ultimately enforced with guns: "All-out marketization in China did not originate from spontaneous exchange but from acts of violence--state repression of protest." The protest Wang refers to is, of course, the one that resulted in the June 4, 1989 crackdown, violence which, according to him, not only crushed the Tiananmen students' campaign for democracy but also ordinary people's resistance to price reforms (reforms pushed, incidentally, by Zhao Ziyang, who ultimately lost power because of his unwillingness to back martial law against the protesters).

Not content to keep things on a domestic scale, Wang continues:

... the Open Door policies of Deng Xiaoping demanded a much deeper insertion of China into the world market. How did that happen? A key step in the process was China's invasion of Vietnam in 1978--the first war of aggression by the PRC after 1949. The only reason for this otherwise senseless attack on a small neighbor was Deng's desire for a new relationship with the United States. The invasion was offered as a political gift to Washington, and became China's entrance ticket to the world system. Here too violence was the precondition of a new economic order.

I don't know that there's any consensus that a desire to please the U.S. was "the only reason" for Deng Xiaoping's decision. China waited until after it had resumed diplomatic ties with Washington before it launched the invasion, suggesting that Beijing was actually worried that America would not support the violence--but then, I'm no expert on these things.

However, I admire Wang's stubborn humanism, with his insistence that liberalism doesn't offer an easy ticket out of China's dilemmas and that authoritarianism and unfairness must be dealt with together and are equal challenges.

Again, I can't recommend Chaohua Wang's collection One China Many Paths (from which the quotes above come) enough! It places Wang Hui alongside thoughtful liberals like Zhu Xueqin, who acknowledge the dangers of China's rising inequality, as well as people like Gan Yang, who argues for national elections as a means of creating national cohesion and checking local despots. The book is a good survey of debates from the 1990s to early 2000s---and a good corrective to the blues one can get reading too many blogs.

New rules for courts re: mass incidents

China has just asked courts to help prevent protests. On the face of it, this seems like another outrage in a long stream of reversals of progress on rule of law by the new, Wang Shengjun-led Supreme People's Court. And that's how a Forbes article sees the situation:

According to the internal handbook of the Chinese communist government, China's legal system is defined as its exclusive tool to safeguard one-party rule. This week, to make this clearer to potential troublemakers, Beijing asked courts across the country to help curb rising workers' protests.

But it's not clear that Forbes is entirely right. I don't mean they're wrong. I mean the facts just aren't all in yet.

Specifically, the new rules call for a) tracking trends in labor disputes, b) thinking about the broader social consequences of cases involving big companies, c) more mediation and d) more coordination with local governments.

There's nothing wrong that I can think of with item "a". Presumably plenty of countries' courts take note of patterns in the cases they receive. But "b" could both mean adopting measures, as the American government has (though not through court rules), to tide over weakened but "too big to fail" corporations or... it could mean protecting companies from workers' cases if it seems like those cases could spread. As China Daily says:

In Fujian and Guangdong provinces, recent disputes over such issues involved hundreds of workers dragging companies to court.

"It is very important to handle such cases carefully as some large enterprises have divisional companies across the country. Court decisions in one place might lead to mass incidents in other places," Liu told China Daily.

Item "c" is also troubling. Neighborhood mediation committees in particular, which are used to sorting out domestic disputes and the like, are ill-equipped to handle labor law questions and liable to simply split the difference between employers and employees.

Finally..."d" does give pause rule-of-law-wise. Not sure what it would mean in practice, though.

Wonderful news

The FMLN has won El Salvador's vote. The victory was deferred a couple decades. And it grates to read old, 1980s U.S. war criminals now taking credit for the country's democratic transition after they backed up the killers of three U.S. nuns, at least a thousand farmers in El Mozote, Archbishop Oscar Romero, and countless others. But so it goes and it's incredible to see El Salvador show where its heart has always been.

Asia Times article on reform

Following up on the previous post, Asia Times has an interesting article wondering if modest but still significant systemic (tizhi) reforms are around the corner for China. The piece puts a lot of weight on a speech by the current head of Hunan Province:

A pointer to the shape of future changes came recently in the form of explicit remarks about "political reforms" by Zhang Chunxian, the CCP head of Hunan province.

At a televised conference of Hunan officials on August 31 held to mobilize a province-wide campaign for further "emancipation of minds", Zhang said reforms in the past 30 years had focused on how "to return li [economic interests] to the people". The focus now would be on how "to return quan to the people" , with efforts devoted to "developing socialist democratic politics". The Chinese word quan has a double meaning and could refer to rights or (political) power or both.

Asia Times then rattles off various ways that the comments could be interpreted---land reform, "public opinion" surveys as effective votes on cadre promotion, as well as more ambitious stuff---and notes that Zhang appears to be in the process of being groomed for higher posts, so it is unlikely that he "made a slip of the tongue."

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I for one am extremely nervous about the prospect of premature land reform. The free market crowd loves the idea for all the usual reasons: farmers being given incentives to invest in the land, land being used as collateral for loans, bigger and more efficient farms, etc. But without courts that will actually protect farmers' rights, it seems likely that land reform would just yield more, not less heartless land grabs by officials and developers with no more push back than today.

Land grabs are serious. Any more of them and a critical social safety net, the ONLY social safety net in many areas, will be lost to hundreds of millions of rural people who would no longer have any "right" to a patch of (leased) property for their families. It is not hard imagining landlords returning. Worse yet, there is the possibility of a phenomenon that China has largely avoided but that other countries at its income level in Latin America and Southeast Asia endure: shantytowns.

Therefore, on top of all the reasons for political reform on its own merits, I hope elections and press freedoms and freedom of association (such as for farmers associations) will move ahead so that rural people can gain a stronger check on local authorities---before literally the ground beneath them is torn up.

Let's hope this is what Mr. Zhang has in mind. More importantly, let's hope this is what his superiors have in mind.

Up ahead

There are two views of what the end of the Olympics will bring for China. One is that a newly confident Chinese people will finally turn their attention to long-standing problems---and the government, no longer able to rally its citizens around preserving the national "image" for the Games, will have to begin to relent or face trouble. The other view is that the state will have no reason not to continue to rely on the tools that got it more-or-less-smoothly through August: high-tech surveillance of potential demonstrators and terrorists (to the extent that the two are distinguished in the government's mind), skillful handling of popular opinion through the media and internet, and selective use of the law (especially RTL) to lock up troublemakers---and that this will work just fine.

I really don't know what will happen (duh), but there have been some interesting developments since the closing ceremonies. Protests focusing on local issues, like the protest in Weng-an before the Games but for now largely non-violent, have erupted in Jishou City in Hunan and even in the Chaoyang District of Beijing. Journalists, meanwhile, have pushed new boundaries. Caijing Magazine reporters have revived taboo questions about collapsed school buildings during the Sichuan earthquake and Window on the South reporters penned a cover story on limiting government power. And the state seems to have responded mildly, if at all.

Beijing apologized for the pollution that drove Chaoyang residents to the streets. Xinhua ran a fairly low-key account of the Jishou incident, without the usual hyperbole about bad elements. And those newspaper articles were allowed to be published in the first place, no small feat.

Meanwhile, Secretary Wang Yang in Guangdong continues his push for "liberation of thinking" and the Shenzhen trade union appears to be stepping up to the plate with proposals for an active role in bargaining and dispute resolution---even dancing fairly close to acknowledging a right to strike---while Guangzhou's trade union is pushing for sharply separating unions from management.

It is far too early too tell. These examples may be too selective---countless counter-examples can doubtless be dug up. But I am not pessimistic that some meaningful political reforms are around the corner.

Correction: The Window on the South piece came out in the midst of the Olympics---maybe the loosening started early? Maybe I'm completely off?