PROSPECTS FOR POLITICAL REFORM IN CHINA AFTER THE 18TH CONGRESS

중국 정치 전문가인 번스타인 교수가 18일 서울 한국프레스센터에서 열린 J차이나포럼에서 주제 발표를 하고 있다. [김경빈 기자]

[J-CHINA FORUM 국제학술회의] 시진핑의 중국 어디로 가나?
제1세션 18차 당대회 이후 중국의 정치체제 개혁전망 발제문

PROSPECTS FOR POLITICAL REFORM IN CHINA AFTER THE 18TH CONGRESS

Thomas P. Bernstein, Professor emeritus, Columbia University

In March 2012, Premier Wen Jiabao stated during his press conference that followed the annual session of the National People’s Congress (NPC) that China needed political reforms, without which further economic reform could not succeed. Failure to reform would mean not only that past successes might be lost but that new problems in Chinese society could not be fully resolved. This in turn, he warned, could lead to another Cultural Revolution. It was not the first time that the Premier had spoken out on behalf of political reforms. What is interesting is that political reforms have also been widely discussed in recent years in elite circles, including advocacy of liberal reforms.
In China’s authoritarian Party- state, the issue of political reform centers around the question of how far and in what ways the Party-state should retreat from control over society and to what extent and how societal voices, interests, and demands should be allowed to enter the political arena. It is not that there have been no political reforms but that they have not kept up with the staggering pace of socio-economic change of the last 30 years. In particular, those who have been advocating political reforms do so in response to the effects of China’s authoritarian mode of development. One of the most important of these effects is the rise of intertwined political and economic power holders who often harm the interests of ordinary people. In the absence of legal channels through which to secure redress widespread protests have erupted. Current political reform proposals seek to address this and the related problem of accountability. This presentation sets forth the background and current status of this issue and gauges its prospects for the future.

THE TRAJECTORY OF CHINA’S POLITICAL REFORMS
The era of “reform and opening up” began In the late l970s with a political reform of historic importance. This was the replacement of Mao Zedong’s totalitarian rule with a more moderate form of dictatorship for which the label “authoritarian” is appropriate. Mao had sought to transform society and the individual along extreme socialist lines, an utopian endeavor that required concentrating enormous power in the Party-state’s hands. The Cultural Revolution was his last attempt to achieve his goals, but it failed catastrophically. After Mao’s death and Deng Xiaoping’s ascendance as paramount leader, Mao’s totalistic objectives were abandoned. Mass terror ended. The political process became somewhat more open. More pragmatic and experimental approaches to policy making came into being and the media became significantly freer. The Party reduced its claims on society and allowed much more personal initiative and choice, a change that was also necessitated by economic reforms, such as the dissolution of rural communes and more generally the rise of a market economy.
Over the years, more political reforms were introduced. A rudimentary legal system was set up. Participatory institutions such as the people’s congresses were allowed to debate some policies. In the 1990s, village elections, in which candidates competed for votes, were introduced. More recently still, the Party-state sponsored experiments with consultative or deliberative democracy (xieshang minzhu 協商民主), in which the participating public has a voice in decisions of local significance. It introduced public hearings on policy proposals and experimented with giving the public a voice in the promotion of officials. These innovations embodied the principle that the public has a right to know and to be involved in the “management of state affairs.” In order to rule effectively, in this view, the CCP should be receptive to a wide range of opinions and suggestions solicited from or volunteered by the public. Currently, official policy calls for these participatory arrangements to be “perfected” (wanshan 完善), but only with prudent “regular adjustments.”
The limitation of all these reforms is that they must to take place under the ongoing leadership of the Communist Party. The official line sees participation mainly in terms of consultation rather than of power sharing. For instance, China has eight small “democratic parties and groups” (minzhu dangpai 民主黨派) that exist on condition that they accept the Communist Party’s dominance. According to an official statement, the CCP “holds power,” while consulting these parties on policies, social problems, and even on personnel, thereby helping the CCP make good decisions and avoid mistakes.
The chief issue, however, is that these essentially limited modes of citizen participation have long been outpaced by the extraordinary social and economic changes that have transformed China. During three decades of ten percent growth China has become integrated into the world economy and exposed to many foreign influences. Society has become far better educated and informed. A communications revolution has swept the country, strikingly symbolized by the fact that there are now around 500 million netizens, while well over 200 million write blogs, a subset of whom comment critically on deficiencies in society and government. Chinese, formerly bound to their urban work units (danwei 單位) or rural communes, have become mobile. Millions have experienced upward and horizontal mobility, but some groups, such as state industry workers experienced downward mobility, when they were laid off when the state restructured that sector in the 1990s. New professional and managerial groups have emerged, as has a middle and an upper class.
In any society, rapid social and economic change alters people’s orientation to the political system. In China citizens developed new interests, concerns, and grievances. Many wanted their voices heard and they wanted more opportunities to participate, not to oppose the state but to help in the national construction effort. Many were willing to volunteer to help in emergencies such as the horrific Wenchuan(文川) earthquake of 2008, which elicited an outpouring of public support for the victims. Non-governmental organizations have proliferated as part of an emerging civil society, albeit one that is closely tied to the state. Implicitly or explicitly many Chinese have demanded greater inclusion in the political process.
Central leaders have recognized that the increasing diversity of the society over which they preside confronts them with a new situation. In 2007, General-Secretary Hu Jintao observed that “It has become more difficult to accommodate the interests of all sides.” But leaders have not responded to the new situation by putting into place a more pluralistic political system, one which would provide opportunities for trade unions, farmers’ associations, business groups, veterans, migrants or national minorities freely to organize and articulate their interests. The reason for this is fear. The Party-state’s restricted approach to political participation reflects fear that without Party control, participation might get out of hand and slide into “political liberalization” (zhengzhi ziyouhua 政治 自由化), which in turn might lead to collapse, chaos, or, Western-style democracy, which the CCP has long rejected out of hand as unsuitable for China. This fear became particularly salient during the momentous Tiananmen Democracy Movement of 1989, during which students and workers demanded the right to form autonomous student organizations and trade unions. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, followed in 1991 by the end of Party rule and the disintegration of the USSR, were catastrophic “negative examples” for Deng Xiaoping and like-minded leaders. They believed that the collapse of communism was caused by Mikhail Gorbachev’s “political liberalization,” including his surrender of the “imperial sword” of coercive power, his freeing of the media and his enabling society to organize autonomously, which unleashed the forces that eventually brought the system down. The lesson of the Soviet “catastrophe” continues to guide Chinese leaders to this day.
One of Deng Xiaoping’s enduring legacies was to impose a taboo on political liberalization, even as he espoused market liberalization as “socialist.” Accordingly, anything seen as attempts to liberalize the system has been suppressed. The Wenchuan earthquake referred to above illustrates this point. While the regime gladly accepted donations and volunteers from the public, it clamped down on autonomous political initiatives. When activists sought to hold corrupt officials accountable for the shoddy school construction that led to the deaths of thousands of children and when they tried to organize their parents to pressure the authorities, they were rebuffed and even jailed.

THE RISE OF GRIEVANCES AND PROTESTS.
In the last two decades, state-society relations have to a significant extent been defined by grievances that arose in consequence of the country’s authoritarian mode of pursuing economic development. Popular grievances expressed themselves in the rising number of demonstrations, or what Chinese politicians term “mass incidents” (qunzhong shijian 群衆事件), from an estimated 3,500 in 1993 to 87,000 in 2007 and, reportedly, 180,000 in 2010. The number of participants in each ranged from a few dozens to ten thousand or more. Even though these events do not endanger the People’s Republic, being scattered, horizontally uncoordinated, and lacking in sustained leadership, they do rivet the attention of the political elite, if only because they could mushroom into large-scale social movements. Specific policies responsible include large-scale conversion of arable land for non-agricultural uses for which farmers often receive far less compensation than legally stipulated. Developers pay large sums for the land requisitioned from farmers but frequently much of the money is diverted by revenue-hungry local governments for their own purposes, whether corrupt or constructive. Elected village committees have often sided with the authorities and the developers rather than with their constituents. Farmer protests against evictions often have been down put down forcibly by police. One senior Party official labelled some local officials “red apples with rotten cores” for selling farmland who sold off farm land “without providing for residents welfare.”
Similar official violation of citizens’ interests occur during the vast construction projects that have reshaped the cities and that have required the relocation of millions of residents. As in the countryside, local governments, in collusion with developers, often fail to pay all or part of the promised compensation, while tolerating forced evictions and illegal demolition of houses, causing protests. Still other cases involve members the new middle class, which western scholars regard as stalwart supporters of the regime, to which they owe their new status and prosperity. But when local governments allow polluting enterprises to be built near their residence, even the well-off have joined in large protests. And finally, incidents have erupted spontaneously against officials and their offspring for displays of arrogant indifference to injustices inflicted on the public. In one case that caused outrage on the internet, the son of a police official who killed a pedestrian while driving a car exclaimed, “sue me if you dare, my father is Li Gang.” Protests against officials seemingly immune to punishment illustrate the emergence of a wide gap between state and society which is at the core of demands for political reform that would hold officials accountable.
Protesters do not put forth explicitly political demands, as by calling for reforms that would empower them legally to challenge entrenched local elites. What they want are specific remedies for their grievances and they invoke existing state regulations that require officials to treat people fairly. For their part, the state has acknowledged that protests are often rooted in violation of the “legitimate rights and interests” of the aggrieved. Protestors trust higher authorities, especially those at the Center, far more than they local officials, hoping that if they can bring their plight to the attention of the Central authorities, that latter would take corrective action. This is one reason for the rapid growth in the number of petitioners (shangfang 上訪) who travel to Beijing. But since the Center doesn’t intervene directly in the localities, it is up to officials further down the hierarchy to deal with popular grievances. Their interventions often consist of arresting ring leaders of protests while appeasing ordinary demonstrators with ad hoc compensation. Or they might discipline or transfer offending officials, while also relying heavily on the police to keep order. In the case of the middle class pollution protests, officials have promised that the offending plants wouldn’t be built. The bottom line is that protests broke out because ordinary people lacked regular channels through which to seek redress.
The regime responded to the burst in protest by stepping up its insistence on “stability above all else” (wending yadao yiqie 穩定壓倒一切) and preservation of “harmony” (hexie 和諧) . The “Color Revolutions” that broke out in Ukraine and elsewhere between 2003-2005 and in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011, which mass demonstrations forced governments to resign or call for new elections, added another reason for concern. Since these “Revolutions” were supported by foreign powers, chiefly the United States― which funded NGOs to influence the societies in question― they reignited longstanding regime fears that “hostile foreign forces” were plotting to westernize and divide China. Top leaders said that this struggle vigilance and “forceful measures” were needed. When rumors circulated in 2011 that someone called for an Egyptian-style “Jasmine Revolution” large-scale police and other security forces in Beijing were instantly mobilized in order against this non-existing threat.
In order to cope with new challenges to social stability, in 2011 and 2012 the Party-state increased the domestic security budget such that it now exceeds that of the regular military. The huge resources devoted to censoring the Internet, especially the blogosphere, seeks to prevent or to stop subversive messages from reaching the public. Netizens understand that the mobilization of protests instantaneously be repressed. . But a lot of anger against governments policies can be found on the web and it is not inconceivable that controls over this immense, nationwide communications facility could break down, and open up opportunities for the organization of large social movements. In addition, tightening security has led to more persecutions of dissidents for advocating peaceful democratic regime change. A harder line towards lawyers requires that they follow Party policy. Channels such as the petitioning system have been sharply constrained. An official from whose jurisdiction petitions originate gets a black mark on his record. Independent candidates for the people’s congresses of city districts have been prevented from running in contravention of the law. Restive minorities, especially in Tibetan areas and in Xinjiang, have been subjected to ever tighter coercive control. Previously accepted political reforms either stagnated or remained at the experimental level.

ELITE CRITIQUES AND ADVOCACY OF POLITICAL REFORM
For several years, discussion and debate about political reform has taken place in elite circles. The most visible advocate has been Premier Wen Jiabao who will leave office in March 2013. From 2010 to the present, he repeatedly called for liberalizing the political system. But advocacy has also come came from Party elders, retired high-ranking officials, prominent academics and public intellectuals, reform-minded “princelings”―offspring of revolutionary or retired leaders― lower-level Party officials as well from journalists, editors, and commentators. Criticisms and advocacy were directed at both at the existing political system and at problems in state-society relations.
Five interrelated demands have been made: First, the “excessive concentration of unrestrained power” should be reduced. This could be achieved by implementing what was already planned in the l980s but put aside as too risky, namely the separation of the Party from the government. The Party should also be required to obey the law and the Constitution. Checks and balances should be installed to insure the supervision of powerholders;
Second, an independent judiciary should be created, which should be protected from interference by administrative organs, social groups, or individuals and should safeguard Constitutional rights. And an effective legal anti-corruption mechanism should be established;
Third, censorship by the “invisible hand of the Propaganda Department” should be ended. One proposal suggested that the process begin by granting full freedom to two liberal publications, Nanfang Zhoumo(南方週末) and Yanhuang Chunqiu(炎黃春秋), and then be gradually extended to other media.
Fourth,“vested interests” in the political and economic system (jide liyi 旣得利益, liyi jituan 利益集團), another consequence of China’s developmental evolution, should be countered. Contrary to expectations that China’s private sector would eclipse the state sector, the government has used its clout to build up state industries. State conglomerates, often monopolies, have been established in major branches of the economy and huge investments now flow to the public sector, leaving private entrepreneurs to fend for themselves, even though they account for most of the nation’s job growth (guojin mintui 國進民退). State sector managers, many of them princelings, collude with Party-government officials, thereby securing subsidies and preferential access to scarce resources and gaining protection from competition. The emergence of these arrangements signifies a deepening of crony capitalism, while greatly contributing to the country’s massive corruption.
The state conglomerates and their ties to officialdom have enabled them to obstruct further economic reform, especially financial liberalization, since the status quo maximizes their gains, throwing China into a “transition trap.” Wang Yang, Guangdong’s Party secretary and a candidate for the incoming Standing Committee of the Politburo, told a Party gathering in January 2012, that “Thirty years ago, the reform focused on shaking off the shackles of ideology; today’s reforms must focus on breaking the constraints of the existing pattern of vested interests. If the direction of reform is decided only by this interest structure, it can no longer proceed.”
Fifth, society needs to be empowered. Critics have charged that the state’s obsession with stability has been prompting officials to resort to violence or bribery as a way of handling protests. “Treating stability as the overriding priority overrides livelihoods, officially required reforms, yet, doesn’t curb corruption, mining disasters, and illegal demolition of residents’ houses for redevelopment,” The right approach should be to negotiate, make concessions, and make compromises. But the advocate who made this point wanted more, namely creation of institutional “mechanisms for social justice and balancing of interests” so that legitimate interests can be openly pursued. In the absence of such mechanisms, blind insistence on stability “will mean an accumulation of contradictions and render society more unstable.” Another conjured up the risks of “social eruptions.” A similar critique was directed against the entrenched power of local Party-government establishments allied to business interests. These, also called vested interests, were using stability maintenance as a pretext to oppose reform. In response, an idea was voiced that restrictions on people seeking to safeguard their rights should be lifted. They should be able to organize and thereby check the power of well-organized interest groups. The government should maintain neutrality, evidently allowing the groups to contend with one another.
Finally, and most recently, the associate editor of Xuexi Shibao(學習時報) published by the Higher Party School, escalated criticism and advocacy in a sharply worded indictment of the outgoing leadership’s failure to tackle ten major problems in a serious and sustained way. These include moral degradation, income inequality, and the “outdated” family planning and household registration policies. The author’s key point is that the accumulated problems had one cause: the failure to engage in “real” political reform,” which would address the “growing public demand” for more “democracy and accountability.” Democracy, he wrote, restricts the powers of government and this is what China needs most of all. However, the author rejected universal suffrage because the people were not prepared for so drastic a step, which could also lead to China’s “territorial disintegration,” an apparent reference to separatist aspirations among Tibetans and Uighurs. He proposed instituting the rule of law and direct local elections. The rejection of universal suffrage provoked “outrage” among “many impatient netizens.”
Although lacking in detail and not presented in programmatic form, these proposals envisage a very substantial change in China’s political and societal institutions, clearly violating Deng Xiaoping’s stricture against “political liberalization.” A weakened CCP would have to adjust to political pluralism, to the reality of countervailing political power, autonomous interest groups, and real pressure from the public. These ideas run directly counter to the Party’s insistence on unity, unanimity, and singleness of purpose.
What is curious is that while the critiques have not been addressed, neither have they been suppressed. To be sure, censorship has at times intervened. The just-mentioned critique of the outgoing leadership was removed from the internet. In the past, some of Premier Wen’s proposals were not reported in the central media. And when widely circulated newspapers and journals carried daring articles that went “too far,” offending publications were sometimes closed down, at least temporarily, and their editors penalized. But the extent of official tolerance has been striking. One explanation is that advocacy did not extend to calls for mass mobilization, which probably would have ended official tolerance. But another explanation is also plausible, namely that the public’s concern about China’s stagnation is so widespread that outright suppression would exacerbate the legitimacy crisis that many Chinese seem to believe is at the core of the CCP’s problems.

REFORM PROSPECTS AFTER THE 18th Congress
The obstacles to major liberalizing reforms are formidable, since by definition, major reforms are initiated from the top down, requiring strong leadership. A “transformative” leader would seem to be necessary, i.e., one who has the vision, commitment, authority and political clout to innovate, to reinterpret ideology, take risks, and persuade, pressure, outmanoever or coerce other leaders to go along. A “transactional” leader, on the other hand, is one who has a limited vision and engages in bargaining and exchanges on behalf of narrow goals. Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev were transformative leaders. Deng’s acceptance of a market economy and of private enterprise broke with longstanding ideological taboos. By analogy, another transformative leader would be needed to break with the longstanding taboo against “political liberalization.”
The incoming General Secretary and President, Xi Jinping, seems to be more of a transactional leader. Unlike Deng, he rose through the Party bureaucracy, in which successful performance, loyalty, and capacity to please superiors are prized. Of course, little is known about Xi. Most recently he was quoted as saying that reforms were an urgent matter, including political reform. But If he does harbor genuinely liberal ideas, he is not likely to disclose them until he has consolidated his power. This suggests that a surprise cannot be excluded. After all, Gorbachev also climbed through the Soviet bureaucracy but he essentially gave no hint that he would turn into a transformative leader.
Assuming that Xi is only a transactional figure, he would be subject to the constraints of collegiality. Since the Deng era, the central leadership has ruled by consensus, which requires balancing the interests of factions by striking bargains and reaching compromises. In such a situation, caution is likely to prevail, strengthened by the conservative orientation of many senior leaders. And, after all, political liberalization does pose risks of getting out of hand. A convincing case for liberalization would have to show that it would not endanger the primacy of the CCP and that it would not, as noted, lead to state disintegration.
A major crisis could be a catalyst for liberal political and economic reform. Deng Xiaoping took advantage of the system-wide crisis provoked by the Cultural Revolution to push for fundamental change. An unprecedented economic crisis which led to mass unemployment and social turmoil might provide the pressure necessary to get the leaders to act together for fundamental change. They might seek to overcome vested interests in order to free resources with which to redistribute wealth and in the process expand citizens’ rights to organize and pressure entrenched power holders. One senior editor expressed hope for a “stormy” crisis so the need for reform would become “truly clear,” forcing the hands of China’s leaders.
But, in the absence of a severe crisis, major liberal political reforms seem a distant prospect. . Instead, a cautious leadership is more likely to take marginal steps that leave the monopoly power of the Communist Party intact. Such steps could lead to improvements but would also not solve the political problems created by China’s astonishing transformation.