There are inherent contradictions in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) system of rule and in the Chinese economy, according to a panel in Washington, and mass protests are the visceral, and often violent, response from the ruled.
Popular discontent is so far at a manageable level, but what happens when the Communist Party’s paper-mâchéing over China’s contradictions stops working?
The topic was taken up by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), who gathered experts together for a day of discussion and debate on Feb. 25.
In the morning panel spoke Elizabeth Economy, Senior Fellow and Director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, Martin Whyte, Professor of Sociology at Harvard, and Murray Scot Tanner, China Security Analyst for the research firm CNA. A digest of their testimonies follows in order.
Ms. Economy explained that the roots of protest in China mostly lie in systemic weaknesses: a lack of transparency and accountability in governance, endemic corruption, and the absence of the rule of law. The nature of protest is also evolving in important ways. Protests have traditionally been rural based, but more recently the urban middle class has gotten in on the act. They challenge the regime in different ways.
The Internet has become a potent weapon, a virtual political system. The CCP has been effective in keeping these protests isolated. The Party is enormously concerned about ability to maintain stability; it is trying to develop a set of tools to do more to address the symptoms of citizen discontent.
Without robust political institutions, public grievances cannot be redressed. Manageable disputes then flair up into something else.
Often, ordinary people try to work through the legal system and existing institutions to seek redress. They may, for example, suffer crop losses or dying fish or health issues. Activists—patient and committed, not to say desperate—engage in legal activities for years. When the authorities don’t listen to them, they start protesting.
When businessmen hire thugs to violently disperse them, the crowds escalate the matter. Entire villages may begin protesting, drawing thousands of people. Before the authorities know it they have thousands of people smashing buildings and setting police cars on fire. In some cases residents have chanted anti-Party slogans at these events.
The degree to which a small incident that impacts only small number of people can spiral into a big issue shows latent frustration and alienation with the political system, Ms. Economy said.
Between 90,000 and 100,000 protests shake China each year in rural areas. Urban educated middle classes protest primarily around environmental issues. Protests against incinerators being built in coastal cities are common.
The difference between urban and rural protests is that the former are preemptive while the latter are post-facto. Ms. Economy noted how the urban protests may therefore influence the policy making process.
The rise of the Internet is also a prominent issue, and a Janus-faced one. The Internet can serve for promoting the voice of the Party in promoting nationalist and pro-regime propaganda, or it can allow timorous Chinese to vicariously live out their political dreams. It is even said to be a possible mechanism for promoting transparency—for example, as the misdeeds of cadres are exposed, they may be encouraged to do a better job (or, more likely, to be more careful to hide their corruption).
Ms. Economy notes how, at one point, Beijing tried to say that housing prices had increased by less than they had. Within three weeks an independent real estate firm put out an entirely different set of statistics, much higher than official numbers.
Others have uploaded videos of the bullying behavior of communist bureaucrats onto Youtube. People with common experiences are thus united, at least virtually, across the country.
The depth of the challenge to the CCP is not great at this point. Authorities try to meet some demands, but they also seek to eliminate, violently if they need to, the leadership of organized groups. They also arrest, kidnap, and intimidate anyone who may be a leader, such as civil rights lawyers.
They monitor the Internet heavily, shut down websites, and harass and detain dissidents. “It’s got a very active toolbox in terms of managing social unrest,” Economy says.
Ms. Economy suggested that the mounting resources the Party invests in domestic security may be at similar levels to national security. That is to say that the regime may be spending as much money defending itself from its own people as it does defending the whole nation from external foes.
Next: The CCP often overreacts to perceived challenges
The CCP often overreacts to perceived challenges, but this insecurity is real fear, Ms. Economy says.
Mr. Whyte presented survey data indicating a generalized optimism with the status quo. One panelist from the Commission said that it is unknown how quickly those sentiments could change in the face of adverse conditions, and there is the basic problem of whether people answer such surveys honestly.
One expert, speaking privately on the day, said that ordinary people worry about the consequences of saying things that may reflect negatively on the government, whether the researcher says they are with Chinese officialdom or not; and, secondly, that basically all surveys of public opinion in China show astronomically positive sentiments.
Murray Scott Tanner noted that despite 30 years of economic growth, available data indicates that unrest in China has risen for two decades with no break. The core list of governance and managerial abuses that spark the majority of protests has changed little, notwithstanding a raft of laws from Beijing; this demonstrates that there are institutional problems, unsolved, behind these predations, Mr. Tanner said.
Secondly, opening up or increasing oversight on the political and legal systems is not a priority for the CCP. Shortly after the onset of the 2008 economic crisis, public security organs issued new regulations on more sophisticated responses to unrest.
It is unclear to Mr. Tanner whether the internal armed forces can develop the discipline and professionalism necessary to carry out this strategy long term, and especially if the masses were to rise up in a concerted way.
Protests have increased in China every year from 1993 to today. Mr. Tanner gets data from police sources inside China that he considers trustworthy. There were 8,700 incidents in 1993, 74,000 in 2004, 87,000 in 2005, 90,000 in 2006.
Despite the CCP trying to keep protests down, many persisted during the spring and summer of 2008. Mr. Tanner cited 120,000 in 2008, despite tightened Olympic security. Nationwide figures for 2009 are not yet available, Mr. Tanner says, but data from prominent academics says protests climbed greatly in the wake of the economic difficulty resulting from the global financial crisis. Chinese analysts blame economic factors: unemployment and increasingly unequal income distribution.
Professor Xia Yeliang of Beijing University said in a Radio Free Asia interview that, according to the statistics from the CCP’s Political and Legal Committee, the number of group protests in 2009 rose to 230,000.
Mr. Tanner cited many of the same problems as Ms. Economy for protests: Illegal land seizures, forced evictions, withheld wages, air and water pollution, refusal to honor petitions. Party and state leaders have issued numerous speeches demanding an end to abuses, but given that these abuses are part-and-parcel of Communist Party rule in China, their commitment to real change is hard to gauge. The fact remains, Mr. Tanner says, that police data says unrest persists.
The systemic inability to deal with the population’s demands, often for straightforward matters of livelihood, means the Party has had little choice but to resort to the use of force.
The 2008 edicts required police to make sure things didn’t spin out of control by ham-handed violence, emphasize intelligence and monitoring of citizen activists, and develop the capacity to deploy large numbers of police quickly.
Protests and mass protests are not yet at a stage that is destabilizing for the regime, but they are the result of fundamental contradictions of one-Party rule in China, and are more acutely reflected as time passes. An economic shock could trigger a series of events that quickly unravels the status quo.
“They don’t fundamentally change anything. They can’t change anything,” Mr. Tanner said. “If you want to root it out you need a governance system that works in a different way.”
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