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New revolution threatens 'mandate of
heaven'
By Christopher Horton
BANGKOK - The arrest on Wednesday of the man who
took the Reuters Beijing bureau hostage with a hoax bomb
may have restored calm to those working in the building,
but it most definitely did not provide closure to the
larger drama unfolding across China as it continues its
rapid economic development.
While the
National People's Congress (NPC), China's legislative
body, is in session this week Chinese leaders are being
forced to confront the biggest threat to the legitimacy
of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP): rapidly increasing
unemployment and poverty throughout the country. Rural
Chinese, as well as those in urban areas both inland and
in the northeastern "rust belt" provinces, are
increasingly finding themselves without work, money or
food. The only thing most of these people have is
nothing to lose.
'A cycle of Cathay'
While
China is busy attracting the world's investment as it
marches to the beat of "socialism with Chinese
characteristics", it may seem that the country is
entering a new era. In fact, history is just repeating
itself. If one looks at the roots of communist power, it
appears quite plausible that China was in a similar spot
about half a century ago. Take the city of Shanghai for
example.
Before the communists wrested power
from Chiang Kai-shek and his party, the Kuomintang
(KMT), Shanghai was on the cusp of emerging as a major
world city. Chinese and foreigners made mountains of
money during the day and spent their evenings (and
money) at clubs and chic restaurants, indulging in
champagne, cocaine, opium and prostitution. Today,
despite the chaos that virtually shut down Shanghai for
most of the latter half of the 20th century, it appears
as if Shanghai has picked up right where it left off.
After working all day for large multinationals, many
Chinese and foreigners in Shanghai go out every night
indulging in drink, drugs (cocaine, ecstasy and ketamine
are today's drugs of choice) and prostitution. Once
again, Shanghai is being touted as a major up-and-coming
world city, the next New York or Hong Kong. Will it once
again be denied its promise by impoverished
waidiren (outsiders), the people who often do the
dirty work in fields and factories that enable
Shanghai's new yuppie boom to earn their high salaries?
The Communist Revolution of 1949 was a revolt of
disenchanted (and war-weary) farmers and laborers who
resented their lack of a social safety net as well as
the corruption of the KMT and its quarter-century of
rule. They were especially upset with the decadence of
coastal cities such as Shanghai while the countryside
and inland cities suffered. Now it would behoove the
Chinese government to review its own history. Led by Mao
Zedong of rural Hunan province, the 1949 revolution was
a result of, among other factors, KMT corruption and an
enormous gap between the rich and the poor. Despite
Beijing's revisionist history in which films and other
media portray the communist revolutionaries as
strapping, determined and invincible, they were in fact
an undersupplied, undernourished ragtag militia who
fought seemingly insurmountable odds to defeat a
powerful army. It was their ideological zeal and their
focus on helping the countless poor Chinese that earned
respect both at home and abroad - many foreign nationals
were inspired by the revolution and went to China to
assist the building of a new society.
China has
a long history of leaders losing the "mandate of heaven"
(in essence a social contract between the emperor and
the masses) and subsequently being overthrown by peasant
rebellions. Today, the CCP's mandate of heaven is solely
to provide economic growth - which it is doing, but for
only some of China's 1.5 billion citizens. To those who
remember the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989, the idea of
Beijing being toppled by peasants may not seem
plausible. But there are leaders of the Party who can
see past the glimmering facade of booming cities like
Shanghai and Shenzhen. What they see is a rapidly
growing, increasingly frustrated population of
unemployed workers and migrant laborers who care less
about their own lives and more about avenging perceived
wrongs.
As China moves closer to capitalism, it
moves farther from the "iron rice bowl", or life-long
guaranteed employment in a state-owned enterprise (SOE).
The SOEs of the past served as a source of stability for
workers and the government. Workers were assigned to
"work units" in factories. These work units frequently
doubled as political study groups and also served as an
effective structure for monitoring citizens. Today, as
these SOEs are forced to compete in the global
marketplace, they are facing two options: privatize and
downsize, or close. Thus, not only are people losing
jobs, but the government is losing its ability to
monitor its citizens effectively. The significance of
this shift cannot be overlooked.
Zhu smells
trouble
Last week, in his farewell speech as
premier, Zhu Rongji sternly warned the NPC to work
swiftly and assiduously to remedy the rapidly rising
number of unemployed and the growing disparity between
rich and poor (see Zhu warns Congress of 'outstanding
difficulties', March 6). Zhu addressed the 3,000
delegates to the NPC inside the cavernous Great Hall of
the People, adjacent to Mao's mausoleum in the center of
Tiananmen Square, where Mao proclaimed the founding of
the People's Republic of China (PRC). This area in the
center of Beijing is where the CCP radiates its power
throughout the country, just as the emperors did in
dynastic times. During the NPC there has been a major
increase in security provisions: some street corners
have two or three dozen police officers, while
plainclothes officers and patrol vehicles buzz about the
city. Zhu, however, was not lulled into a sense of
safety or accomplishment by the praise and adulation
heaped upon him as he ended his five-year term as
premier.
Zhu, 74, could have solely emphasized
the great economic accomplishments of the PRC during his
tenure, or the bright future that the state-controlled
media herald daily. Instead, he chose to focus on a
sobering reality: the CCP is highly vulnerable to a
repeat of 1949 - but this time in the role previously
filled by the KMT. Chiang Kai-shek and company were
lucky enough to have the nearby island of Taiwan to
where they could flee. The communists would not be so
lucky in the face of a new revolution.
"We must
exert a great deal of effort to resolve the problems of
back pay for workers and overburdened farmers," Zhu said
to the NPC delegates. To be sure, this statement was
made in earnest. It was after last year's NPC that the
largest protests in the history of the PRC erupted in
Daqing, an oil city in the northeastern province of
Heilongjiang. In the days of Chairman Mao, the Chinese
were urged to "learn from Daqing", as it was China's
first developed oilfield. Now it is the CCP that must
learn from Daqing.
Daqing and March
madness
In the three years leading up to the
beginning of the Daqing protests last March, New York-
and Hong Kong-listed Petrochina, owner of the majority
of the local oilfields, laid off more than 80,000 of its
workers in an effort to increase efficiency within the
old state-owned enterprise. It was in that month last
year that the government went back on the promise it had
made to pay the heating bills of retired workers in the
extremely cold city and then had the gall to demand that
they make substantial new payments if they wanted to
continue receiving their previously "guaranteed"
benefits under Petrochina's medical and retirement
insurance. That was when retired Petrochina employees
began their public protest. Two weeks later, workers who
were still employed by the company joined the protest
after the amount they had been forced to contribute to
their pension funds was suddenly tripled.
The
Daqing protests were the most sustained and biggest
self-organized workers' demonstrations in post-1949
China. At their peak in the first half of March, between
30,000 and 50,000 workers, unemployed as well as
employed, were making their voices heard. The Daqing
protests are extremely significant, because unlike with
1989's Tiananmen protests, the government did not crush
the protests. It instead found itself forced to the
negotiating table because the workers were not demanding
democracy, they merely wanted the money they had been
promised. Although the workers were not fully
compensated, their partial compensation indicates that
Beijing has lost the iron grip it once had on the
Chinese masses. As Zhu no doubt remembers, there was
much more to last March, especially in the country's
economically troubled northeast, than just Daqing.
In mid-March 2002 in the city of Liaoyang, in
Liaoning province, 5,000 workers from several recently
closed enterprises took to the streets, demanding
payment of unpaid back wages and the arrest and
prosecution of local officials within the company as
well as the government for graft. By March 18, partly
because of the arrest of one of the protest organizers,
the number of demonstrators exceeded 30,000. The crowd
demanded the firing of the head of Liaoning's People's
Congress.
In fact, last March China witnessed
virtually innumerable protests, almost all resulting
from governmental refusal to honor severance agreements
or pay pensions for which the government had been
deducting money from workers' paychecks for decades. In
mid-March in Liaoning's Fushun, 10,000 coal miners
obstructed highways and railways in response to
shortfalls in their severance packages. Similar issues
surrounding severance packages led to sizable protests
in the same month at the Huabei oil field in Hebei
province near Beijing, as well as the Songjiang oilfield
in Jilin province in the northeast.
Demonstrations in Sichuan province's Guangyuan
featured the encirclement of the local government
building by more than 20,000 laborers. Clashes between
demonstrators and police led to numerous injuries. On
March 27, in Beijing no less, more than 200 retired auto
workers stopped traffic by their old factory to bring
attention to the delays in their retirement payments,
some as long as four years, which they blamed on corrupt
factory officials.
And these are merely the
protests that got the attention of the Hong Kong or
Western media. In a country as vast as China, there's no
telling how many people took to the streets in protest
last March.
Which brings us back to the Reuters
office in Beijing.
'Nobody
move!'
According to the British Broadcasting
Corp, the man who burst into the bureau office at
10:30am had a black bag with visible wires around his
neck and he kept his thumb on a red button. He demanded
to be interviewed on tape. The man said that his name
was Fang Qinghui and that he was an unemployed
steelworker from Heilongjiang, where last year's Daqing
protests occurred.
The BBC reported that Fang
said, "I want the whole world to know how black China
is, how corrupt it is.
"Leaders should respect,
protect and love the workers," Fang added. Not
surprisingly, Chinese media reports did not mention
Fang's stated motivation for his taking hostages.
A March redux?
After releasing his
hostages, Fang was arrested by police, who determined
that the bomb was a hoax. The threat that people like
Fang represent to the CCP is no hoax, however. Back in
Fang's home province of Heilongjiang, another protest
was busy garnering attention from foreign media. The New
York Times reported on Monday that in the city of
Jiamusi, government officials were negotiating with
unemployed protesters in the frigid city that once
housed many an SOE, but now has an unemployment problem
of such magnitude that residents claim 80 percent of
those in their 40s are now unemployed.
The
Jiamusi incident is actually the latest in a wave of
protests that have taken place in the city since last
autumn. This month's protest saw thousands of people
blocking the local railway. Local restaurants gave food
and tea to protesters, indicating public support that
should send an unmistakable message to Beijing.
Previously, tens of thousands of protesters used their
strength in numbers to paralyze highways, railways and
even the city's lone runway, the Times reported.
The government is not oblivious to the problem
that unemployment is creating for the country. Last
March, Vice Minister of Labor and Social Security Wang
Dongjin said that more than 20 million urban Chinese
would be unemployed by 2006.
"It is estimated
only 8 million jobs can be generated annually over this
period, even with the country's current economic growth
rate," Wang said. "The country is facing a serious
oversupply of labor with the number of people coming
into the labor market reaching an unprecedented peak."
Wang also estimated that there was a floating
population of 150 million rural laborers in the
countryside who drifted in search of work. It doesn't
take a political scientist or historian to realize out
how volatile these immense numbers of unemployed
urbanites and poor migrant laborers could become.
Indeed, Zhu asserted that "agricultural, village and
farmers' problems relate to the overall situation of
China's reform, opening and modernization. We cannot
neglect them or relax at any time."
"We are
clearly aware that there are still some outstanding
difficulties and problems in China's economic and social
life," said Zhu. There is no doubt that in the near
future, drastic measures will be taken to ameliorate the
plight of China's poor and unemployed. The real question
is, who will take these measures: Beijing, or the
victims of China's economic transformation?
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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