Page 2 of
2 China battens down the
hatches By
Peter Lee
It takes a village,
apparently, to button up a lawyer-activist in
China, and the amounts expended on supervising and
harassing Chen - estimated at over 8 million yuan
(US$1.26 million) - are a source of wonder.
What
is perhaps an even more remarkable source of
wonder is the fact that variants of this
extravagant system are applied to perhaps one
million Chinese that no one has ever heard of. As
reported by Charles Hutzler of AP, hundreds of
thousands of Chinese activists, dissidents,
miscreants, parolees, and suspicious characters
are kept under intensive surveillance similar to
Chen's.
The operations are funded by
"stability maintenance" funds from
the
central government, part of the $110 billion the
government spends each year on domestic security
and order.
The article recounted the
case of Yao Lifa, a schoolteacher who ran afoul of
the system when he tried to run as an independent
for a local political office 25 years ago. The
current system of tight surveillance has been in
place for a year or so.
Yao
told AP how his surveillance is managed, including
a significant outsourcing to gym teachers in the
school he used to teach at:
Anywhere from
14 to 50 people a day are on the local
government payroll for his round-the-clock
surveillance - what he calls the "Yao Lifa
special squad". They get 50 yuan, $8, for a day
shift and twice that for night work. Often, he
said, hotel rooms, transport, meals and
cigarettes are thrown in.
The sums add up in
Qianjiang, a city of struggling factories and
one million people set in the center of the
country. Basic pay runs about 1,000 yuan, or
$160, a month for an entry-level teacher and
goes to three times that amount for a veteran,
Yao said.
"This isn't bad for
teachers," said Yao. "An English teacher
probably wouldn't take it. They can earn extra
money giving private tutoring. But gym teachers
can't do the tutoring. Besides, their superiors
have told them to do this. They can't not do
it." …
He said he heard the school
and education bureau were arguing over $48,000
for his surveillance.
"I
have many acquaintances. Some of them work in
police stations," Yao said. "They tell me
'Really we could use a Yao Lifa. If we had one,
we could make more money.'"
[3]
According to Hutzler, an article
in Caijing reported on a village in south China in
which a quarter of the local government personnel
were on the stability payroll.
This
would appear to be more than "stability
maintenance". It's a form of central government
support to shore up the finances and legitimacy of
the local government, ie, the local communist
apparatus.
Call it CCP welfare, or
"workfare". Well, maybe call it "goonfare."
It
is, to put it mildly, not a good thing for the CCP
when the local face of the party is a crew of
musclemen hassling schoolteachers. To add to the
problem, and the perception, for many local
officials, the temptation to graft off the
imperfectly supervised "stability maintenance"
funds is reportedly irresistible.
Now
that this system is in place, it is difficult to
see how the central government can abolish it -
unless, in addition to howls of protest from local
cadres, it is interested in dealing with a surge
of local unrest and disgruntled petitioners, and a
legal system that is not up to the task of
protecting the rights and serving the aspirations
of its citizens.
The fundamental problem is
that, contrary to the party's hopes, breakneck
economic growth over the last decade has not
translated into an outpouring of gratitude or
support for the Chinese Communist Party.
"Socialism with Chinese characteristics", like
another triumphant economic system we all know and
love, has inequality built into it.
In
Western capitalism, the power of the "1%" is
diffused, anonymous, entrenched in every
institution, and embedded in every political
party. Even after the colossal rich man's cock-up
of the 2008 financial crisis, for instance, 99% of
Americans were unable to summon up the united
political will to confront Wall Street, let alone
engage in a satisfying politico-economic jacquerie
against the moneyed elite.
However, in China, the
political problem is much more severe, because
inequality clearly benefits party members - and
princelings within the party - disproportionately.
Overall gross domestic product (GDP) growth, that
scorecard of economic success that infatuates
state planners, foreign businesses, and economists
alike is, for China, a two-edged sword, since it
ineluctably widens the perceived income and social
justice gap.
Therefore, there is a lot of
anxiety inside and outside the party about closing
the wealth and justice gap ranging from
traditional command economy nostrums like
subsidized housing to fancy free-market panaceas
such as reforming the pampered, cash-rich state
run corporations through private corporate
competition and public wealth sharing through
increased stock ownership.
In
fact, it would be useful to consider that China is
now trying to turn away from macro-economic
management of the economy, with its implication of
passively waiting for the tide to lift all boats,
to politically targeted financial and investment
policy meant to selectively grow vulnerable
sectors of the economy at the expense of
industries and institutions that have emerged as
political liabilities.
However, these solutions
don't go very far in addressing the disgruntlement
that suffuses Chinese society like a toxic fog:
the idea that Chinese wealth creation is primarily
an exercise by which the CCP enriches and
entrenches itself.
It's not easy - or perhaps
even feasible - to remove the dead hand of the
party from economic and political life, or from
the consciousness of the Chinese citizenry under
the current system. Things are less than ideal
even after - and, to some extent because of - a
decade of rampant growth. Now, of course, China is
looking at a period of slowed growth as a matter
of policy as well as necessity, one that will
presumably leverage even greater perceived
economic and social injustice onto the shoulders
of the resentful Chinese citizenry.
The
West's faltering effort to free itself of the
incubus of its failed economic policies means a
eurozone crisis and bad news for China's export
economy. At the same time, China is still dealing
with the inflation and real-estate bubble hangover
from its massive 2009-10 stimulus and cannot risk
fueling inflation by dumping a lot of money into
the economy.
If the CCP finds itself
unable to finesse the looming economic and
political crisis through a savvy combination of
political and economic policies, the alternative -
a bout of xenophobia and domestic repression that
reveal the party in its least attractive light
both to the world and its citizens - is not going
to be pretty.
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