After China’s state-run news agency Xinhua posted the music video online overnight, it’s gone viral. A quick listen to the lyrics makes Communist centralized economic planning seem cheery:
Hey have you guys heard about what’s going on in China? / President Xi Jinping’s new style? / Yes! And there’s more! / The Shi San Wu! / The what? / China’s 13th five-year plan! / Yeah! The Shi San Wu! / Oh! / Every five years in China, man, they make a new development plan…
The video raises a lot of questions, like: Why are hippies with guitars and bongo drums atop a VW bus singing about China’s 13th five-year plan?
Or: Why did Xinhua think this would appeal to foreigners?
Or, simply: Why?
People everywhere are better off living in liberal democracy: that has been the reigning assumption of the western world. But could it be we’ve got it wrong? If you were one of the world’s billions of poor peasants might you not be better off under a system dedicated to political stability and economic growth – one that has lifted 400 million out of poverty – rather than one preoccupied with human rights, the rule of law, and the chance to vote out unpopular rulers?
So is China better off without democracy? Or is that just the age-old mantra of the tyrant?
Speakers for the motion Martin Jacques
Author of When China Rules the World, visiting senior research fellow at the London School of Economics, and visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing Zhang Weiwei
Senior Fellow at the Chunqiu Institute, author of The China Wave: the Rise of a Civilizational State, and former translator to Deng Xiaoping
Speakers against the motion Anson Chan
Former Chief Secretary of Hong Kong and campaigner for democracy
Jonathan Mirsky
Historian of China, and former China correspondent for The Observer and East Asia editor of The Times
Your Assignment:
Come to class with detailed notes from this debate. Your notes should detail:
The speaker’s arguments
Evidence deployed to substantiate his/her arguments
Rebuttals made to 2 and/or 3 above
Though you may type or write your notes, use this note organizer. Your notes will be collected and assessed.
Watch (or listen to) the entire program; the first 55 minutes is opening speeches, the second 45 minutes is debate and closing remarks.
We will continue the debate over this motion in class. Come to class decided on the motion. But be prepared to argue both sides in class, as I might choose to assign sides.
If you prefer, you can listen to this debate on a mobile device, either in podcast or streaming formats.
The flaws in China’s political system are obvious. The government doesn’t even make a pretense of holding national elections and punishes those who openly call for multiparty rule. The press is heavily censored and the Internet is blocked. Top leaders are unconstrained by the rule of law. Even more worrisome, repression has been ramped up since Xi Jinping took power in 2012, suggesting that the regime is increasingly worried about its legitimacy.
Some China experts—most recently David Shambaugh of George Washington University—interpret these ominous signs as evidence that the Chinese political system is on the verge of collapse. But such an outcome is highly unlikely in the near future. The Communist Party is firmly in power, its top leader is popular, and no political alternative currently claims widespread support. And what would happen if the Party’s power did indeed crumble? The most likely result, in my view, would be rule by a populist strongman backed by elements of the country’s security and military forces. The new ruler might seek to buttress his legitimacy by launching military adventures abroad. President Xi would look tame by comparison.
Across China, where new developments are keeping pace with the rapidly growing economy, reports continue to surface so-called “nail houses.” These properties, standing alone amid the ruins of other buildings, belong to owners who have stood their ground and resisted demolition. Defiant property owners say the compensation being offered is too low. Some of them have remained in their homes for years as their court cases drag on and new construction continues all around them. A few homeowners have won their fights, but most have lost. Meanwhile, these nail houses have become powerful symbols of resistance against the world’s fastest-growing major economy.
Protesters have vowed to paralyze Hong Kong’s financial district after China denied the former British colony the right to elect its next leader in 2017. Protesters started gathering outside Hong Kong’s government headquarters on Sunday night and have said they won’t be leaving anytime soon. “This is the end of any dialogue. In the next few weeks, Occupy Central will start wave after wave of action,” a co-founder of the Occupy Central group said, according to the BBC. “We will organize a full-scale act of occupying Central.”
China on Sunday made it clear Beijing would remain firmly in control of Hong Kong’s political future when the legislature ruled there would be no open nominations for the next election, saying it would create a “chaotic society.” The guidelines now state that there can only be three candidates for the position of Hong Kong’s leader and each must be approved by more than half of a 1,200-member nominating committee that will likely be filled with Beijing loyalists,
Twenty-five years after June 4, 1989, even China’s educated youth have only a foggy understanding of the incident, and they’re skittish about discussing it openly. Textbooks don’t mention the violence that left hundreds, maybe thousands, dead in the streets of Beijing. The Chinese Internet has been scrubbed of all but the official accounts. (The first result on the search engine Baidu is a short article from People’s Daily concluding that the incident “taught the party and the people a useful lesson.”) The Chinese government has arrested dozens of people in recent weeks for planning or participating in events related to the anniversary, and police have warned foreign journalists not to cover the story. Still, most young Chinese people I approached were willing to talk—as long as they could remain anonymous.
If the front page story today in the NYT is right, Bloomberg has made a craven decision that calls its larger credibility into question. According to the Timesarticle, Bloomberg managers in New York decided to squash stories by their (aggressive) China-based reporters for fear of angering the Chinese government. The less-damaging rationale for this decision is Bloomberg’s concern that its reporters might be kicked out of China. The more-damaging suspicion is that the company was worried that it would lose subscribers in China for its cash-cow Bloomberg financial terminals.
This is part of a much more widespread pattern of making it hard for international journalists to get into China.
At least 27 people died in rioting in far western China on Wednesday, when protesters attacked a police station and government offices and the police fired on the crowd, state media said. It was the worst spasm of violence for years in Xinjiang, a region troubled by tensions between Uighurs, an overwhelmingly Muslim ethnic minority, and China’s Han majority…
“This clash did not happen by chance,” said the spokesman, Dilxat Raxit, who lives in Sweden. “There have been sweeps and crackdowns in the area, leading to many Uighur men disappearing, and the authorities have refused to give information about their whereabouts,” he said, citing recent phone conversations with residents…
The government has placed blame for past violence in Xinjiang on groups it accuses of using terror to seek independence for the region, including the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. But advocates of Uighur self-determination and some foreign scholars say the discontent has local causes and is not orchestrated from abroad.
China is a much better place to live now for most people. Young Chinese people now have far more freedom to pursue the career of their choice, travel abroad, and marry whomever they choose (provided their spouse is of the opposite sex, though China has also become much more tolerant of homosexuality in recent years). Far more Chinese citizens than before have access to the country’s social safety net, including a rudimentary health care system, and a much greater proportion of the China’s population can realistically obtain a university education. These advancements do not excuse China of its continued human rights violations, but they do explain how the Party can remain popular despite repression, corruption, and other problems.
Communist Party cadres have filled meeting halls around China to hear a somber, secretive warning issued by senior leaders. Power could escape their grip, they are being told, unless the party eradicates seven subversive currents coursing through Chinese society.
These seven perils were enumerated in a memo referred to as Document No. 9 that bears the unmistakable imprimatur of Xi Jinping, China’s new top leader. The first was “Western constitutional democracy”; others included promoting “universal values” of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civil society, ardently pro-market “neo-liberalism,” and “nihilist” criticisms of the party’s traumatic past…
The warnings were not idle. Since the circular was issued, party-run publications and Web sites have vehemently denounced constitutionalism and civil society, notions that were not considered off limits in recent years. Officials have intensified efforts to block access to critical views on the Internet…
“Constitutionalism belongs only to capitalism,” said one commentary in the overseas edition of the People’s Daily. Constitutionalism “is a weapon for information and psychological warfare used by the magnates of American monopoly capitalism and their proxies in China to subvert China’s socialist system,” said another commentary in the paper.
The government enacted a law on Monday aimed at compelling adult children to visit their aging parents. The law, called “Protection of the Rights and Interests of Elderly People,” has nine clauses that lay out the duties of children and their obligation to tend to the “spiritual needs of the elderly.”
Children should go home “often” to visit their parents, the law said, and occasionally send them greetings. Companies and work units should give employees enough time off so they can make parental visits.
The law was passed in December by the standing committee of the National People’s Congress. It does not stipulate any punishments for people who neglect their parents. Nevertheless, that officials felt the need to make filial duty a legal matter is a reflection of the monumental changes taking place throughout Chinese society.
In my occasional search for contemporary Chinese political studies, I stumbled upon an interesting new study. Titled “What Kind of Democracy do Chinese Want?”, it’s a study from the leading state think tank in China, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Zhang Mingshu, the study’s author, apparently hopes to distinguish between different types of “democracies”. He explains thusly:
Generally speaking, one type is Western democracy. It originated from Greece … and through the catalyst of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, produced the type of democracy we see today in the United States and England. But another type is China’s democracy today, which we call “socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics.”
At this point, groans are emanating from astute China analysts about how such arguments typify Chinese political discourse today. What’s more, Zhang goes on to say that his exploration of the kind of democracy Chinese want is largely determined by the existing political and civic culture, citing the work of American political scientist Gabriel Almond on how specific civic cultures can shape the type of political system. This, of course, sounds awfully close to the longstanding debate over the lack of suzhi — loosely translated as civic values — that make Chinese society unprepared for major systemic changes.
But putting aside these issues for now, some of Zhang’s key findings nonetheless may offer some insight into the current state of political attitudes among Chinese, particularly of a younger generation of Chinese. [I can’t vouch for the soundness of the methodology, but the author claims that he conducted a survey with 1,750 random samples across four different regions in China. Each of the participants was given a 40-question survey to fill out.]
Table 1.1: Is democracy a good thing?
Number of respondents
% of respondents
Good
961
54.9
Not good
47
2.7
Can’t generalize, has to be in context of whether it is appropriate for China’s current conditions
703
40.2
Other
0
0
Don’t know
39
2.2
Table 1.2: Is democracy a good thing? (age breakdown)
Age cohort
Good
Not good
Can’t generalize, has to be in context of whether it is appropriate for China’s current conditions
Don’t know
Total respondents
18-21
44.1%
3.6%
50.5%
1.8%
111
22-31
48.3%
2.1%
47%
2.6%
387
32-41
50.6%
1.9%
46%
1.5%
411
42-51
63.6%
2.7%
31%
2.7%
365
52-61
58.3%
3.1%
36.2%
2.4%
290
62-71
61.4%
5.5%
31%
2.1%
145
>72
65.9%
0
31.7%
2.4%
41
Total
54.9%
2.7%
40.2%
2.2%
1,750
Table 2.1: Is China better or America better? (meaning models)
Number of respondents
%
China is better than America
666
38.1%
America is better than China
140
8%
They have different national conditions, can’t be simply compared
901
51.5%
Don’t know
43
2.5%
Table 2.2: Is China better or America better? (meaning models)
Age cohort
China better
America better
They have different national conditions, can’t be simply compared
Village family-planning officers vigilantly chart the menstrual cycle and pelvic-exam results of every woman of childbearing age in their area. If a woman gets pregnant without permission and is unable to pay the often exorbitant fine for violating the policy, she risks being subjected to a forced abortion.
According to Chinese Health Ministry data released in March, 336 million abortions and 222 million sterilizations have been carried out since 1971.
It is not surprising that China has the highest rate of female suicide in the world. The one-child policy has reduced women to numbers, objects, a means of production
Baby girls are also victims of the policy. Under family pressure to ensure that their only child is a son, women often choose to abort baby girls or discard them at birth, practices that have skewed China’s sex ratio to 118 boys for every 100 girls.