{"id":71042,"date":"2016-03-28T12:00:34","date_gmt":"2016-03-28T11:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=71042"},"modified":"2016-03-27T17:22:49","modified_gmt":"2016-03-27T16:22:49","slug":"china-broken-rice-bowls-stifled-voices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/03\/china-broken-rice-bowls-stifled-voices\/","title":{"rendered":"China: Broken Rice Bowls, Stifled Voices"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Flag_of_the_People's_Republic_of_China.svg\"<\/a>Amidst the economic downturn in China, two developments that are not \u201cin the human interest\u201d stand out: rising unemployment among workers in state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and repression of criticism of the party-state leadership.\u00a0 China, no different from any other large country, has a multitude of domestic problems, but those two are especially worrisome in that they have the potential for significant unrest.\u00a0 And for the Chinese leadership, social instability always raises red flags.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s breakneck economic expansion has finally slowed, as it surely had to after so many years of double-digit growth.\u00a0 During that span, the leadership has largely delivered on increasing income, alleviating poverty, opening overseas markets, allowing people to get rich, and widening the circle of private enterprise.\u00a0 But at the same time, these dramatic changes in post-Mao economy have also produced large-scale official corruption at every level of government, widening household income gaps, worsening of air and water quality, a huge influx of rural people into cities, and reduced employment opportunity for educated young people.<\/p>\n

In the economic reform era, SOEs have been a weak link\u2014often too big to fail, but also too expensive to keep subsidizing.\u00a0 Now that official thinking has turned to a version of supply-side economics, steel and coal SOEs are a prime target. Overproduction is being met by substantial layoffs<\/a>\u2014estimates run anywhere from 2 to 3 million workers\u2014and reduced or withheld wages.\u00a0 Other inefficient, debt-burdened SOEs may face new restrictions on their activities, though closing them down is as much a political as an economic issue.\u00a0 Strikes and labor protests are already accelerating<\/a>; in 2015 they reportedly doubled (to around 2,700) compared with 2014, leading the government to actions designed to disrupt labor organizing.<\/p>\n

Simultaneously, Xi Jinping has also further concentrated power in his hands and spread his words and image far and wide\u2014so much so that some people believe he is styling himself after Chairman Mao, whose cult of personality dominated Chinese politics for more than a quarter century.\u00a0\u00a0 Elevating the great leader has been accompanied by a crackdown on lawyers and journalists, jailing or house arrest of prominent online critics, censorship of newspaper articles<\/a> deemed offensive to the party leaders, and warnings about embracing Western ideas.\u00a0 Xi recently paid a personal visit<\/a> to the three major state-run news outlets to insure conformity with the party line.\u00a0 As the China Times intoned, \u201cit is necessary for the media to restore public trust in the party.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two trends are closely connected in that the legitimacy and longevity of the party-state depend above all on maintaining social stability\u2014wei wen<\/em>.\u00a0 As Deng Xiaoping said, \u201cstability overrides everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe stability maintenance regime is China\u2019s hybrid approach to suppress undesirable elements in the social order,\u201d Dali Yang has written.\u00a0 But wei wen<\/em> can be risky when the economy is being deregulated, as the strikes and protests show.\u00a0 Cracking down on critics of the regime on charges such as \u201cprovoking trouble\u201d and \u201cillegal content\u201d makes a mockery of the official commitment to the \u201crule of law\u201d and raises fears of a return to the era of \u201cdemocratic dictatorship.\u201d\u00a0 And if high-profile people with well-connected backers are among the victims of a crackdown, party leaders could find themselves in a serious predicament.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere there is oppression, there is resistance,\u201d Mao once said. And so there has been, though not of the sort that threatens regime stability.\u00a0 A prominent financial newspaper, Caixin, publicized the fact that one of its articles had been censored.\u00a0 When a real estate tycoon with millions of followers of his blog came under party assault for his sharp criticism of the party\u2019s authoritarianism, and had his blog account expunged, a number of prominent journalists and scholars jumped<\/a> to his aid. An employee of Xinhua, the official news agency, wrote a letter protesting that \u201cthe public\u2019s freedom of expression has been violated to an extreme degree.\u201d\u00a0 The letter got plenty of attention<\/a> online before the authorities, of course, took it down.<\/p>\n

Xi Jinping\u2019s evident effort to build his reputation as a no-nonsense leader may win applause in foreign affairs\u2014such as the tough line he has taken on the South China Sea dispute\u2014but at home it seems destined to meet with a rising backlash.\u00a0 Chinese politics isn\u2019t freewheeling like Taiwan\u2019s, but neither is it the tightly controlled society of Chairman Mao. Workers and professionals alike have more room than ever before to express their discontent.\u00a0 While \u201cforbidden zones\u201d remain and party apparatchiks function as usual, China is now a wired society, and everything from ordinary complaints to mass protests can go ballistic in an instant.\u00a0 China is a long way from falling apart; but enforcing \u201cstability\u201d is likely to prove increasingly difficult.<\/p>\n

_________________________________________<\/p>\n

Mel Gurtov, syndicated by <\/em>PeaceVoice<\/em><\/a>, is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Portland State University and blogs at <\/em>In the Human Interest<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

China, no different from any other large country, has a multitude of domestic problems, but those two are especially worrisome in that they have the potential for significant unrest. And for the Chinese leadership, social instability always raises red flags.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71042\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}