The Party Adapts to Stay on Top

Posted May 1, 2009

Twenty years on from the Beijing massacres, China faces a set of challenges even greater than those of 1989. Recovering from the economic downturn that set in a year ago is obviously the most immediate of these. But, beyond the quarterly growth rate statistics, the mainland is confronted with a plethora of more fundamental issues that its leadership cannot duck. For all the talk from the top of encouraging a harmonious society, fighting pollution, boosting consumption, helping the rural world, increasing efficiencies and modernizing industry, the results achieved in the seven years since Hu Jintao succeeded Jiang Zemin as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party have been spotty.

The regime’s legitimacy has come increasingly to rest on crude economic growth. Now that this has been curtailed by the decline in external demand and internal imbalances spawned by the low level of consumption and the excessive dependence on fixed-asset investment, the CCP faces an existential question similar to that posed in 1989: What is it for?

For the protester in the capital and other cities, backed by a swelling number of nonstudents, the CCP had become a bastion of profiteering power which was acting in its own interests rather than those of the country at large. The growth over which it had presided since Deng Xiaoping launched market-led economic reform at the end of 1978 was seen as having produced lopsided results that favored a privileged class of power-holders, spawned corruption and hurt those on fixed incomes (or student grants). The political system remained fixedly top-down. Whatever the ideological content of the messages delivered from the summit, the style was still that of the emperors lowering their decrees from the Tiananmen Gate.

The outcome, when it emerged on the night of June 3-4, 1989, in Tiananmen and, more murderously, along the avenues leading to the square, had the stamp of history on it. Once again, force was the means by which a dispute was settled and the conservative leaders imposed themselves. This bred a tragic inevitability to the way in which the reformist Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang was sidelined, returning from a brief period of sick leave in late May to an office where he had no papers, no work and no news of what was happening, rather like the Guangxu Emperor consigned to palace arrest after his botched experiment with change in the Hundred Days of 1898.

Today, many of the issues raised in 1989 remain alive. Growth in 2007 and early 2008 ran out of control. For all Mr. Hu’s propagation of a Harmonious Society, the Gini coefficient measuring wealth disparities has widened in recent years. A recent online survey showed that corruption is the prime cause for complaint among those polled; despite a few high-profile targets such as the head of the Food and Drug Administration shot for taking bribes, campaigns against graft have had little effect or, as in the case of the ousted Shanghai Party Secretary Chen Liangyu, appear to be primarily politically motivated. Workers cannot organize outside the official monopoly union. The Communist aristocracy has grown steadily, with half the current Politburo consisting of “princeling” children of first generation leaders. Students worry about unemployment as the number who cannot find a job is forecast to reach six million this year. The rule of law remains weak, with police and judges seeking to impose rule by law as enforcers for the authorities. Accountability is patchy at best, as shown by last year’s Sanlu powdered milk scandal in which the cover-up only ended after the deaths of children.

Above all, the deal enforced by the tanks of June 4 remains the rule. The CCP offers economic progress so long as its political stranglehold is not questioned; even in hard times this year, the leadership was busy producing green shoots to back Mr. Hu’s message that only the CCP can lead China forward economically. After the downturn provoked by the irresponsible West, the CCP will ride to the rescue: it was a spin doctor’s dream scenario. Suddenly, an economy with a state-owned banking system and a controlled currency could be celebrated as epitomizing the prudence so lacking in more developed states, and Wen Jiabao could lecture the fallen masters of the universe at Davos.

The comfortable Western assumption of the 1990s that material advancement and the triumph of market economics on the mainland would inevitably bring political liberalization has no place in the thinking in the Zhongnanhai leadership compound. For Mr. Hu and his colleagues, Bill Clinton’s remark to Mr. Jiang that the regime in Beijing was on the wrong side of history has been disproved by China’s growth and emergence onto the global stage. At the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress this spring, its president, Wu Bangguo, who ranks second in the Standing Committee of the Politburo immediately behind Mr. Hu, insisted that there was no place for Western-style democracy in China.

This does not betoken immobilism, however. The Leninist model perpetuated by the CCP gives it the power to change on its own terms, if it so chooses. Even if this involves obvious difficulties with entrenched interest groups and power centers, the Party has undertaken a considerable overhaul since 1989, pointing towards what David Shambaugh describes in his admirable new book, China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation, as a new form of “eclectic state” that draws on indigenous and foreign practices to adapt to changing times. The mixture of the Party’s emphasis on retaining monopoly power and its involvement in the growth model has been a hallmark of China in the past generation, in particular since 1989. Now the growth model is in need of overhaul, and the CCP faces a similar challenge.

Whether it can handle that test, adapting more than atrophying, is a question that will only be answered on the 30th or 40th anniversary of the Beijing massacres. But its Darwinian ability to adapt from Maoism to the market, from utopianism to managerialism has not been unimpressive, and, whatever one might wish for, it is difficult to detect where the often-forecast inevitable democratization of China is to come from. Some see it in the collapse of the present system, but there is no guarantee that this would lead to democracy any more than the abdication of Pu Yi in 1912 did. From the ascension of the first Han dynasty to the CCP’s victory of 1949, regime transformation in China has invariably come as the result of the exercise of force in one form or another. It is hard to imagine such a process in the foreseeable future that would sweep aside the People’s Liberation Army, the People’s Armed Police and the rest of the repressive security apparatus.

Nor is there much sign of “vanguard democratic forces” that could bring about change. Whether one counts it at 80 or 100 million, the middle class which was meant to lead the drive for democratization has shown little sign of embracing organized dissent. The protests that derailed the chemical plant project in Xiamen and the extension of the Maglev train track in Shanghai were “not-in-my-backyard” occurrences. The notion that such expressions of one-issue discontent will form the basis for call for a multiparty system seems fanciful. On the contrary, it is a fair guess that members of the middle class are keener to hold on to their privileged position than to empower the people below them.

That is even more the case for the leading entrepreneurs who have been co-opted under the Three Represents doctrine promulgated by Mr. Jiang to give business people a place in the Communist system. It is unclear whether they are expected to press for their interests as when the Chairwoman of the Nine Dragons Paper group lobbied in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference for the top rate of income tax to be slashed, and was roundly criticized before a fellow plutocrat pointed out that she was only standing up for her class. But the presence of CCP cells in companies certainly binds them to the power apparatus while the opening of the credit floodgates this year mainly benefited big state and private firms that enjoy the right political connections.

The big earners from the stimulus program announced last November will be firms which, while they have floated shares on the market, remain part of the state sector. Just look at where the major contracts are going, for work on the railways and the power grid. If China’s bid to build national champions works out, they will be the likes of PetroChina, Baosteel and Chinalco, and not from the private sector. What, after all, is the point of introducing capitalism unless it benefits the Party state?

Nor do the tens of thousands of grassroots protests reported across the country each year appear to be a wellspring of pressure for democracy. They consist of local, one-issue events over land grabs, unpaid compensation, corruption and health and pollution abuses. They have shown no sign of coalescing into organized movements. At the time of writing at least, the striking thing about the soaring rate of unemployment among migrant workers is how few protests there appear to have been after the two outbreaks of violence in Guangdong at the end of last year, which have been endlessly recycled in foreign press reports. It is possible that news has been censored, but reports of trouble do tend to surface on the Internet, even if only briefly. The riots have happened in Europe, not in China.

On the human-rights front, any delusion that the Olympics would bring a relaxation was swiftly dispelled by heavy-handed police action and the way in which designated protest sites in Beijing remained empty by “mutual agreements” between the authorities and would-be demonstrators. Since then, we have seen continued harassment of activists, the persecution of the Charter 08 group for proposing multiparty democracy, and the severe beating by thugs of retired Professor Sun Wenguang under the eyes of the police as he tried to go to Zhao Ziyang’s tomb in Shandong on grave sweeping day in April. Tibet and Xinjiang are rigorously controlled.

A CCP Central Committee Leading Group Tasked With Preserving Stability has been set up, reportedly overseen by Xi Jinping, the man thought most likely to succeed Mr. Hu as Party general secretary in 2012. Internal Party democracy means making the CCP more efficient, not opening it up to competition. Media censorship remains tight, even if the Internet is a more tricky proposition than the press and broadcasting. The rest of the world seems to have accepted this as par for the course, a necessary evil which has to be accepted in the interests of doing political and economic business with Beijing. A decade on from Bill Clinton’s warning, his wife drew a public line between human rights and the rest of Sino-American relations on her first visit to Beijing as secretary of state.

Though the CCP’s historical narrative is as full of holes as that of any dynasty seeking to establish its claim on the Mandate of Heaven, it can point to solid material achievements over the last 30 years. The citizens of the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe had little reason to remain attached to their rulers by the late 1980s. In China, on the other hand, the regime can point to economic growth, infrastructure, urban development and a higher global profile, even if its performance on health, welfare, education and pension remains lamentable. Polls in an authoritarian society are, necessarily, open to question but recent surveys undertaken by non-Chinese companies show far higher levels of satisfaction and lower levels of concern about the downturn among people on the mainland than in OECD nations.

Too often, forecasts of where China is heading seem to stem, in part at least, from the author’s idea of where it should be heading. To argue that the lessons the CCP learned from the Beijing Spring and the collapse of the Soviet Union may strengthen its hold on power rather than making it realize it is going to be consigned to the dustbin is to run counter to the Western liberal democratic current and to give insufficient credit to those who still struggle for political liberalization. Still, the reality seems to be that, 20 years on from the massacres of June 3-4, the CCP has developed significant Darwinian survival skills reaching beyond the simple use of force, and it will deploy the full range of instruments at its disposal. These range all the way from increasing tax rebates for exporters and offering rural dwellers cut-price refrigerators to the mass repression of the past year in Tibet and putting thousands of provincial cadres through course on how to maintain “stability” of the kind which the army brought the nation in June, 1989 at the behest of the CCP Elders gathered in Deng Xiaoping’s home.

The challenges faced by Mr. Hu and his colleagues are substantial. Apart from the fundamental block on political liberalization and human rights, the continuation of the present state capitalism system involves blockages and inefficiencies which China’s economy would be much better off without. But it is hard to anticipate any sea change of the kind dreamed of by the protestors of 1989 or by the signatories of Charter 08. This may not be an outcome to be relished, but that has often been the case in China’s modern history.

Jonathan Fenby is China director at the research service Trusted Sources. His most recent book, The Penguin History of Modern China, has just been released in updated paperback edition.