Democracy can’t Buy People

I have no strong doubts that America will “only” be the second or third largest economy within two to four decades. In the meantime, while the trends will be suggesting that, many people elsewhere in the world, including Westerners who are focused on economic power alone, will start placing their political bets on China, too. In the views of many, a society where human rights only rank second or third and where democracy is deemed an unnecessary luxury will appear to be more efficient than a democratic model. Many will easily forget or push aside all evidence that democracy may be an essential human right, or an important practise to avoid untenable living conditions of the “ordinary people”, and therefore, in the end, a stablilizing rather than a destabilizing factor in the life of a country. Many people won’t see either that even under an undemocratic – i. e. inefficient – form of government, peoples’ livelihoods can still hardly drop in China. Quite naturally, the only likely direction is upwards anyway, at least for some time to come, as long as most Chinese citizens are living close to the bottom of their individual potentials.

Radio Canada International QSL, 1988

I got this feeling when I looked at the German press online yesterday. An article by Niall Ferguson, first published by Britain’s Financial Times (now only accessible for registered readers) on December 27, has since been published in German by the weekly Stern, the weekly Der Spiegel, the daily Die Welt, and probably a number of regional newspapers, too.

Niall Ferguson’s article doesn’t look wrong to me, but it can encourage short-sighted views of the future when it comes to the benefits that political concepts, rather than civilizations, can offer, or the drawbacks they can cause. The main factors which play a role in Ferguson’s article are money (American current account accounts, public expenditure and revenue) and military power (Afghanistan and Iraq). Even if democracy never becomes something most Chinese people would appreciate and fight for – and among many of them, national power may be viewed as a sufficient substitute for leading a full life individually -, China won’t be an attractive model for most other nations. A country or empire may be powerful – but it won’t be attractive elsewhere unless the citizens can live their lives to their full potentials.

That said, Taiwan before all other countries will be in a difficult position, unless a majority of its people actually like the idea of being “re-united” with China. Their window of opportunity to have their sovereignty internationally recognized – if the opportunity still exists at all -, has begun to shrink. Will the Taiwanese test their opportunities and risk to codify their sovereignty internationally? And how far will the rest of the world – most crucially America – be willing to support and help to defend them?

For those of us who live in democratic countries, China’s growing weight poses questions which would have seemed unimportant only a few years ago. It is unlikely that the average Chinese citizen will enjoy our standards of living in the foreseeable future. And besides, it is unlikely that our standards of living will remain as high as they are. We will need to save more, and to spend less – not only in America. There are ecological reasons for that, and economical reasons. Rises in productivity can’t be endless, as long as we are confined to this planet. Democracy stabilizes society when its promises are sustainable. But democracy may stop doing so if the promises made by its political class – in order to secure their election or reelection – become unsustainable. This question about sustainability has always been an issue, but it must become a central issue in our societies. Democracy isn’t here because Westerners were better people than the Chinese. And the matter of sustainability isn’t at all lofty. While China’s social insurance programs are facing huge challenges, they are only promising comparatively small benefits to the Chinese people. Our welfare systems are much less challenged than theirs, but the promises of our welfare systems to their clientele have become a great burden for every regular employee. If democracy shall stay, we must ask ourselves who we want to be, rather than what we want to own. Democracy can’t buy people. Democracy is either wanted, or it will go away.

Freedom is not a matter of where we live, and it is no matter of nationality or race. But it is, of course, a question about who governs us, which economic and political system we have, and into which direction we want to develop. As China is a totalitarian country, led by a “Communist” party which wants to stay in power (no matter if that will require Communist, Socialist or Confucian colors), its growing influence will require us to be vigorous competitors in terms of political concepts, and to some extent, in terms of power.

It doesn’t really matter how powerful the West’s position will be in the future. But there need to be democratic societies which are able to defend themselves, and which can convince the global public that people only live full rights in the light of human rights.

Once China is a country with a p0litical class that works to heal, rather than to cultivate the mortifications of its people, it can – and maybe should – lead the world. Otherwise, it shouldn’t get into that position.

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Related:
How to Corrupt an Open Society, Aug. 29, 2009
The American Era isn’t over, October 30, 2008

2010: Make-or-Break Time for “Social Stability”

2009 had been the “most difficult one” for China, writes Han Yonghong (韩咏红) of Singapore’s United Morning Post (联合早报), with a deepening international financial crisis, receding export opportunities as a result, sensitive anniversaries, public anger and resulting mass incidents, and sharp political criticism on the internet. But then again, it had also been the year where China had forged ahead, becoming a great country on equal footing with the United States. All in all, 2009 had been a successful year, writes Han, but besides the rapid economic rebound, there was still a lot of unfinished business. The biggest changes for the CCP’s policies in 2010, according to the impression the statements of its leaders are leaving, would be the people’s livelihood, the people’s livelihood, the people’s livelihood (民生、民生、民生). On the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (中国人民政治协商会议全国委员会, or 政治协) New Year’s tea reception, CCP Secretary General and State Chairman Hu Jintao (胡锦涛) had emhasized that the quality and the benefits of economic growth needed to be improved, more attention needed to be paid to the improvement of the people’s livelihood, that lower [i. e., local] party officials needed to push the good trend of rural development further, that the peasants’ incomes shouldn’t remain static, and State Chief Councillor Wen Jiabao (温家宝) explained that the gap between small cities and rural areas should be reduced, that the treatment of migrant workers needed to be improved, and that the living standards of farmers needed to be improved.

The leadership hasn’t addressed the issue of the people’s livelihood for the first time, writes Han Yonghong. In 2009, Beijing provided free textbooks for primary and secondary schools, increased teachers’ incomes and pension funds, etc. The difference between then and now is that in 2009, those were emergency measures, with local governments reacting to discontentment, worried by contradictions.

Behind the concept of reducing the income gaps between small cities and rural areas there is the aim to increase incomes, to create domestic demand, thus creating sustainable growth, writes Han, which would correspond with a speech by Wen Jiabao in September, where he pointed out that “expanding China’s domestic demand is the long-term strategy of China’s economic development” (扩大内需是中国经济发展的长期战略方针).

Closely related to the people’s livelihood are the Three Big Mountains (三座大山), and among these – medical care, education, and housing -, medical reform may also be promoted. It was said that the medical insurance draft had gone through several discussions and amendments, and this new draft was certainly the main point in the government’s provision of public health and basic medical services, and it was hoped that urban workers, staff and residents plus the farmers’ participation in medical insurance (农民参保) would be at above 90 per cent. Besides, at the end of last year, the Central Economic Work Conference (中央经济工作会议) had pointed out that urbanization (城镇化) needed to be stadily advanced, and that the problem of how migrant workers should settle in urban areas needed to be resolved – which would also help to distribute public services more equally to the citizens.

To accomplish these tasks, the governments needed to become more determined, writes Han Yonghong, and the political system itself would need reform, too. In that field, the government’s approach was cautious, and could achieve the effect of relieving social contradictions, but in an environment where civil rights weren’t clearly stated, even revised public policies wouldn’t necessarily bring benefits for disadvantaged groups.

So is it all the usual talk with little action and even less local effects? [*)] Experience suggests that. Then again, even if the next generation of leaders should be even less inclined than the incumbents to care about the “countryside”, demographic data make it abundantly clear that it is make-or-breaktime, and that it is now.

And for avoiding “social contradictions”that could actually lead to the much-trumpeted big chaos (大乱), not only medical care, but the pensions systems too, need to be assured, even if only at a very low level. Chinese people may settle with very little, and old people with even less, but China is a rapidly-aging society. The window of opportunity has become extremely narrow. “China aims to gradually set up a series of networks for the aged, including social endowment assurance and a looking-after service, by 2010″, the Beijing Times wrote – in 2002.

Related:
2010: More Martyrs, more Permanent Residents, December 31, 2009
A Glimpse at China’s Social Security Programs, December 24, 2009

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*) Double-pasted text deleted. This post was heroically written on a very unstable online connection.

Shaolin Monastery: A Monk and his Merits

Zhengzhou / Dengfeng City (登封市), Henan Province — Shaolin Monastery won’t become a shareholder in a new tourism company which will seek to list in 2011 in either Hong Kong or on the Chinese mainland, Clifford Coonan of The Independent quotes Shi Yongxin (释永信), the monastery’s abbot. That said, abbot Shi has an undeniable sense for business: the temple’s list of commercial achievements would put any theme park to shame. The monastery’s management could and still can draw on the place’s traditional popularity with people at home and abroad, among them Kangxi (康熙帝), the Qing Dynasty’s second emperor (a Manchu and himself half-a-foreigner to China back then).

But it wasn’t popular with everyone. The monastery is certainly in need of solid funding, as it was destroyed or damaged many times during the imperial times, by warlords during the Republican era, then by the Japanese in 1941, and once again by the Red Guards.

Traditionalists distrust both the Wushu adaptation of Kung-fu by the PRC, and Shaolin’s commercialization. Both came with the post-Mao era, the policies of reform and opening. Allegedly, abbot Shi himself also reaped some fruits of the new times, by accepting a brand-new luxury car for his services to the local tourist industry.

It seems that as a party to the controversial plan, Shaolin Monastery would have entered as a shareholder via a company more or less of its own, the Songshan Shaolin Shaolin Cultural Scenic Area Co. Ltd. (少林景区的嵩山少林文化有限公司).

The company reportedly open for investment is the Songshan Shaolin Culture and Tourism Co. Ltd., co-established on December 27, 2009, by Songshan Shaolin Culture and Tourism Group Co., Ltd. (嵩山少林文化旅游集团有限公司), wholly owned by the Zhengfeng City Government, and China Travel International Investment Hong Kong Ltd. (香港中旅国际投资有限公司). The China Travel International Investment Hong Kong Ltd. itself is wholly owned by the China National Travel Service (HK) Group Corporation (中国港中旅集团公司), which again is a state-owned enterprise under the direction of the of the State Council’s State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (or 国务院国资委).

The China Travel International Investment Hong Kong Ltd. has a share of 49 per cent in Songshan Shaolin Culture and Tourism Group’s registered capital of 100 million Yuan RMB. And Songshan Shaolin Shaolin Cultural Scenic Area Co. Ltd. – i.e. Shaolin Monastery itself – doesn’t have a share in it, according to the disclaimers.

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Footnote/Disclaimer
The above is the background according to JR’s (possibly limeted) understanding of the Chinese articles linked to in this post.

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Related:
State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (国务院国有资产监督管理委员会) official website (in English)

No Global Governance as “Old Pain” lingers

“One World” – instead of “first, second, and third world” – used to be an unalienable piece of vocabulary in every do-gooder’s wordpool, at least from Western countries. German weekly Die Zeit, not really a bunch of treehuggers, but a paper usually giving responsible opinion and unhurried advice, is re-assessing the one-world concept in an online article. Yes, in London and Pittsburgh, the governments of the world did write new rules for the financial markets. In Geneva, they held another round of  negotiations about a new trade system. They will be back in Davos again soon, to perambulate all the global problems in their totality. They tried to save global climate in Copenhagen. But they are forgetting the financial crisis, the further we seem to leave it behind us. The more remote the memory, the smaller chances are to write global rules that would be globally effective.

And they failed in Copenhagen – “Every country has its own dirty taboo”. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schröder liked the idea of global governance, writes Die Zeit. In the end, they hoped, negotiated agreements and international organizations – NGO’s and corporations included – would lead to some kind of substitute for a desirable, but still unachievable global government. Liberals and left-leaning people in general seemed to support the concept.

But global emergency management has proved to be the maximum of what global governance could achieve together. There is no common concept of tomorrow’s world, writes Die Zeit. Both Europeans and Asians had gained a new self-confidence vis-à-vis America. Europe’s economic and social systems had shown a remarkable resistance against the effects of the economic crisis, and India and China put economic development before climate protection. “In India, you can’t see the climate problem eye-to-eye with Europe or the USA”, the paper quotes Shyam Saran, an advisor to India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh. On a global scale, Europe’s concept of political integration appears to be a  rather singular one.

Europe should get prepared for a world with a patchwork of powers which go it alone, like China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa, and clusters of global governance like ASEAN or the EU, Die Zeit quotes a study by the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation.

Die Zeit lists liberals and left-leaning people who actually start to like the idea of such a world – and of nationalists who had always been skeptical of any kind of global governance anyway.

The article’s author actually confuses China’s party and state chairman Hu Jintao with the country’s chief councillor Wen Jiabao. And in other ways, the author also still seems to underestimate the distance between East (arguably excluding several countries such as India, Vietnam, and possibly Japan and South Korea) on the one hand, and Western countries on the other. There isn’t really much reason to believe that a common view of the world will emerge any time soon. Jonathan Spence, in a Reith Lecture in Liverpool, broadcast by the BBC on June 10th 2009 June 10th 2008,  suggested that the issue of the Opium Wars

is now no longer a real one in any important sense and to harp on it now is not something the Chinese have to do. It’s something they can do if they wish to keep an old pain alive.

You can be pretty sure that China’s government does want to keep the old pain alive. “To remember the bitter past to cherish the happy present tense” is a tradition that either came into being or was revived by the CCP during the Chinese Communists’ early days in power – and it is still an efficient way to keep the Chinese public sufficiently afraid or distrustful of foreigners to disapprove of “foreign concepts”. Even otherwise highly open-minded Chinese people often cling to these “open accounts from history”.

At hindsight, at the end of the 20th century or at the end of the 21rst century’s first decade, one may probably say that it was naive to believe that world governance could be an option. You can’t do business with a totalitarian regime, unless you are ready to do business at its terms.

The Zeit article, as flawed as I believe it to be in one or another detail, caught me by surprise. I’m left-leaning myself, and until today, I have felt that my re-orientation towards regional solutions, rather than global ones, was something not too many others of my political color would share. But there seems to be a general trend towards regional action. Elinor Ostrom, an American economist, argues that people may actually commit to the common, rather than the individual use of resources, so long as they succeed in organizing the use and maintenance of such resources. A single system of rules for rather large international fishing zones was likely to fail, she suggests. Polycentric solutions – or regional ones – might work. Experimenting with different ideas in different places could amount to a competition of different ideas., which would either convince bystanders, or leave them unenthused.

And even steps deemed small by its actual practitioners might convince visitors from overseas.

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Related:
Mark Lynas: “How China wrecked the Copenhagen Deal”, December 24, 2009

2010: More Martyrs, more Permanent Residents

China’s laws and regulations can often be confusing, writes China Daily. There are several small changes to laws regulating security guards. If one dies on duty, they will be honored with the official title of martyr, usually reserved for those the government says have died for justice. Second, security guards are banned from performing body searches or using violence.

A regulation that may change more peoples’ lives and status is Guangdong’s Provincial Service Management Regulation on Migrant Population (广东省流动人口服务管理条例), which comes into effect all over the province on January 1, after it had been tested in Shenzhen for a year. Tens of millions may bid their current transitional status in Guangdong goodbye and become permanent residents, writes Southern Metropolis Daily (南方都市报). The kind act (善举) doesn’t yet amount to a household registration reform (户籍改革), but is a step into the ideal direction, believes the paper, as it indicated the provincial government’s changing concept.

51 years ago, New China stipulated the policy that citizens who temporarily live in a city outside their regular city or district for more than three days had to carry out temporary residence registration. In 1985, given a strong current of work migration into Guangdong in the wake of the reform policies, the public security office (公安部) issued the Interim Provisions on the Management of Temporary Urban Residency (关于城镇暂住人口管理的暂行规定). The status of migrant workers was that of temporary residence. They weren’t included in the province’s GDP statistics, and they had no entitlement to governmental services. Outsiders also criticized the temporary residence permit (暂住证) as a money machine (敛财的工具) for some departments, as some cities charged several hundred Yuan RMB per temporary residence permit, and another Defense of Law and Order fee of 158 Yuan RMB was charged in Guangzhou in 2001.

The Southern Metropolis Daily suggests that the case of Sun Zhigang (孫志剛) in 2003 helped to speed up the reform of temporary residence in Guangdong. The Southern Metropolis Daily doesn’t go into details, and doesn’t mention its own role in investigating Sun Zhigang’s case (which apparently led to massive revenge by the local authorities against its editors Cheng Yizhong and Yu Huafeng).

During the new regulations’ test period in Shenzhen, Professor Zheng Xinzhen (郑梓桢), head of the Guangdong Provincial Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Sociology and Demographic Studies, said that permanent residence was a rational reform, but only a beginning, and its bonus could be applied more broadly.

Southern Metropolis Daily also addresses the question if Guangdong Province has the financial resources to live up to the new regulation’s promises. The article believes that as the first ground for the reform policies, with the highest incomes in China, Guangdong should be able to afford education to the migrants children, and make them a force in building the province. Besides, without proper education, the new generation after the initial migrants could become destabilizing factors.

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Related:
Household Registration System – a Personal Opinion, September 11, 2009

Back in Prison – Liu Xiaobo Short Bio

Liu Xiaobo (刘晓波), president of the Chinese Independent Pen Center, once a lecturer at Beijing Normal  University,  and political commentator, has been sentenced to eleven years in  jail for “inciting subversion of state power” (煽动颠覆国家政权). Liu co-published the Charter 08 (零八宪章). He was arrested on December 8, 2008, before the charter’s formal release. The police had ended the “investigation phase” earlier this month. Beijing First Intermediate People’s Court announced the sentence today. Xinhua News Agency quoted a statement by the court that Liu’s legal rights had been fully guaranteed during the proceedings.

More than twenty years ago, shortly before the Tian An Men massacre on June 4, 1989, Liu returned from a visiting scholarship at Columbia University and took part in a hungerstrike in solidarity with the students’ movement, according to CNA. He was jailed for “counter-revolutionary crimes” (反革命罪), and released from prison in January 1991.

He refused to leave his country after his release from prison, campaigned for a re-evaluation of the official version of the “June-4 incident”, and was imprisoned again from May 18, 1995 to January 1996.

Also according to CNA, Liu was held in a labor camp in Dalian from October 8, 1996 to October 10, 1999, after authoring Anti-Corruption Proposals Addressed to the Third Plenary Session of the Eighth National People’s Congress, and Bloody Lessons from the Process of the Promotion of Democracy and the Rule of Law – an Appeal on June-4’s Sixth Anniversary (「汲取血的教訓推進民主與法治進程–「六四」6週年呼籲書」).

Now he is back in prison.

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Related:
“One day, he’ll be thought of as a very good citizen”, BBC News, Dec 25, 2009
Charter 08 Seminar held in Shandong Province, Dec 8, 2009

A Fair Trial, according to the Relevant Laws

If you are looking for a seasonal piece of prose you can read to your loved ones on one of these comfy winter evenings in the northern hemisphere, why not choosing A Fair Trial. That stuff is of course an entirely biased, unfair, and inaccurate account of what really happened, because the fat bad boys and girls, in reality, came from a country which bought too much and had too big a navy to allow for a really fair trial as described by MyLaowai. But if the lad on trial there had been a Chinese national with not-too-much guanxi, he might have gotten a fair trial according to the relevant laws.

So before you start finger-pointing and interfering in China’s internal affairs again, remember that an entirely fair and harmonious judicial system can’t be built in a day.

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Related:
The Stupid Little Mermaid, March 12, 2009

Obituary: Paul Samuelson, 1915 – 2009

He was no friend of Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction. He advocated the rule of law – capitalism needed rules, he said. In an interview with Der Spiegel a few years ago, he accused America of being a society of “Me, me, me, and now”, not taking tomorrow and other people into consideration. Maybe one out of ten students among young students of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were actually born in America – he blamed television. In general, he ovserved, there were too many distractions for young people from training their intelligence.

Paul Samuelson, a renowned American economist, died on Sunday after a brief illness, aged 94.