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Stability, byword of the Tiananmen tyrants, on even shakier ground in China
The Australian - June 5, 2010
Michael Sainsbury and Zhang Yufei – In late May of 1989, Zhou Dou was one of four young men, including recently jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo, who began a hunger strike as tensions escalated between massed groups of students and Communist Party authorities in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
Twenty-one years ago today, tensions reached breaking point and the Chinese government called in troops and killed hundreds of people in the name of stability. Today a range of social and economic ills, headed by corruption, a widening income gap and forced home removals, are once more testing the world's most populous country.
Zhou, now an independent commentator and constitutional academic, tells Inquirer the prospect of stability in China is becoming more uncertain, with "economic reform only half-way and political reform stuck".
The situation is grabbing headlines even in the tightly controlled state media. Government news agency Xinhua released a report last month that said income disparity was weakening economic security and development potential, endangering social stability.
According to a World Bank report, while 5 per cent of Americans hold 60 per cent of US assets, in China, 1 per cent of the population holds 41.4 per cent of the assets. China's wealth polarisation is the most severe in the world.
As the income gap between the rich, the struggling middle class and the poor continues to widen and avenues for redress shrink, protest by individuals and groups have become widespread and multifaceted in their causes.
In the past three months there has been a spate of attacks, often with knives on school children, that has left 21 people dead and more than 100 injured.
In November, Tang Fuzhen, a 47-year-old businesswoman, burned herself to death in Sichuan while holding a red national flag in a last, vain attempt to halt the demolition of her house.
In March, in the southern city of Kunming, a dispute between unlicensed street vendors and law enforcement officers escalated into a full-blown rampage by angry citizens.
This week, 46-year-old Zhu Jun, head of security at the Lingling district post office in Yongzhou, broke into a court office in Hunan and shot six people, murdering three judges before killing himself.
Electronics maker Foxconn, which makes Apple's iPhone near Shenzhen, has been hit with a spate of 10 worker suicides.
Nearby, at a Honda plant in Foshan, workers have staged one of the biggest public strikes in decades, seeking better wages.
At the heart of Beijing's battle to keep its populace under control is the shadowy but powerful Stability Preservation Office, which is controlled directly by the country's ruling nine-man Politburo Standing Committee.
China's acknowledged expert on social stability, senior thinktank researcher Yu Jianrong from the China Academy of Social Sciences, believes individual and group outrage are being spurred by unfair and unclear rules.
"Uncertainty about the rules tends to cause people a kind of terror, a fear of the future, which in some people manifests as weakness and mediocrity, while in others it may turn into hatred, and the hatred by generated fear is sporadic," he told China's progressive Southern Weekend newspaper.
David Kelly, a professor at the China Research Centre at the University of Technology, Sydney, tells Inquirer: "Economic growth has left some people and groups completely disenfranchised.
"They are unable to represent their own interests. Most Chinese believe that rich people can get away with anything."
Tiananmen veteran Zhou says: "The fundamental problem with the political system of China is the four cardinal principles, (namely, adhere to the socialist road; adhere to the people's democratic dictatorship; adhere to the leadership of the Communist Party of China; adhere to Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought) which are written in the constitution, is completely against rule of law.
"It doesn't insure the basic rights of people, and makes the government beyond any containment and supervision.
"Running a country by suppression and an iron wrist can't last long.
"The stability maintenance measures, with rising investment in it, can only work as plaster: it covers the surface, but not heal the root."
The Stability Preservation Office was founded in the late 1990s, when workers were laid off during a period of privatisation. Its local offices extend to provincial, city, county and street level (the lowest government level) as well as into important institutes and enterprises. So-called mass events or public disturbances provide routine work for the office. It also works to prevent petitioners from lodging their complaints in Beijing, an ancient Chinese practice.
Says Du Guang, a professor at major think-tank The Central Party School:"It's a political system protecting the interests of powerful interest groups... officials protect officials, power protects power."
Guang says: "So when deprived, exploited, ordinary people stand up to protest, the institute with power naturally stands together with the exploiters to crack down on the public."
Stability is also costing the country a small fortune. The report says public security cost 514 billion yuan ($90bn) in 2009, an 8.9 per cent increase over 2008.
The increased spending rate is higher that that of the military budget, and comes as China stalls investment in health and education. It spent less than 1 per cent of GDP on health from 1995 to 2008. In February Xinhua noted that, in 1993, China planned to increase its investment on education up to 4 per cent of GDP but that this had been postponed to 2012.
At the root of the national ill is the fact that China is heaving towards its 10-year transition from the leadership of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao to their apparent successors Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang respectively in 2012.
The various factions of the Communist Party are in the midst of backroom battling and deal-making from which will emerge in the new 25-person politburo and its nine-person leader's committee. Kelly says: "The result of this is a policy stasis, or vacuum, and an increase in government control as no one wants any major outbreaks of instability on their watch.
"The evidence is mounting, however, that it is having the opposite effect."
China University of Political Science and Law professor Zhang Shuyi says that although China's level of income disparity (calculated by the global Gini index) is higher than an accepted point at which riots would occur, the country is not near breaking point.
"I'm pessimistic on individual cases, but I still have hope for the future," he says.
"As long as China follows the way of the market economy, the public's sense of individual interest and right will increase, and the right of the public will win over the power of the authority at last, though it will be a long and painful process."
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