The People and the Party: Chinese Politics in the 21st Century
Bruce J. Dickson
Princeton University Press
The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China
Minxin Pei
Harvard University Press
Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China’s Most Influential Television Journalist
Chai Jing / Yan Yan
Astra House
China strikes many outsiders as a black box—inherently unknowable yet assumed that inside of which the Chinese government routinely and randomly imposes harms and hardships upon its own people. In the U.S., politicians and news media tell us that the People’s Republic of China is actively engaged in undermining America’s worldwide economic and military hegemony using underhanded (i.e., unstated) means to do so. So what is going on over there? Why don’t Chinese citizens rise up against a regime whose judicial system is often described as frequently brutal as its decisions are arbitrary.
Bruce J. Dickson’s The People and the Party describes the Chinese government’s various layers, their purpose, and how they work. The branches of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are the legislature, government, and party (formally distinct from the government but in practice indistinguishable), each with its own sets of members, ranks, and departments at the national and local levels. (A person may work within the government and not be a party member, but will quickly hit the ceiling of advancement among the lower tiers.) The guiding spirit of the CCP is embodied in and enacted by the ideological basis of its government’s structure—the “Leninist” of China’s Marxist-Leninist-Maoist triumvirate, Lenin who proposed a government dependent upon a rigid structural hierarchy set within a byzantine bureaucracy. Making matters worse, the three branches of government do not interact, share information, or personnel with each other. The application of these ideological principles results in a government that Dickson’s describes as “responsive but not accountable” to its citizenry.
Government employees must understand that their service is first to the government, not the people. The first third of The People and the Party is devoted to describing how the various levels and departments of the government function, select their members (creating for them the obligations of patronship), and pass, interpret, and enact laws. Dickson does not investigate the corruption endemic to the party and government. To the best of my knowledge, while President Xi does indeed root out corrupt members of government, he focuses only on those committed by political adversaries or by cabinet members he wants to eliminate, after installing them himself.
Given that the party comes before individuals, it comes as a surprise to witness—or see on YouTube—public demonstrations in China that the government permits—a surprise given Beijing’s massacre of peaceful demonstrators during the uprising in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Dickson makes this distinction: While citizens are prohibited from public acts that question the CCP’s policies or motives, they are allowed to protest over such things as pollution, corruption, living standards, etc. As long as demonstrators don’t tell the government what to do or how to do it, their demonstration will probably be allowed. Any words or actions seen as dictating to the party what it should is not tolerated. Complaining about living conditions is one thing; pointing out the entities responsible for the poor living conditions is another.
What Beijing also sees as threatening its legitimacy is religion. Churches and temples must register with the government (which recognizes Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism), as should their parishioners, or face fines, closures, and imprisonment. The atheist Communist Party even rents space for worship in its office complexes and runs seminary schools to ensure that religious personnel have received “correct” training so that all religious instruction also complies with party dogma. Because higher-level positions within any denomination requires the approval of both the state and religious officials, Beijing is often in tension with these religious groups.
Two things of note regarding religious practice in mainland China: One, if a citizen attends, say, an Episcopalian church on one side of town, she may not visit, commune with, or talk to members of another Episcopalian church on the other side of town. The ability to do so would allow alliances to form that could challenge the government. Two, the seeming contradiction between China’s ongoing hostilities toward the Dalai Lama, on the one hand, and the Buddhist temples packed with Buddhists in the mainland unmolested by police, on the other hand, is explained by the fact that Tibet Buddhism is a sect different from the Buddhism practiced in the mainland.
Will China eventually become democratic? While many mainland Chinese are dissatisfied with Xi’s rule, that doesn’t necessarily mean his successors will be interested in democracy. Broadly speaking, China’s leaders have historically been either Confucian or Daoist. Confucian leaders see their minions as, basically, idiots in need of a firm guiding hand from a wise father. Daoist leaders, on the other hand, believe it is their responsibility to provide the conditions that will allow them to best develop and thrive. Xi’s authoritarian rule is that of a conservative strongly influenced by Confucian notions of responsibility, which require absolute, unquestioning fealty to the father, i.e., the party by way of Xi.
THE AMERICAN NOVELIST William S. Burroughs once noted that an ideal police state doesn’t need police—citizens have seen, heard, or experienced enough police actions to challenge them. But beatings, threats, and imprisonment aren’t the only items that satisfy repressive tendencies: a state security apparatus can function very well for these means, too, which is what Minxin Pei examines in The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China.
Just as Dickson’s The People and the Party serves to support his description of the CCP as “responsive but not accountable,” Minxin Pei’s The Sentinel State serves to support his description of the CCP’s current surveillance system as “pre-emptive repression”— the ability to stop demonstrations before they begin. Pre-emptive repression offers the benefit of repression while avoiding the occurrence of distressing videos showing the police and military beating and killing civilians, which only add to China’s already bad PR.
Soon after Mao came to power, the CCP began collecting information on its citizens, including their addresses. This collection quickly turned into the system of hukou—still in effect today—in which where people lived came to also determined where they could legally live. Furthermore, gaining the legal right to live in a city other than one’s hometown is not the same as having legal citizenship in that town. Thus, if a non-resident living in Shanghai requires surgery, she will have to have that surgery in her hometown, no matter how far away. If her hometown is too poor have hospitals capable of performing the surgery, she will have to pay for it in Shanghai out of her own pocket. Squatting in abandoned buildings is of limited help to poor internal migrants to large cities, migrants who lack a relative or employer who can write a letter to the government vouching for them, as required by the hukou system for persons seeking legal residence.
The CCP also established, soon after Mao came to power, the practice of internal spying, at all levels of society, including by neighbors, small business owners, cab drivers, and others who know the area, whether a single apartment building or a general neighborhood. In effect, the CCP over the course of 70 years has turned neighbor against neighbor, utterly undermining civic trust among fellow citizens. Since they don’t always know who is spying on them, citizens distrust each other as much as they do the government, and the government distrusts everyone. According to Pei, although the government spies on a little less than one percent of its citizens, and although most complaints or tips against citizens turn out to be false, Beijing is reluctant to accept the fact that the vast majority of its citizens are law-abiding.
Whether most Chinese are law-abiding out of choice to do the right thing rather than fear of being caught for doing the wrong, and because the CCP can’t always count on people to rat out their friends, neighbors, and family members, modern technology has provided the CCP with a vast network of surveillance cameras. According to Pei, the CCP’s preferred standard of surveillance is one camera per 100 citizens. Given a population of 1.4 billion people, the absurd number of cameras this means signals the level of Xi’s paranoia. And given Xi’s unpopularity with most Chinese, I question how long the effectiveness of the surveillance system will last— even if the system can perform to the promised levels of proficiency—primarily because Beijing’s surveillance quota is an unfunded mandate. Beijing requires that cities pay for the surveillance systems it demands (because, the CCP claims, those cities reap the benefits of having less crime), a cost that varies, according to Pei, from $2.5K to $10K per camera. Such tremendous costs are more easily borne by megacities like Shanghai, with a tax base of 25 million people, than by remote, sparsely populated rural areas that are poor, lack technically adept personnel to maintain the system, and lack an infrastructure for the electronics. But even megacities face economic downturns. How vital to city economies is this surveillance system to make it worth playing nanny for the state?
Furthermore, Pei shows that even the much-ballyhooed advent of “social credits” to still be more pipe dream than enacted reality. The proposed “social credit” system adds to or subtracts from each person’s “social value,” depending on whether that person has, for instance, helped a nice old lady across the street or jaywalked instead. The social credit system threatens to punish such scofflaws by denying the offenders the ability to use public transportation (trains, buses, cabs), by groceries, go to the movies, and so forth, by triggering the cards and apps people use to pay for services (all controlled or overseen by the government). But just as most cameras in American party stores aren’t connected to anything—it’s the possibility of surveillance that serves as the deterrent—social credits may be more show than anything else.
BRUCE DICKSON’S AND PEI MINXIN’S academic studies of contemporary issues in China are at a remove from the people and society they study. Chai Jing’s Seeing fills in some of the gaps created by Dickson’s and Pei’s studies by reporting on issues in contemporary China from the viewpoint of its citizens. Chai, who used to provide China Central Television (CCTV) with human interest stories from 2001-2014, eventually left CCTV to become an independent producer, largely because as she became better and more experienced, she discovered deeper layers of systemic troubles within the nation and its government that increasingly led her to findings that met with increasing resistance from the government and her managers to allow broadcasting.
Chai originally began as a reporter of human-interest stories of the “cute kitten meets terminally ill child with medical miracle results” variety. Although intelligent and hardworking, Chai discovers times and again throughout this book that her knowledge of people is still naïve and her knowledge of political corruption not nearly cynical enough to understand how most Chinese—especially its poorest citizens—experience life. That is to her credit as a humble narrator intent on learning as much as she uncovers. Most of her book’s eleven chapters cover the stories she and her team put together, most of which were broadcast, some of which were censored. From the earthquake of 2008 in Sichuan (which killed over 69,000 people) to the case of a college music major who murdered a peasant woman after accidentally hitting her with his car, Chai reveals layers of frustration and duplicity.
Many of the 69,000 who died in the Sichuan earthquake—including schoolchildren—were killed in the collapse of buildings erected by a government that deliberately used faulty materials and cut costs in other ways to divert the funds into the pockets of construction bosses. The deaths of children were particularly devastating for parents who, because of China’s one-child policy, lost the only child they had. (Many parents had, for financial reasons, put off childbearing until their late 30s. Having another baby was too late for the majority of these parents.) The CCP eventually agreed to pay parents the equivalent of $22K for their loss, which might have been enough to replace the parents’ destroyed house (simple structures with no indoor plumbing).
As I have discovered with my own Chinese students, China’s single-child policy resulted in children who were the sole focus of their parents’ and grandparents’ hopes and neuroses. When the CCP decided to allow the re-introduction of market policies for the nation’s economic growth, these single children were raised with the expectation that they would become the family’s financial salvation. The result has been an enormous emotional strain on the children, many of whom suffered from parents who relentlessly criticized and punished them for earning less than A averages. (“An A-? Why isn’t this an A? Who in your class is doing better than you?!”) Chai explores the lives of these children in two of her reports.
The first deals with an outbreak of suicides by 12-year-olds in a remote rural area, far from the influence of mass media. At first, the surviving children refuse to talk to anybody about what happened, including their parents and other authority figures. Chai initially receives the same treatment, but with gentle persistence she persuades them, one by one, to tell their stories. (Spoiler alert!) Chai discovers that the suicides were prompted by a member of a group of friends, a girl many befriended because she listed without judgment to their stories of frustration and unhappiness and kept the stories to herself. She became, their only trusted confidant. After a boy at a party grabbed her breasts, rumors began spreading about her sexual availability. For a poor girl in the rural countryside with no prospects of a career in her future, her reputation is all she has. With that gone, she felt she could no longer go on, and a number of her friends decided that without her friendship, they couldn’t go on, either.
The second deals with a college-age piano performance major. Driving alone late at night along unlit streets, he accidentally hits a woman with his car. Afraid that she will pursue his parents for money to cover her medical costs, he takes out a knife he happens to carry with him while traveling alone and stabs her eight times. (Although Chai doesn’t clarify this point, in Chinese law, any driver who injures another person with his car is liable for that person’s medical bills. Out of fear of having to finance another person’s medical bills for life, stories circulate in China about drivers backing up their cars to kill outright persons they have only injured. Out-of-pocket penalties to drivers for deaths caused by poor driving amount to about $3,000, far less expensive than potential decades of medical treatment.) What drives a person to such horrible lengths—murder—is more than potential medical bills. In the case of the pianist, it was the culmination of an emotionally abusive upbringing, including being locked in a basement for weeks at a time for disobedience, in which his parents—swayed by an off-hand remark by one of their son’s elementary school teachers—decide that their only hope out of poverty lies in their son’s musical ability. Thus, he is required to spend days entirely focused on practicing. All costs associated with developing his talent are made clear to him, in demeaning tones, from his father, who lets his son know just how much his son owes him. The father believes that never-ending shaming is required to toughen a person into perfection.
Emotional and physical abuse isn’t limited to only children, of course. Chai also interviews women imprisoned for murdering their husbands, all the women having endured abuse for decades before finally snapping. While the government is usually quite swift in its deployment of capital punishment for capital offenses, it does make some exceptions for murderous housewives. (I once read an article in People’s Daily (the official voice of the CCP) boasting that 30 days was generally the amount of time between a person being accused of a capital crime and being executed for that crime.) Spousal abusive is common in China, which has only recently recognized physical abuse as grounds for divorce. It does not recognize infidelity as grounds, however, although it will allow a husband to divorce a wife who does not produce a male heir.
Chai also encounters a level of corruption she had not expected: While working for CCTV, she receives a letter from 300 factory workers complaining about an impending sale of their factory which will result in the loss of their jobs. Each employee signs the document with his thumbprint dipped in his own blood. Struck by the apparent seriousness of the petition, Chai and her crew visit the factory site to investigate the impending sale. Once there, and after months of investigation, Chai discovers that there are three main groups vying for profiting illegally from the sale of the factory—including the factory workers. Everybody in this episode is culpable; everybody acts in bad faith.
Which is not to say that the mass of Chinese citizens are dishonorable people. Chai provides many instances of deeply humane individuals engaged in deeply good acts. Reducing or eliminating corruption and bad faith is difficult if not impossible in an environment cultivated by the CCP that insists on hiding its crimes against its citizens and its citizens challenge to build better lives for themselves through honest acts of ethical integrity. To the CCP’s credit, allowing its citizens and corporations to enter the marketplace has brought around a generally improved quality of life, incremental improvements I see every time I stay in Shanghai to teach. While personal affluence has brought about a general complacency with the status quo, so long as the CCP refuses to learn from or even apologize for the many mistakes it has made over the decades, leading to the deaths (sometimes deliberate) of tens of millions of its own people, its people will be trapped in a bubble of severely circumscribed opportunity.