Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Tuesday, October 02, 2018

Be careful what you wish for

Chinese leaders must be nervous. The last time youthful protests were widespread, they ended only after the army killed hundreds of protesters in Tiananmen Square. The army moved in when workers began joining students in the protests.

China’s Leaders Confront an Unlikely Foe: Ardent Young Communists

They were exactly what China’s best universities were supposed to produce: young men and women steeped in the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party.

They read Marx, Lenin and Mao and formed student groups to discuss the progress of socialism. They investigated the treatment of the campus proletariat, including janitors, cooks and construction workers. They volunteered to help struggling rural families and dutifully recited the slogans of President Xi Jinping.

Then, after graduation, they attempted to put the party’s stated ideals into action, converging from across China last month on Huizhou, a city in the south, to organize labor unions at nearby factories and stage protests demanding greater protections for workers.

That’s when the party realized it had a problem.

The authorities moved quickly to crush the efforts of the young activists, detaining several dozen of them and scrubbing the internet of their calls for justice — but not before their example became a rallying cry for young people across the country unhappy with growing inequality, corruption and materialism in Chinese society.

“You are the backbone of the working class!” the protesters chanted at one rally, addressing workers at an equipment factory. “We share your honor and your disgrace!”

Protests are common in China, especially by workers who have nowhere else to turn in a nation without independent unions, courts or news media. But the demonstrations in Huizhou were unusual because they were organized by students and recent graduates from some of the country’s top universities, who have generally stayed off the streets since the 1989 pro-democracy movement that ended in bloodshed outside Tiananmen Square.

In the decades since that massacre, university students have generally helped advance the party’s economic and political agenda, focusing on jobs, homes and other aspects of material well-being while supporting authoritarian rule, or at least eschewing politics. As economic growth has slowed, party officials have grown more nervous about Western influences on the nation’s youth, who are more worldly and digitally connected than ever before.

But the Huizhou activists represent a threat the authorities did not expect.

Carrying portraits of Mao and singing socialist anthems, they espoused the very ideals that the government fed them for years in mandatory ideological classes, voicing grievances about issues like poverty, worker rights and gender equality — some of communism’s core concerns…

Zhang Shengye, union organizer

Since President Xi took power in 2012, the party has sought to restrict the use of Western textbooks and stop the spread of “Western values” on campus, referring to ideas about rule of law and democracy that could undermine its hold on power.

At the same time, Mr. Xi has demanded that universities expand their teachings on Mao and Marx…

But some in the party seem uneasy about the proliferation of these groups, apparently worried that their calls for greater economic equality and worker rights could undermine China’s modern-day embrace of capitalist markets.

While only a small minority of students are involved, they represent a leftist critique of Chinese society that seems to be gaining traction on college campuses, partly because the authorities have been more hesitant to suppress it than other political discussion…

Younger Chinese are often described as apathetic, selfish and obsessed with money. But Eric Fish, a writer who has studied Chinese millennials, said that the generation born after the Tiananmen Square massacre lacks the instinctive fear of authority of older generations…

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Labels: China, cleavage, communism, ideology, participation, political culture, politics

Tuesday, October 03, 2017

Private business in China

Beijing tries to win over entrepreneurs with praise and promises

The Communist Party… said it will support and protect entrepreneurs in the first such directive to safeguard China’s private business owners since it took power in 1949.

The guideline – issued by the Central Committee and State Council – praises China’s business people for boosting national economic growth.

“Lots of entrepreneurs … have made a great contribution to the accumulation of social wealth, to job creation, economic and social development,” the directive says…

It also promises to protect their legitimate rights and interests, ensure fair market competition and strengthen protection of intellectual property rights…

The promises come at a time when the authorities are in dire need of more investment from the private sector to support growth…

Overall investment in China went up 7.8 per cent in the first eight months… State sector investment grew at 11.2 per cent, but investment growth from the private sector slowed to 6.4 per cent in that period…

“China’s economic growth can’t rely on government-led investment as it is unsustainable,” said Lu Zhengwei, chief economist at the Industrial Bank. “Private investment still has huge scope to grow…

China’s political ruling class has had an on-again off-again attitude towards the country’s private business sector… After Mao Zedong took power in 1949, the new regime set about confiscating assets from the bourgeoisie and forcing many private businesses to enter “public-private joint ventures”. Private entrepreneurship was wiped out in the ’60s and ’70s under a centralised command economy that took the country to the brink of collapse before Deng Xiaoping revived it with his liberalisation policy in the late ’70s. Jiang Zemin went further, allowing private capitalists to join the party in the 1990s – a major ideological breakthrough for the sector.

Many Chinese tycoons are among the richest people in the world, and the party is generous in giving honorary titles to loyal entrepreneurs – the parliament’s largely ceremonial advisory body counts a long list of billionaires as members.

At the same time, business people often find themselves dependent on the whims of the authoritarian state and haunted by the so-called original sin – problems that emerged in the early days of the private sector…

Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed. Use the search box to look for country names or concept labels attached to each entry.

Labels: capitalism, China, communism, economics

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Communism with historical characteristics

No, it's not 1948 in Israel. It's not 1958 in China. It's not the 1960s in the USA. It's 21st century China. And the Communist Party-led government is not happy with this communist commune. After all, it's not accepting the official Party line of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

Communism Is the Goal at a Commune, but Chinese Officials Are Not Impressed

Members of this idyllic utopian commune tucked away in the mountains of southwest China share an agrarian life that would probably have delighted Chairman Mao: Every day they volunteer six hours to work the fields, feed their jointly owned chickens and prepare enough food to fill every belly in the community. The bounty of their harvest is divided equally and apparently without strife, part of a philosophy that emphasizes selflessness and egalitarian living over money and materialism…

But Marxism doesn’t often look like that in modern-day China, and New Oasis has unnerved local officials in Yunnan, a lush semitropical province that borders Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar.

Months of official intimidation and acts of sabotage have destroyed New Oasis’s water and electrical supply and driven many residents away, emptying two of the group’s three communes in the province.

The unfolding drama highlights the perils that Chinese people face in trying to address their country’s problems on their own terms.

New Oasis village

With its emphasis on organic farming, earthy spirituality and unconventional forms of kinship, the New Oasis communes were a beacon for people of all stripes who sought escape from the smog, graft and social conservatism of contemporary Chinese life…

But the Communist Party has never had much tolerance for independent organizations of any kind, however benign. Even as it has loosened restrictions on religious worship in recent decades, the government has moved to crush unsanctioned Christian churches, Buddhist teachers with their own followings and disciples of the Falun Gong…

Even small groups like New Oasis run afoul of the party’s deep fears of independent movements, especially when they are led by charismatic figures — a trepidation rooted in a national history of upheaval and revolution…

For the past year officials have been pressing New Oasis to disband, claiming that it violated laws on marriage, forestry and education. At the same time, they have mounted a campaign of unrelenting harassment that underscores China’s troubled relationship with the rule of law…