MCLC: fear of change

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: fear of change
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (7/17/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/world/asia/as-china-talks-of-change-fear-
rises-on-risks.html

CHANGING OF THE GUARD
As China Talks of Change, Fear Rises on the Risks
By MICHAEL WINES 

BEIJING — A heavyweight crowd gathered last October for a banquet in
Beijing’s tallest skyscraper. The son of Mao Zedong’s immediate successor
was there, as was the daughter of the country’s No. 2 military official
for nearly three decades, along with the half sister of China’s
president-in-waiting, and many more.

“All you had to do,” said one attendee, Zhang Lifan, “was look at the
number of luxury cars and the low numbers on the plates.”Most surprising,
though, was the reason for the meeting. A small coterie of children

of China’s founding elites who favor deeper political and economic change
had come to debate the need for a new direction under the next generation
of Communist Party leaders, who are set to take power in a once-a-decade
changeover set to begin this year. Many had met the previous August, and
would meet again in February.

The private gatherings are a telling indicator of how even some in the
elite are worried about the course the Communist Party is charting for
China’s future. And to advocates of political change, they offer hope that
influential party members support the idea that tomorrow’s China should
give citizens more power to choose their leaders and seek redress for
grievances, two longtime complaints about the current system.

But the problem is that even as the tiny band of political reformers is
attracting more influential adherents, it is splintered into factions that
cannot agree on what “reform” would be, much less how to achieve it. The
fundamental shifts that are crucial to their demands — a legal system
beyond Communist Party control as well as elections with real rules and
real choices among candidates — are seen even among the most radical as
distant dreams, at best part of a second phase of reform.

In addition, the political winds are not blowing in their favor. The
spectacular fall this spring of Bo Xilai, the Politburo member who openly
espoused a populist philosophy at odds with elite leaders, offered an
object lesson in the dangers of challenging the status quo. And official
silence surrounding his case underscores high-level fears that any public
cracks in the leadership’s facade of unity could lead its power to crumble.

As a result, few people here expect the party to willingly refashion
itself anytime soon. And even those within the elite prepared to discuss
deeper changes, including the second-generation “princelings,” as they are
known, have a stake in protecting their own privileges.

“Compare now to 1989; in ’89, the reformers had the upper hand,” said Mr.
Zhang, a historian formerly associated with the government’s Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences, referring to the pro-democracy student
protests that enjoyed the support of a number of important party leaders
but were crushed in Tiananmen Square. “Twenty years later, the reformers
have grown weaker. Now there are so many vested interests that they’ll be
taken out if they touch anyone else’s interests.”

To Mr. Zhang and others, this is the conundrum of China’s rise: the
autocracy that back-flipped on Marxist ideology to forge the world’s
second-largest economy seems incapable of embracing political changes that
actually could prolong its own survival.

Much as many Americans bemoan a gridlocked government split by a yawning
partisan gap, Chinese advocates for change lament an all-powerful
Communist Party they say is gridlocked by intersecting self-interests.
None of the dominant players — a wealthy and commanding elite; rich and
influential state industries; a vast, entrenched bureaucracy — stand to
gain by ceding power to the broader public.

Many who identify with the reform camp see change as inevitable anyway,
but only, they say, because social upheaval will force it. In that view,
discontent with growing inequality, corruption, pollution and other
societal ills will inevitably lead to a more democratic society — or a
sharp turn toward totalitarianism.
An overriding worry is that unless change is carefully planned and
executed, China risks another Cultural Revolution-style upheaval that
could set it back decades.

“The bureaucrats still don’t have this sense of a crisis,” one editor at a
major Communist Party newspaper, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said
in an interview this year. “They think that they can continue to muddle
through.” And perhaps they can — at least for a while longer. Most Chinese
credit the party for lifting hundreds of millions of citizens from poverty
and creating a huge urbanized middle class, providing a foundation of
support for the status quo.

But many people are dissatisfied with an elite that retains tight
political control, holds immense wealth and operates with largely
unchecked authority. Scholars say the number of “mass incidents” — a
vaguely defined official measure of discontent that includes spontaneous
citizen protests — has doubled since 2005. The government stopped publicly
reporting the total in 2006.

“We recognize the achievements,” said Yang Jisheng, an editor of the
liberal journal Yanhuang Chunqiu. “But we worry about how to sustain them.

“The cake is extremely big, the second-biggest cake in the world. But it’s
divided extremely unfairly,” Mr. Yang added. And “it’s systemic. If the
system doesn’t change, it is always going to be unfair.”

Some leaders share those fears. The Communist Party’s only vocal advocate
of systemic reform, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, warned at his annual news
conference in March that failing to overhaul the party’s leadership risked
setting off a second Cultural Revolution. Political change is a common
topic of debate in the government’s many research groups and in the
party’s school that trains up-and-coming leaders.

“Neither the rulers nor the ruled are happy with the current situation,”
said Mr. Zhang, the historian. “The prevailing belief is that change is
coming soon, but the question is how. Change is either going to come from
the top leadership, or from the grass-roots level.”

Critics complain of stagnation during President Hu Jintao’s decade in
power, and note that Mr. Wen has only halfheartedly pushed for change.
They say the party has focused less on addressing citizen grievances than
on erecting a sophisticated security apparatus to stifle them.

Mr. Hu’s stab at loosening up the Communist apparatus has been a call for
“intraparty democracy,” code for giving the party’s lower ranks more voice
in setting policy and choosing higher-ups. But there is scant evidence
that even those minor changes in the power equation have been seriously
pressed.

Little is clear about the leanings of a new generation that will supplant
Mr. Hu and most other members of the Politburo standing committee, the
party’s top ruling body, in the transition starting this fall.

The political views of Xi Jinping, China’s vice president and Mr. Hu’s
anointed successor, are unknown, though he has flashed brief signs in a
few speeches and meetings of what sound to analysts like more progressive
leanings.

Some others who seem likely to ascend to the leadership have shown
glimmers of support for change. They include Li Keqiang, Mr. Wen’s
expected successor as prime minister; Vice Premier Wang Qishan; Li
Yuanchao, the head of the party’s powerful organization department; and
Liu Yandong, a contender to become the standing committee’s only female
member.

“I’m optimistic,” Zhou Zhixing, a media executive and former official at a
Communist Party research organization, said of the next standing
committee. “I think these people have a very good understanding of China’s
current situation, and they know that people’s demands include political
reform.” Mr. Zhou’s Web site, Consensus Net, has become an important forum
for political debate.

If peaceful change is to occur, Mr. Zhou and many others say, it must
begin inside the Communist Party; the lesson of Tiananmen Square is that
the leadership will not tolerate threats to its control. Many speak of a
transformation along the lines of that in Taiwan, where authoritarian
rulers peacefully gave way to direct elections in 1996, and helped spawn
today’s robust democracy.

But the pro-reform contingent agrees on little else: on whether China
should seek Western-style democracy, a more open form of the Communists’
single-party dictatorship or something altogether different.

Populists want to remake the party to reflect Mao’s early vision,
redistributing billions in government riches to the people. A so-called
new democracy movement, led by a rural economist and journalist named
Zhang Musheng, is gaining followers with a plan to add checks and balances
to one-party rule and to significantly expand welfare benefits. But
Mao-style populism is disdained by most current leaders, and Mr. Bo,
perhaps its leading apostle, was felled by scandal last spring.

A second Communist camp wants to open the party to internal competition,
abandoning the leadership’s facade of unity and letting rival factions
take their ideas to the wider party for approval. Over the long run, they
say, transparency will spawn competing parties under a Communist umbrella
— a sort of one-party democracy. But in a China where stability is the
leadership’s obsessive concern, the notion of baring divisions at the
pinnacle of power seems almost farcical.

Indeed, the reformers cannot even agree on their motivation. Intellectuals
and dissidents see political opening-up as an article of faith. Many in
the second red generation, the children of the founding warriors, are
driven by anger over what they believe China has become under Mr. Hu.

“They think the Youth League has ruined the country that their fathers
fought and died for,” said Mr. Zhang, the historian, referring to the
Communist Youth League, which is Mr. Hu’s base of support.

The beleaguered idealists cannot afford to be too choosy, though. “We
welcome them,” Mr. Zhang said. “It’s better to at least have an interest
in reform, no matter why.”

But the sheer scope of the discord leads some who call for change to
wonder whether they are less a movement than a debating society —
intellectuals trading theories over plates of noodles in their apartments,
the second red generation trading theories over lavish hotel banquets.

“Mao used to say that ‘revolution is not a dinner party,’ ” Mr. Yang, the
editor at Yanhuang Chunqiu, said sardonically. “But right now, revolution
is precisely a dinner party.”

Sharon LaFraniere and Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting. Mia Li
contributed research.