MCLC: plutocrats with opinions

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: plutocrats with opinions
***********************************************************

Source: The New Yorker (10/23/13):
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/10/chinas-plutocrats-wit
h-opinions.html

CHINA’S PLUTOCRATS WITH OPINIONS
BY EVAN OSNOS 

Wang Gongquan, who was charged in Beijing on Sunday with “assembling a
crowd to disrupt order,” hardly fits the profile of a classic Chinese
political activist. He doesn’t lead a threadbare life on the margins of an
increasingly prosperous society. He doesn’t scrape by on a mixture of tiny
grants, consulting fees, and the sale of obscure essays. On the contrary,
Wang, who is fifty-two, is a plutocrat, one of China’s most famous venture
capitalists. He made a fortune in real estate, technology, and other
investments. People call him a billionaire, or maybe just a
multimillionaire—in China, it can be difficult to know for sure. He has
indulged in the decadent excesses of his moment, most memorably in 2011,
when he announced that he was leaving his wife to journey abroad with his
mistress—news that he broke on Weibo. “I am giving up everything and
eloping with Wang Qin,” he wrote to his social-media followers, whose
numbers eventually grew to more than a million. “I feel ashamed and so am
leaving without saying goodbye. I kneel down and beg forgiveness!”

He came back. His fans, by and large, forgave him. (He even seemed to get
credit for what some interpreted as an act of true romance.) But Wang is
not a man accustomed to living within limits, and he had begun to bridle
against other restraints.

The ancient sage Mencius once said, “Those who have property are inclined
to preserve social stability.” For the past decade, the Chinese Communist
Party has thrived on the belief that co-opting those with property will
buttress it against pressures for greater political openness. But stories
like Wang Gongquan’s suggest that some of the nation’s most prosperous
citizens are not comfortable with the status quo.

In China, the Communist Party asks something of its entrepreneurs: be
daring and ambitious in business, but not in politics. It is an odd
arrangement. Men and women who have made it to the top of society by being
unrelentingly determined are advised to relent when it comes to calling
for the rule of law, adherence to the constitution, or an end to abuses of
power. Wang had trouble with that kind of compartmentalization, and he
began to criticize the government and support activists who called, in
particular, for China’s government to enforce its own laws. A few years
ago, he befriended Xu Zhiyong, a lawyer who organized a petition calling
for high officials to disclose their wealth. That project attracted
several thousand supporters to what Xu called the New Citizens’ Movement.

But China is in the midst of a new crackdown. In the past six months, the
government has detained nearly a hundred people who have attempted to take
a more entrepreneurial approach to civil liberties; among them was Xu, the
lawyer, who was arrested in August
<http://bigstory.ap.org/article/chinese-citizens-movement-leader-arrested>
and charged, like Wang Gongquan, with “assembling a crowd to disrupt
order.” (That’s a common charge for people who are said to be involved in
a public protest; authorities said that Xu had incited people to stage a
demonstration.) Wang, the investor, was detained after he organized a
petition calling for his friend’s release. The addition of formal charges
signals that authorities plan to bring him to trial—a demonstration of how
acutely uncomfortable the Party is with the idea of plutocrats with
opinions.

In the summer of 2011, the Party declared that it would welcome
non-Communist Party candidates to run for local office. One of the people
who signed up was a real-estate developer named Cao Tian, who’d made
millions of dollars and had been honored in the state media as one of the
“Top Ten Influential Citizens in Henan.” He wanted to be mayor of
Zhengzhou 
<http://www.scmp.com/article/974940/tycoon-runs-mayor-and-has-run-cover>,
the capital of Henan province; he said that he would take no salary, and
he put up fifteen million dollars of his own fortune as a “deposit for
clean governance,” which would go to poor students were he ever convicted
of corruption. On his blog, he wrote, “To have a Zhengzhou mayor actually
voted in by the citizens? That would bring true hope and confidence to
Henan and all of China.”

Then his phone rang. It was an old classmate who had gone into government
and climbed the ranks. “Have you lost your mind?” the classmate asked,
according to Cao’s notes from the call
<http://club.kdnet.net/dispbbs.asp?id=7533577&boardid=1>. “I’m serious
about this,” Cao replied. “I’m tired of making money. I’m willing to spend
a hundred million yuan for a chance to do something for the public. You’ve
been a public servant all these years. Why not give a turn to someone like
me?” His schoolmate left him with an old saying: “Remember: The first bird
to take flight is the first to get shot.”

Ten days after Cao announced his candidacy, police visited him at home; a
team from the local tax bureau arrived at his office and announced that
they were opening an investigation. The Henan Provincial Propaganda
Department ordered the local press to stop covering his candidacy, because
“foreign forces are participating with ulterior purposes and attempting to
overthrow our government.” Cao retreated from public view. In the end, the
local government ordered him
<http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1104391/mainland-tycoon-fined-hk40m
-after-launching-clean-government-bid-mayor> to pay more than five million
dollars in back taxes and fees. Cao Tian never ran for office again, but
it seems unlikely that his fate can prevent another Cao Tian—or Wang
Gongquan—from deciding that he should be allowed to extend his success
into affairs of state.

The Party today is facing an expanding problem: losing the confidence of
some of its most successful residents. Another pugnacious plutocrat,
Charles Xue, is a Chinese-American investor with twelve million followers
online. He has been jailed since August, initially accused of soliciting a
prostitute and later charged with spreading rumors online. Xue didn’t hide
the pleasure he took from gaining influence. He once said that gaining a
big voice on the Internet is “like being an emperor.” And that, it turned
out, was one luxury the Party could not tolerate.