China's Crisis, China's Hope

Picked up the book China’s crisis, China’s Hope, Essays from an Intellectual in Exile (Liu Binyan (刘宾雁), Harvard University Press 1990) after developing a sudden affinity with the late Chinese dissident in exile.

(Coz during my search for housing in Washington DC I chanced upon a Dupont Circle apartment that Liu used to live in for a year, at least according to the owner.)

Even as an exile, Liu was hardly bitter about the Chinese regime. His collection of essays were mainly reasoned and measured.

Liu noted that before 1988, officials used their authority for personal economic advantage but such acquisitions were considered illegal. The harm they inflicted on society by misappropriating funds and diverting public wealth was “more or less indirect.”

But since 1988, bureaucrats and their relatives were said to be diverting public funds “through the authority of party organizations to enter the realm of production and commodities by setting up state-funded companies; their speculation and profiteering caused untold damage to the national economy as they reaped staggering profits.”

Writing before 1990, Liu said the most serious problem was the “widespread spiritual malaise” among ordinary Chinese from all walks of life, “a growing mood of depression, even despair, a loss of hope for the future and of any sense of social responsibility, as if China were no longer their country and society owed them something.”

Remarking that such an attitude had not been seen in the four decades prior to 1990, Liu, a former Communist Party member and People’s Daily correspondent, argued that the malaise had led to disturbances such as labor strikes and work slowdowns.

Even so, Liu contended that the CCP had enjoyed a high degree of moral authority which is “unmatched by any other regime in the country’s history.”

“Even though people constantly witness the misdeeds of party members, they continue to view the party in a good light. Concepts, particularly traditional ones, have a powerful hold. So when people talk about forming another political party in China or setting up a multi-party system, I think the time is not yet ripe for that.”

Liu was sanguine that changes would occur in China, citing the role of the country’s trade unions which were then clamoring for reform and emphasizing on participation in government and their watchdog functions.

Liu noted that such clamoring were not official announcements, nor do they “originate from the powers that be”. Instead, these stemmed from changes within the unions themselves, many of which were no longer content to be “mere branches of the government” and were more interested in serving the interests of the workers.

These unions had formulated a series of demands, and they wanted to participate in legislation and be consulted on policies that involved the interests of workers.

“Government-run trade unions are in the process of becoming popular labor unions. Even though the appearance of a union like Poland’s Solidarity is not considered a strong possibility in China, there is a distinct possibility that government-run trade unions will in fact evolve into popular unions.”

Another example cited was the China Youth Daily which in 1988 published speeches of Ding Shisun (丁石孙), the president of Beijing University, and noted economist Qian Jiaju (千家驹). The move was said to have upset the authorities.

“I assumed that the paper would be chastened by this criticism, but they leaped right back into the fray after some perfunctory self-criticism. This is a case of a government-run newspaper evolving into a popular one.”