CHINA'S WORST-KEPT SECRET
CHINA'S LEADERS DON'T WANT DEMOCRATIZATION, BUT THE RURAL POOR WILL NEVER PROSPER WITHOUT IT
19 March 2006

Beijing is nervous about a movement stirring in the remote countryside. The severe hierarchy and stratified economic system dominating the ancient nation are provoking violent demonstrations and calls for economic reforms by poor in rural areas.

The communist revolution began in largely the same way, though it took root in a time of chaos and disorder, and this is not so much a matter of revolution as of revolution's unraveling. The Communist party (CCP) has never managed to solve the problem of extreme rural poverty, despite its rise to power being motivated by precisely this goal.

While some basic services were once available, like state-run healthcare and education, these are increasingly scarce as state resources are devoted to industry, development and international trade. China's leaders have preferred, as throughout the rule of the CCP, to project an image of wellbeing and harmony to dealing with the problems that threaten its rule.

Since pres. Hu Jintao came to power last year, his government has instituted a new wave of aggressive media crackdowns, arresting dissidents and even jailing individual citizens for accessing forbidden websites or republishing foreign news items or reports.

The last few years have seen a troubling rise in violence in rural communities, largely stemming from angry demonstrations against authoritarian state tactics which perpetuate or worsen already severe deprivation. Farm workers have rallied against expropriation of lands for big state development projects, or against endemic corruption, which enables local officials to skim resources and money which should otherwise benefit the laborers themselves.

The Chinese government has investigated literally hundreds of thousands of cases of corruption at all levels of government during each of the last few years, but the official system for addressing complaints of injustice has done little to remedy injustices suffered by complainants. In fact, reports late last year suggested the Beijing government either participated in or turned a blind eye to systemic violence against complainants.

The government's response to these rallies, and to the violence which has been used to put them down, has been to conceal them. It is considered a violation of state security to report to the Chinese public that anti-government demonstrations have been staged, and the government has aggressively pursued a program of persuasion, trying to paint development projects and state land seizures as part of a harmonious new era of prosperity, benefitting all and without protest.

It is efforts to muzzle the press, by barring of words and themes from internet sites accessible from inside China, through coercion and the use of foreign tech giants like Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google, who have agreed to censor materials for the Chinese market, along with deadly efforts to conceal information even where related to public health, as with the SARS outbreak, that show China's regime is not ready to release its grip on state-run media propaganda and information control.

Presently, the Beijing government is testing a new "parallel" internet, to use only Mandarin Chinese characters. Though there may be sound linguistic reasons for such a project, the scope of it, and the fear of some that all other sites would be banned, has given rise to concerns China is planning an internet "schism" designed to allow near total control of information in the country. The leadership deny this.

Now tensions are flaring with Taiwan, a democratic satellite state which has functioned as an independent democracy for decades, though formally its allies have not refuted China's claim on the island. Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian has recently declared that a massive increase in China's military spending, some of it hidden through an alternative budget, and consequent weapons build-up, is a direct threat to Taiwan and that the island needs to gain support to defend against an invasion.

Beijing has reiterated its claim on Taiwan as Chinese territory, and the US has criticized Chen for inflaming tensions. But the Chinese response has not assuaged fears that in fact the authoritarian regime does want to annex Taiwan as it did Tibet and other neighboring countries during the post-revolutionary period.

Beijing's handling of the Hong Kong devolution has been rocky, and democracy activists there have long complained that Beijing has actively sought to violate the agreement that turned Hong Kong back to China by setting up a puppet regime hostile to free expression or democracy.

Now it looks like the world may see another test of Beijing's true stance on democracy. As the appetite of China to consume the world's resources explodes, and prices of oil and metals have shot up in recent years in part due to this extraordinary demand, its tolerance of economic competition nearby has been strained.

Taiwan though small in comparison, does a lot of business on a lot of fronts, including playing a role in pricing of resources through exchanges where speculation allows profits China would prefer to control. It is also a manufacturing and shipping powerhouse, and a foothold of democracy in the regime's immediate vecinity.

But China's rural poor cannot be won over with patriotic talk of recovering lost lands or of travel into space (another new front where Beijing hopes to compete with world powers, launching more satellites, and now people, into space with Chinese technology).

The problem in China's rural areas is complex and unrelenting, a constellation of forces ranging from official corruption to lack of land rights, to environmental degradation on an almost unthinkable scale (the entire northwest of the country is suffering severe desertification and millions of acres of arable land have been lost).

Industrialization is speeding ahead, but extinguishing whole regions and thousands of years of history. The Three Gorges dam project to control the Yangtze River is moving ahead of schedule, and millions of people have been displaced, with literally hundreds of villages to be forever submerged under hundreds of feet of water, behind the dam.

Chemical contamination of waterways has reached historic levels, with entire cities having to be shut down or barricaded to prevent a public health emergency from contamination of drinking water, last fall. It is the poor who have been left out of China's boom equation, and the real secret is, the poor know this all too well; they are not deceived.

So what can a burgeoning superpower do, as it moves to the apotheosis of its clout and currency in the international community, to solve the age-old problem of society's have-nots? Banking reform, as demanded by international institutions, could be one step forward, creating a system where wealth is not artificially propped up by the government and where currency is openly traded and valued against other currencies.

But those are measures that benefit the market as a whole, not those who already receive little to none of the market's benefits. No, the only way the rural poor of China will be able to improve their lot is through democratization. This is a simple analysis based on matters of fact; the rural poor are under-represented. Their interests are not first among the regime's priorities, and they are still viewed in large part as a resource of the state.

Developing a system whereby rural Chinese laborers would choose their own local officials, then vote for members of a legitimate representative government, would allow their massive but so far inconsequential voice, to be heard in the halls of power, and that would direct social and economic policy toward helping to ease their desperation.

Without such an innovation, it is all too obvious that a government which systematically distorts and manipulates information about its activities and its failings, and where an overclass of near hereditary officialdom skims massive amounts of wealth from across the economy, will sooner gloss over the plight of the rural poor than take comprehensive nationwide action to afford real opportunity to those most in need of it. [s]

• Washington Post: "China's Rising Tide of Protest Sweeping Up Party Officials"

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