George Orwell’s China?
By William de Tocqueville
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PlurkHu Jintao has been keen to emphasize ‘fairness’ in China. But has the message reached the ears of many of the country’s officials?
The author is a professor of economics at a university in China. His real name has been witheld at his request.
Over the Chinese New Year holiday, a crowd of passengers at the Tianjin Railway Station were held waiting by police, left holding their luggage on the platform in the piercing cold wind while a small group of Communist Party cadres strutted onto a first class carriage. Enraged by the unfairness of it all, a young law student from Beijing University snapped a photo of the scene with her cell phone. Several uniformed and plain-clothes police rushed her, yelling at her to surrender her camera and come with them. When they grabbed her, she screamed ‘like a fishwife’ (in her own words), creating a scene until they let her go. The moment she did board the train, she posted her story on her school’s micro-blog, where it spread like wildfire across the Chinese Internet.
Ever since President Hu Jintao took office in 2003, he has made fairness a central theme of his agenda. Hu, along with his power base in the Communist Youth League, view China’s widening gap between rich and poor as a significant threat to social and political stability. The country’s latest Five Year Plan, which was unveiled last November, aims to redistribute income more evenly in order to foster ‘inclusive development,’ reflecting a widespread belief among Party leaders that Deng Xiaoping’s maxim—‘let some people get rich first’—has gone too far.
The incident at the station, however, reveals the disconnect between the government’s fixation with income inequality and what’s really been rubbing the masses the wrong way. What people resent isn’t wealth, it’s privilege. By and large, your average Chinese worker admires people who have gotten rich through cleverness or hard work, because that’s what they aspire to do themselves. What bothers them, though, is the growing sense that there’s a special class of people who get to live by a different set of rules than everyone else.
One night last October, in the provincial city of Baoding, just west of Beijing, a 22 year-old drunk driver mowed down two female college students—then casually cruised away, to pick up his girlfriend a few blocks away. One of the girls, left lying in a pool of her own blood, died. When a crowd of bystanders followed and accosted the perpetrator, he contemptuously brushed them aside. ‘Sue me if you dare,’ he reportedly taunted, ‘My father is Li Gang!’—the district’s deputy police chief.
The incident was just the latest in a series of fatal hit-and-run incidents where young hot-rodders appeared to get off scot free due to family political connections. Despite the government’s best efforts to suppress the story, it quickly became a cause célèbre via the Chinese Internet, with the slogan ‘My father is Li Gang!’ emerging as an all-purpose catchphrase for official arrogance and corruption. Under immense public pressure, Li Gang’s son was eventually tried and sentenced to six years in prison.
The assumption, in Beijing, is that the government needs to intervene more actively to combat inequality. But the real problem is that government officials have far too dominant a role in picking winners and losers in almost every walk of life. Lack of accountability, combined with a natural tendency to favour family and friends, gives rise to a vicious cycle where influence begets money and money buys influence. According to a recent survey by YouGov and London’s Legatum Institute, 93 percent of Chinese entrepreneurs cite guanxi—connections with government officials—as a critical factor in business success.
Image credit: Kate Janis
theorycraft
Also about Li Gang, Chinese law actually states that drunk driving has a 2-6 year sentence, but 7-14 years if there is a fatality. Somebody was bought off… even after all that criticism.
Soham
I myself hail from a particular state in India that has been ruled by the Communist Party of India for 34 years. As an erstwhile member of the same party I must say the picture presented in this Article about China is similar in any polity run by the Communists for long.
Communism is a great revolutionary ideal but it it is far from perfect in the realities of Governance where as all forms of conservative Democracy passes the bar even if not with flying colours, regarding the issues of Popular Governance.