Opinion | Columnists
People power in China
Beijing has a well-justified reputation for being highly autocratic, but at the same time it pays great attention to popular opinion.
- By David Piling, Financial Times
- Published: 23:14 September 11, 2009
The words 'people power' and China are not generally associated. China is seen as an authoritarian state in which the will of the people is crushed by lightning economic growth and improving living standards. To be sure, the country has its fair share of censorship but there is more going on besides.
Take recent events in Xinjiang province. There, tens of thousands of Han Chinese protesters have poured onto the streets of Urumqi demanding the head of Wang Lequan, regional Communist party chief. Anger has been prompted by a bout of syringe stabbing attacks blamed on the Uighur minority, as well as by the authorities' perceived timid response to July ethnic riots in which 197 people, mainly Han, were killed. The government responded by offering up the scalp of Urumqi city's party secretary and Xinjiang's chief of police, though not yet that of Wang, a politburo bigwig.
The attempt to fling the public a bone is not limited to Xinjiang. Local governments regularly punish corrupt officials, terminate projects or change policy direction in response to popular outcry. Only last month, a city government in southern Hunan province shut a manganese smelter after 1,300 children were diagnosed with lead poisoning. The crackdown came after 1,000 villagers blocked a road and upended a police car. Just a week earlier, authorities in north-western Shaanxi province closed a smelting works after a press campaign exposed the poisoning of children. Nor do things have to go quite so far for the state to intervene. In July, Guangdong's party secretary said he was relocating a proposed $5 billion (Dh18.3 billion) petrochemical plant because of 'strong criticism from the community' over environmental safeguards. The government in Beijing is also susceptible to popular pressure. Its tough language on the US deficit and the risk to dollar assets is, at least in part, for domestic consumption. Party leaders have been stung by criticism that they have mishandled China's foreign investments and put too many hard-earned foreign exchange reserves into shaky dollar assets.
The authorities' responsiveness to public opinion is not exactly democratic. There are no regular soundings in the form of elections. Rather, there are eruptions of anger in the street or, increasingly, on the internet.
Arthur Kroeber of Dragonomics, a research company, says that, in some instances, the authorities actively encourage the press to dig up information. When controversy first flared in June over a proposal to install Green Dam filtering software in all personal computers, the media were given a one-week grace period before reporting restrictions came crashing down. The information unearthed persuaded Beijing to water down its plans. The government also expends considerable effort on surveys and investigations. Not unreasonably, it does not trust local officials to inform party bosses about corruption in their own backyard. Yet if there is a conscious effort to seek out popular opinion, the outcomes are arbitrary at best. In the absence of elections and free speech, the government's ability to uncover the true state of public opinion is limited. For every victory of people power, there are dozens - perhaps hundreds - of cases that never come to light. Even those that do, such as protests over children killed by the shoddily constructed schools that collapsed in last year's Sichuan earthquake, often elicit a harsh response.
Not all popular protests are equal. Ones that threaten the integrity of the state, such as demonstrations in Tibet, are quickly suppressed. State authorities are also ambivalent about nationalism. Useful at times - patriotism equates national prestige with Communist party rule - it is prone to get out of hand. In 2005, anti-Japanese sentiment grew ugly when violent street protests erupted all over China. Beijing's fear that things had gone too far may have contributed to its subsequent resolve to repair relations with Tokyo.
Nationalism can mould foreign policy in other ways. Yan Xuetong, director of international studies at Tsinghua university, says the central government is ultra-sensitive to accusations that it cannot protect its citizens. He foresees a time when Beijing will take a more active global role in the name of safeguarding Chinese citizens abroad. If Yan is right, people power would, in effect, be driving China's foreign policy. Clearly something important is going on.
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