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Russell Senate Office Building, Room 385 of Hu Ping What Does This New Crackdown Tell Us? Since Hu Jintao took office, the plight of the intellectuals in public life in China has not been bettered; in fact, it has worsened. In reality, the lack of improvement in and of itself is tantamount to worsening, because the same oppression becomes more onerous as time goes on, and the consequences of that oppression more and more severe. Not long ago, the Hu Jintao regime unleashed a new crackdown on intellectual circles. The authorities once more raised aloft the banner of "anti-liberalization", and stridently criticized "liberalized thought" and "public intellectuals." The Central Propaganda Department brought out a list of names and banned a number of liberal intellectuals who had a tiny foothold in the official media from making more statements. The Ministry also demanded that the media implement rigorous checks, as they "may not report on premeditated bombings, riots, demonstrations or strikes." A batch of books was banned, and a number of Web sites were closed down. At the same time, the authorities also utilized administrative means and autocratic methods to persecute some liberal intellectuals. Some were discharged from their jobs, some had their houses searched and notes confiscated, some received very stern warnings, and others were arrested and sentenced. When Zhao Ziyang died, it was as though the CCP authorities were on their guard for all possible danger. They took all sorts of measures to strengthen their control, and many dissidents were subjected to house arrest, with others taken into custody. Those inside the system received harsh warnings: they were not to participate in any memorial event on pain of losing their posts. Moreover, we must not forget the world-renowned Dr. Jiang Yanyong, who fought against SARS. For no greater reason than the fact that the letter he wrote to the National People's Congress and the Chinese Political Consultative Conference last Spring asking for a rectification of names for the June 4th event was published overseas, he was kidnapped and held in custody, and continues under house arrest today. The facts demonstrate that Hu Jintao and his predecessor Jiang Zemin are cut from the same cloth. In 1991, Jiang Zemin quoted a literary reference from the "Commentary of Zuo", a famous Classical Chinese work, while speaking privately to a visitor from Taiwan. The passage basically holds that in politics it is better to be fierce than lenient. Fire is fierce, and everyone who sees it is frightened and hides away. As a result, very few people are burned to death. Water seems to be gentle and weak, so many people do not respect it. They fool around in the water, and even more people end up drowning. (Later on, this exchange was published in the August, 1996 issue of "The 90s", a Hong Kong magazine.) The Chinese Communist leaders are deeply cognizant of the fact that their political power is entirely based on the fear of the masses. Consequently, if they are to preserve their own rule, they must keep the people in fear. That means they cannot seem warm or enlightened in front of the masses. If the people feel the authorities are kind or enlightened they will dare to speak out, saying things they would never have dared otherwise. The more they dare to speak out with demands they would not have dared offer otherwise, the greater the pressure and the challenges become facing the authorities. The authorities must invest a great deal of energy if they are to repress (if indeed they are able to do so). At the end, their image may be even more severely tarnished. Hu Jintao showed his true face of cruelty the moment major power was within his grasp. His primary goal was to maintain and consolidate the power of intimidation by force and the effect of fear that the autocratic Chinese government had enjoyed since ˇ°June 4.ˇ± By so doing, he would then nip any unrest in the bud. There was no need to use force or violate any taboos on killing. Everything Hu Jintao has done since taking office has been the cause of widespread disappointment in him on the part of the outside world. It has also given people the impression that he has not gone overboard in any way. However, in reality, that is precisely the effect he wished to achieve by implementing this sort of strategy. After Hu Jintao took office, he reiterated time and time again his concern for disadvantaged groups. Many people mistakenly thought that Hu would permit events that would safeguard the rights of these groups, but that simply wasn't the case. For example, Li Boguang, a PhD in law from Beijing, has helped peasants to guard their rights, always within the dictates of current law. Not long ago, he was detained by the local government on suspicion of fraud (he recently made bail and is currently awaiting trial). This proves that while it's not necessarily true that Hu Jintao's regime was not thinking of shrinking the huge disparity between rich and poor to some extent, of putting the brakes on corruption to some degree, and of improving the lot of disadvantaged groups a bit, they absolutely do not permit the people to initiate any open group action or to stand up to defend their own rights. The authorities can partially satisfy the material needs of the people, but the thing they fear most is that the people might thus obtain the ability to engage in independent group activity. Additionally, the authorities also refuse to implement a true rule of law, in which everyone is equal before the law. This is because they know full well that the existing allocation of wealth is based on a huge injustice that is essentially illegitimate. The gap between rich and poor in China is unique in that it is not a product of history or of the market but is mainly due to power. In China, the poverty of the poor exists in large part because the products of their labor have been appropriated by those in power. The wealth of the rich is in large measure due to their use of power to steal the prosperity created by others. The moment that the people are able to argue strongly based on law and rationality, the moment they have the ability to band together to make a stand, they will absolutely no longer be satisfied with a tad more aid to the unemployed or a small additional subsidy for the poor. They will first demand that the group of people who used power to first become rich turn over the property they plundered, and there may very well be a day of reckoning for privileged rich privatization that will threaten the autocratic government itself. Naturally, this is not the wish of the Hu Jintao regime. As a result, the so-called "concern for the disadvantaged" touted by Hu Jintao's regime is in reality no more than a desire to employ "controlled oppression" and to maintain "continued squeezing". Yes, on the surface it seems that the intelligentsia are very active in today's China. On the Internet, even in the official media, discussion certain public issues is quite open and even quite lively. Some dissidents express themselves without fear, and nothing happens, they sit at home, quite well. But what I must bring to your attention is the principle being implemented by authorities in China today, that principle is "all people are not equal before the law." When the authorities handle issues related to expression and speech, there is no single standard measure used. The standards vary by person, by time, and by place. When the authorities oppress the intellectuals, they often consider a multitude of factors, such as; do you have any position within the establishment? Are you known internationally? What's your social network of "connections" like? And so on. We cannot draw the conclusion based solely from the situation of a few well-known dissidents that freedom of speech in China has expanded greatly. Again, we cannot forget that the means the Chinese Communists use to squash freedom of speech have taken on many forms over the years. For example, during the Anti-Rightist movement only a handful of the over 500,000 Rightists were actually imprisoned and sentenced, some Rightists were fired from their jobs and sent to the countryside to do manual labor. Some were demoted, had their salaries cut, or were forced to move to other posts. Some Rightists were permitted to show their faces in the official media to say a word or two. The situation today is the same. At this point I should mention that when the outside world assesses the degree of freedom of speech in China, it quite often focuses on how many people have been arrested or imprisoned. Without a doubt, a shocking number of dissidents have been locked up in China, a number that puts China in first place in such matters. However, this is but one standard by which we assess the amount of freedom of expression and the plight of intellectuals in China. First I want to say that precisely because there is still no freedom of the press in China, the outside world does not have an accurate figure on the number of dissidents in prison there. The figures the world gets are usually greatly understated. Second, another point that must be made is that the number of dissidents in custody isn't really as important as it might seem at first blush. Nations that arrest smaller numbers of dissidents do not necessarily have a more serious lack of freedom of expression than nations that arrest many. At times, the situation may be quite the opposite. We all know that traditional autocratic governments use investigation and punishment after the act to control freedom of speech. When the media does not get government approval on articles or news it puts out, then the chances greatly increase that articles or news items not favored by the government will become known to the world. Moreover, it also greatly increases the difficulty the government faces in penalizing the articles or news items it does not like. This results in the government being unable to cover up its oppression and makes its evil deeds obvious. But Communist autocracy doesn't work this way. The Communist Party takes a preventative approach before anything even happens. The Communist Party government not only has its book and newspapers supervisory structures in place (such as propaganda offices at various levels), but also, quite simply, has a direct hold on all the media. Party faithful are sent out to lead the defense effort. This is tantamount to a double layer of insurance. Under these circumstances, opinions or news items that displease the Party have no chance of making it to the media. And there is no need to run out and lock up the occasional minnow that manages to elude the net. The only thing needed is to mobilize Party sanctions and administrative sanctions, which are generally enough to resolve the problem. Doubtless the advent of the Internet has made control more difficult, particularly when users can post articles on their own, and it's almost impossible to censor in advance. Accordingly, the Chinese government has established the largest network surveillance system in the world. On the one hand, screening programs search for "sensitive" words and phrases, while on the other hand the instant any writings with a "dangerous bent" are detected, they are immediately erased. If necessary, the poster of the content can be found and punished afterwards. As a result, in a country that undertakes this sort of rigorous before-the-fact preventive actions, the government has no need to lock up too many dissidents. In reality, of the dissidents the Chinese government has in prison at present, quite a few were brought in for issuing articles or placing news items either on the Internet or in the foreign media. This is a benefit accrued from today's high technology and from being opened up to the outside world. If it were not so, these people would not even have the opportunity to "commit a crime", and the government would very likely catch fewer of them. If we liken the traditional model of autocracy and its treatment of free expression to killing people or butchering children, then the Communist autocracy's methods are not limited to killing people and slaughtering babies but also include abortion and contraception. The effects of this oppression are not only more severe and far-reaching; they are also more insidious and more apt to fool people. On the surface, the yardstick used as a measure for the control of free speech by the authorities is broader than before, with the standards not only looser than those of the Mao era but also as loose as or even looser than those of the 1980s. But this doesn't mean enlightenment on the part of the authorities. It should be said that it is a number of other factors that are creating this situation. First and foremost is the impact of the 1989 democracy movement. During that movement, tens of thousands of people took to the streets shouting "We want democracy, we want freedom!" The butchery of the June 4 incident caused the common people to be even more incensed. Throughout China, people of both high and low status began to curse the Communist Party in untold numbers. No matter what means the authorities adopt, they are unable to completely return the hearts of the people to their former cramped and limited space. As a result, the government was forced to turn a blind eye to many expressions of opinion that are outside the "norms". Second we have the breakdown of the international Communist fraternity and the bankruptcy of Communist ideology. This includes the economic reforms promoted by the authorities themselves, in which, theoretically, they overturned the golden rules of theory that they themselves had enshrined. This provided the opportunity for all sorts of other ideologies to have their moment in the sun. At the present stage, the Chinese Communist authorities are still working hard to put together a new ideology, doing their utmost to find a theme and striving in vain to once more unify thought. However, their efforts are falling short and they have been forced to turn to largely defensive principles. This means that in the current phase, when the Chinese Communist authorities are controlling speech, they are largely looking not at whether something that is said is in line with the official ideology, but rather thinking about whether it poses a direct challenge to the current regime. This provides relatively more space for other thought and speech. Also, with the June 4th massacre as their landmark, the Chinese Communist government has lost the traditional support of belief. It has been transformed into a rule of naked violence. Violent rule means negative indifference toward government by the people; it means widespread cynicism; and in today's China, the power of thought and speech to appeal lags far behind the force these carried in the 1980s. This has increased a certain type of immunity on the part of the authorities to resist criticism. Violence does not care much for people's criticism. That is because violence is forced upon people without the need for the consent of a third party. You yell about what you want, and I'll comply about what I like. What can you do to me? Simply put, the authorities have become even more shameless ("I'm a rogue, who should I fear?") so the "degree of tolerance" for dissidents has, on the contrary, increased. However, at the same time, the authorities have adopted a more straightforward means of implementing oppression than they previously had regarding speech they simply cannot tolerate. In the past, officials who toed the Party ideological line were all recognized by the entire Party as having theoretical authority (in more cases, the tone was personally set by the "Great Leader"). It was said that only they could accurately discern what conforming speech was and what was not. At that time, if the authorities wanted to crack down on some type of opinion, they would always take care to cobble up some sort of reason, to show that they had a basis for their actions. Quite often the offending speech was trotted out and shown to everyone so that the masses could judge it and criticize it jointly. But now, today's guardians of ideology don't need to trouble themselves overly much. If they say ban, it's banned; if they say wipe it out, it's wiped out; and if they say "arrest him", he's under arrest. They don't need to give any reason. Sometimes they don't even need to issue formal paperwork. It can all be done with a single phone call, avoiding all the other formalities. Today, the Chinese Communist authorities control over speech is in no way truly looser than it was in the past. Beijing Film Academy Professor Hao Jian once gave this explanation. He said, "We definitely know when we can strike the table in anger and speak with the force of justice behind us. We also know when we have to stay quiet about things we are perfectly clear on and keep our lips sealed. We do something else that's even scarier, we go for the underbelly, picking the softest, easiest targets and making a great deal of noise for justice and truth, but in fact it is all a sham. We also know when to say what so that we can get right to the top for a nod of approval and what will enrage everyone. For myself, I've perfected this sort of calculation to a fine art. And it's already become a part of my subconscious." This statement can help us understand the extent to which pretense flourishes among the intellectuals of today's China. Long-term oppression produces very negative results. Up until the 1990s, there were still quite a number of dissidents in China who dared to speak out that held high posts within the system. For example, some held posts in Party media organizations, higher research institutes or in famous universities. Some were even in leadership positions. They had more chances to speak out and faced less risk. As the years went on, there were constant purges, and fewer and fewer of this kind of person remained. What's more, the party authorities stepped up their control of the media, and liberal intellectuals all over felt their situation worsen. In these circumstances, dissenter activities still hold on tenaciously among the people, but it's very difficult for them to develop any further. In direct opposition to the early hopes of many Chinese and Westerners, the economic reforms and economic development in China have not put China on a pathway to freedom and democracy. On the contrary, reform and development have become the main reason the authorities use to cling to one-party rule and deny freedom and democracy. From Li Peng and Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, leaders have taken China's successful economic development as their basis to justify the crackdown on June 4th as necessary and right. They use it to show that a one party autocracy is necessary and right. In reality, China's privatization reforms not only were not aimed at setting down a foundation for democratization; they were actually aimed at throwing up more obstacles to democracy. The privatization and reform in China, if the truth be told, was nothing more than officials using their power to misappropriate resources that originally belonged to all the people. This sort of privatization reduces the "transaction cost" to a minimum, making it far quicker and more effective than privatization accomplished with democratic participation. However, such reforms are necessarily of the type that can never be approved by the people. The great blocs who profit immediately from all this are those who are most in fear of democracy and most stoutly oppose it. That is because these officials know very well that if they open the door to free democracy, they will not only lose their monopoly on political power but also, very possibly, will be called out by the people on charges of economic corruption. In today's China, the Mao era is water under the bridge, and there is no going back. Even the ruling blocs themselves are not willing to go back to the days of Mao. China today must concern herself with something that seems even more old-fashioned, but which could be an even more persistent type of oppression: that of rule by people who believe in no "ism" but wield enormous power, and are determined to use every means at their disposal to preserve it. |
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