When you start to engage in reform, it can get out of your hands
By Liu Yu (劉瑜)People are getting more and more conscious of their political and social rights. If you think about recent social conflicts — land disputes and environmental issues — the government tries to use old ways to deal with these: they try to deal with it in an isolated way, to buy off people’s dissent. However, if the government does not allow some kind of institutional participation, no matter how much they compensate those who are losing land, people will feel there are problems.
Whether people can participate in the whole decisionmaking process will be the biggest challenge. Ten or even five years ago people at the grassroots cared more about material benefits or short-run issues, but if you look at what is happening in Wukan [where locals staged a rebellion against officials they accused of stealing their farmland], you see that even peasants are thinking the real solution is to have genuine village elections.
If you watch Weibo [microblogs], you can see so many Chinese people caring about what is happening in the Taiwanese elections, the Middle East and Russia. It is the issue of democratization rather than those particular countries or regions that people really care about. The government’s response to such challenges is not as fast as many people hope.
It is much harder to kill a dog than a puppy and civil society is not a puppy any more. The government is playing a very delicate balance between maintaining power and retaining legitimacy.
If change takes place, how things go probably will not be in the government’s control. When you start to engage in reform, even if you are the Chinese Communist Party, it can get out of your hands. Even if the government has the intention to control change little by little, I don’t think it will be a planned change.
Liu Yu is a political scientist at Tsinghua University.
The coming decade will be a difficult process of recovery
By Jin Jiaman (金嘉滿)
In the past, the Chinese public, government and businesses have focused more on the economy and have neglected the environment. Because China developed too fast after opening up, problems have accumulated over the past 20 years and more will appear, despite the implementation of protection measures.
In the coming decade, environmental problems will affect ordinary people and they deserve our attention — issues such as poor air quality causing lung cancer and heavy-metal pollution resulting in birth deformities.
China’s minister of environmental protection said earlier this year that the country had seen more than 30 major incidents of heavy-metal pollution since 2009.
Supervision should be enhanced. Reporting and emergency measures are needed. When accidents happen, enforcement and strict punishment should be implemented.
China has the right attitude to environmental problems, but to solve them it also has to rely on civil society and on introducing mature international practices.
Global warming poses a big challenge and it is pushing the country to adopt a model which can ensure development, but decrease energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. China is one of the few countries using coal as its primary form of energy. That will not fundamentally change for a fairly long time.
The effects of global warming have been increasing. In the past 50 years, glaciers in northwest China have shrunk by 21 percent. Extreme weather has been widely observed — continuous droughts in the north and frequent floods in the south. China’s agriculture has been affected and its food security threatened.
In the coming decade or for even longer, China’s environment will be in a difficult process of recovery.
Jin Jiaman is executive director of the Global Environmental Institute.
Things have not become more just and equal, they have gotten worse
By Yu Hua (余華)
China’s development seems to have proved the point that in a country under a dictatorship the economy seems to develop faster, but the problems that develop along the way seem to be greater.
For example, the wealth gap has not got smaller as the economy develops, it has grown.
Society has not become any more just and equal, but worse. Corruption is more severe. When a tycoon is detained, someone will come to the detention house, saying: “If you are willing to sell your 3 billion yuan [US$475 million] of assets for 300 million, I can get you out of here.”
This is a corruption industry created in the process of fighting corruption.
People are looking at the case of Wang Lijun (王立軍) [the Chongqing police chief suspected of seeking to defect to the US]. It sends the signal that in their bones Chinese senior officials do not loathe western democracy as they say. Deep in their hearts, they do not trust the government.
The children of high officials get fortunes from their power and migrate to democratic countries, not dictatorships.
As social conflict becomes sharper, maintaining stability becomes more important. The official figures say the cost of public security is more than 600 billion yuan — even more than what is spent on the military, according to Western media.
At least right now in China, there has not been any political power strong enough to challenge the Chinese Communist Party. We can see small-scale protests all over China, but all of them have one thing in common — they only fight local officials, not the central government.
As these small protests become more and more numerous, there will be more problems. The only solution is democracy, to make officials careful about what they say and what they do. If there is not a revolution, the party has to make itself democratic to ensure its own survival.
Yu Hua is a novelist and the author of China in Ten Words.
State-owned companies should provide more social dividends
By Wang Hui (汪暉)
While some claim that China’s economy will collapse soon, I do not think we will see dramatic changes. As a result of the economic crisis, there has been a certain shift from the coastal areas, which rely on the global economy, to central and northwestern China. This shift can help with the imbalance in regional and overall development, but as industries move, crises concerning land, urbanization, the environment and resources are being repeated in inland areas.
I do not believe these crises will decline while China’s development model is unchanged. Conflict will not weaken because the economy is growing, but it will intensify in some places.
There were an estimated 180,000 mass protest incidents last year and more than 60 percent had to do with land disputes, so exploring a flexible land system which can protect farmers’ interests is essential.
Conditions beneficial to the privately owned economy should be encouraged and cultivated. The operation of state-owned companies should provide more social dividends, but this does not equate to large-scale privatization.
Some state-owned enterprises have monopoly problems, but most gain growth through market competitiveness.
What needs to be considered are the principles of fair competition, market mechanisms, supervision and control, and the encouragement of other ownership, to make state-owned enterprises more democratic, transparent and standardized.
Wang Hui is a professor at Tsinghua University and the author of The End of the Revolution.
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