The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (45 page)

He glosses over the fact that in many of these countries, especially the democratic ones, when corruption is revealed, people have a means of holding officials accountable. In China, the party polices itself. It has made an effort to do so because it realizes corruption is a surefire way for its legitimacy to erode quickly. Between 1997 and 2002,
the top body charged with holding party members accountable—the Central Discipline Inspection Commission—punished nearly 850,000 members and expelled more than 137,000 from the party. In recent years, the commission has established “accusation centers” where people can file anonymous complaints, and it has set up a confidential hotline to report abuses. In 2005, more than 115,000 party members were reportedly punished across the country. In 2010, the number stood at roughly 146,000 officials.

The numbers are less impressive when you realize that the vast majority get off with nothing more than a warning. Furthermore, these investigations represent a small percentage of the number of cases reported to the commission. Minxin Pei, a leading China scholar, has calculated that
the odds of a corrupt official getting jail time are at most three in one hundred. All of which suggests that those who do face serious consequences either are the losers from political turf battles or committed abuses so egregious that even the party could no longer ignore them. Either way, corruption remains endemic. When the National Bureau of Corruption Prevention set up a Web site in 2007 for citizens to report abuses, it crashed within hours. It could not handle the traffic.

Being so bullish on China’s political system, Pan was not worried about the wave of revolutions in the Middle East reaching China’s shores. “[The government] fears this flower movement, so they have spent money monitoring it,” he told me. But after all, the mistakes that these Arab regimes made are “common sense here,” so he believed the popular uprisings would probably do more to complicate U.S. foreign policy in the years ahead than to negatively affect China. That may be true, but it was also true that the United States did not
need to spend time, energy, and money censoring the news coming out of the Middle East. While losing Arab allies might force U.S. foreign policy to adjust, the demise of dictators thousands of miles away did not threaten the legitimacy of the American form of government. Pan conceded there could be some “disturbances” in China, but there were advantages to this as well. “Many smaller earthquakes are better than a big one,” he replied.

At the end of our meeting, as I was preparing to leave, Pan had one more thought. “I think the Communist Party is just a new dynasty,” he said.

Given that Chinese dynasties rise and fall, I asked, “Do you think it’s early in its life? Do you think it’s middle-aged?”

“I think it’s early,” he replied. “The average life span is 270 years or so in China, for the major dynasties.”

So, by his reckoning, the regime has a little more than 200 years left. For some, though, that may be too long to wait.

The shortest route to the government office building was through a dense warren of
hutongs
, a network of narrow alleys and traditional courtyard homes. It had snowed overnight, and in the early morning patches of ice and snow remained in the shadows of these low, sprawling structures. As I made my way through the maze of streets, I came across a crowd of forty or fifty farmers huddled closely together in the cold. You could tell instantly that they were farmers, most of them middle-aged or older, their faces drawn and weathered, their clothes dark and ragged. I did not understand why they were all gathered there, until I noticed where they were standing: in front of the petitioning office of the Ministry of Land and Resources.

This clutch of farmers, all from the same village in Shandong Province, was engaged in a time-honored practice: petitioning the central government with their grievances. They told me that local officials had taken their land and that they were collectively owed more than a million dollars. A middle-aged woman in a padded wool jacket pushed her way forward. She explained that they started petitioning the government three years ago, but they have been sent from
one bureau to the next. The official inside the Ministry of Land and Resources office told them that they should go back to Shandong and deal with the local government. That was a week ago, but they decided to return each morning to press their case. An older man, in a snug cap and leather coat, scoffs and says, “
Our local government is no better than a legalized mafia.” A week later I passed by the same spot. The farmers from Shandong were still there.

Unfortunately, they are hardly alone. The Chinese government’s petitioning system is swamped by letters, calls, and people who make the trip to Beijing seeking redress. By some estimates,
more than ten million petitions are ongoing at any time. The system itself is a holdover from imperial China, when people would seek justice from a noble official or the emperor himself. If the practice is ancient, the motivation remains the same. With little faith in China’s courts and a fear that local officials will punish them for their complaints, millions take up the vain pursuit of circumventing the system by going directly to the source.

The cause is relatively hopeless; as one recent Chinese study estimated, roughly two in one thousand petitions delivered in person are ever resolved. And worse, petitioners can face dark consequences when they return home. It is not uncommon for villagers to be beaten or jailed for taking their grievances to the national level. No mayor or governor wants to attract unwanted attention from the central government by having a string of his constituents come to Beijing to air their complaints. Not surprisingly, a market has sprung up to prevent petitioners from ever successfully making the journey. Local governments send their own officials to Beijing to intercept petitioners when they arrive, putting them back on the next train home before they see anyone. Others have contracted out such work to security companies.
The Anyuanding Security Technology Service reportedly had “petitioner-interception contracts” with nineteen different provincial governments. The company would be paid for each petitioner detained and transported home.

The national government has made repeated attempts to reform the system—and even protect petitioners from abuse—but to little effect. In January 2011, in a symbolic gesture, Premier Wen Jiabao became the first Communist leader to ever visit the national petition office, urging the personnel there to handle the cases with speed and
care. Calls by experts to abolish the system have been ignored, probably because the government knows its legal system could not absorb the added weight. Worse, the end of petitioning might trigger the very wave of angry protests it was meant to prevent.

If there is a silver lining for the regime in having so many citizens line up to petition its offices, it is that it suggests some lingering faith in the system. When people lose faith in nearly everything—local government, the courts, petitions, and their leaders—they are more likely to take to the streets. And that is precisely what the party has witnessed in recent years.
In 1993, the Ministry of Public Security reported that nationwide there were roughly 8,700 “mass incidents,” a category that includes strikes, demonstrations, marches, and sit-ins. In 2005, the number had skyrocketed to 87,000, a tenfold increase. Five years later, in 2010,
the number of protests had more than doubled to 180,000—or nearly 500 each day. The list of causes is long: corruption, land seizures, forced evictions, police brutality, layoffs, ethnic discrimination, failing infrastructure, health risks, and environmental pollution. The triggers are so varied it is hard to imagine easy solutions for tamping down the anger and resentment that gave rise to them.

In this atmosphere, the singular worry of the Chinese bureaucracy is what it calls “stability maintenance.” In recent years, the party has redoubled its effort to clamp down on social unrest by investing heavily at all levels in the tools to keep its own population in check. In the wake of the “color revolutions” and in anticipation of the 2008 Olympics, the budgets for China’s security barons surged. Ethnic unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang in 2009, as well as the spike of “mass incidents” nationwide, likely fed these bottom lines. In 2010,
China spent more on its internal security than it did on its national defense. In 2011, that remained the case, as
the published budget for police and domestic surveillance leaped nearly 14 percent to $95 billion, compared with $91.5 billion for the Chinese military. (Many suspect the actual figures are even larger.) Sizable hikes in spending have occurred at lower levels of government, too. In 2010, after the worst ethnic clashes in decades,
the provincial government in Xinjiang raised its spending on public security by 88 percent.
In Liaoning, 15 percent of the province’s overall budget is eaten up by “stability maintenance.”

The money has bought a substantially beefed-up security architecture.
Large sums have been spent controlling information, whether tightening the government’s grip on the flow coming in via the Internet or broadcasting its own message out. Propaganda authorities monitor news coverage carefully, sending out detailed instructions on how sensitive stories should be covered, often by text message. (In the aftermath of a high-speed train crash in July 2011, the central government forwarded a number of bullet points to Chinese media: “Do not report on a frequent basis”; “More touching stories are to be reported instead, i.e., blood donation, free taxi services”; “Do not reflect or comment.”) A substantial expansion of the security budget appears to have come at the local level, where protests or demonstrations begin.
Thousands of stability maintenance offices have opened across the country, with more than 300,000 government personnel. They in turn have hired networks of neighborhood informants to report unrest before it builds. The authorities offer cash to the local cadres who are most effective in defusing angry citizens. If there are no mass incidents for a whole year, the bonuses get bigger.

Chinese often refer to the cyclical pattern of political seasons, where a period of opening
(fang)
is followed by a period of closing
(shou)
. By anyone’s measure, China had already experienced an extended season of
shou
when the Arab uprisings of 2011 began. Some dated it to the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics, when the government wanted to ensure the games went off without a hitch. Others say it may have been rooted in the “color revolutions” a few years earlier. Either way, the regime had tightened its grip on Chinese civil society. A large number of NGOs, especially those that received foreign funding, came under pressure from tax authorities and other bureaucratic agencies. Groups whose work had never been targeted before, such as the Women’s Law Studies and Legal Aid Center, an NGO that fights against domestic violence and employment discrimination, lost sponsorships and economic support. “
You don’t win points within the party in the past two decades for being a liberal,” one Western expert with longtime experience working with Chinese NGOs told me. “But I have never seen the party so suspicious and so repressive. Harassment would be too polite a word.”

In February 2011, after Mubarak fell from power and the calls for a Jasmine Revolution appeared online, the regime ratcheted the pressure up to what was the strongest national response since Tiananmen
Square. The crackdown was far more selective and targeted, but it was no less real.
The last time the regime acted as swiftly was in 1999 when it began a campaign to eradicate the Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement. The religious group had stunned authorities in April of that year when ten thousand of its followers held a silent protest around Zhongnanhai, the senior leadership’s compound. Within months, the regime had broken the movement’s back, rounding up members in raids and subjecting thousands to prison and torture. The difference in 2011 was that the party acted preemptively, moving against a disparate group of people who belonged to no single organization or group. The regime’s dragnet targeted the people who speak out for others, the lawyers, advocates, and public figures who sometimes represented those at odds with the party. The government may have calculated that silencing these voices was the most effective way of quashing a movement before it began and, in so doing, redrawing the red lines of what is deemed permissible. Whatever the thinking, the party has begun to increasingly rely on secret arrests, detentions, and kidnappings to make its critics literally disappear. What’s more, it does not seem to be a tactic the party will soon abandon.
The government recently proposed rewriting the national criminal procedure to make such abductions legal.

The party no doubt takes heart from its successes. It is true, for example, that the regime’s domestic security apparatus has prevented any nationwide protest or movement from gaining steam. The Falun Gong had been so threatening because it had grown, right under the regime’s nose, creating a movement with an allegiance higher than the party that connected people of different walks of life across great distances. Today, even as protests and demonstrations have become more frequent, they remain local events. The party requires an atomized society, and for now that is what it has. But there is no question the system is straining. For all its effort and investment, the party has not been able to reverse the trends. The Chinese economy may continue to grow, but so too does the number of people unhappy with their lot in the new China. “
The ideology and legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party has already disappeared,” says Pu Zhiqiang, one of the country’s leading rights lawyers. “It’s naked interests. The slogans, they don’t work anymore. They need to buy people.”

It can be done for now. But the costs of “stability maintenance”
are rising. And another question lurks in the distance: What happens when a technocratic fix is not enough? What happens when it matters more to be legitimate than correct?