China's Challenge: Social Disorder

Nation, page 10-11
Issue 508
February 28, 2011
Translated by Tang Ruoji and Tang Xiangyang
Original article: [Chinese]

When examining contemporary Chinese society, many have drawn attention to the phenomenon of what I like to refer to as "lifting the lid" (牵出 qiān chū) - that is, while everything in a certain area or field might appear fine, or even to be doing particularly well, all it takes is for one problem to emerge and, like a gentle tap on a smooth surface, a host of complicated problems are revealed.

What's really interesting is the long list of results you get if you type the phrase "牵出" into a search engine.

The search results will lead you to stories about how a single corruption case in the city of Shaoguan in Guangdong "lifted the lid" on 31 bureau-level officials who were also involved, another story details how the controversy surrounding Tang Jun (a former Microsoft China executive accused of exaggerating his academic achievements) "lifted the lid" on other celebrities who allegedly exaggerated or falsified their academic achievements.

Other results include links to stories that explain how the "My Dad is Li Gang" case "lifted the lid" on a scandal involving accusations of plagiarism against the dean of the university where the incident occurred or how a recent environmental scandal involving Zijin Mining Group "lifted the lid" on broader collusion between businessmen and politicians.

Other results refer to how the fire that engulfed a Shanghai apartment building late last year "lifted the lid" on illegal subcontracting, how a divorce case "lifted the lid" on corruption at Wuhan University, how an investigation into the former Communist Party Secretary of the city of Maoming in Guangdong "lifted the lid" on a number of other cases involving officials and property developers, how the case of four Rio Tinto employees convicted of accepting bribes in 2009 "lifted the lid" on corruption within the country's steel industry - and so it goes on.

A classic example of the kind of phenomenon that I'm talking about emerged at the end of last year, it revolved around two brothers who were accused of evading expressway tolls in Henan.

On the face of it, this was a straight-forward legal case involving the conviction of a truck driver for attempting to avoid paying road tolls, but the deeper people dug, the more problems that emerged - unreasonably high road tolls (a nationwide problem), the chaotic nature of the country's transportation industry, drivers being forced to choose between breaking the law and going bankrupt, the sale and illegal use of military license plates, corruption in the management of freeways and it even went so far as to "lift the lid" on the qualifications and family background of one of the judges involved in the initial case and so on.

A seemingly ordinary case leads to the uncovering of a whole series of unexpected problems.

We're left to wonder if the toll evasion case had not attracted so much attention, perhaps none of these problems would have seen the light of day and things would've have continued on as they were.

We are forced to ask ourselves: beyond the surface appearance, is it possible that problems have emerged at a deeper level with regard to how our society functions?

The more fundamental question is, during the process of social transition, how can we avoid the emergence of serious social disorder?

What do we Mean When we Talk About Social Disorder?

In order to understand the concept, we need look no further than Chinese football.The recent exposure of rampant corruption among the highest levels of Chinese football says it all.We can go so far as to say that Chinese football is rotten to the core. The phenomenon of referees being bought off and of gambling on games has led to the collapse of the fundamental structure of a sport that is based on ideas of fair competition played according to agreed rules. In order to win a bet, you can pay off a referee, a player or even a football club. In some areas, even government officials were involved in these betting scandals.
A few years back, I mentioned in an article that if we viewed it from the point of view of contemporary politics, China's domestic football league ought to be a model of modern governance - it was one of the first sectors in China to be opened up to the market and it's probably one of the most transparent areas in Chinese society, if a member of the football association were to simply meet with a businessman for dinner, it would be reported. It's probably also one of the only sections of Chinese life that is fully supervised by the strength of public opinion, it's only in the realm of Chinese football that the naming and shaming of high level officials is permitted, people even go so far as to say that Chinese football journalists are the most competent journalists in the country. Finally football is one of those few areas in Chinese life where multiple social forces have a say and where people down the bottom of the chain are able to exert pressure on those above them.

However, it now seems that not even all these factors can save Chinese football.

"Social disorder" refers to a situation where it is almost impossible to get by if you simply follow the official rules and act normally.

A good example of this is the small rural county of Baimiao, which falls under the authority of Bazhong in Sichuan Province. Over recent years, there have been many calls to make government spending more transparent, and in March last year, Baimiao County took the lead by becoming the first county-level government in the country to "open the books" and make public a detailed budget of government spending.

After announcing the move, the small county became a focus of national media attention and many residents began to lift their hopes that their needs would be better met in the future.

However, the county has been given the cold shoulder from those within the system and has had difficulty petitioning higher levels of government for funding. Baimiao still lacks more than ten million yuan needed to fund social welfare programs included in the budget, and in a last ditch effort, the local government attempted to attract investors or other assistance over the Internet, but after more than a month, they received no responses.

The party secretary of Baimiao was left to ponder what this push for "opening the books" was all about?

Unregulated Power is the Key to Social Disorder 

It should be clear to us that the problem of social disorder is no longer restricted to certain places or situations; it has spread to become a common social problem. In an era when encouraging social investment is now official policy, we should heed the warnings and pay close attention to this phenomenon.

We can use the term social disorder to describe the distorted actions of some local governments: the unchecked abuses of power, the use of violence to silence petitioners, forced expropriation and destruction of property, corruption among those who work for the courts so that some people have no place to turn if they are wronged against, corruption so rampant that people have no choice but to go along with it, backroom deals and unwritten rules become so prevalent that they become the default working method of officials, entrenched powerful interest groups abuse their strength to erode any concept of fairness or justice that might exist and drive society further along the road to a mafia state, the moral baseline of society is not defended, we become morally bankrupt and it becomes common for people to lose their professional integrity and virtue.

Daily experience also testifies to a kind of social breakdown that can be seen everywhere you look: teachers and administrators at schools make profits by ripping off their students, doctors become rich by swindling patients, industrial monopolies continue to reap monopoly profits, counterfeit goods are everywhere, fake food products impact on food safety, if old people fall down no-one helps them up and handicapped children are used as beggars.

A bizarre cycle emerges that reinforces mistrust, as someone once put it: the cash that teachers take from students to give them a pass, is transfered to hospitals and telecommunication companies after the school bell rings. The employees of monopoly enterprises end up spending most of their salary on sending their kids to school or paying to see a doctor. The money that producers earn by selling poor quality or poisoned products, are used to pay off officials or to support the teachers and doctors. At the end of the day, even the corrupt officials and managers who are able to use their position to amass vast fortunes, are eating the contaminated food, breathing the polluted air and using the dirty water.  

Society is falling apart. Over the past few years it was common for people to say every-one's hometown is tainted (每个人的家乡都在沦陷); now people say all that's solid melts into air (一切坚固的东西都在撕裂).

I've heard it said that a high level official at Peking University once said: if even monks and teachers are corrupt, then the country is already rotten to the core.

Normally, social disorder occurs during a phase of social transition, as existing rules and customs begin to lose their hold - social disorder normally ensues. 

While this serves as a reasonable explanation for the chaos of the 1980s, it is an inadequate characterization and oversimplification of the problems we are facing today. 

At the core of contemporary social disorder lies a loss of control over how power is exercised. As paradoxical as it may seem, power grows when no one is capable of controlling it. Over the past thirty years of opening up and reform, the country has established the basic framework for a market economy, but the axis that our society turns on is still political authority.

But the exercise of power is facing challenges in the face of an increasingly complex society – as an emerging market economy, accelerating globalization, the development of science and technology, the coming of mass consumerism and the speeding up of the pace of urbanization all add to the complexity of Chinese society. 

When we view it objectively, a complicated society calls for a more effective method of political control and management. But in a society without an independent market or any form of political self-determination, the very real demand for more effective political control can very easily be diverted into a call for a stronger centralized political authority as people hope to make use of "total government" to alleviate their problems.
This strengthening of authority can solve a lot of problems, and, in the short-term and on the surface, appear to satisfy our needs.

But the strengthening of authority alone will never be able to solve the problem of unchecked power. 

The Chinese writer Wu Si (吴思) introduced the concept of unwritten rules (潜规则). Recently, another Chinese writer, Wu Gou (吴钩), coined the phrase "informal power" (隐权力), referring to the kind of implicit power that bureaucratic systems have wielded throughout history.

No matter if we refer to them as unwritten rules or informal powers, the fact that these terms exist indicates that the rules that define the formal exercise of power are no longer effective. The result is a loss of control over how authority or power is exercised.

When we say a loss of control over the exercise of power, we mean that attempts to limit the abuse of power from both within and from outside the system are ineffective.

We can use a some-what paradoxical example to explain what we mean by loss of control over the exercise of power: government power that acts without regard for government authority.

On the one hand, government power is unchecked and acts as it see fits, on the other, it undermines its own legitimacy and the effectiveness of the entire government structure.  

Several years ago, the so-called "government decrees" that were announced by the central government in Zhongnanhai didn't appear to hold much weight.

The power exercised by regional governments and central government ministries were said to be neither subject to supervision nor did they engage in supervision of the lower tiers of government, indicating a total fragmentation of the top-down model of power. At the same time, the horizontal check and balances in the system had weakened, indicating that national authority had fragmented.

Unregulated power also indicates that officials are not responsible for the whole system but are taking measures which will hurt the system as a whole.

On the surface they may appear to be acting to protect the interests of "the system," but in reality they were damaging the system while in the process of feathering their own nest.

The phenomenon of "informal power" has dealt two crippling blows to the system, a decline in government credibility and damage to public morality.

The result is that the mechanism required for the ordinary functioning of society begins to lose its efficacy at critical moments.

The Qian Yunhui case serves as a good example. Though many claim that the case has already been dealt with, it's possible that questions will always remain about what really happened.
The worst possible conclusion is one that avoids the truth. This is not to say that there is no one truthful account of what happened, but rather there is no single account of what happened that has bee accepted by the public at large as the truth.

To go one step further, we can say that our society is losing the ability to persuade people to accept something as being "true."

When seen from a social perspective, the direct result of unregulated power is that the ability to maintain a fair and just society has weakened. Unregulated power has swept aside reason and law, and everyone of us has felt the absence.

When we talk about effective social management, some say that first we need enforce checks on government power, if we can't effectively supervise power, then there is no effective means of halting the trend towards social disorder.

There are two consequences of social injustice: an increase in social conflicts and cynicism.

According to the 2005 edition of the "Blue Book of China's Society" published annually by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government-backed think tank that operates under the authority of the State Council, the number of incidents of social unrest, often referred to as "mass incidents" in Chinese, increased from 10,000 in 1993 to 60,000 in 2003, and the number of participants in such incidents increased to 3.07 million.

Zhu Lijia, director of the public research department of Chinese Academy of Governance, said in a recent interview with the Oriental Outlook Weekly《瞭望东方周刊》that the number of mass incidents had doubled from 2006 to 2010.

Others have estimated that at least 180,000 incidents took place in 2010.

The 2010 China Crisis Management Annual Report (《2010中国危机管理年度报告》) released by the Shanghai Jiaotong University shows that there were 72 major crises that had a comparatively large impact on social opinion last year, an average of one every five days. 

Cynicism is spreading. This is rooted in the desperation caused by the sense that there is no hope in righting social injustice; people become "realistic" and are forced to deal with injustice and immorality with sarcasm and mockery.  

Being jaded and sly is considered as mature behavior, while fighting for equality and justice is considered naive.  

This rampant cynicism has already become a formidable barrier to social reform. It is even said that reform is no longer possible. One of the most important reasons is that the society has lost the courage to challenge social injustice and to change. 

How to Survive in a Disorderly Society  

An interesting phenomenon worth noting is that many, including government officials whose positions are envied by many, think of themselves as members of a weak or "disadvantaged" group (弱势群体). At the end of last year, a survey of government officials conducted by the People's Forum magazine《人民论坛》found that nearly half of respondents believed they were members of a "disadvantaged group." Similarly, 55.4 percent of intellectuals felt the same way, while among white collared workers, the number who thought of themselves as somehow "maginalized" climbed to 57.8 percent. 

According to a similar survey conducted by The Beijing News《新京报》, a popular Beijing daily newspaper, 18.8% of participants thought of themselves as "extremely disadvantaged," while 61.9% of those surveyed defined themselves as "moderately disadvantaged." Only 12.2% of respondents felt that they were "not at all disadvantaged." 

There are at least two points to be gleaned from this. The first is the breakdown of existing social structures, and the second is the state of anomie that exists in societies that are in a state of disorder.   

I began discussing the breakdown of social structures and warning about the increasingly apparent threats to our society over a decade ago. This type of society is divided between the haves and the have nots, the rich and poor, the urban and rural - with a fault line down the middle. The two sides exist in opposition to each other and make up a fragile and fractured society.

Many of the social tensions that exist in contemporary China are a product of this deep split in society.

Hatred of the rich and contempt for poverty signals a rapidly widening gap between society’s elite and everyone else. We can view the ever increasing amount of ridicule and scorn aimed at the wealthy that appears online and at the same time what appears to be the ever more excessive sense of entitlement among the rich.
When real estate companies declare that they will construct houses for the rich but not for the poor, when all of Beijing's taxi companies announce that the decision of what kind of cars they choose to use has nothing at all to do with customers, when the educated class says that opposition to their views among ordinary people can be viewed as further proof that they are right, all this gives us a sense of the overbearing attitude of the elite and also shows the widening gap between the wealthy and the average citizen.

This article was edited by Paul Pennay