Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Monday, March 11, 2013

Will the Middle Class Shake China?

In 2002, the Chinese Communist Party faced a political puzzle: After half a century of denouncing bourgeois middle-class values, how could the political élite embrace the rising ranks of entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and technocrats that the country increasingly relied upon to drive its economic rebirth?

Then President Jiang Zemin unveiled an elegant rhetorical solution: from that day forth, he declared, the Chinese Communist Party would do whatever it could to promote the “New Middle-Propertied Stratum.” It was an ungainly euphemism—the Party still couldn’t bring itself to utter the term “middle class”—but the idea was clear, and overnight it was everywhere: editorialists heralded the “golden age” of the New Middle-Propertied Stratum and vowed that it would encompass more than half the country by 2020. A book published by China’s Police Academy hailed the middle class as the “the political force necessary to stability,” “the moral force behind civilized manners,” and “the force necessary to eliminate privilege and curb poverty.” In short, the police wrote, “It is everything.”

The proletariat was yesterday; the middle class was tomorrow. Cultivating and satisfying the middle class was now an explicit part of the Party’s recipe for holding onto power.

A decade later, Chinese politics have not achieved that goal. The Chinese middle class— defined by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development as those with the means to make spending decisions beyond just subsistence—is almost certainly growing: it is now about ten per cent of China’s population, and on pace to be forty per cent by 2020. But when it comes to politics, the Chinese government risks losing the support of the middle class.

In Beijing this week and next, more than five thousand members of China’s legislature and advisory bodies are meeting to enact the will of the people. This gives us the chance to assess the economics of the National People’s Congress—in terms not of the members’ policy but of their personal wealth. This year, Bloomberg News reports a sharp increase in what we might call the Oligarch Index: the number of legislators who are on the list of China’s richest people grew seventeen per cent, from seventy-five to ninety—each with an average fortune of $1.1 billion.

The U.S. Congress has its own plutocracy problem, but in this case any equivalence is false. The House, Senate, and upper levels of the U.S. federal government do not boast a single billionaire (the Chinese government has scores of them), even though average citizens’ incomes in America are six times larger than those in China. For China, the disproportionate rise of extraordinary wealth at the highest ranks of government is not a problem of optics; it is a problem of substance. A decade after recognizing that the middle class might be a signpost on the way to redemption, the government is demonstrably failing to enact the will of the men and women it needs most, and thus it risks losing its greatest bulwark against the change it fears.

In 1968, Samuel Huntington wrote that, in most places, the middle class tends to be born revolutionary and becomes conservative by middle age. For years, that concept, in one form or another, underlay the work of Western analysts who predicted that China’s middle class would be the greatest defenders of the status quo rather than the challengers of it. But that verdict may have failed to account for the way that the process would unfold under an authoritarian regime. In his book “China’s Emerging Middle Class,” the political scientist Cheng Li examines a raft of mounting evidence from Chinese scholars, much of it previously unavailable in English, and finds signs of a rising dissatisfaction. In a series of surveys over the last decade, sociologists led by Li Peilin, of the China Academy of Social Sciences, concluded that it was “incorrect to believe that the middle stratum is a force for stability.” Compared to poorer and richer cohorts, members of the middle class, Li found, were more skeptical of official pronouncements and less confident in government performance. In another study, the sociologist Zhang Yi found that the new middle class was acutely sensitive to feeling silenced or to efforts to deprive it of information.

And when a leading pollster, Yuan Yue, compared urban and rural attitudes on three issues—the price of consumer goods, the stock market, and the housing market—Yuan found, in 2008, that urban residents were “far more dissatisfied with the central government’s performance than are residents of small towns or rural areas,” as Li put it. This was especially striking because, historically, people were quick to criticize local officials but generally complimentary of the central government.

Let’s be clear: the Chinese middle class is not preparing to take to the ramparts. But for years, people talked about the Chinese middle class as one caricature or another: an ardent protector of the status quo, or a ticking time bomb. On the ground, the men and women at the heart of it have turned out to be something more complicated: they have no appetite for outright revolution, but they are weary of injustice and unfairness, and the oligarchy provides a vanishingly small outlet for them to seek redress on the issues they care about most: the availability of safe food, fair access to good education and health care, and, more and more, safe air.

When the National People’s Congress convened yesterday morning, the skies were thick; the ultra-fine particles in the air that are the most dangerous to the lungs were measuring at a level of four hundred and sixty-nine—“hazardous” on the official scale, and more than ten times higher than the highest level ever recorded in Los Angeles. The problem is not abstract. As Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote this week, the number of lung-cancer patients in Beijing has increased by sixty per cent in the last ten years—even though China’s overall smoking rate did not rise. A joint study by Greenpeace and Peking University’s School of Public Health estimated that those tiny particles contributed to eighty-five hundred premature deaths in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Xi’an in 2012 alone.

How much of this does the leadership understand? The Great Hall of the People, where the legislators are convening, employs some of the most advanced and expensive air purifiers in China. So members of the legislature are protected against what a 2007 World Bank study discovered: only one per cent of China’s five hundred and sixty million urban residents are breathing air that would be considered safe by the European Union. More than anyone, perhaps, the Communist Party should be mindful of the risks of government by the one per cent.

Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Evan Osnos

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