ABSTRACT
Frustrated practice of socialist democracy in a posttotalitarian society The theoretical framework of post-totalitarianism is particularly useful for understanding politics in China today (Feng 2008). Using the element of pluralism as the key criterion, Linz and Stepan classify political systems in the contemporary world into five regime types: democracy, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, posttotalitarianism and sultanism (Linz and Stepan 1996: 44-45). Based on their research on the former communist states in Eastern Europe, they defined posttotalitarianism as a continuum varying from ‘early post-totalitarianism’ to ‘frozen post-totalitarianism’ to ‘mature post-totalitarianism’. According to them,
early post-totalitarianism is close to the totalitarian ideal type but differs from it on at least one key dimension, namely some constraints on the supreme leader. The defining feature of ‘frozen post-totalitarianism’ is a mix of the persistent tolerance of some civil society critics of the regime and the maintenance of almost all the other control mechanisms of the party-state. In ‘mature posttotalitarianism’ there has been significant change in all the dimensions of the post-totalitarian regime, except that politically the leading role of the party is still sacrosanct (Linz and Stepan 1996: 42). By the end of the 1970s the totalitarian order in China had eventually lost its vitality, not only because of the death of Mao and the erosion of political and ideological fanaticism, but also because of the measures taken by the ruling elite to protect themselves from the abuses engendered by the personal cult and lawlessness of the Cultural Revolution. However, rather than being replaced by conventional authoritarianism, not to mention constitutional democracy, the totalitarian order in China has evolved into a post-totalitarian rule, which allows economic, social and cultural pluralism but not political pluralism. The power structure of one-party autocracy remains intact, with the CCP legally accorded the leading role in the polity. The political leadership, though more technocratic in character, is still exclusively recruited from the structure created by the regime, with an emphasis on political loyalty. Despite growing disjunction between official ideological claims and realities, the party-state in China still maintains a highly articulated ideology justifying the leading role of the party and defining most aspects of society. In the meantime, socialist democracy in China under the post-totalitarian conditions has made a positive turn towards constitutional democracy, making both ideological and institutional changes to accommodate to a certain extent democratic procedures, human rights and the rule of law. Several waves of ‘mind emancipation’ in China since the 1980s have fundamentally altered the landscape of the official ideology (Nathan 1985; Ding 1994; Mok 1998; Qiu 1998; Goldman and Lee 2002). While Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought is still maintained as the official ideology, the agenda and policies of ‘reform and opening to the outside world’ have been largely informed and guided by pragmatic strategies known as Deng Xiaoping Theory, Thought of Three Represents and the Scientific Concept of Development. Cult of personality, overconcentration of power, lawlessness, obscurantism and other aspects of despotism have been labelled ‘remnants of feudalism’ and attacked in a systematic way. The previously alien concepts of human rights and the rule of law and even constitutionalism (xianzheng) have now become parts of the official vocabulary or principles. Also, democrats within the CCP have spearheaded the political reforms, underpinned by the universal values of human rights, democracy and the rule of law (Feng 2008). These ideological and political changes have served well the dual purposes of easing the legitimacy crisis of the CCP rule and improving economic efficiency. In terms of institutional change to generate the building blocks for constitutional democracy, major progress has also been made in all of the economic,
social and political spheres. Property rights and private ownership have been firmly established through abandonment of the people’s commune system for family farming and the legalization of private economy and free enterprises. Social space has been created for individual autonomy and independent citizens thanks to the relaxation of danwei (work unit) system, the hukou (household registration) system and other social control mechanisms. Through numerous measures, such as the official embrace of human rights, the legalization of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and improvements in the People’s Congress System, the legal framework and political process have been reformed to partially accommodate the popular demand for genuine political participation and a nascent civil society. As a result, the three components of constitutional democracy, namely protection of human rights, the rule of law and fulfilment of popular sovereignty through democratic procedures and institutions have all appeared on the horizon and at least rhetorically have been endorsed by the CCP regime. Since the 1980s, efforts have been made by the regime to carry out legal reforms and come to terms with human rights norms as embodied in international treaties. By the 2000s, for the first time in Chinese thinking, a clear distinction has been made between the rule of law (fazhi 法治, rulers subject to and limited by the law for protection of human rights and justice) and rule by law (fazhi 法制, law as a tool for the rulers to control the population). In the meantime, the CCP leadership has created and allowed space for the growth of the legal profession, with more than 200,000 lawyers employed at 19,000 law firms in China today. The 1989 Administrative Litigation Law authorized the judicial review of government decisions and lawsuits against government agencies. The government signed The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1997 (ratified in 2001) and The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1998 (ICCPR, pending ratification). More broadly, legal reform and development in China have been characterized by massive transplantation of Western laws into the Chinese legal system, and many of these new laws grant further rights to Chinese citizens (Zou 2006). The CCP’s response to the pressure for the rule of law is a mix of reluctant accommodation and profound fear. The party-state continues to routinely violate basic human rights of citizens, legally or otherwise. The Criminal Law of the PRC maintains the clauses of loosely-defined political crimes, such as ‘subversion of state power’ or ‘inciting subversion of state power’, similar to the ‘crime of counter-revolution’ during the Mao years. The party-state also maintains its notorious system of ‘re-education through labour’, which is a system of administrative detentions carried out arbitrarily by the police rather than through the judicial system. Detainees are subject to forced political education and varying forms of torture. The internal security apparatus, armed with the world’s largest paramilitary, of over one million, continues to take political and religious dissidents rather than conventional criminals as primary targets. By the same token, the propaganda apparatus continues to control the circulation of information through strict censorship. Despite media commercialization in China, the mass
media are owned and run by the state, and the Internet is brought under strict state control, with politically sensitive websites blocked, politically sensitive words filtered, and disobedient cyber writers banned. Journalists who do not exercise sufficient self-censorship and who overstep the boundaries are met with such ruthless punishments as dismissal and imprisonment. The crackdown on democracy movement leaders, human rights activists and other dissidents has been so intensive and extensive in recent years that legal scholars at home and abroad have pointed out a retrogression of Chinese official legal reform towards the rule of law (Cohen 2009; Jiang 2009). Media reports in China showed that at least 150 political criminals have been imprisoned under the Hu-Wen leadership over the past ten years (Bei 2012). Currently China is as bad as Iran in jailing dissident journalists. Reporters Without Borders ranked China 174 out of 179 countries in its 2011/2012 worldwide index of press freedom (Reporters Without Borders 2012). In the area of democratic institution building, the reform of the People’s Congress system, the village democracy, and the intra-party democracy have been widely highlighted by the CCP and the academic community as the three most salient items of progress (Wong 2005). However, the progress falls far short of a real breakthrough towards ‘institutionalized democracy’, let alone constitutional democracy. In China today, no government official with significant power of decision-making is publicly elected through open and fair competition. The CCP only wants to pursue democracy under one party autocracy, which by definition rules out democratic elections, just as the rule of law under one party dictatorship means that the legal system serves the interests of the party-state. The Chinese authorities claim that ‘the people’s congress system is the fundamental political system by which the Chinese people act as masters of the state’ and that the National People’s Congress (NPC) is ‘the highest organ of state power’ (The State Council Information Office of the PRC 2005). However, the CCP stands above this ‘highest organ of state power’. The reform and institutionalization to increase the institutional power and autonomy of the NPC since the 1980s has been firmly kept within the limit of maintaining the supremacy of the Party. Together with the power to legislate both the constitution and other national laws, the NPC appears to be equivalent to the parliament in the West, but the analogy is misleading in view of the absence of an opposition party. Over the last three decades, more than 200 laws have been passed by the NPC and thousands of regulations by the local peoples’ congresses, with some of them going through lengthy discussions and repeated revisions, such as the cases of the enactment of the Property Law in 2007 and the Labour Contract Law in 2009. The NPC and the local people’s congresses also occasionally turned down the work reports presented by the government departments and the candidates nominated for the government posts as high as vice governor of a province. But the fact remains that all of those laws and regulations, as well as major decisions on personnel and other issues, were ultimately made by the Party. The Party also strictly controls the selection of deputies to the people’s congress, rather than allowing free and fair elections. In 2011 when the Chinese authorities
encountered the upsurge of campaign announcements by ‘independent candidates’, who run for deputies to the people’s congresses in accordance with the provision in the Electoral Law that accepted nomination by ten or more citizen voters in one constituency, these candidates were rejected on the grounds that their campaign activities had not been approved and organized by the official electoral committees (People’s Daily 2011). These candidates are not only prevented from getting on official ballots, but also persecuted by local officials and security apparatus, with physical assaults, surveillance, extralegal detention, intimidation of their families and supporters, and even arrest (Liu 2011). The much praised ‘village democracy’ has helped to train the peasantry for democratic elections as a massive educational process but failed to deliver the ‘grassroots democracy’. The provisional Organic Law on the Village Committees was passed in November 1987, providing political autonomy for the villagers from direct governmental control and making each Village Committee accountable to a Village Assembly consisting of residents 18 years of age or older. Measures such as anonymous ballots, secret voting booths and multiple candidacies were used to ensure that elections for officials of Village Committees are ‘free, fair and competitive’, with some localities even introducing the mechanism of haixuan (sea election) in which candidates are directly and freely nominated by villagers alone. However, after the initial experiments, the rural grassroots units of the CCP have been authorized to ‘control the correct orientation’ of the elections and to ‘provide leadership for the Village Committee’ since 1998 (Guo and Bernstein 2004). Worse still, after more than 20 years of experiments, the grassroots democratic elections have been limited to the village level, which does not count as a level of government, although dozens of pilot projects have been allowed at the township level. The high profile ‘intra-party democracy’ operates within the framework of ‘democratic centralism’. The concept of ‘intra-party democracy’ was coined by Ye Jianying, then a powerful Vice-Chairman of the CCP Central Committee, in his concluding remarks at the Central Work Conference on 13 December 1978, to refer to relatively free debates and discussions (Ye 2009). The achievements of the ‘intra-party democracy’ to date include a collective decision-making process at party committees and a level of institutionalization in the sensitive areas of leadership politics. In particular, a collective decision-making process at the all-powerful Politburo and its Standing Committee has been established to restrain the ability of the Party boss to acquire dictatorial powers, as Mao Zedong did (Miller 2011). In order to make power succession more stable and predictable, the system of compulsory retirement according to age limit was introduced in the 1980s and, after the retirement of Deng Xiaoping in 1989, the top Party and State positions were limited to two five-year terms. However, the process of institutionalization remains far from complete, not least because open competition and formal democratic election for senior positions has not been adopted. As one step of the promotion process, the mechanism of ‘democratic assessment’ does involve votes by a selective constituency, but the number of votes is not disclosed, nor does it determine the outcome of winners. Rather the
number of votes can be used as a criterion to eliminate the least popular candidates. As a matter of fact, maintaining stability at all costs has been the dominant Party line since 1989, leading to the establishment and consolidation of the ‘system of stability preservation’ (维稳体制 weiwen tizhi). It was Deng Xiaoping who first put forward the thesis ‘stability overrides everything’ (Deng 1993: 285). The ‘system of stability preservation’ emerged in the aftermath of the 4 June 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. In March 1990, the CCP Central Committee of Political and Legal Affairs, which had been abolished in 1988 as part of the political reform to ‘separate the Party from the government’ and promote judiciary autonomy, was re-established to oversee the work of law enforcement. In February 1991, the Central Comprehensive Controlling Committee for Public Security, with counterparts down to the county level and personnel drawn mainly from the security apparatus and the propaganda apparatus, was set up to formulate policies and coordinate the measures for internal security. In April, the CCP Central Committee issued a ‘Circular on Strengthening Law Enforcement Work for Preserving Social Stability’, making clear that preserving stability is a political task of utmost importance to the Party and to the entire nation. The ‘system of stability preservation’ took shape in 1998-1999, following the death of Deng Xiaoping in 1997. The Central Leading Group for Stability Preservation Work as well as its Office was established in 1998. The personnel and functions of the Office for Stability Preservation at all levels largely overlapped with those of the Office of the Comprehensive Controlling Committee for Public Security. In 1998, former student leaders of the 1989 demonstrations were joined by the veteran dissidents of the Democracy Wall Movement of the late 1970s to organize the China Democracy Party. The party was crushed, with all of its leaders jailed for up to 14 years (Wright 2004). In his comments on the report by the Ministry of Public Security about the re-emergence of the underground Autonomous Union of University Students at Beijing University and Qinghua University in April 1999, the General Secretary of the Party, Jiang Zemin, issued the call to ‘nip every element of instability in the bud’ (Xiaocankao 1999). Beginning in June 1999, this new strategy was put into practice on a spectacular scale in the campaign to crackdown on the Falun Gong (Chan 1999). According to the insightful observations of the deposed Party chief, Zhao Ziyang, in 2000, there were five major measures taken by the Jiang Zemin leadership to preserve stability: suppression of dissent by the military and police forces; control and manipulation of the media; elimination of social unrest in the embryonic stage; strict ban on the oppositional organizations; and delivery of economic benefits for settlement in some cases (Du 2010: 230). The ‘system of stability preservation’ has been consolidated by the Hu Jintao leadership since 2002, when the first smooth succession of power was achieved at the 16th National Congress of the CCP. Zhou Yongkang and Li Shangchun, two protégé of Jiang Zemin, were appointed as Politburo Standing Committee members in charge of internal security and propaganda, respectively, to ensure the maintenance of domestic stability. The Hu Jintao leadership has expanded
the personnel and budget for stability preservation and resumed the Mao-style ‘mass line’ in carrying out the stability preservation work to the effect of rolling back the rule of law. Since 2009 there has been a nationwide drive to establish the ‘Grassroots Centre for Petition, Comprehensive Control and Stability Preservation’ down to the level of street and township or even village. These centres have the responsibility to keep close surveillance on several categories of ‘instability suspects’ such as Falun Gong adherents, the floating population and petitioners, so that any small rumblings of unrest can be nipped in the bud. (Hu 2010) It was in 2009 that the formal budget for internal public security started to surpass the huge budget for defence, hitting the level of ¥487 billion, compared to the ¥480 billion of the defence budget (The PRC Ministry of Finance 2010; Xu, Chen and Li 2011). However, these efforts have not resulted in a more stable society. Instead, more seeds of social instability, known in China as the vicious cycle of ‘stability preservation leading to more instability’ have been sown (Social Development Research Group 2010). Obviously, the CCP leadership is seeking a special kind of stability in which the priority is no regime change, rather than stability based on social justice, the rule of law and the protection of civil liberties and human rights. In contrast, the Chinese public have a different definition of stability, which seeks genuine social stability, as demonstrated by the increasingly vigorous rights defence movement. In the view of a leading Chinese sociologist, the artificial ‘stability’ imposed by the party-state at the expense of social justice, reform and progress, has led to more dangerous instability and what some term ‘social decay’ with serious symptoms, such as runaway state power, structural corruption and a ‘situation beyond governance’ (Sun 2009). Viewed from this perspective, the transition to constitutional democracy in China is likely to unfold as the process of asserting the rights of citizens and as a way out of the stalemate engendered by the ‘system of stability preservation’.
