Danwei translates a signed editorial from China Newsweek by Xu Youyu which gives a pretty straight account of the liberal view in China of reform, corruption and one party rule. I’ll highlight this bit because it’s clever:
In the face of corruption in contemporary society, there's a widespread opinion that "there was no corruption in past eras" before the reform. This viewpoint holds that although reforms did indeed achieve success in the form of economic growth, they paid a price in the form of morality, the tone of society, and social equality, and that the harm outweighed the good done. The belief is that privilege and corruption were far more rare before the reforms; the people may not have been rich, but at least life was fair……It is first necessary to explode this idealized wishful thinking. China was certainly no Garden of Eden before the reforms; privilege, corruption, and social inequality were present then, too, along with social contradictions and public complaining. The "four clean-ups" movement demonstrates the severity of the situation in which cadres used their offices to seek bribes and abuse their power to pursue their own interests. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong used "anti-bureaucratic privilege" as a slogan to gain the enthusiastic support of the public, demonstrating the acute social contradictions that existed at the time.
What constitutes the “left” in internal Chinese politics is quite hard to identify these days; at any rate you’re not talking about a monolithic force. I think what Xu is doing here is more trying to identify and refute a wider, basically emotionally rooted position which is Party centred, favours strong government, tends towards nationalism and supports redistributive policies on basically Prussian grounds – and given what that list implies, I wish him well in the venture.
The clever bit is the use of the cultural revolution. The position he identifies claims some leftwards tendencies, but the Chinese far left was always suspicious of bureaucratic communism as being inherently corrupt. Now, he implies, it supports exactly the same bureaucratic communism in the name of opposing corruption. But anyway, the conclusion:
In fact, it is more important for us to consider that even though there are differences in scale and degree of corruption between the past and the present day, issues of supervision and restriction of power have yet to be resolved.
…which is about as close as you can get to calling for political pluralism in China and still hope to write for a mainstream magazine there and it’s a pretty fair summary of the liberal side of the debate over reform and corruption.
On the other hand, there’s a problem that it doesn’t address. Democratic change in the old Warsaw pact was carried through with the support of the cadre classes, or at least without their opposition. Party apparatchiks realised that they were economically and politically bankrupt. This is precisely the reverse of the position in China, where the good times are rolling like never before for the well connected. These boys aren’t going to back away from the honeypot voluntarily. Try and co-opt them into a democratizing process as things stand and you’d probably see something which makes the reverse takeover of post Soviet Russia by the siloviki look like a Women’s Institute AGM.
Liberals like Xu may be correct in arguing that corruption itself doesn’t stem from reform, though it’s certainly granted the beneficiaries many more opportunities. But if you want to make a successful transition to an open system, the corrupt need to be weakened as a class first by whatever institutional means are currently available, including, if necessary, limiting their economic scope.
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