more chartism

Catherine Sampson tries to give the Charter ’08 crowd a boost:

The global financial crisis is hitting China harder than analysts at first expected. Stock markets and property prices have fallen, exports have slowed dramatically, and production is ceasing in many of the southern factories that keep the shops of the world stocked. The western world has been through boom and bust before, but China's newly affluent classes have so far only boomed. No one knows what to expect if things go bust, least of all the Chinese leadership.

Well it depends on how old they are. There were sharp downturns in growth from 89-92 and 97-98, for instance. None of these produced any of the politically directed unrest Ms S is looking forward too. And besides, she’s looking in the wrong places. It’s the people who marginally benefitted in the good years who are in most danger of running out of money and options. Most analysts number the Chinese middle classes at around 200 million. That’s over a billion people left who never did that well in the first place, though most did do better.

What effects will recession have there? “More unrest” is the usual answer. Most of the earlier wave of MGIs were actually products of increased growth: cadres and well connected businessmen grabbing peasant land to put it to more profitable use. These are not likely to increase in a recession. Nor are the civic protests such as those against the Xiamen PX naphta cracker or the Shanghai Maglev project for similar regions. Social MGI’s, where large crowds of under or marginally and under- employed people gather to riot against some example of abuse of power by Party officials are likely to grow, if only because recession will increase the numbers of the rioting classes. But it’s unclear how much of a threat this is to Communist Party rule. At one stage during the Cultural Revolution, 120,000 men fought on the streets of Shanghai and the Party got through that OK. The CPC is a very resilient organization. It’s not some rancid Soviet false face in Eastern Europe.

Ms Sampson also seems to be enamoured of the odd idea that the Chinese as whole have been somehow pampered over recent years. Someone my age would have been born in China just after the Great Leap Forward and just before the Cultural Revolution. I would have been fourteen when Deng introduced the household responsibility system in the countryside, at which age I would have been able to count on a regular full stomach. I’d have got to university a few years after regular examinations were introduced. I’d have been on the job market for two or three years at the time of Tiananmen and the resultant freeze on economic growth. Things might have got better along a fairly smooth upward gradient since then, but there’s nothing about a recession in itself that would produce a shattering sense of disillusion.

As it happens, there’s not been much response of any kind that I’ve been able to detect to Charter 08 from the wider Sinosphere. Roland Soong translates a critique by veteran dissident Wang Xizhe here. But that’s broadly it. Liu Xiaobo was arrested, but Liu Xiaobo is always getting arrested. It’s debatable how much publicity the Charter would have got if he’d have been left alone.

Comments

[Fellow Traveller]

You've examined the wrong age range. Middle aged men don't make revolution. Young men (18-24) do. They don't owe the existing system anything and could quite easily become the leaders of the new order.

I agree that the Chinese state doesn't look weak enough for a successful revolt. I anticipate mass demonstrations, protests and a re-organization of the political hierarchy in their wake.

[jamie k]

"Middle aged men don't make revolution"

No, but they do lead them :-) I was thinking more of this idea that recession is some kind of unparalleled catastrophe in recent Chinese history.

What I'd anticipate politically is more of a withdrawal from the parallel administrations the CPC runs right down to village level, with autonomy and local democracy very gradually increasing in size and scope, at times under pressure from localized outbreaks of discontent.

In Britain we got the Baron's charter in 1215; women were granted equal suffrage with men in 1928. I think we might be looking at that kind of timescale for China.

[Fellow Traveller]

I think the modern world moves at a faster rate than your historical analogy. The speed of communications across the whole globe makes rapid transformation much more likely. We've not seen the full effect of the Internet & mobile phones in every pocket yet.