Boss Xi's new deal

After the waffle, the meat. Xinhua has been pumping out specific reform proposals arising from the CPC plenum - there are apparently sixty, all told – in what in local time counts as a Friday night data dump.

These have been greeted with a somewhat overexcited response. China isn’t abolishing forced labour as a whole, it’s abolishing the RTL system, whereby people could be sent to camps without being tried. Nor is it ending the one Child policy: it’s extending the privilege of having more than one child from couples who both came from one child families to couples in which one member was an only child. And so on.

Some of the new measures are just the latest incremental additions to evolving policies. Others make tentative attempts at realising policy changes that have been floating round Beijing in theoretical form for years. What we can see when we look at various measures is a common theme. Let’s go through a few of them.

One Child Policy: The principle of the one child policy remains intact, and it looks like it will remain so until it is so riddled with exemptions that it basically becomes a dead letter. However, these changes, piecemeal as they are, have serious implications for village level government, who rely on fines charged for excess children as a major income source.

RTL: As stated, the ending of Reform Through Labour doesn’t end the laogai as such. What it does do is prevent local cops and officials from simply picking up people they don’t like for whatever reason and sending them away for 18 months without trial.

Amending the death penalty. This has been happening for a while: the number of offences punishable by execution has gone down over the past decade from 68 to 55. Perhaps more importantly, the power of local courts to hand out death sentences on their own recognisance has been reduced and if Beijing is genuinely attempting to kill fewer people, which it has been doing over the past few years, then we can expect this process to continue.

Hukou reform. Xinhua announced unspecified measures to enable rural migrants to move more easily to cities and receive basic services on conditions of equality with locally born residents. These measures are to be applied more aggressively to lower level cities than to the tier one megalopolises like Beijing, Shanghai etc.

SOE reform. SOE’s weren’t dismantled despite the fond hopes of the pro-market wing of the Party. Instead, they have been opened up to limited private investment (up to 15% of equity) and tasked with handing over 30% of their profits to fund better social security. In other words, SOEs are losing financial autonomy even as they contribute to a further ‘nationalisation’ of China’s benefits system.

The common thread in this is that beyond their headline impact all these measures contribute in one way or another to a centralisation of power. This is capped by the establishment of two new oversight bodies – for economic reform and national security – formed at Leading Small Group level ie as subcommittees within the Politburo Standing Committee headed by Boss Xi.

 Now all this has been announced after a year when Beijing has intensified its harassment of dissidents, launched anti-rumour campaigns on the internet that have seen over 100,000 people sanctioned in some way and in the general midst of what the government has decided to call a ‘public opinion struggle’.

 Taken together, you can see the outline here of a kind of new deal between the Party leadership and the wider party-state. Internally, the grassroots Party  must lose powers, subject itself to greater internal discipline and put up with more aggressive policing by CDIC. In return it will be protected from even the most rudimentary form of external challenge. You can see the tactical necessity of this. If the Party is to be subjected to serious internal strain, then it makes sense to protect it from external assault. But you can also see a general policy triangle emerging: satisfy the people; discipline the party; obliterate the opposition. Obviously, one should never underestimate the pure dysfunction of the CPC. But if enough of this goes right then you have a fairly robust template for the future, almost a sort of platonic ideal of 21^st century dictatorship.

Comments

[Barry Freed]

satisfy the people; discipline the party; obliterate the opposition

I've finally found the right slogan for that Chinese character tattoo I've always wanted.

[Alex]

I was in the British Museum yesterday and I saw a Chinese wine bottle (I forget the period, but celadon) with the inscription Benevolence & Harmony Tavern.

Coming out to the Benevolence & Harmony? Sure you are.

[ajay]

Coming out to the Benevolence & Harmony? Sure you are.

It's Friday night, we're the opposition, time to get obliterated.