Hi quest ,  welcome  |  

China’s Hidden Democratization

15/03/2013 | Zhang Jun、Gary H. Jefferson |Project Syndicate
Since Xi Jinping was anointed as China’s new president, reports of official repression of dissent have hardly abated. But, while criticism of China’s human rights record clearly has merit, it is important not to lose sight of the extent of genuine political change in China.
Since 1978, China’s political system has overseen the transfer of a wide swath of economic power from the state to its people. As a result, Chinese may operate family farms, own homes and businesses, control their educational choices, patent inventions, and amass fortunes. It is precisely the exercise of these individual rights that has created the foundation for China’s ongoing economic transformation.

By creating the diverse and conflicting private economic interests that are typical of a capitalist society, China has had to create a set of institutions to clarify and mediate the exercise of these rights. These emerging institutional arrangements include contracts and commercial law, bankruptcy and labor codes, and courts to oversee their enforcement. More recently, local commissions, non-governmental organizations, an increasingly assertive media, and sanctioned public demonstrations have become established channels for mediating social conflict.

But the transfer of rights has often been ambiguous, and is all too frequently vulnerable to official corruption. As a result, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is facing growing demands from the country’s well-educated and affluent middle class for greater transparency and accountability in the institutions on which their careers and livelihoods depend.

The enactment of the Administrative Litigation Law in 1990 enabled Chinese citizens to file lawsuits against local governments and public agencies. In recent years, hundreds of thousands of non-governmental organizations, often with official approval, have represented individuals on bread-and-butter issues, including land seizures, housing demolitions, environmental abuses, labor rights, and health care. The number of lawsuits against the government has ballooned to more than 100,000 per year, with plaintiffs winning more than one-third of the cases.

Another avenue through which Chinese residents advance their interests is public protest. Across the country, residents often protest wrongful eviction from their homes, frequently at the hands of corrupt local officials. One of us recently observed a street protest in Wuhan, the largest city in central China. Armed with banners and placards and a permit to demonstrate, street protesters, having learned that their homes were to be razed for redevelopment, agitated for and eventually secured substantially more compensation than the local government initially offered.

Such protests against public agencies, employers, and developers are now commonplace (though not always authorized). Indeed, China’s leaders recognize that if these channels for public expression of grievances were not available, the potential for civil and political unrest would be far greater than it already is. Generally, provided that protesters seek mediation and redress for their economic rights and do not attempt to encroach on the CCP’s authority, Chinese residents can advocate for their interests.

Some observers see the outline of a democratic system emerging. China’s president and prime minister are both limited to two five-year terms. Legislative debates within the National People’s Congress, whose nearly 3,000 members are elected from a wide range of local and national organizations, can be quite spirited.

For example, China’s bankruptcy law, enacted in 2006, required 12 years to negotiate, as factions within the Congress, the CCP, and the executive branch struggled to balance the interests of workers and creditors. Likewise, China’s property law was debated for years, as conservative forces, with the support of various media outlets, resisted marketization and privatization in defense of older citizens whose livelihoods continued to depend on the “iron rice bowl” of state ownership.

In short, though China’s political system functions in a manner that is far more centralized than outlined in the country’s constitution, it provides an increasingly meaningful set of avenues through which citizens can exercise influence over political life.

Two of the most vexing official constraints on Chinese citizens are restrictions on movement from the countryside to cities and limits on the number of children born to couples. Both policies reflect the skewed distribution of China’s population, with more than 90% squeezed into the eastern half of the country, creating extreme congestion and the potential for political instability. Nonetheless, responding to popular pressure, both restrictions have been substantially relaxed.

The Chinese leadership’s motivation in making such changes is not to embrace the ideals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or to placate foreign demands. Bound by the goal of economic prosperity, China’s leaders let the genie of individual rights out of the bottle. These same leaders now must tolerate – even facilitate – the creation of institutions to mediate the conflicts over these rights that inevitably result.

So long as China continues to offer basic economic rights to its citizens, these incremental changes, though slow, will drive the country’s gradual democratization. Where rights are well established, progress in building a civil society will surely follow.



中国政治变革的隐含逻辑17/05/2013 | 张军 |金融时报

在2008年北京奥运会前,我在美国访问中,我的好友、经济学家谢千里(Gary Jefferson)教授给我转来《纽约时报》发表的一篇批评中国人权状况和民主缺失的文章。其实,在欧美的主流媒体发表这样的文章对我们而言已经司空见惯,而在北京奥运会前《纽约时报》发表这样的文章当然是有考虑的。尽管这样的文章对中国的批评原则上并不错,不过,谢千里教授还是觉得有必要换个角度来说这些问题。中国当然还不是一个民主政体,人权的状况也有诸多可担忧之处,这些尽人皆知,真正值得讨论的问题是,中国因经济快速发展而在这些方面逐步改变的程度。简言之,值得提醒西方读者的是,不要忽略了中国内部真正政治变革的推进程度。
于是,我们决定以这个视角合作写篇文章给《纽约时报》,希望能够在奥运会前后发表。由谢千里教授主刀,我们写出了文章“Rights in China: Half Empty or Half Full?”,几经修改给了《纽约时报》,可是,《纽约时报》最终还是决定不发,可见其意图。这当然没有关系,我们决定把我们的想法扩展成一篇学术论文,深入地讨论一下中国政治改革的逻辑。于是就有了后来我们合作的一篇论文“政治变迁的一个内生经济理论”。 很快,谢千里教授携带该论文在芝加哥大学的那个由科斯教授发起的纪念中国改革30年的研讨会上做了报告,现在该文收入了我主编的英文著作《中国经济未尽的改革》中,即将出版。
我们在文章的开头就说,西方媒体群起检视中国的人权,美国公众把人权视为衡量中国政治进步的唯一尺度是可以理解的。尽管对中国人权纪录的批评有其真实的一面,但这种批评低估和忽视了中国经济改革30年来中国政治变迁的程度。中国巨大的经济增长是建立在广泛的经济权利(产权)从国家转移到公民的基础之上。这是资本主义体系的典型特征。但是,随着经济的发展和收入水平的提高,这些权利的行使正在创造个体和群体间的冲突,这反过来要求中国的政治领导人创建调和这些冲突所必须的制度。结果是,公民政治权利(人权)取得进步,民主化的进程不可逆转
我们在文章中给出的逻辑看上去不可思议,因为我们认为对于经济发展而言,人权的发展是私人产权的扩展与延伸。但这样的逻辑不是空穴来风,更多还是基于经济发展的理论与东亚的经验。实际上,就在2008年,世界银行就曾邀请几位在政治制度、政府治理和经济发展方面的世界级学者就政治制度与经济发展的话题进行过总结。其中,曾写出《历史的终结》(1992)和《信任》(1995)一书的福山(Francis Fukuyama)教授给出的政治发展与经济发展的关系与我们不谋而合,也许这并不是偶然。
福山认为,政治发展至少要包括三个独立的组成部分。第一是国家能力的建设。国家能力建设是指创建合法的强制力、界定主权、塑造官僚体系的行政能力、实施政策法规、征税并提供公共产品。第二是对私人产权保护和法治第三才是民主
福山特别指出,首先,对于那些低收入的国家而言,国家能力的建设似乎比法治和民主重要得多。其次,越来越多的经验研究发现,对于经济增长而言,保护私人产权比人权(如言论、集会和宗教自由)更重要。历史上看,很多高增长的国家的政府只是部分地为私人产权提供保护,但不怎么保护个人的其他权利(人权)。最后,大量的跨国研究发现,民主与增长的正相关性显著地弱于两者的负相关性
东亚四小龙的情况多少可以部分说明这一点。由于历史的原因,在经济发展的初期,韩国、台湾与新加坡和香港的政治制度是非常不同的。例如,上世纪60-70年代的韩国和台湾看上去也并没有强有力的法治,法律淡薄软弱,甚至只有不完全的私人产权保护,但是它有一个威权的发展型政府维持政治秩序,保护私人产权,推行发展的政策而不是掠夺的政策,其增长记录不见得比从英国引入现代法治体系的新加坡和香港差多少
而我们在文章中认为,中国的人权或政治权利的扩展在逻辑上最好理解为政府保护私人产权的延伸和必然结果,因为说到底,政府确立和保护私人产权是经济增长必要条件,而经济增长将推动经济利益的多元化与冲突,并产生扩大私人获得政治权利的需求
毫无疑问,自1978年以来,中国的经济见证了一系列产权从国家向私人的转移。形象地说,现在的中国人可以承包土地、拥有住宅和企业、自主投资和做出决策、拥有发明专利并积累个人财富等。也正是政府对这些私人产权的界定和保护为中国的持续经济转型与增长奠定了基础。
快速的经济增长和发展创造了多样化的、有冲突的私人经济利益,而中国政府不得不建立新的制度来界定并调解这些权利的行使。这些新兴的制度安排包括合同法、民商法、破产法和劳动规范以及监督执行这些法律的法院系统。而最近一段时间,地方的有关委员会、非政府组织、日益强势的媒体以及得到批准的公共示威也成为了调解社会冲突的渠道。更重要的是,中国个人的这些经济权利的获得和转移往往也可能模糊不清、模棱两可,而且经常会受到官员腐败行为的侵害。因此,中国的领导层也面临着来自本国不断增长的中产阶级的呼声与压力,要求增加那些与后者的职业和生活密切相关的制度的透明度与政府的问责程度。
1990年行政诉讼法的颁布使得中国公民能够起诉当地政府和公共机构。近几年,成千上万(通常得到官方许可)的非政府组织在民生问题上(包括征地、房屋拆迁、环境污染、劳动者权益、医疗卫生)代表个体权益。对政府的诉讼数量激增到每年10万件以上,而原告胜诉的案子超过三分之一
此外另一个争取自身利益的途径就是公众抗议。全国到处都有居民抗议被非法征地拆迁(通常由腐败的地方官员而为之)。街头抗议者手持横幅、标语和示威许可证抗议走上街头,要求得到比政府最初报价更高的补偿金额,并最终如愿以偿。
这类针对公共机构、雇主和开发商的抗议如今已是司空见惯了(尽管未必得到了批准)。事实上,中国领导人意识到如果公众缺乏这些渠道来表达不满的话,那么就有可能发生比眼下严重得多的社会及政治动荡。一般来说,考虑到抗议者只不过是想寻求调解并补偿其经济权益,而非试图挑战执政党的权威,人们一般都能对自身的利益做出申诉。
有些观察家们甚至看到了一个民主制度兴起的雏形。中国国家主席和总理都最多只能连任一届,即最长任期为10年。全国人民代表大会的立法辩论也可以是相当激烈,因为有近3000位从全国各级组织选举出来的代表。比如,颁布于2006年的中国破产法花了12年的时间来商议,这是因为中国共产党、人大和行政部门努力想在工人和债权人的利益之间进行反复权衡。同样,围绕中国物权法的争论已经持续了好多年,这是因为保守派力量在各种媒体的支持下对市场化和私有化加以抵制,以保护那些生计上还依赖国有制“铁饭碗”的较年长的公民的利益。当然,包括计划经济时代遗留下来的对中国民众自由迁徙的限制早已不存在了,但接下来需要解决的是城乡公民在政府提供的公共福利待遇上的不同。
简而言之,尽管中国的政治体系以比国家宪法规定的更集中的方式来运行,但它还是提供了一系列越来越有意义的途径,因为公民可以通过这些途径来对政治生活发挥一定的影响。
谢千里教授和我都知道,其实,中国领导层做出改变的动机并不完全是因为接受了《世界人权宣言》的理念,也并非是为了安抚国外的不满。在经济发展这一目标的驱使之下,借用《一千零一夜》里的说法,中国领导人已经把个人的经济权利这个“魔鬼”从瓶子里放了出来,如今必须容忍、甚至促进相关机制的建立来调解这些权利无可避免会导致的冲突与矛盾。
所以,我们相信,只要中国政府继续对其公民提供基本的经济权利(产权)的保护,在政治权利上的那些日积月累的变革按照西方的观点来看也许是缓慢的,但将会不断推动人权的扩展和逐步的民主化。一旦那些政治权利得到了有效保障,建立公民社会的进程就随之而来了。


China and Democracy’ Debate 
中国与民主现场辩论: Minxin Pei VS. Eric Li 

The Aspen Institute has posted the full video of a debate from its Ideas Festival, which ran from June 27th and July 3rd. The discussion pitched venture capitalist Eric X. Li against professor of government Minxin Pei on the subject of “China and Democracy”, moderated by James Fallows.
A show of hands suggested that few in the audience had been swayed from their initial positions by the end, but that more had swung towards Li than away from him. Asked by an audience member whether a similar conversation could take place in Beijing, he insisted that it could, though many others could not. But, he said, he wanted to “break the spell of so-called freedom of speech”: “speech is act”, he said, it “has harmed since time immemorial”, and should be managed and regulated accordingly. Pei also said that the conference could take place in Beijing, but that the US government would have to rescue him immediately afterwards.
J Gould summarised the arguments at The Atlantic (articles below), and the complete video is embedded below.
Chinese Democracy: Will It Ever Be More Than a Guns n’ Roses Album?
In time of wide-ranging political change initiated by new pro-democracy movements, across North Africa and the Middle East, and elsewhere around the world — change that’s taking place against a centuries-in-the-making historical backdrop where the language of democracy has become increasingly the language of political legitimacy itself — there may be no non-democratic political model with a stronger claim to sustainable legitimacy than China’s.
So how sustainable is it? At the Aspen Ideas Festival today, Minxin Pei, professor of government and the director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College, debated the question with Eric X. Li, founder and managing director of Chengwei Capital, a Chinese venture capital company. The exchange was moderated by Atlantic national correspondent, and author of China Airborne, James Fallows.
Pei’s argument, one he’s been developing for years, is that there are contradictions in the Chinese system that are straining that system and starting to manifest themselves more and more. Pei sees these contradictions on two levels: economic and political. In the economy, he says, we’re seeing a slow-down that’s become cyclical: The economy has been driven primarily by investments at home and exports to developed countries, which isn’t sustainable. In the political sphere, we’re seeing manifestations of a fundamental vulnerability of one-party systems globally: a tendency to drift into benefiting a relatively small, and ultimately predatory, elite at the expense of society generally, and the associated phenomena of high-level corruption and inequality.
Together, Pei claimed, these two domains of contradiction tend to impede the growth of China’s economy and undermine the legitimacy of its government. You can see the last two decades as a story of the rise of the Chinese system, Pei said; but the next 10 to 15 years (no less than 10, no more than 15) will be one of the system’s unraveling. And this is what the United States and the West generally need to worry about — not China’s strength but its weakness, because when the transition to a more democratic system comes, it will be very difficult to manage, particularly given the country’s deep ethnic divisions, its disputed borders, and its complex integration with the global economy.
Li responded by conceding — despite the populist idiom of the Chinese Communist Party and the “People’s Republic” itself — that if you understand democracy specifically around the idea of one person having one vote in a competitive multiparty system, China is indeed not a democratic system. But should it become one? “I’m a venture capitalist,” Li said, “so I look at track records.” In 1949, the country had been suffering from years of war and economic stagnation. The average life expectancy was 41; the literacy rate was 15 percent; GDP was nothing. Now life expectancy is 75; literacy is at 80 percent; and GDP is a multi-trillion-dollar number.
Yes, Li said, monumental mistakes have been made (he didn’t specify what these were), but they’ve been dwarfed by China’s achievements. Here Li referred back to his role as a venture capitalist and the priority he puts on track records: If I’m at a board meeting, and the proposition on the table is to take a company that’s engineered an enormously successful turnaround and to fire that company’s top executives, replace the entire management system, and do everything differently, that doesn’t make sense. “The one-party system has taken China from 1949 to today. … I think the answer is clear.”
Track records may not contain all the information you need to place a good bet, Fallows pointed out: “The Wang computer company had a very strong track record — until it didn’t.”
China’s is in any case a complicated track record, Pei argued — and one “with a lot of cliff-hanging moments.” From the Great Leap Forward, through a period of mass famine, and all the initial stages of the Communist system’s consolidation, the cost of that system’s development is measurable in tens of millions of lives. “This was one of most violent episodes in Chinese history,” Pei said. “The Mao regime outdid all other emperors” in bloodshed — “and China’s history is full of bloody emperors.”
When you look at the future of this system, Pei said, the issue is: How does it compare with similar “companies”? And is it in a “sector” that shows future growth? To answer this, the most important issue is the ultimate collapse of similar one-party systems around the world. The longest-surviving among them ever was the Soviet Union, which didn’t make it past 70 years. Chinese Communism has been in power for 63. So if you consider the Soviet lifespan, and the nature of what ultimately limited it, would you “invest” in the Chinese system’s political future today?
It wasn’t that long ago, Li responded, that they said Apple was going to flop, because all personal computing would all be open-system. The history of real democracy is in any event very short: In America, it generously speaking goes back only to the post-Civil War, less generously only to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965, if you take the “one person, one vote” definition seriously.
Democracy has contributed to rise of West, Li said. But electoral politics is in disarray on both sides of Atlantic, and Western democracies are broadly incapable of dealing with the monumental challenges they’re charged with. Comparing public-opinion polling in China with that in the United States, Li noted the happiness and trust in their institutions that Chinese people report relative to Americans. Asking China to democratize? “It’s like asking Apple to turn itself into RIM.”
Corruption in China is a big problem, Li concedes, but that needs to be understood in a proper context: In Transparency International‘s ranking, for example, all of the top-20 least-corrupt countries in the world, except four, are Western, and among that four, only Japan is democratic; the rest of the TI’s top-20 that are not from the West are autocracies. The question, Li said, is whether corruption is inherent to the political system, or whether it’s a byproduct of rapid development — noting the portrayals of earlier times in the development of the United States portrayed in films like Gangs of New York or There Will Be Blood. “China should have at least as good a shot of correcting for corruption as any other system.”
On the greater reported levels of support for government and public institutions reported among Chinese relative to Americans, Pei said, “popular opinion surveys are highly variable” — and one of the factors that really tends to affect it is past experience. I.e., the Maoist era was terrible. But in any event, if you really want to test whether people accept the current system, rather than using popular-opinion polling as an indicator of legitimacy, “give them the real test — give them the vote.” In the United States, Pei said, citizens get angry, but they don’t question the legitimacy of the system in a way that people do in power systems maintained by lies, cheating, and violence. The world today has 120 democracies; 80 have made transitions to electoral democracy in last ten 10 years. Yes, corruption exists everywhere, but the main thing to take away from the TI list is that the world’s least-corrupt countries are almost all democracies. The exceptions are the autocracies. Democracies cannot, to be sure, eliminate corruption altogether; but autocracies have no hope combating it effectively. The three conditions any political system needs to check corruption, Pei said, are free media, the rule of law, and nongovernmental-organization / civil-society monitoring. None of these things are available in autocracies.
Fallows asked Li whether he saw the current system in China as being optimal in the long run, or whether he saw it more as the best system for now, pending future economic and social development.
“I am saying the former.”
The system will certainly have to adapt, Li said, but the country today would be unrecognizable to the Chinese people 63 years ago, and that entire transformation has taken place under the same one-party system. Not only that: On a global axis, the breadth of change that this one-party state has been able to embrace and oversee has been unparalleled in any of the world’s advance democracies.
Much has changed, Pei agreed, but the one thing that has not is the political system. If you look at footage of the National People’s Congress, for example, there you see stasis. People have changed, society has changed, the economy has changed — but one thing that has not changed is political system. There must, Pei emphasized, be meaningful compatibility among society, the economy, and the political system. But the political system doesn’t want to change. More than that, it wants society to change slower than it’s changing. “At some point, either the political system gives, or social system slows down.”
Pei copped to regularly fantasizing about how China could become democratic. “Economic performance is the key,” he said. If it stays as strong as it’s been, that would mean one kind of transition; but if it falls off, the Communist party will face rising social discontent. The party will ultimately split, and one of the splinter groups will end up trying to tap into that social discontent to gain legitimacy. No democratic transition has ever occurred without support from elements of the ruling elite, Pei said, and China won’t be an exception.
It’s a fallacy to say the system hasn’t changed, Li countered: There have been big changes the National People’s Conference — most conspicuously, its members are now younger, because of term limits and other reforms. There have been major changes to the composition of regional and municipal governments, as well. But these changes are not reported in the West, because, Li speculated, Western reporters aren’t interested in this kind of story; they’re interested in the dichotomy between dictatorship and democracy.
Fallows then asked Li about expatriation among the families of Chinese elites, noting the degree to which they’ve come to move their assets, or send their children to school, outside China. Li had little to say on this point, admitting that it was an issue, though insisting that it’s highly overplayed. (Pei pointed out that the data on these matters are difficult to come by, but there are at least hundreds of cases of Chinese officials looking for American passports — and you don’t ever see American officials looking for Chinese passports.)
Li wanted to go instead to what he clearly sees as the bigger picture and the real comparative context for assessing the legitimacy and durability of the Chinese system: the weakness of American democracy, both in its ability to live up to its ideals and in its ultimate ability to justify them.
By the standards of democracy that he, Pei, and Fallows agreed to at the outset of the conversation, Li insisted, some of the greatest political leaders in American history were illegitimate. Washington was illegitimate; Lincoln was illegitimate; and if you take the 1965 Civil Rights Act as the beginning point for anything that could really be considered democracy by our own parameters for the idea — as Li clearly would — even Roosevelt was illegitimate.
In response to a question from the audience, Li also criticized the very ideas of political liberty and individual rights. Unless you think rights come from God, he insisted, you really have no theory of why any one view of political liberty any discrete set of individual rights should be sacrosanct at all. “If they’re from men, they’re not absolute; they can be negotiated.” It was only too bad there wasn’t time to discuss what “negotiated” means here.
“I want to break the spell of the so-called right to freedom of speech,” he added later. “Speech is act. It has harmed from time immemorial.”
Asked about the Chinese government’s censorship of the Internet, and its potential for exacerbating social disaffection and economic deceleration, Li asserted that these would be negligible. Pei disagreed: Internet censorship, he said, is a massively futile and regressive thing: It’s targeted toward very few people, but it inconveniences millions. Pei said that he didn’t know if this practice has played any real part in slowing down the economy, but he’s sure that it’s had a social cost. Ask Chinese people which they’d rather have, faster internet connection or access to social media, Pei said, and they’d say the latter.

linkwithin》

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...