Despite the massive economic and social changes, the top priorities of China’s leaders have remained almost unchanged since Deng launched reform at the end of the 1970s. They are economic growth, social stability, and continued Communist Party rule.
For Deng and his successors, maintaining the rule of the Communist Party has been the sine qua non of their agenda. After the disastrous years of the Cultural Revolution, Deng realized that the key to ensuring party rule and rebuilding China’s strength was to raise the national living standards. Doing so would both justify the party’s right to rule and allow it to regain popular support.
Thus through the 1980s and 1990s, official China followed a single mantra: “What is good for growth is good for China.” Farms were transformed into economic zones, city residents were uprooted to make way for highways, migrants from distant provinces were brought in to man assembly lines, foreign investment was welcomed, and banks were forced to make loans for machinery and equipment—all in pursuit of growing GDP.
Progress was not always smooth. The student-led democracy movement of 1989 revealed a widespread discontent with inflation and cor-
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ruption. For Deng, however, although the protests represented a threat to social stability and the party’s authority, they also demonstrated why getting the economy right was vital to the long-term survival of the Communist Party. So after overseeing the suppression of the protests and the brief period of economic stagnation that followed, Deng resumed his calls for radical economic reform, albeit with greater attention to ideological education and the prevention of the emergence of new threats to Communist Party rule.
The economic expansion that followed vindicated Deng’s decision. But by the year 2000, it was becoming clear that many problems had been brushed aside in the country’s rush for growth. Wages had soared in the cities, but they had stagnated in the countryside. Inland regions had been left behind while the coastal regions prospered. Health care, education, and other social welfare provisions had lagged badly. The environmental damage being inflicted on the country was reaching crisis proportions. And, in the general rush to become rich fast, corruption had flourished.
By 2002, when Hu Jintao became the chief of China’s Communist Party, it was clearly time for a change of emphasis. Official China needed a new mindset, one that emphasized a far greater range of values than economic growth alone. It came with the unveiling that year of a new goal for China: the establishment of a “harmonious society” that would be achieved using the principles of a “scientific perspective.”
To many people outside China, such phrases sound vague and meaningless. Their adoption, however, marked a major shift in outlook at the top of the Communist Party, one aimed at addressing the many dissatisfactions emerging in a society where some people prospered much more than others. Quickly, it became clear that the single- minded emphasis on growth that dominated the first stage of China’s economic development would be replaced with a more holistic approach. Strengthening the economy, although still a vital task, would henceforth be balanced with other priorities; at the top of the list was
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reducing the various inequalities that had built up, especially those that threatened to lead to social unrest. The new outlook also embraced other areas, from more environmentally conscious industrial policies (discouraging the further development of resource-intensive industries; promoting energy efficiency; and fostering exploration of alternative and renewable energy sources) to increased spending on education and health care to new laws strengthening workers’ rights.
In addition to a more sustainable development model, China’s political leaders have been reworking their approach to governance. Their goal is to ensure greater public support for the Communist Party, and thus to give it legitimacy and reinforce the party’s hold on power. The largest changes have been concentrated in two areas: improving effectiveness by strengthening the Communist Party’s organization and raising the standards for admitting members; and enhancing the government’s ability to direct and respond to public opinion. These two areas are worth examining in detail because they demonstrate official China’s seriousness and thoroughness of purpose, and its commitment to maintaining both social stability and the current political system.
Through the 1990s and early 2000s, the Communist Party directed its research institutes to study the longevity of political parties. The collapse of socialist rule in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was examined as was the continued success of parties such as Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party and Singapore’s People’s Action Party. In a fascinating examination of these studies, David Shambaugh, a professor who specializes in the internal workings of the Chinese Communist Party, lists the conclusions that official China took from them: 1
• Don’t let the economy stagnate; maintain growth and keep living standards rising.
• Keep the economy open to the rest of the world; continue absorbing the best techniques of capitalism, be they managerial practices or technologies.
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• Strengthen the Communist Party’s organization, particularly where its powers have been weakened, such as in the countryside, or where they never existed, such as within private and foreign- invested enterprises.
• Maintain strict control over the media; use it to promote desired views and restrict the spread of dissent.
• Be wary of Western attempts to undermine Communist Party rule; counter these wherever necessary.
These were all areas that the communist parties of the Soviet bloc had neglected. Not wanting to follow them into oblivion, the Chinese Communist Party has paid attention to all of them. It has established new local committees in organizations and communities ignored during the 1980s, and reinvigorated committees that had withered. In a monumental human resources initiative, the party assessed every one of its tens of millions of members. Older, poorly educated officials were retired, and younger ones promoted to replace them. Training courses were created. And the party broadened its membership base—including, since 2001, private businesspeople.
The party simultaneously undertook a massive effort to strengthen its ability to monitor and shape public opinion. Aware that the developments of the past three decades have created a society that is far more diverse, with wide-ranging interests, official China has studied the persuasive techniques of marketing and public relations, including the techniques of “spin” used in Western democracies. Opinion polls and surveys are regularly conducted. City governments set up websites to keep their citizens informed about their actions and established telephone hotlines for complaints and comments.
Most interesting of all is official China’s new approach to oversight of the media, which represents almost a 180-degree turnaround from the brainwashing of traditional communism. Using the media it controls directly, particularly television, the government delivers messages that it wants to get across. These might emphasize China’s
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achievements, particularly its economic ones. The government also restricts the dissemination of messages that it deems counterproductive. At the same time, however, an enormous degree of freedom has been granted to media companies that produce publications, broadcasts, and websites devoted to entertainment, lifestyle, sports, and other nonpolitical subjects.
This has resulted in an explosion in the volume and quality of Chinese media. Career opportunities that never existed before have opened to those who want to work in broadcasting or print. And those working in media know that most of the time, on most subjects, they can say whatever they want, provided they don’t cross clearly delineated boundaries. Similar demarcations exist elsewhere for academics, artists, musicians, authors, and so on. Governmental oversight and control is maintained via regulations and laws, monitoring, and, most significantly, the self-interest of the players, who have no wish to lose their status and newfound freedom.
Official China’s new approach to media might, and does, seem strange and discomfiting to people who grew up with a tradition of free speech and free press. But in the context of its predecessor, it has created notable change on at least three fronts. Socially, the country has a media and cultural life with a variety that is more responsive to people’s needs, tastes, and interests than ever before. Commercially, the way has opened for an enormous expansion in the media industries. And, politically, the government and the Communist Party have enhanced their image as the protectors and promoters of the Chinese people and Chinese culture.
In short, official China has moved from being a “hard” manager to being a “softer” one. Just as economic management has shifted from a command-and-control model to one where market forces determine most decisions, official China’s social management has come to rely on indirect techniques of persuasion rather than repression. In September 2009, Newsweek quoted Brookings scholar Cheng Li on this new aspect of the party; he said it was “a substantial change” related to
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the shift in party leadership from an older generation trained in engineering to a younger cohort trained in law, economics, and history. 2
At heart, this represents another step in the continuing metamorphosis of the Communist Party’s identity. It began as a revolutionary party with a mission to capture and hold power. Now it is a governing party, whose primary task is the management of society. No longer does it see itself, as it did under Mao, as a party that represents the interests of just one stratum of society—the peasantry and the working class. Instead, its task has become the governing of society as a whole.
Hu Jintao’s declaration that China’s goal should be the establishment of a harmonious society marked the official recognition of this transformation. Underlying this notion is an acknowledgment that as Chinese society has grown more complex, its government must continually earn its authority by improving the lives of the Chinese people and by reconciling conflicting interests and demands. The government has embraced the idea that prosperity brought about by economic reform can be shared equitably—but only if the state is involved in determining and shaping the nation’s direction and development, which in turn requires better governance skills. From this perspective, the Communist Party remains as vital to China’s future as ever. In addition, China’s leaders believe that to maintain relevance and legitimacy, they must recover and expand China’s standing in the world. This is why they now emphasize China rather than communism.
Although there are still those who predict the collapse of official China, all evidence points in the opposite direction. By most measures, China remains authoritarian, and there is no sign that this will change. For Western advocates of human rights, the restrictions that continue to exist in China will thus remain unacceptable. But the fact is that the Chinese people have far more freedom in almost every area of life than ever before. Many people, probably the vast majority of the population, don’t just passively accept their country’s political system, but actively support it, in a way that goes far beyond anything that propaganda or repression could induce. This is confirmed by surveys,
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such as a 2008 survey by the Pew Research Center, which concludes that the satisfaction levels of the Chinese people with their government and their lives ranks among the world’s highest. 3