This course offers a conceptual framework for understanding China that highlights the intersection of politics and economics. It shows that rather than develop into a full blown market economy, state and party officials at all levels of the political system maintain significant influence in economic development. Such a “political” economy has had both positive and negative outcomes, which we will assess in detail. We also look at the origins, views, backgrounds and relations among leaders, and how those leaders make decisions about public policy and try to get those decisions implemented down through the system. China has few formal institutions through which citizens can participate in politics, but we will study the strategies Chinese people use to try to influence their leaders’ decisions. Finally, we assess China’s future and whether rapid economic development and the emergence of a vibrant middle class will push China towards greater democracy or whether the single party system is likely to survive into the future. The course is a quite useful background for Chinese Politics Part 2 – China and the World. Course Overview video: https://youtu.be/7FpNL67EbE4
4.6: Group Activity and Group Politics
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來自 The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology 的課程
Chinese Politics Part 1 – China and Political Science
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The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
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Module 4: Understanding Societal Engagement in Politics in China
與講師見面
David ZweigChair Professor of the Division of Social Science and Director of Center on China’s Transnational Relations
[MUSIC]
Let's look now at the question of group activity and group politics.
Group activity is very important to the pluralist view of democracy,
but first, let's define it.
So our definition of group activity is conscious awareness
of shared interest by people in these organizations
that have leaders who are autonomous from the state.
So being autonomous from the state is very important because in
that way they can pursue the interests of the group and
not be controlled or dominated by the state.
And as I said, these group interests are key to pluralist view of democracy.
And the pluralist view of democracy tries to deal with the fact that maybe not so
many people vote or that elections are sometimes, even in the west,
seem to be slightly structured or fixed.
But what really happens is that there are social groups in society,
who organize, who raise money, and who then compete.
They may lobby the government, but
they compete with each other for resources from the state.
So it's this competition of groups for control of the state that seem
to be making society democratic rather than the right to vote.
Now, in China the CCP does not allow formal
organizations, formal interest groups.
But these kinds of groups can emerge, or
these interests can be found within organizations, such as the Writer's Union.
Or even you could say the young communist leagues,
the writers union, some kind of artist associations.
These are important, but one very important part would be that these
organizations, the communist party still controls the leadership of those groups.
That's a very big different between a Western group,
where the leadership is autonomous from the state, and organizations in China,
interest groups or collective associations,
where people may pursue their interests, but they are controlled by the CCP.
The leaders are selected.
The CCP has long had this tradition of trying to incorporate people,
pull them into associations as a way to prevent them
from acting independently outside of the organized structure of the state.
And the CCP does this largely because, or at least intellectually,
theoretically, because it claims to be the vanguard, or
the leading force in society, that represents the working class.
And it demands the right to monopolize all kinds of legitimate authority,
because it claims it stands the highest, it looks the broadest
as the Chinese would say and that it understands the interest of the nation
while interest groups are simply too narrow, they're self interested.
They look out only for their local, their collective, their group interest
that they share, but not necessarily looking out for the national interest.
Now, regardless of whether or not they actually exist,
formally, we can see that groups have existed within China.
Some common degree of shared
attitudes towards politics, towards their common interests and
in the 1980s the reformers actually saw autonomous groups as
a way to generate popular support and to resolve social problems.
So one of the surprising things was in 1986 the reformers
tried to persuade State Owned Enterprise, these SOE managers
the state-owned enterprises to talk about political reform.
And that was something that got
some top leaders in the Chinese communist party, who Yao-bung, as I mentioned,
got them into trouble because they took that attitude that maybe factory managers,
the heads of SOEs, had some common interest different from the state and that
they should be able to think about that within the context of political reform.
So a year later between 1987 and 1988 there was a major
heated debate within the top echelons of the Communist Party as to whether or
not the party should accept the fact that people with shared social interests
should be allowed to organize and pursue those interests and
be recognized by the CCP as having legitimate interests, right?
The big question here is legitimate interests.
Should their interests be seen by the party as being legitimate,
that they have a right to pursue those interests?
And in 1987, then General Secretary of the Communist Party Zhao Ziyang, he clearly
believed that there were competing social interests emerging from economic reform.
And that after the 13th Party Congress he and
his colleagues tried to recognize social groups and
present them as acceptable and that they should be competing
with each other within society and that the state should accept that.
Now I have some old documents, some old magazines that actually show
a really interesting show, I can document for you that there was this debate.
So, this is the Beijing Review, which was the sort of Time Magazine,
Newsweek magazine of China published in English for Westerners.
And this is an article called Different Interest Groups Under Socialism.
All right, and here it's the subtitle says, the advance of China's reform will
inevitably accelerate the redistribution of interests in society.
All right, and that they can't come equal to everybody the same so
that the reformers were arguing we need to recognize that there are interests,
that reforms effect different groups in different ways and
some will get faster advantages, larger advantages from reform than others.
So let me read to you, this was a small paragraph in here
which I think is very interesting and here you can see it, I enlarged it for you.
There are very complex relationships of interest between town and countryside,
cadres that's officials and masses, the various professions, different age groups,
people with different educational levels, central and local governments.
Coastal and hinterland,
raw-material-producing and goods processing areas, seller and buyers.
And here's the key sentence, all these interest relationships are shifting,
creating new contradictions and conflicts which must be taken into account.
And must be taken into account meaning,
in policy that they have to be managed, not controlled, but
the policy has to take into account that are these interests that are emerging.
So that was the reformers, but there was another group of leaders.
A conservative group of leaders, mostly related to the Prime Minister, Li Peng.
And they rejected this conceptual framework.
They rejected this idea, seeing Zhao's views as being far too liberal and
being quite threatening to the leadership of the communist party, and,
oh, so I'm sorry I forgot to show you.
So, this is Beijing review, November 30 to 5th December, 1987.
This is right after the 13th party congress when Zhao Ziyang
puts forward a lot of liberal political ideas at the 13th party congress and
he has just become the General Secretary of the Communist party about a month or
two before this article appears.
But, about a year after that, we see the alternative view,
a challenge to that more liberal view, come forth from the Prime Minister.
And, within society, we can actually see that, in some ways,
Li Pung was trying to control their proliferation of interest and
the activism in this case liberal intellectuals and students.
And so in late '88, after Zhao sort of sent out this message the intellectuals
in China demand a re-evaluation of the 1957 antiwriter's campaign.
And that's a big danger to Dum Shao Peng Because Deng Xiaoping was responsible for
running the 57 Anti-rightist Campaign.
So he too may not have liked Zhao Ziyang's more liberal views.
And as we will see, soon after in spring of 89,
the students tried to built their own Autonomous Student Union.
With Autonomous Student Union with their own leaders, all right?
And that they would then feel that they have the right to pursue their student
interests separate from the Communist Party.
Being in a position to dictate by controlling who are the leaders of these
student unions.
And the Communist party wanted to have nothing to do with that, right?
Or at least certain sectors within the Communist party.
So it wasn't so long later on here we can see again one year later,
October, the end of October in 1988, what's happened politically in the country
is the Jao's political position has been weakened because of some
problems with the economic reform in the summer of 1988.
And so the same magazine, Beijing Review, a very different viewpoint.
Controlling the diversification of interest.
And what does it say?
It says the diversification of interest is complicated, the distribution and
use of social wealth.
Simultaneously increasing the difficulties
in coping with the problems that are thrown up.
And the key word here is chaos.
And we'll see this in 1989 as well.
Chaos has emerged in various economic fields.
It's not like something we can manage but it's really getting out of control.
In some, many orders have been disobeyed.
And many prohibitions.
Things that shouldn't be done have been ignored.
Behind these phenomena are local and group interests.
In the final analysis private interests.
In other words Liping is saying that private interests are coming out and
that that's creating chaos within Chinese society.
A very, very different view from Taoism.
Taking this forward, though, as we look in the 1990s and into the 2000s what we do
find is that lobbying government agencies has now become much more acceptable.
And that as I showed you before in the slide about the Guam Jo,
Business people that these associations, business associations
are now seen to be actively involved in policy making or policy input and
that they are acceptable to be acting on behalf of these associations.
One organization that I know something about,
the Western Returned Students Association, they try and
promote better ties between China and overseas.
Because many of them have studied abroad,
they feel that they understand the outside world.
And so they try and have in put into the policy process as a group, right?
That they have these interests, and they want good ties with the outside world.
So they can play a role.
Local governments, particularly provinces they can lobby the central government for
favorable policies.
Almost every city in China, well every province in China has it's own office in
Beijing and many of even the largest cities in China will send an official
into Beijing and try and lobby the ministers or
the people within the ministry to run in their city.
And that's very much the kind of lobbying
politics that you might see in a Western democracy.
