BOOK REVIEWS

Dong Yuyu and Shi Binhai (eds.): Zhengzhi Zhongguo (Political China)

The editors of this book combed China‘s open press and journals for articles advocating political-legal reform and assembled them into this anthology. One of the editors, Shi Binhai, aged 36, was detained last November for allegedly having passed on to the Japanese news media a letter by the former secretary seneral to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In that letter Zhao Ziyang pleaded with the Party to reverse the verdict of the 1989 Tiananmen democracy demonstration and hunger strike which ended with the June 4th massacre. At the time of his arrest, Shi was reportedly seeking to interview Zhao Ziyang. Whether his part in putting together this anthology was one of the reasons for his arrest is not known. At the time of Shi’s arrest, the authorities reportedly ordered the publisher to discontinue the printing of this book.

As with most anthologies the quality of its contents varies from essay to essay. Most are thoughtful pieces while several are scholarly essays of relatively high quality. About half a dozen articles expound the distinction between “rule by law” and “rule of law”, pleading for a speedy transition from the former to the latter (1). One essay pleads for the freedom of thought (pp. 120-123), another for the freedom of information (pp. 124-128), and yet another calls for legislation to protect the freedom of the press (pp. 129-131). Still another essay laments the insufficient and inadequate state of statutory laws and corrupt judicial systems (pp. 93-107). One article describes “grass-roots democracy”, that is, the election of village officials (pp. 352-367), while another article, by Li Rui (formerly a personal assistant to Mao Zedong), condemns “ultra-leftist tendencies” and pleads for the strengthening of intra-Party democracy (pp.368-381). There is only one article on rule of constitution, “On the Authority of Constitution”, by Gong Xiangrui (pp. 175-189). Of all these, “From [the Party] Rule by Law to the Rule of Law State”, by Liu Junning (pp. 233-266) is by far the best and most scholarly. Its bibliographical citations show Liu to be quite familiar with Western literature. All of these essays stress the linkage between the economic reform process and the legal and political reform process. All plead for speedy legal and political reform.

The editors claim that they have identified all the writings on legal-political reform published in recent years. If their assertion is true (and I have no reason to doubt it) then I must say that China has a long way to go in so far as the liberalisation (a dirty word there) and democratisation process is concerned. Only a total of 40 articles are identified and assembled—this from a country with a population in excess of 1.2 billion! That China is in dire need of political reform almost all educated people, including Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, agree. If so, then why have attempts at such a reformation attracted so little scholarly attention or effort?

What the contributors to this anthology do and do not address reveals not so much their intellectual concerns as it does the degree of the CCP’s tolerance. They do advocate a speedy transition to rule of law, legal protection of freedom of press, lessening the concentration of power in the hands of Party secretaries, less top-down decision making, less Party interference in all domains, the overhaul of economic law and further economic liberalisation, a less corrupt judicial system and finally, elections at the village and township levels. That’s all. They feel it either premature or imprudent to advocate ideas and ideals of a more explosive “bourgeois liberal” kind. Not a single essay in the batch explicitly advocates the superiority of the Constitution and the parliament (NPC) over the Party, separation of government and the Party, direct election of provincial and national officials, nor legitimacy of organised political opposition. None dare to state publicly that in accordance with “the natural law” and the “law of nature”, all human beings are entitled to certain inalienable and fundamental human rights that no secular authority may violate. A few authors do point out the importance of “natural law” in the progress of human rights in the West. Decades of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist and Han chauvinistic indoctrination have had their effect. The prevailing anti-bourgeois, anti-West sentiment in today’s China is such that none of the authors feel free to use Western liberal democratic values to challenge the Party’s ideological orthodoxy. Instead, they champion their cause on utilitarian grounds (e.g., good for China‘s modernisation; good for the survival of the Party-state rule). Years ago a Hong Kong journalist asked Peng Zhen:“ Which is superior? The Party or the Law?” (Dang da haishi fa da?) The then Chairman of the NPC Standing Committee answered: “Honestly, I don’t know”. Amazingly, none of these authors dare to unambiguously utter: “Law enacted in accordance with due process is superior to the Party. The Party must obey the law like everyone else.” (There is no Chinese equivalent of the English “due process”. In Taiwan the term was translated into “procedural justice” [chengxu zhengyi] only two decades ago by some liberal intellectuals, and has since been widely used by educated people.)

“Intellectual desertion” is one of the four prerequisites of revolution, according to Crane Brinton who did a comparative study of revolutions (2). That intellectual desertion is a fact of life in today‘s China is a proposition informed observers of China would find it hard to dispute. Transition away from totalitarianism has been under way for two decades. However, “intellectual desertion” must be preceded by an “enlightenment prelude”. An “enlightenment prelude” has yet to unfold in China. Historically, enlightenment precedes liberalisation and democratisation. Propagation of liberal democratic thoughts and values precedes democratic breakthrough, as has been the case in the historical West and Taiwan, among others. For it to become a more liberal and democratic polity, China must first have an enlightenment prelude. Many educated people in China must first desire liberal democratic governance. For this to happen, a critical educated minority must perform the missionary tasks at risk of imprisonment and life. They must expound and propagate the liberal democratic ideas incessantly and widely. There must be a large volume of writing, at the philosophical and eclectic level, that explains and elaborates on these ideas and values. Such a proselytising phase is a necessary prelude to political reform. For instance, in the West the ideas of Locke and Montesquieu were popularised and refined by the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine, the authors of the Federalist Papers.

In Taiwan too, democratic transformation was preceded by an enlightenment prelude in two phases. The first phase of the enlightenment prelude dated back to the 1920s and 1930s when Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule (3). The first-generation liberals learnt about Western liberalism and the Wilsonian national self-determination by way of the Japanese language and their Japanese professors during the Taisho democracy period. They propagated these Western values and demanded the Japanese government to grant colonial Taiwan “home rule” in the name of these values. In pursuit of this goal, they published newspapers and magazines to propagate the values and to achieve popular awareness. They also organised “cultural” associations, and sponsored “cultural” activities to convert and recruit members.

After the change of rule, the educated Taiwanese were made “functional illiterates” overnight, unqualified to work as teachers, journalists and senior public servants. For while they might be able to read Chinese, they could not speak Mandarin, much less write fluent Chinese. With the change of rulers there also occurred a change of the champions of liberalism in Taiwan. The torch of enlightenment passed on to a new and “alien” breed, the immigrant liberals from mainland China. Many anti-communist intellectuals migrated to Taiwan with the KMT government following its defeat by the CCP in China in 1949. Several opinion journals, dedicated to espousing liberal democratic thoughts, were launched by a few of the immigrant intellectuals devoted to the liberal democratic causes. Foremost among them were Minzhu pinglun (Democratic Review) and especially Ziyou Zhongguo (Free China). Founded in 1950, Free China lasted 11 years until the then oppressive KMT regime jailed its editor, Lei Chen. During their life span, the two journals published volumes of articles and editorials aimed at popularising not only Western classical liberal democratic thoughts but also contemporary refinements. Throughout the 1950s these opinion journals, especially Free China, educated and converted many of their readers to the cause of liberty and democracy. They were not only widely read by “rebellious college students” but also by many in the society at large, including quite a few in the armed forces. They expounded such ideas as civil liberties, a bill of rights, constitutional rule, judicial independence, limited government, checks and balances, legitimacy of political opposition, government by the consent of the governed and its institutionalisation by way of party politics, and so forth. They also popularised major contemporary refinements such as Karl Popper‘s Open Society and Its Enemies and Fredrick Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (4). Furthermore, they used these Western values and norms as the yardstick to measure and criticise the government practice and usurpation of power. Some even attempted independent and original studies. Chang Fo-chuan‘s On Liberties and Human Rights, remains to this date the best Chinese language exposition of the origin and evolution of the thoughts of liberties and human rights in the West (5). Hsu Fu-kuan and his neo-Confucianist associates re-interpreted Confucianism in an attempt to graft the Western-originated ideas of liberal democracy onto indigenous intellectual tradition (6) (e.g., minbian [people as the foundation], tianmin [mandate of heaven], minyu [fulfil people’s desire], and zhu tufu [the right to kill the tyrant]).

After the forced shutdown of these reviews, Wenxing and Daxue appeared. The dangwai (outside the KMT) persons also published numerous tabloids and magazines, capitalising on every opportunity to apply liberal democratic values and norms to scrutinise and lambaste the KMT governance throughout the period of martial law and “Provisional Articles”.

Where are the PRC counterparts of Lei Chen, Yin Hai-kuang, Chang Fu-Chuan, Hsia Tao-ping, Hsu Fo-kuan and the like (7)? Certainly not among the authors whose essays are reprinted in this anthology, Liu Junning being the only exception. But even he confines his advocacy of the rule of law to abstraction. Even he dares not advocate the supremacy of the Constitution and the superiority of statutory laws over the Party and party politics as the mechanism of institutionalising democratic rule. Is he too afraid of being condemned as too pro-capitalist or too pro-West? Most probably. Few want to be perceived as such in a xenophobic China, a China where virtually all Western thoughts except those approved by the Party (e.g., Marxism) are presumed to be subversive and illegitimate.

In short, the quantity and quality of the eclectic exposition of liberal democratic thoughts in the PRC is no match for that in Taiwan in the 1950s and subsequent periods. Unfortunately, the editors do not (cannot) identify the periodicals in which the essays first appeared. However, it is safe to assume that even to this day, the PRC has had no counterpart of the Democratic Review, Free China, and their successors (8). In contemporary China the only enlightenment endeavour is the series of translated Western social science and humanist classics known as “Toward the Future Series of Books” (zou xiang weilai zhong shu) launched by Jin Guantao. It is a sad commentary of contemporary China that none of the research institutes under the state-funded Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has done anything that may be regarded as Enlightenment.

Why the gap? Are the PRC champions of liberal democratic values less learned and/or less courageous? I do not think so. The relative isolation of the PRC intellectuals from the outside world is one explanation. Another, more convincing explanation is the difference in degrees in which the KMT and the CCP, the twins of Bolshevism, tolerate freedom of expression. In the 1950s, the KMT government partially “Leninised” Taiwan. It was Chiang Ching-kuo who personally carried this out, with the consent of his father, Chiang Kai-shek. The government, however, tolerated the advocates of liberal democracy to freely proselytise their cause, so long as the latter did not step beyond their bounds. Lei Chen and a few of his close associates were jailed not because they endorsed Western ideals, but because they wanted to put them into practice. Not content to exercise their freedom of expression, they wanted to exercise their right to freedom of association; taking the lead in forming a political opposition. Worse still, they attempted to forge an alliance of liberal immigrants from China (such as themselves) with some charismatic Taiwanese politicians such as Li Wan-chu, Kuo Yu-hsin, Kuo Ko-chi and Kao Yu-shu (9). Chiang Kai-shek and his son found this attempted alliance between the immigrant liberal democrats (who wrote superbly in Chinese) and the indigenous liberals (who commanded a mass following but could barely write in mandarin Chinese, having been educated in Japanese) as something dangerous, and consequently had the ring leaders (Lei Chen and a few of his close associates) thrown into jail on fabricated charges (of harbouring a communist infiltrator.) The KMT government, hoping to warn “the monkeys by killing the chicken”, had Lei and Fu thrown into jail because they were “ring leaders”, and Yin Hai-kuan, an enormously popular professor of philosophy, was fired from the National Taiwan University because his classroom attracted and corrupted “the best and the brightest” college students. The KMT spared him a prison term not because his writing was not scathing and devastating from the government point of view but rather because he was not one of the “ring leaders”, having little inclination or patience for tedious political activist chores (10). Hsia Tao-ping and Hsu Fo-kuan were spared a jail term for the same reasons, in spite of the fact that their criticism of KMT governance was no less severe or scathing. The Taiwanese politicians too were also spared a jail term because the authorities thought that jailing Lei and a few others was enough to nip the bud of an organised political opposition.

China is “a civilisation pretending to be a state”, once wrote Lucian Pye (11). One may paraphrase his remark: “China is the last bureaucratic empire pretending to be a state” (12). Still, some observers regard today’s Russia a “failed state”, an observation applicable to China. In a contribution to this anthology, He Qinglian, the author of China’s Pitfall (13), notices that present-day China displays virtually all the characteristics and features of a “soft state” (ruan zhengquan) (p. 222). Coined by Gunnar Myrdal, “soft state” refers to the phenomena often found in third world countries—a shortage of statutory law, arbitrary interpretation and enforcement of the law, the disobeying or ignoring of regulations and orders by officials at all levels and collusion of officials with merchants nominally under their charge in the hunt for rent (14). I consider all the above characterisations of China to be correct; they do not contradict one another.

What kind of political system can best ensure China’s internal order and sustained modernisation while minimising the prospects of sudden discontinuity or systematic breakdown? Except for Yu Keping, none of the authors address the issue, much less strive to find the answers. In a short thoughtful piece (pp. 49-53), Yu explains the distinction between “static stability” and “dynamic stability”. Static stability refers to maintenance of stability by prohibition—forbidding citizens to petition, march, demonstrate and sit-in to express their discontent of certain government officials and units. Dynamic stability refers to maintaining stability by dynamic accommodation—allowing citizens to express their discontent and striving to accommodate their demands. Yu pleads for dynamic stability in place of the “traditional static stability” (pp. 52). He says that maintaining stability by maintaining status quo is the least desirable approach. He goes no further. Either he has not thought through how to institutionalise the concept of dynamic stability or he dares not articulate his thoughts.

Among the contemporary China reformists, I can identify only Yan Jiaqi as one who has advocated federalism to reconcile the seemingly conflicting demands pointed out above. He believes that only with a federal arrangement can China preserve its unity; only through federated arrangements can the PRC maintain unity between China proper on the one hand and Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and eventually Taiwan on the other. Yan came to this conclusion only after he travelled to the West and America. However, the PCC leadership has constantly rejected federalism, and the main reason why none of the contributors to this book have tackled this issue is that it remains largely a taboo subject.

What does the above analysis portend for China? In a nutshell, China’s sustained modernisation and its evolution into a liberal democracy is by no way a foregone conclusion, contrary to what some China watchers in the West may presume or hope. China has a long way to go before it becomes, if ever, a modern state and its vast population enjoy the blessings of human rights and freedom. At a more practical level, and as a matter of immediate urgency, it remains to be seen whether political China can survive as a unified and viable polity capable of addressing its rapidly deteriorating environment, the ever-widening inter-region and inter-class disparity in opportunity and income, the separatist tendencies and ethnic-driven separatism, and the moral bankruptcy of the ruling Party. All of these have repercussions and implications for the world outside China.