Second Basic Principle: A Measure of Respect for Property Rights
Respecting private property and tolerating people’s desire to pursue wealth creation is the Second Basic Principle. We went from a time when private property and ownership were regarded as the source of all social evils [during the era of ‘High Maoism’, from 1956 to1976]and entered a period that tolerated hundreds of millions of Chinese legitimately pursuing greater personal wealth, and then on to a time when there was the prospect that property rights would even be recognised constitutionally — or as the short-hand puts it, ‘private property would be allowed into [recognised by] the Constitution’ [私產入憲]. This new approach liberated the natural desires of our people to seek prosperity for themselves and their families. The politics of China [finally] embraced the natural human desire for a better life. In these circumstances, not only did the state enjoy massive economic growth, it also made it possible for the state to allocate appropriate funding to Science and Technology, Education, Culture, National Defense and the Military. Importantly [for the Power-Holders], it also underwrote the massive expenditures of the Party-State itself. Of course, the average Chinese benefited as their standard of living improved. Such is the legal and legitimate basis upon which China has enjoyed such rapid development; it is also the underlying economic rationale behind why the existing political legitimacy [of the regime] has been tolerated by All-of-China. After all, this is what people regard as fundamental: Touch whatever you must, just don’t touch our wallets. This is a principle universally accepted by humanity at large for, in the modern era, the idea of private property is wedded to the concept of human nature.JFb免费翻墙网
After [the Party implemented a raft of policies in the late 1970s in the wake of the Cultural Revolution as a result of which] ‘Wrongs were Righted and Order replaced Chaos’ [撥亂反正, a short-hand covering a series of significant policy adjustments, including the rehabilitation of tens of thousands of cadres, intellectuals and individuals, along with the implementation of new quality-oriented educational policies and the encouragement of basic positive social values, among other things. The conceit of the Communist Party was that for a time — 1957 to 1976, or 1966 to 1976, it had strayed from its mission to build a united, strong and prosperous China. This ‘fake history’ has been central to the Party’s post-1976 self-mythologising, and to The China Story that it now tells] China converted [皈依, a Buddhist expression that denotes conversion to the tenets of faith and the foreswearing of one’s sinful past] taking up once more the journey along the Broad Way of Universal Human Existence. And, lo and behold!: ‘Verily, There is No Greater Virtue than to Realise the Error of Your Ways’.JFb免费翻墙网
Third Basic Principle: A Measure of Tolerance of Personal Freedoms
Over the past decades, civil society has not evolved in China. Whenever there’s been an outbreak of anything approaching normalcy, it has been crushed. This has had a profoundly negative impact on the individual growth and political maturation of our citizenry. Politically speaking, things are dire and the Chinese Nation as a whole continues to be seriously diminished as a result. However, personal ethics have, to a great extent, enjoyed a revival; in the economic and private realms there has even been positive growth.JFb免费翻墙网
Today, people enjoy their liberties of social actors but not as citizens; this is particularly so in the case of the more economically advanced provinces where this has been the case for some time. What I mean by ‘the liberties of social actors’ is that in the private sphere people can enjoy limited personal freedoms, in particular in regard to normal pleasures such as eating, going about one’s daily business and personal intimacy behind closed doors. There is also latitude in regard to a range of individual choices that have no immediate political dimension. For example, if nothing else, people don’t have to be worried about official invigilators interfering with their hairstyles or fashion choices [as they did from 1966]. You can also enjoy massage parlors and public baths, travel freely, eat yourself silly and even indulge in extra-marital affairs [in Chinese, the tone of these remarks is, to put it mildly, ‘male-centric’]. It’s all very comfy and petit-bourgeois. People have for some time been able to enjoy a general sense of social normalcy and everyday ease. Given the brutal monotony of the Maoist years when everyone had to be careful to keep it in their pants, you can’t be that critical of the fact that people prefer to settling for normal everyday pleasures rather than perilously demanding their true rights as citizens. Again, this [relative non-interference in the private sphere] is a major contributing factor to why people are willing to tolerate the present political arrangements.JFb免费翻墙网
And it is in this context that we should also mention how, the police use the pretext of, say, cracking down on prostitution to target certain individuals [as in the case of the environmental activist Lei Yang 雷洋 who died in custody after being detained by the police for supposedly soliciting a prostitute at a foot-massage parlor in Beijing in May 2016]. Such policing behaviour contributes to an atmosphere of insecurity. Although you might think you’ve achieved what you want in one particular case, [since these stories are reported both in the official and the unofficial media] you end up undermining people’s general sense of personal security. So you end up losing more than you gain.JFb免费翻墙网
Or take the policy to clean up Beijing [launched by Cai Qi 蔡奇, mayor of Beijing and one of Xi Jinping’s protégés, in late 2017, ostensibly aimed at ‘urban renewal’, but for all intents and purposes it was a putsch against what was derisively referred to as the city’s ‘low-end population’ 低端人口 of itinerant workers and their families]. The forced closure and destruction of small shops, convenience stores and bars was a typical example of ‘Vanity Politics’ [that is, political actions that are more for show than practical effect; policies that are aimed either at pleasing other bureaucrats or at currying favour with one’s superiors] that allowed the Authority to demonstrate His power over the common mass and to pursue an aesthetics of suffering in the process. — Don’t urban planners in such international metropolises as Hong Kong, London and Paris allow spaces for open-air trading and business as a matter of course?JFb免费翻墙网
In a market economy, people all too readily despise poverty but they tolerate prostitution; some even chose to amuse themselves to death. There people who might put on a big show and come across all coy, yet [behind closed doors] they indulge in the boundless possibilities afforded to them by their obscene wealth and they do so in the most immoral [無德], mindless [無識] and shameless [無恥] fashion. Very well, [we admit that] such debauched phenomena are the price one pays for the existence of a consumer society. In the eyes of ordinary people who living average lives, such things are all part and parcel of the modern comedy — or the post-modern farce. They have no choice but to live according to the logic of the market, one that stipulates that everything is a commodity.JFb免费翻墙网
Fourth Basic Principle: Set Term Limits for Political Appointees
For over three decades, and despite the evidence of a certain level of social pluralism and a measure of political tolerance [at certain points in time], China has in fact experienced no substantial political reform. In essence, the Party-State is founded on dictatorial political principles which at their rotting core are maintained by a philosophy of pitiless struggle and factional infighting. On the surface, this is a political modality with an ugly maw that can only be sated by ruling over and consuming the wealth of the nation. However, due to a Constitutional Provision [introduced following Mao’s death and in consideration of the depredations resulting from his lifelong tenure as Party Chairman] that limited the highest power-holders to two five-year terms in office — and that includes both the state president and the premier — since 2003 [when Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao came to power], and with the peaceful transition of leadership [from Jiang Zemin who was personally appointed to lead the party-state by Deng Xiaoping following the ouster of his predecessor Zhao Ziyang at the time of the 4 June 1989 Beijing Massacre], the country finally experienced ten years [2003 to 2012] after which the leadership showed that it was satisfied with two five-year terms in power. It finally seemed as though we were coming to regard the situation [involving the regularisation and peaceful transition of political power] as something like a ‘constitutional convention’.JFb免费翻墙网
For once it was as though the Law and our Reality were in sync, and that we might now be able to proceed along a set path [of regular political turn-over]. The situation afforded the people of China a measure of political certainty and it bolstered international confidence due to the fact that our country seemed to be on the way to becoming a modern polity. It should be pointed out that this, and this alone, has, over the last thirty years, been the only tangible example of real political reform and progress in China. Despite all the vacuous hoopla about other kinds of political reform initiatives, the Party-State system had otherwise remained immobile. So, everyone came to believe that now, no matter who you are or what you do [that is, regardless of how bad or incompetent Party and State leaders might prove to be], at most you’ll only be in power for ten years. For the blameless masses of Chinese — they who are as humble and as numerous as ants, the people who till the yellow earth tirelessly, their sweaty backs bent beneath the sky, those who live laboring to the end of their days just to keep their families fed, people who are absolutely powerless to resist the might of a highly organized state machine — now, finally, they had [understood the concept of] a ‘ten-year rule’; there actually seemed as though a [quasi-legal] measure had been instituted that would prevent the outbreak of yet another period of political instability. Finally, the Masses could go about their everyday lives with one less thing to worry about.JFb免费翻墙网
