China, A New Equality and the World_A Conversation With Wang Hui

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Greater ChinaJul 3, '13

2013 1

INTERVIEW

China, a new equality and the worldA conversat ion with Wang HuiBy Gabriele Battaglia

BEIJING - Wang Hui is one of the great contemporary Chinesescholars. Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Beijing'sTsinghua University, he is universally considered as one of themain representatives of the Chinese "new left", a definition hedoesn't like, being too tied to old patterns and to a Western pointof view. "Let's go beyond old thoughts" definitely seems his newmanifesto and in today's China the equality issue happens to be agood start.

Wang Hui: [Currently] I'm writing about "the equality of what?". Itis a big issue now, everywhere, both in China and in the West.Here, it's about the rich and the rural regions and it is also about

the ecological crisis and other issues such as the minorities.

We all know [in China] there is a crisis of equality, but how todefine it? At the end of the '70s, China's socialism was in crisis, sosome people attacked equality, especially the state-ownedenterprises, by suggesting a new liberal agenda: privatization,property rights and so on.

At the same time they suggested a new kind of equality, calling it"equality of opportunities" and the legal frame followed. But thiscame to be the legitimation of an unequal process. Everybody cansee how the workers suffered from privatization, which started inthe mid-'90s when they became unemployed and thecompensation was very low or none at all. On behalf of the market

we had deprivation, they took away rights and property from thehands of labor while arguing for equality of opportunities.

Then, at the end of the '90s, came debate about a crisis in socialwelfare and an attempt to rebuild. For instance, how to spread themedical system in the countryside.

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In this context, the idea of "equality of redistribution" re-emergedin China, but now the process itself is facing new challenges. Onone hand it is necessary to rebuild the social security system foreverybody; that's about basic rights. However, this is just aresponse to the earlier stage, the privatization process, and nowwe need to do something for the migrant workers, otherwise therewill be turmoil.

The big challenge here is that the Chinese economy is slowing

down. More money is needed to build up that social securitysystem while the revenues are decreasing. And at the same time,this kind of growth is so unfriendly toward the environment.

More and more energy is needed, but when you make a projectfor a new dam you immediately face a protest. You need torebuild the social security system including in it ecologicalpreservation, and this is a paradoxical, contradictory situation.

This means that you have to change the production model. Thereis a gap between the poor and the rich, but the main gap isbetween urban and rural population. So the government launchedthis new campaign for urbanization, chengzhenhua, [urbanizationof medium and small cities] but it is nothing new, it has been likethat for decades. At the same time, you see this processhappening in the Chinese frontiers, the minority areas in thesouthwest and morthwest whose culture, lifestyle and religion are

very different.

So, on one hand it's perfectly legitimate to improve the economicsituation there; however we have also an ecological crisis goinghand in hand with a cultural crisis, because their lifestyle ischanging, and so we have conflicts in Xinjiang and Tibet.

All this means that we basically need a new idea of equality thatincorporates the idea of diversity: not simply equalize everybodyand everything but try to respect singularity, diversity, differenceswithout rejecting the basic idea of equality. This is the challengebecause modern equality was based on the idea of citizens whoare equal. But now how to deal with lifestyles, religions,biodiversity, environment? Which equality we need? Maybe not asingle idea, but a set of ideas. And this reminds to the kind ofdevelopment we want.

But it's not easy to convince those economists and policy-makersin charge of the economic process, basically because theeconomic issue has become dominant especially for differentinterest groups. Even the officials can't control the whole process.So the point is that you have to think about the general issue, notonly about investment and money.

This is the reason why right now we have in China a debate aboutthe basic orientation of reforms. You know we have a say: "Crossthe river by feeling the stones", but now where are the banks ofthe river? And you risk getting lost in the middle of the river. Thepoint now is that nobody can clearly define where the banks are.

Gabriele Battaglia: How to put this debate in concrete terms?

WH: Take the big debate about the constitution we have now. It isvery ambiguous because the new liberals argue for aconstitutional reform whose implication is to change the wholepolitical system. However, "constitutional reform" means startingfrom the constitution itself. If you start from the rejection of theconstitution this means revolution. And right now there is no socialbase for a revolution. The basic guarantee of the constitution isthe Communist Party in power, and this is not a big problembecause everybody knows that there is no other political forcewhich can replace the Communist Party. Even the radicals of theright-wing perfectly know this.

On the other hand, if you recognize this constitution it means thatwe are actually a socialist country and the working class is theleading class. So what is the political status of the working class inChina?

Opening a discussion about the constitution is good and we needto go back to the 1954 constitution and guarantee basic rights. Itwas quite open and good; the Communist Party was the leadingforce, but you had freedom of speech and the right to strike, whichwas cancelled in 1982 after the Cultural Revolution, when DengXiaoping thought that China was at risk of anarchy and so theychanged the constitution.




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Again, the way to go back to this constitutional debate is to openup the discussion. The problem is that this discussion is veryofficial so far; there is no real public space. This also relates toanother big issue in China, which is the crisis of the media. Onone hand, you have a huge amount of publications; on the other,public space is shrinking.

And here we have the Nanfang Zhoumo case last January, theweekly magazine whose editorial board's new year editorial on the

defense of the constitution was substituted with another onepraising the Communist Party, by the local propaganda leader.Huge protests happened in that case.

There is a relation, but this is not a good case because the conflictdidn't happen about the public debate, it happened within thesystem: the appointed board members and their leaders. Onbehalf of freedom of speech there was a complete exclusion ofreal public opinion. So it was actually a matter of powerredistribution. They simply rejected any single different idea to bepublished in their newspapers, there was only one side's idea,polarized in the Southern Weekend [Nanfang Zhoumo] and thePeople's Daily. Ironically both were kind of official newspapers.The conflict was about the leadership of the Department ofPropaganda between old and new leaders.

This is also a crisis of representation because it is just a

representation of the idea of freedom of speech and democracy,as much as the Communist Party is the representation of the ideaof working class. We really need to rethink and redefine publicspace because the media can easily mislead public opiniontowards so called "truth". This is why when I was editor of Dushumagazine [until 2007] I tried to open up this kind of space. And itis interesting: now it is all completely gone, not allowed by all themainstream forces.

GB: What about urbanization, so called chengzhenhua?

WH: It's difficult to say if generally speaking it is right or wrong.Maybe here is good and there is bad. For instance in some areasa large amount of urbanization means a high ecological price butsomewhere else it fits. So you need to allow some experiments togo on, and according to our past experience these are the realdriving force for the reforms. In China, most of the general

macropolicy has always been a recognition of an earlier localprocess, not the beginning of it. For instance, rural reform startedin Anhui and then spread out. So you need an even bigger spacefor these experiments.

GB: Isn't chengzhenhua an egalitarian process? It looks like anattempt to create the biggest middle-class in the world.

WH: I'm afraid chengzhenhua is too much of a top-down process,so why not allow the people to try some practical experiment fromthe lower level and gradually make it more and moresophisticated?

For instance in Chengdu and Chongqing, they have already haddiscussions about integration, how to deal with the population andtheir citizen status. But we have another big problem, which is thateverywhere there is no longer any difference among the cities.This is a big loss of diversity.

Nobody can reverse the process, so we have to think about it.Sometimes the choice between slow and fast is not an easy one. Ithink it's not necessarily good to have fast Internet in every singlevillage and China has this problem: it's too fast.

Once you have urbanized, how do you guarantee enough land forcultivation, who can you guarantee food for the huge Chinesepopulation? So we have Monsanto's shares booming in the stockmarket. Why? Because China made an agreement with Argentinato allow and import their OGM [genetically modified] products. Andyou know these kind of products are unpredictable but at thesame time you need to guarantee food for a huge and densepopulation while economic growth means more land. Everybodyknows the secret of Chinese growth is a land policy carried on bylocal governments: without grabbing land and selling it todevelopers there is no way to get enough taxes.

There are limits, and nobody can guarantee a success and eventhe creation of a middle-class, which is shrinking everywhere.How can we guarantee a middle-class instead of slums, as




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happened in India or Latin America? Without land, people become"unemployed without land" in an urban area.

So now we have some scholars who even argue that slums aregood because the slum system is based on private property ofland and "freedom of migration": slums are "human rights", yousee? This is the reason why I feel like writing something about"the equality of what?".

Please note that in the last few weeks the rhetoric of the

government on chengzhenhua has changed. They now speak ofwentuo chengzhenhua, which means "safe urbanization". ZhangGaoli [first-ranked vice premier of the PRC and a member of thePolitburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party] was thefirst to speak in these terms.

What does it mean? I guess something like this. Almost 10% ofthe Chinese population is a migrant population, which for exampleis a huge problem for domestic transportation, like you see duringthe Spring Festival. But in these past few years the situation hasimproved because of the [global financial] crisis, which pushedmany migrants back to their villages and to cultivate the land. Thisprobably means that migration should not necessary be so fastand so long-distance. People don't lose contact with theirhometown, and we could have migration at the local level. This isa positive development, and the government probably thinks nowin these terms. But if the process is too fast it is still dangerous.

So, the land and the people. Here we have the Wukan case - thevillage whose rebellion against land eviction forced a politicalchange: new grassroots elections after many years.

You know the latest developments. It was a sort of model fordemocracy but eventually didn't follow [after one year the evictionsgo on and villagers' anger is rising against the newly elected localcommittee] and when this happened the media lost interest in thatand they even didn't know how to define it, the real difficultiesthose people meet. In the beginning it was easy: a call forelections. But when the real problems emerged the media losttheir voice.

The point is [it] not only Wukan, it's a huge process going on since2005 with the privatization of state enterprises and so on, all onbehalf of democracy and the protection of private property. What's

the result of that? At first it was "democracy", then, when even theelected local leaders became critical about it, everybody lostinterest.

This is the problem, which means we need a new vocabulary. Thedebate inside the left is about the language to define the newprocess and only in this way you can find new strategies to fight.

At the state level and at the village level is the same thing: thepolitical form and the social form do not match, and it's the samebetween our system and the Western system.

In Western media it's too easy to use terms such as totalitarianstate or state capitalism about China, but understanding otherpolitical forms is too challenging. And for the mainstream mediahere, if anything happens you immediately go back to the CulturalRevolution and the crisis of that utopia. But this is not the point,since utopia is not the beginning of a problem, it is the response toa problem we already have. It reveals our incapability of masteringreality.

Let's see the Diaoyu islands issue. Both the Chinese and theJapanese speakers give a response based on a common ground:this happens because of Mao's earlier policy. I asked them: "If thisproblem comes from Mao, why in Mao's era a reconciliation tookplace in 1972 and no such a big crisis happened? China was asocialist country, Japan a capitalist one, but they sat together andreached ambiguous agreements, suspended any conflict foralmost 40 years which in terms of foreign policy is quitesuccessful. What's the foundation for that? Why have the islandssuddenly became a main issue now, instead?"

For them everything which is wrong is past and it is not ourresponsibility. This is ridiculous and looks really like the call ofideology.

GB: Speaking of scapegoats, such as Mao in this case, do youhave any idea about the Edward Snowden case and therevelations about widespread US espionage? The guy flew awayright now, but this is anyway a big issue for China and Hong




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Kong.

WH: I disagree with those people who argued that this guy shouldhave been handed over to the US; this is not the case. Instead, abig investigation should start because Snowden revealed that theUS got a huge amount of information from Hong Kong and China.Why don't we do this investigation and reveal it to the world? Ireally argue that in this case China shouldn't only defend China'sinterest, it should keep this case transparent to the world. Again,it's a case of opening up.

Of course the hacking issue is widespread. America is actually themore culpable country, since we all use Microsoft, Apple andGoogle, but all the countries do that and now we need to revealthe whole story to the world.

I really hope China's relations with America will improve, but thisdoesn't mean it must compromise too much. It's not necessary. Ireally think China shouldn't use this case to defend its ownbehavior. Instead, I think that this kind of debate needs a realinternational opinion because the US got a lot of information fromEurope too. And ironically most of America's media now describesthat guy as a criminal.

GB: So it's a test for China too.

WH: Yes, it's very interesting because this is a big test not only for

America. It is a big test especially for China. It is meaningful notonly for the international system but also for China's inner systemand its relations with Hong Kong. Snowden arrived in Hong Kongbecause he knew it's different from China. Of course he didn'tcome to Beijing.

And also, Hong Kong and the US subscribe to internationaltreaties. So some people in China acknowledged for the first timethat Hong Kong enjoys some kind of rights which only nation-states, sovereign states, have. So what kind of state is Hong Kongwithin our system? This is a big issue because we have not reallyclear what the double system means.

Some people immediately argued this is the first time we knowHong Kong has such an independent legal system in theinternational realm, and this means it has also a kind ofsovereignty. And in my opinion this is interesting because, again,

the handover of Hong Kong to China was the result ofnegotiations between Britain and China's government, not a publicprocess. Now it will be tested by the people. So I think this is avery good story with different possible developments.

GB: How this case can affect relations between China and theUS?

WH:As for America, well they are embarrassed but not so much,they don't care that much about their behavior. They did so manywars, killings, kidnappings, so this is nothing new. But here it'simportant because every reform here is a China-America matter.Even if people criticize how they launch a war in Muslim countries,South America or Africa, America is the model because peoplethere enjoy freedom of speech and, especially, state interferencein people's private life is illegal.

In Chinese, Weibo [microblogging] people repeat these slogansevery day, and now this story has happened. So what is theresponse? My point is that this is not only an American problem.Here we have the disillusion about a certain kind of politicalchange, this is important because otherwise we always try to take"the other" as a model.

Now the new nature of the crisis is totally different from the ColdWar and post-Cold War context. You cannot simply think that wecan replace this system with that system. We don't want to defendthis system but try to change it. And we need to rethink reality, notsimply start from the illusion about "the other". This is only a smallstory, but also a new beginning.

There's a debate between the Chinese and former Sovietacademic world, and I recently read the book of Rein Mullerson,who is the president of the Tallin University's Law School and wasalso Gorbachev's legal adviser during the [USSR] reform era.Well, he is very critical toward that era's process and says wemust rethink it. The context is different but we both agree that forChina it's pretty much the same, the process is similar. Iremember the slogans of the Tiananmen movement in 1989




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because I was there, and at the beginning of the hunger strike,when Gorbachev came to visit China, we had this: "We want 58,not 85", because Gorbachev was 58 and Deng Xiaoping was 85.But history proved that 85 was possibly smarter than 58, and thisis the irony.

Gabriele Battaglia is an observer of Chinese affairs based inBeijing, the place to be and a good starting point for a look onglobalization and its alternatives. He is a member of China-Filesagency, and has previously been a writer for PeaceReporter and

E-il mensile magazines.

(Copyright 2013 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rightsreserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication andrepublishing.)

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Dean Jackson Top Commenter American University

"We all know [in China] there is a crisis of equality, but

how to define it?"

It's defined as total control of the economic, political and

institutions by the Chinese Communist Party, as you very

well know comrade.

"But now how to deal with lifestyles, religions,

biodiversity, environment? Which equality we need?

Maybe not a single idea, but a set of ideas. And thisreminds to the kind of development we want."

Overthrow the despotic Communist regime in Beijing, of

course, as you very well know comrade.

By the way ladies and gentlemen. Don't be fooled by the

upcoming fraudulent "collapse" of the Chinese Communist

government:

Since at least the early 1970s, the Communist party of

China has been poised to create a spectacular but

controlled democratization at any appropriate time. The

party had by then spent two decades con... See More

Reply Like July 7 at 1:17pm

Chinese Economic

CollapseWealthDaily.com/China_Economy

Corruption, Manipulation, Bad Loans Is

The China Bubble About To Burst?




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China, A New Equality and the World_A Conversation With Wang Hui

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