JOIN USIn today's China, repression is big business
When it comes to Zhang Zuhua, a former official who helped draft the pro-democracy manifesto that earned his co-author, Liu Xiaobo, an 11-year prison term and the attention of the Nobel committee, it means posting a dozen plainclothes police officers and guards outside his Beijing apartment day and night around the clock.
Across the capital and around the country, scores of Liu’s supporters and their families are being watched by surly men who accompany them on errands, sleep at their doorsteps and repeatedly disrupt their phone and web links. An internal security agent minding one liberal scholar bragged that the government had allocated up to 5,00,000 renminbi, about $75,000, to monitor for two months each of the 140 people whom Liu’s wife invited to the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony.
“There is no shortage of money available for controlling people like us,” said one of the invitees, Zeng Jinyan, the wife of the jailed activist Hu Jia, whose apartment building is flanked by a guard house outfitted with infrared video cameras.
The resources spent to watch these and scores of other dissidents is just one small sprocket in a multiagency security bureaucracy charged with the of ‘stability maintenance,’ which integrates the Chinese police with an other departments — judicial ganda, petition and land resources — down to the neighbourhood and village level. Such work covers everyday crime-fighting duties but it also includes such tasks as intercepting petitioners bound for government offices and tamping down protests by dispossessed farmers.
A crucial metric in rating the performances of officials, stability maintenance, or ‘weiwen’ for short, over the past decade has grown into a huge industry, one that employs millions of people and fattens the budgets of local governments. This year, China was slated to spend 514 billion renminbi on such measures, according to one Tsinghua University study based on official police budgets, putting internal security almost on par with defence spending.
But more than just a line in the national budget, maintaining stability has become a comprehensive governing approach that critics say puts repression above reform as a way to counteract the growing social conflicts that keep Chinese leaders awake at night. The late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping may have declared ‘stability above all’ more than two decades ago, but the government led by President Hu Jintao has elevated the pursuit of stability to new levels.
In speeches and official dictums, Hu and other top leaders often declare their devotion to creating a ‘harmonious society’ through the rule of law and social investment to narrow income gaps. But analysts say the central government’s vision of social harmony means devoting a growing portion of its resources toward restraining nongovernmental organisations, harassing rights lawyers and curtailing the independence of the judiciary.
David Kelly, a visiting scholar at Peking University, said the government’s stability campaign was largely driven by fears that spiraling social unrest could lead to the kind of ‘colour revolutions’ that brought down authoritarian governments in former Soviet republics.
“If students complain about the food in the school canteen, that will be reported as social instability,” he said.
The heightened focus on stability has served to bolster the clout of men like Zhou Yongkang, a member of the elite nine-man Politburo Standing Committee, whose portfolio includes domestic intelligence and the judicial system. Zhou spent three decades working in the rough-and-tumble petroleum industry, eventually rising to lead China National Petroleum, the largest state-owned energy conglomerate in the country. Before his 2007 elevation, he was minister of public security, where he won official plaudits for combating bribe-taking and other abuses among rank-and-file police.
Averse to criticism
His tenure has coincided with a seeming cascade of crises and perceived challenges, including the 2008 Olympic Games, ethnic rioting in Tibet and the western region of Xinjiang, and the 60th anniversary last year of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Amid rising domestic turmoil and the global economic downturn, the government has seemingly harboured far fewer reservations about asserting its will over critics.
In late 2008, the Politburo promptly labelled Charter 08, the blueprint for democratic reforms co-drafted by Liu, as the work of ‘enemy forces’ seeking to overthrow party rule. Almost immediately after its publication online that December, they mobilised a crackdown to rout its spread, later hailed as a success in internal speeches by propaganda officials.
At one Politburo meeting within weeks after its release, according to a political analyst with ties to senior leaders, who spoke anonymously for fear of repercussions, Zhou and other conservative Politburo members easily overruled prime minister Wen Jiabao, who expressed misgivings about the prospect of jailing Liu for fear it would provoke an international backlash.
Analysts say the leadership has used Charter 08, ethnic unrest and the rise of so-called mass incidents to dramatically increase domestic security budgets, set up new stability coordination units at every level of government and hire legions of private contractors to head off social turmoil. “The security and propaganda departments are not initiating this policy from scratch but they are expanding on it,” said a veteran journalist at a party media outlet, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue; “And they are trying to expand it as much as possible, in order to get as much money and power as possible.”
The expansion of the security apparatus has provoked alarm among the increasingly marginalised group of reform-minded officials who worry that legal changes are being sidelined in the name of stability. Over the past three years, the Communist Party has reasserted its control over the court system, launching the ‘Three Supremes’ — a doctrine that directs judges to consider the party’s interests over the law — and installing as president of the Supreme People’s Court a former public security official with no judicial background.
The growing policy emphasis on stability over reform, experts say, is a vicious circle of collusive interests that feeds the very problems it was designed to address. The study published earlier this year by a group of Tsinghua University sociologists warned that stability maintenance policies and the flood of ‘social stabilisation funds’ at the local level often lead to the repression of citizens with bona fide grievances.
Instead of addressing the claims of migrant workers seeking unpaid wages or homeowners trying to stave off the demolition of their homes, the report said, officials are quick to view such grievances as political or economic threats. “Blindly preventing the expression of legitimate interests in the name of stability will only accumulate contradictions and render society even more unstable,” the authors said.
Pu Zhiqiang, one of China’s leading human rights lawyers, said the system has spawned a murky and increasingly entrenched collection of companies and individuals who have profited from the flow of stability management money.