The recent cases of Chen Guangcheng and Gao Zhisheng have once again validated a concern I developed in the past few years, namely that political change is characterized by gangland behavior of the government, privatization of public power, exposure and frequency of political violence. This process can be generalized as "political ruling methods turning illegal."
The basic reasons for the three dramatic changes to China's political landscape can be traced back to the 1990s, during which China's economic revolutions had degenerated into excuses for groups of ruling elites to plunder public wealth. The extremely unfair distribution of wealth leads in turn to a social structure dominated by injustice. The Chinese government will thus confront a crisis in the legitimacy of its rule.
The crisis of legitimacy is not caused by Chinese people's awareness of the pillage and totalitarianism of the socialist system. Rather the crisis comes with the fact that the behaviors of the government and officials have broken the ideological myth on which the Chinese Communist Party had heavily depended for maintaining its rule.
The key tone of the ideological myth is that in a socialist state, people are masters of the state and also masters of the state's fortunes, in other words, the Chinese communist regime is the government for the people and all it does is for serving the people.
Losing support of the ideological myth, the Chinese government faces escalating protest from the masses. To enrich itself by pillaging the public, the Chinese government, with its insistence on maintaining its socialism, has no other choice but to follow the destructive path of using illegal methods to suppress all opposing powers. Illegitimacy of rule by these methods is most aptly illustrated by the fact that the government has relied more and more on violence for routine administration. In the past few years, the violent behaviors of the Chinese government have drawn intense attention. This kind of political violence is demonstrated in several aspects.
The first aspect is the violence against the underprivileged by the departments of the police, taxation, commerce, township officials and family planning during their enforcement of the law. This kind of violence is directed against individuals who are often forced to accept or tolerate it in silence.
Even though some individuals protest, it is mostly confined to individual actions. This kind of loosely organized protest will not alert the Chinese government to the crisis of its rule. The Chinese government also is also aware of the illegality of law enforcement agents, but attributes the result to "lawlessness of law enforcement agents."
The second aspect is that the government, in collusion with gangland groups, resorts to violence. Other times, government agencies directly use gangland methods to comprehensively pillage the resources the masses rely upon for living, like farmers' arable land and the houses of city residents. The governing authority condones this kind of violence, which in turn satisfies the desires of local governments and groups of elites for furthering their own interests.
In addition, the violent deeds are usually based on administrative law announced by local governments. Disguised in a thin veil of state sanctioned legality, violence is wrongly employed by the powerful governors against the governed. The brutality of this kind of violence is far beyond the business-related violence perpetrated by law enforcement agents in the process of law enforcement. Rather, it is a typical example of state-sanctioned illegal behavior
The third aspect is using spies to rule and strengthen state control over society. Starting from the late 90's, the espionage department of the National Security Bureau had already widely infiltrated many social domains and used very modern techniques to track and monitor all those considered dissidents.
The National Security Bureau's abuse of power is even more unscrupulous than other government departments, and it repeatedly seeks to frame human rights defenders. Besides abusing the use of charges such as endangering national security, leaking state secrets and conspiring to subvert the government, many charges against defendants are complete fabrications.
For example, in August 2006, Beijing attorney Xu Zhiyong went to Shandong Province to defend Chen Guangcheng, but was detained by local authorities under a false charge of theft; attorney Guo Feixiong was detained under a false charge of using fake tickets on the train to Beijing.
What is even more serious is that in order to elude its administrative responsibilities, the government instigated many gangsters (i.e., mobs with unknown identities) to physically tyrannize and persecute dissidents and rights defenders. In universities, they implement a system of information management officers to train part-time spies amongst the students and monitor teachers' speech in class.
The reason for Chinese government's ruling methods turning illegal is the government's fear about the legitimacy of its regime. The ruling clique knows deep down that the current unjust social structure has already made the Chinese government's future very precipitous. Democratization is likely to bring the looters to account. Hence their resolve to spurn democratization is far greater than in the 80s. Political ruling methods turning illegal mainly rely on reigning through blatant violence.
This is not only a new political variation of Mao Zedong's slogan of "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," but its essence shares similarities with the criminal underworld relying on violence to establish itself. A result of allowing violence to run rampant is that the buffering room between China's non-governmental society and the government has gradually narrowed, causing greater difficulties in advancing human rights in China. The illegality of this kind of rule is rooted in China's political system. It is an inevitable, logical result of the operation of today's power system in China. It is definitely is not caused by "some government officials being of low quality with little regard to the law." Hence punishing a few officials alone cannot stop the trend of the illegality of the local governments' ruling methods. In other words, only by changing the current unjust social structure in China, is it possible to stop the decline of the government into underworld gangsters. Moreover in order to change the current unjust social structures, one must also change the political system that produced this kind of unjust social structure.
The 154th issue of Huaxia Dianzi Bao
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