No Enemies, No Hatred
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QUESTION FOUR: Why is nothing done to stop China’s underworld economy, even though it includes the oppression and mistreatment of migrant labor, the use of child labor, and the kidnapping of children? Abuses of migrant labor, including minors, have been increasing. New cases keep appearing. And they not only continue but have a snowball effect: the more it is seen that such things can be gotten away with, the more attractive they become to entrepreneurs who exploit the weak as means to get rich and to the interest groups, including corrupt local officials, who stand behind those entrepreneurs by providing them with protective umbrellas in return for a slice of the profits. Officials cover what they do with euphemisms like “developing the local economy” and “safeguarding public order.” But the truth is that in China the underworld and officialdom have interpenetrated and become one. Criminal elements have become officialized as officials have become criminalized. Underworld chiefs carry titles in the National People’s Congress or the People’s Political Consultative Conference, while civil officials rely on the underworld to keep the lid on local society.
Officials and underworld bear joint responsibility for the outrages that take place and for the political cover that protects them—yet central authorities seem to have no formula for curtailing anything. It is not always clear whether they cannot intervene or choose not to intervene, but in any case they do not intervene—and the joint projects of underworld and officialdom go forth unimpeded in many local areas. It makes one wonder if things aren’t just about the same at the highest levels.
QUESTION FIVE: How can the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the people’s congresses at lower levels look the other way at official malfeasance as ugly as this? By law the NPC is the highest authority in the country. Its 3,000 or so delegates are charged with oversight of all branches of the government, and the delegates to all of the people’s congresses at lower levels, who number more than 3 million, are supposed to do the same at their levels. Why is it that, with very few exceptions, these people are so ineffective?
Media reports say that a single delegate to the NPC from Hunan, over a period of nine long years, did do his best with the black-kilns problem. But he was alone; no one else in the NPC or any in people’s congress at any level joined him. What qualifies people’s congresses that behave in this way to say they are organs of public opinion, and how do their delegates have the nerve to say they “represent” anyone?
In the Chinese political system, the lack of supervision by people’s congresses goes hand in hand with the abuse of power by government authorities. The two principles have a long history together. Their symbiosis comes about because the people’s congresses and the government share a common origin in the dictatorial powers of the Party. Both institutions give priority to serving that power, not the people.
Farmers are 80 percent of the population but hold only 20 percent of the seats in the NPC, while urbanites, 20 percent of the population, hold four times as many. But that imbalance actually doesn’t matter, because in fact no one is represented in the true sense anyway. The Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China supplies the chair of the National People’s Congress, and Party chiefs chair the people’s congresses at all the lower levels. More than 70 percent of delegates to people’s congresses are Party or government officials.
Because all authority of the congresses derives from the Party, they become mere rubber stamps for Party power. And when the “people’s representatives” at all levels in fact are officials—premiers, governors, mayors, bureau chiefs, county chiefs, town chiefs, village chiefs all the way down—how are they going to “supervise” the use of the power that they themselves hold? There is no separation at all between administrative power and supervisory power. Wang Dongji is a perfect example. Wang is the father of black-kiln boss Wang Binbin in Caosheng Village, Guangshengsi Township, Hongdong County, Linfen City, Shanxi Province. He holds administrative power as the Communist Party secretary in Caosheng Village and “supervisory” power as a two-term deputy in the Hongdong County People’s Congress.
QUESTION SIX: Why is that, ever since Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao came to power, China has seen such a succession of major crises of a kind that should have been dealt with before they got out of hand? Examples are legion: the SARS crisis of 2003; the Songhua River water-pollution crisis of 2005; the serial panics of 2006 over toxic food products and fake medicines; plus others. The common factor underlying all of them is the monopoly power of an authoritarian government that neglects to take action and then concentrates on concealing its inaction. Were it not for the efforts of citizens with consciences—publishing on an Internet that the government cannot yet completely block and through that means bringing problems to light and forcing the Hu-Wen government to react—the consequences would have been even more disastrous. The Internet is truly God’s gift to the Chinese people.
In the black-kiln case in particular, the Hu-Wen regime cannot foist responsibility onto a local government “different” from itself, because the local government is nothing but an artifact of the central government. Arguments that information was “concealed” or “not received” have no traction. Consider the following story:
On March 8, 2007, Yang Aizhi, who lives in the city of Zhengzhou in Henan Province, began looking for her fifteen-year-old child Wang Xinlei. At the end of that month, she and the parent of another missing child, from Meng County in Henan, set out to Shanxi in search of their children. They visited more than a hundred kilns but did not find them. In early April Yang made another trip to Shanxi, this time with five other parents of missing children, but again they found nothing.
Then, on May 9, Henan television reporter Fu Zhenzhong joined the six parents on a third trip to Shanxi. Fu shot scenes of the black-kiln work sites surreptitiously and then produced a television report called “Cruelty beyond Words, Extent beyond Measure.” When the report was aired, more than a thousand more parents approached the television station pleading for help. Later, on June 5, an Internet post on “Great River Forum” in Henan appeared under the headline: “The criminal underworld strikes again! A desperate appeal from 400 fathers of children sold into Shanxi kilns.” On June 11, Yang Aizhi mailed her own urgent appeal to Premier Wen Jiabao.
Only after all of this had happened did the national media begin to pay any attention to the problem of slavery in the black kilns. Three full months of time had been wasted between March 8 and June 15, the date on which the Hu-Wen regime finally issued some instructions.
Even more maddening, consider this: As early as 1998, nine years before people in Henan took action, a mayor named Chen Jianjiao in Xinguan Township in Hunan, who was a delegate to the Hunan People’s Congress, had been working on the black-kiln problem in Shanxi, Hebei, and elsewhere. Chen had already rescued hundreds of enslaved laborers, many of whom were children. But eventually, overwhelmed by the scale of the problem, he decided to appeal to the central authorities for help. On September 8, 2006, he wrote to Premier Wen Jiabao recommending that there be a comprehensive national project to clear up the black-kiln slave-labor problem once and for all.
But Delegate Chen’s letter sank like a stone in the ocean. He received no response from Wen Jiabao or from anyone else. Imagine what could have happened if Wen had done something then. The exposure of the black kilns, the breakup of the mobs that ran them, the rescue of slave labor, and the discipline of negligent officials all could have happened at least six months earlier than it did. Instead of just passing the blame to lower officials, should not the Hu-Wen regime apologize to victims of the disaster for its own failure to respond to the letter of this member of a provincial people’s congress? And if this is the way they treat an appeal from a person with that kind of prestigious position, need we say anything about the way they treat the appeals of ordinary citizens?
The Hu-Wen regime’s favorite performance since it took power has been its “we-love-the-people” show. Look, they say: we repealed the arbitrary detention s
ystem called “custody and repatriation,” we changed the system that covered up SARS, we have written “human rights” into the constitution, we abolished agricultural taxes, we crisscross the country showing our concern, we help migrant workers get fair wages, we sell peaches for farmers, we spend New Year’s Eve in a mineshaft, we wear old sneakers, we weep repeatedly over the sufferings of the people, and so on. Over time, thanks to their monopoly of the media that report their strivings every day, every month, every year, they have indeed built a certain image of caring about people. But this image is what they wear on their faces, and in front of television cameras. Their coldness lies in the bones, and in the deals they make inside black boxes. They are, after all, the highest-ranking members of the country’s private ruling group, and their first priority must always be to safeguard the vested interests—the power and the special privileges—of this group. It is impossible for them truly to put mainstream public opinion first—or the suffering of the people, or the overall public interest. For them, the first task of the media is to highlight the Party’s political achievements and to show things in as bright a light as possible; it is quite unthinkable that the media should become independent operators, running around uncovering problems. In truth, the black-kiln child slavery affair only illustrates, once again, the mendacity of the regime’s pious pronouncements about “getting to the bottom of things” and “putting people first.”
The reason the regime is so coldhearted is not that the human beings in it are all coldhearted. The problem is the cruelty of the authoritarian system itself. This kind of system cannot adapt to respect life or uphold human rights. A ruling group that makes maintenance of its monopoly on power its first priority can never turn around and put the lives of people—even children—in a higher position. In the end it is because the system does not treat people as people that such hair-raising atrocities can come about. Authoritarian power is as cold as ice. It obliges people to focus on power and power alone, and this makes feelings of human warmth impossible.
The history of the Communist Party’s rule in China shows consistent adherence to this authoritarian pattern. Unless there is a change of system in China, monstrous episodes like the black kilns will never be “uprooted”; indeed, not even many of their leaves are likely to fall off.
At home in Beijing, July 16, 2007
Originally published in Ren yu renquan (Humanity and Human Rights), no. 8, 2007
Translated by Perry Link
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE “WENG’AN INCIDENT”
A SERIES OF MAJOR EVENTS in China in this Olympic year of 2008 have been attracting the attention of the world. In March the crisis in Tibet seriously hurt China’s Olympic image. Then, in May, a huge earthquake in Sichuan handed the Communist regime a chance to restore its tarnished image by using “earthquake relief” to give the impression of “a new China bursting forth from the quake.” But shortly thereafter, another large-scale conflict between Chinese officials and Chinese people emerged to shock the country and the world.
On June 28, 2008, only forty days before the opening ceremony of the Olympics, a confrontation that pitted tens of thousands of people against a local government broke out in Weng’an County in Guizhou Province. Li Shufen, a student only 15 years old, had been raped and murdered, and her body had been thrown into a river. Local police, in handling the egregious case, ruled that the girl had committed suicide by throwing herself into the river. Bypassing autopsy and investigation, they simply released the suspects. The girl’s family, who stoutly rejected the police version of events, sent an uncle of the girl to argue with the police, who then not only refused to give the uncle any explanation but decided to give him a good beating as well. They later dispatched gangsters to beat him again, this time sufficiently to send him to the hospital, where, after futile attempts to save him, he died. His wife was beaten, too—enough to disfigure her face.
The outrageous behavior of the police stirred a public outcry. A group of Li Shufen’s high school classmates went to the local government offices to demand justice, and before long tens of thousands of local citizens had joined them. An angry mob burned the county-government and police buildings and set fire to a dozen or so police cars. The turmoil began during an afternoon and raged deep into the night, when a large detachment of paramilitary police—who opened fire, injuring one person—finally put it down. The authorities cut off communication with the outside world and blocked reporters who tried to enter the city.
In recent years, if one were to read only the Party-controlled media, one might get the impression that China is prosperous, stable, and headed for an age of “great peace and prosperity.” Attention to China from the international community has added to the problem, lending credibility to clamor about “the rise of a great nation.” China’s rulers have, in addition, both instigated and indulged a wave of popular chauvinism that helps to cover their regime with a veneer of apparent widespread popular support. On the other hand, the glaring discrepancy between official New China News Agency accounts of this “Weng’an incident” and widespread popular opinion on the Internet puts the true face of officialdom into sharp focus. Not only from the Internet but from foreign news sources as well as the internal documents of the regime itself—its “crisis reports”—we know that more and more major conflicts, often involving violence and bloodshed, have been breaking out between citizens and officials all across China. The country rests at the brink of a volcano.
The popular “rights-defense” movement of recent years has sprung from the lowest levels in Chinese society. It arises primarily from the following problems (this list is not complete) that China’s dictatorial political system and its unbalanced economy have generated:
—damage to workers’ rights and interests when state-owned enterprises are “reformed” into private hands;
—exploitation of migrant workers in sweatshops;
—damage to the rights and interests of retirees;
—forcible appropriation of farmers’ land for private “development”;
—resettlement and compensation for people who have been displaced by major hydroelectric power projects;
—protests that result when efforts to petition higher authority come to nothing;
—outbursts of public indignation at bullying by officials.
Even more ominous, from the viewpoint of the regime, is that many of the participants in large-scale disturbances in recent years have not been pursuing only their personal interests. They have been, to borrow government jargon, “groups whose direct interests have not been harmed.” The “Weng’an incident” is a good example.
How, exactly, could the rape and murder of one student lead to a demonstration by tens of thousands of people and eventually to the burning down of a building that housed a police station and other government offices? A brief notice from the official New China News Agency on June 29 offered a stale explanation:
Because of some people’s dissatisfaction with the results of the Weng’an public security bureau’s identification of the cause of death of a female student in that county, they gathered in front of buildings of the county government and public security bureau. In the process of discussions with the county officials concerned, some people incited the masses, who did not know the truth of the incident, to attack the county public security bureau, the county government, and the offices of the county Party Secretary. Later, a few lawbreakers took advantage of the situation to smash the offices and set fires in many office rooms and some automobiles.
On the Internet, however, people simply ignored this account, choosing instead to look for what local citizens were saying by computers and cell phones. In the popular accounts, the relevant story was that the black-box politics of officialdom had turned a case of rape and murder into a case of “shielding the suspects and beating the victim’s relatives to death.” Netizens wanted to know how the suspects, if they did not have official protection, could have evaded the long arm of the law.
/> We, on the other hand, should ask why this conflict between officials and ordinary citizens escalated so dramatically. How could it have swelled from an inquiry by a family member of a victim into a huge public demonstration—unless, of course, local officials had already had very bad reputations for nasty rule?
This “Weng’an incident” recalls the very similar “Wanzhou incident” that happened in Sichuan in 2004. Both incidents involved protesters “whose direct interests had not been harmed.” In both cases, the angry citizens in the tens of thousands who surrounded and attacked government offices were neither direct victims, nor relatives of direct victims, nor even people who shared material interests with direct victims. Most did not even know the victims. They came together entirely out of “moral indignation”—an indignation that could only have come from experience of a much more general pattern of official abuse.
Let us briefly review this “Wanzhou incident.” On the afternoon of October 18, 2004, a confrontation broke out in the Wanzhou District of Chongqing. Yu Jikui, a common laborer, accidentally bumped his carrying pole against Zeng Qingrong, a wealthy lady, dirtying her dress. Zeng’s husband, Hu Quanzong, then used the carrying pole to beat Yu, breaking his leg. Undaunted at this result, Hu let it be known that he was a government official and that, no matter what happened, he could always settle anything with money. Even the life of an ordinary man, he said, would cost him only two hundred thousand yuan. To make things worse, when the police arrived they were indulgent toward Hu Quanzong. They shook hands with him, exchanged small talk, then let him go. Angry bystanders, seeing “official arrogance” and “mutual cover-up” as blatant as this, gathered in a demonstration in front of the gate of the Wanzhou District government offices. The crowd grew into the tens of thousands. Authorities, desperate for control, dispatched more than a thousand riot police to disperse the crowd, but this only caused the crowd to counterattack with bricks and stones. They burned police cars and fire engines, and set fire to a government office building. The government in Wanzhou was forced to close down for a day.