China at a turning point: civil rights and economic structures
Milan (AsiaNews) - In the world and in China, attention has been broadly centred on contingent economic issues, questions like: When will the bubble burst in China's real estate market, its shadow banking system and the fraudulent certificates in financial collateral based on non-existent raw materials?
Will the euro survive the economic crisis, the dirigisme of its unelected technocratic elite, and the banks' balance sheets overflowing with non-performing loans and bad debts?
Will the dollar survive as the world's reserve currency after at least five years of intemperate monetary policy and casual abuse in the control mechanisms of international payment?
When will Japan's 'Abenomics' collapse? When will the many internal contradictions with BRICS and other emerging nations explode?
Yet here and there, some important political issues have begun to emerge, bound to play a leading role in the social discourse. After a century of ideologies - capitalism, nationalism, socialism, communism, fascism, and so on - and the "death of history", that is, the end of ideologies as the core of public debates, the pendulum of social affairs is swinging public attention towards basic political and constitutional issues. The topic is that of civil rights - a concept different from that of human rights - because they are more closely related to the debate on the economy and on various forms of entrepreneurship.
New citizens and Mao Zedong
The topic is obviously very broad and at AsiaNews our focus will be on China. The 'Open Constitution Initiative' ('Gongmeng' in Chinese, see footnote) has played a pioneering role in the constitutional debate that quietly began in 2003 at the Faculty of Law of Peking University, a movement that eventually took the new name of 'New Citizens' Movement' in English (see footnote).
Xu Zhiyong (pictured), one of the original founders of the Gongmeng movement (see footnote), proposed the name at the end of May 2012. One of its significant feature is that in Chinese, the term 'citizen' is made with a character initially proposed by Sun Yat-sen.
It is not our intention here to delve into Chinese political issues but simply to offer a few thoughts from a Catholic point of view that can have a more general value.
First, we have to start from the concept of what we mean by civil rights and what is their relation to China's development and the new structures of entrepreneurship. The reference is to the contemporary form of mixed economy created by the process of transition from a Stalinist - which had its own specific connotation compared to other forms of Socialist or Communist economy - in a social context led by the Communist Party.
To better understand today's context, i.e. the process of transition from a command economy to the current one, a few preliminary points must be stressed.
In China, the transition process had its starting point in what was a Maoist economy. The industrial sector - rather marginal at the time - was based on a Stalinist form of command economy, that is an economy that did not meet consumer demands - we might call it market demands - but followed instead the guidelines set by the central government's five-year plans. In agriculture, by far the largest sector in terms of employment, economic management was characterised by the appropriation and the collectivisation of the land on the Soviet model - but with different characteristics, closer to the principle of the Sovkoz or state farm than to the kolkhoz, farming cooperative ownership.
China's traditional rural society underwent a momentous and dramatic upheaval, especially in terms of land title and more generally the law. Land became a state monopoly from which resources were siphoned off to fund industry. Given the great importance of the agricultural sector, Mao's revolution gave its imprint to the whole of Chinese society through this legal approach.
Collectivisation of land begun, gradually, in 1949. It took radical turn with Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' in 1958: an unmitigated economic failure that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people from famine and many other causes related to policy decisions (see footnote).
Although at a catastrophic cost, Mao did in a sense achieve his purpose, namely completely undermining the structures that governed Chinese society for more than two thousand years, as well as the ideas of ownership, legality and legitimacy. What is more, the economic system he imposed had its own inner logic, of course with its panoply of violent coercion (if anyone whispered any dissatisfaction, they were sent to a re-education camp; if they do not toe the party line, they were shot in no time).
Few people in China really miss the Maoist era and the total and meticulous enslavement of the entire population, not just rural society. What is missing in today's Chinese society, which is full of contradictions, is the Maoist system's inner coherence. Because of that and not any nostalgia for Communism, we have today's widespread restlessness.
Nazi Germany and Mao's China
A dictatorship, even a harsh one, can allow economic development and technological progress - Nazi Germany is a case in point. Not Maoist China though. From an economic point of view, the years of Maoist rule were the worst in terms of relative and absolute poverty. If one looks at the ratio between the world's and China's population over the past two millennia starting with the year 1 AD to the present, one can see that the percentage of China's population was relatively stable: from around 25 per cent in the first centuries to about the 22 per cent towards 1700. In all these centuries, China's GDP compared to the world was roughly the same as the percentage of its population to that of the world. Decline set between 1820 and 1840, which coincides with the first confrontation with the British Empire, a clear indication of gradual relative impoverishment.
In 1950, a year after the Communist Party took over China, after the destructions of the civil war, striking picture emerges from the available data. That year China's population represented 21.6 per cent of the world's population but its GDP was just 4.5 per cent. On the even of the 'Great Leap Forward', some gain had been made but were modest. In 1958, the Chinese population was 22.24 per cent of the world's population, but they generated only 5.91 per cent of the world's GDP. After that, it was all downhill for China as its GDP dropped to about 4 per cent of the world's GDP. These were the tragic years of the 'Cultural Revolution'.
From a statistical point of view, recovery began when Deng Xiaoping began implementing land reform in 1978 and set up the first Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in 1980 in Shenzhen, a sort of free industrial zone next to Hong Kong. In 2013, the Chinese population comparatively represented 19.05 per cent of the world's population, generating 12.34 per cent of the world's GDP (at current exchange rates). A hundred years earlier, in 1913, a year after the proclamation of the Republic of China on 1 January 1912, the Chinese population constituted 24.40 per cent of the world's population with a GDP that was 8.83 per cent of that of the world.
See 'The new citizens' movement' by Xu Zhiyong in China Change, original Chinese.
Xu was recently sentenced to four years in prison for his efforts in favour of human rights as defined by China's constitution. See 'Xu Zhiyong gets four years as "last shred of China's dignity" destroyed,' by Wang Zhicheng in AsiaNews, 01 January 2014.
See 'China's growing human rights movement can claim many accomplishments,' by Teng Biao, in The Washington Post, 18 April 2014.
According to most studies and official Chinese sources, the victims of collectivisation vary between 40 and 43 million, whilst the total number of victims of Communism in China according to different sources vary between 70 and 150 million people.
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22/07/2011
