When Did Some Students in Beijing Start Being Indicators of Political Sentiment in China?

There’s an interesting essay at the China File website entitled, “Why’s Beijing So Worried About Western Values Infecting China’s Youth?” by Eric Fish. Fish’s own book on China’s millennials is seen by many in the China-Watching Establishment as a shrewd analysis of China’s young and potentially activist generation, possibly in part because it supports the notion that the next cohort may well bring about the sort of change in China that many of these observers want to believe in.

Fish’s take in the present essay seems to strike the same positive chord for some: That China’s current leadership is anxious enough about the prospect of youth rising up in political resentment here that authorities have assembled a set of draconian measures to control the classroom, specifically Western influence at universities and elsewhere. Surveys taken of students here, according to Fish, indicate that many Chinese youth are favorably disposed towards democracy as well as for what passes for American culture, so Chinese leaders are right to be uneasy.

But there are ample reasons to wonder about this interpretation of China’s youth, as well as the assumption that Beijing is “worried”.

The article cites three surveys of Chinese students--in 2007, 2009 and 2011. It’s not at all clear how relevant these surveys are to China’s current youth, especially since they are somewhat dated and they’re about students, not other sectors of youth. Another analysis that Fish refers to was recently published (in 2016,) but it’s not clear when the survey was conducted (the original article doesn’t say) and, in any event, the total number of interviewees was 29--all of whom said that they were already viewers of various American television series. How fans of, say, Friends are more likely to evolve into an anti-government political force isn’t explained, but it appears to have been assumed that if you harbor such tastes you’re likely to dislike China’s current leaders.

In fact, when Fish’s article refers to “China’s youth”, what’s really being talked about are some students at some Chinese universities—almost always in Beijing, which means the better endowed and established schools, where it’s often the children of elites and the well-placed who go to get credentialed instead of intellectually enlightened.

Fish also cites an article by University of Southern California Professor Stanley Rosen, noting that, according to Fish, shows deep concern on the part of Chinese officials with the attraction of Western culture for China’s young, drew on “surveys conducted for internal government use never released to the public due to political sensitivity, which [Rosen] accessed through contacts in government-affiliated think tanks.”

But while Rosen’s article is more nuanced (noting for example that there are many foreign influences on China’s youth, not just American ones—such as Korean pop idols), there’s reason to wonder about the inference that it’s especially authoritative because it relies on an internal study (or perhaps more than one) of youth attitudes by Chinese government departments and institutes. If there were staff at one of these think-tanks who allowed a foreign scholar to see the study (or at least shared its findings), they were taking an enormous risk doing so—and it’s not immediately apparent why they’d do that. It’s rare to find such risk-taking in think-tanks here in China, especially given the supervision the analysts there live under simply because they are one of the main contacts for foreign scholars and are government organizations, not private ones. Maybe they were particularly courageous--or perhaps the level of classification wasn’t all that high, making the findings perhaps less compelling than what’s implied in Fish’s article. It's tough to tell, and so caution is probably called for here, too.

In short, there are reasonable questions that should be raised about validity and reliability in this regard, especially when efforts are made to extrapolate this limited data to a more general universe—say, employed youth, young laborers still looking for work, and so on, without distinction of gender or location either. If one is speaking of Chinese students in select universities in Beijing and some of their attitudes about American culture, maybe that says something about them specifically. But the claims made in the Fish article are more far-reaching than that, the inferences even more so.

Finally, there’s the Chinese government view as presented in Fish’s essay. As with many commentaries about China under Xi Jinping, the essay speaks of “China’s leaders”—a category that evidently encompasses the entire Chinese Communist party as well as the government apparatus, without any reference to differences of opinion or debate between political elites. As a whole, we’re informed, China’s leaders are frightened, anxious, concerned, worried—the terms may differ but the sentiment seems the same: They’re scared of society. And it’s “them” here: The possibility that some Chinese political elites might well be not all that anxious about youth attitudes (whatever those are) or have other points of view apparently isn’t possible, or at least it’s not even raised.

For evidence of this anxiety, Fish’s article points to Xi Jinping’s recent speech on ideology and political instruction in China’s universities, and an editorial by the current Minister of Education Chen Baosheng [陈宝生], that immediately followed Xi’s address.

Both are important indicators of sentiment in Beijing, but neither pronouncement necessarily indicates a heightened fear in the corridors of power here.

In fact, Xi’s speech, while talking extensively about universities, is actually a part of a larger campaign focused on cadres and how they’re managing not to do a very good job managing the Party’s impact generally and the need to step up. (Fish’s article helpfully provides a link to the official summary of the speech in English, but the actual speech as reprinted in People’s Daily is far more revealing and should have been relied on.) Xi makes no direct mention in his speech of threats from the West, only the need to build up socialism. That's a critical point, and unsurprising really: The threat Xi sees isn’t from Westernization per se but a failure within the Party to protect socialism from neglect so that Western influences can be deflected or absorbed appropriately. That’s where Xi’s focus is—protecting the Party against itself, not fighting off social threats from students who are watching foreign television or hearing about the odd international perspective from their professors. (Left unmentioned in Fish's essay is the desultory attitude that many instructors here take towards their classes and students.)

The editorial from Minister Chen that Fish cites has a somewhat different take—indicating again that there are important distinctions to be made where the actual views of China’s decision-makers are concerned. The headline of the Sina.com news site does emphasize the efforts by hostile forces to penetrate Chinese campuses, but the editorial is actually devoted to explaining in Marxist language how knowledge is acquired and should be conveyed. So it's not an attack on foreign influence as its central theme. This isn't a leading Chinese elite lashing out at the West and worried to death, but a high-level bureaucrat instructing his charges not to neglect Party values. Chen may see insidiousness on the part of some outsiders, but in this essay at least, he’s really speaking to the inattention of education administrators and internal shortcomings, not some all-out assault by Westerners, which is what's implied in Fish's articles.

Most importantly, it’s not at all clear how anyone can truly discern anxiety or fright among China’s leaders. Indeed, it’s apparent in actual conversations with many officials (not only local cadres) that their concerns are often other than what some observers abroad insist that they must be, and that they’re pretty confident in their own capabilities. Maybe China’s elites are wrong to be anything but scared stiff, but how anyone can tell without actually asking them (or at least reading what they actually said and wrote with particular care) remains as much a mystery as how some students based primarily in Beijing suddenly represent China’s political future.

What A Difference A Davos Makes--Except in Local China

What a difference a Davos makes.

Until yesterday, China’s President Xi Jinping was cast by many in the international media as a Mao Wannabe: Someone interested primarily in political supremacy at home, locking up lawyers and political activists and cleaning up the Communist Party, while pursuing an assertive policy of projecting Chinese power abroad. Xi was in command, looking to possibly extend his tenure. All of that had been quite disturbing to many observers outside China (that is, when they weren’t talking about his “challenges” and how any day now—any day now—there would be a backlash from society that would threaten Party rule)[1].

Suddenly, following his lengthy speech at Davos, Xi’s become to many the Great Global Stabilizer, interested in securing trade, opening economic frontiers, expanding commercial cooperation—in a word, what’s been known by many outside China for decades as “globalization”—a term that Xi was careful to qualify by speaking of “economic globalization” [经济全球化]—namely, untrammeled trade for China though not open borders where outside ideas from other societies are allowed free rein. Nonetheless, for a world terrified by the election of Donald Trump as the next American president, Xi and his speech are being cast as a vote of confidence in the existing world order.

Local residents and local Chinese companies here don’t quite understand what the fuss is all about. Their views are varied to be sure; yet more than a few, even in affluent provinces, are anxious about their own economic futures. Many see Beijing as having been very good at bringing benefits to a narrow elite (what Marxists used to call the “comprador class”), while not caring all that much for small businesses and entrepreneurs trying to break into markets, local and otherwise. Some residents see the factory floors and offices in large industrial parks and innovation hubs under construction as already reserved for the well-connected and the well-heeled, with little prospect for themselves. They understand that when Xi is talking about “globalization”, he’s referring to globalization with Chinese characteristics. When Xi praises the status quo, he’s signaling that China is relatively satisfied with its position—and that citizens and local officials should follow suit.

Not everyone here will be persuaded. Many locals here wonder when their children will get to study abroad like their classmates who can afford private tutoring; when their prospects and the small business they’re trying to run will be as good as those who they see as politically-connected, tied into the local power structure where the government still dominates the market. Of course, there’s growing entrepreneurship. But while Alibaba might be seen as a sign of China’s innovative spirit by many observers overseas, for more than a few residents here, Taobao is a place to buy goods cheaply, not a platform to expand their business and grow their income and place in Chinese society.

There’s also a political context to this sort of local unease. Websites and social media extolling Chinese pride (and the need to keep foreign goods at bay) often stoke local sentiment of being sidelined by economic policies which may play well inside China’s beltways but have little impact on the country’s many counties. China’s conservative intellectuals do have a stronger presence here that they usually given credit for, and Xi and his like-minded comrades haven’t been very interested in countering their narrative of a country that’s been shortchanged by foreign forces and foreign companies. Xenophobia is far easier to tap into here in China than it is in the United States.

None of the local disquiet that does exist means that social revolution is simmering; that farmers will be aligning with students and “China’s new generation” (whatever that means this week) to challenge Communist party rule. Nor is the opposite suddenly true here: That Beijing’s rule is especially robust and getting stronger, squeezing out the last breaths of a suffocating civil society and dictating local policies without pushback. Both scenarios are absurd, written from far, far away in what could be another galaxy entirely. For many here in China, Xi's vision is sound and it's secure.

At the same time, what Xi’s speech does connote is very much business as usual for Local China. For the well-positioned in China’s beltways and beyond, that’s delightful news. For the rest, it’s really no news at all. Davos to them makes no difference.

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[1] It says quite a great deal about the bizarre nature of many analyses about China and politics here that these two very different views—that Xi’s in charge and that Xi’s in trouble-- often coexist, sometimes from the same commentators within a very brief time frame. 

China Isn't Leading But Pondering

The US presidential election has been done with for over two months, and the clear winner, we’re told, is China.

China, readers of various newspaper and media sites are informed, is moving into the vacuum created by the anxiety and uncertainty produced by President-elect Donald Trump’s policy statements, tweets, and pronouncements. The Modern Middle Kingdom is looking to guide the world in climate change initiatives, renewable energy programs, high-speed rail and other infrastructure, health care, education--pretty much everything that Trump is looking to subvert or slaughter, the story goes. The world isn’t looking to Washington any longer for leadership, readers are told, but to Beijing, and President Xi Jinping’s presence in this year’s summit in Davos is proof.

But such conclusions aren’t prognostication; they’re projection—in the classic psychological definition, wherein someone attributes to others qualities that they see themselves as lacking. And the reason one can be sure that’s the case here is that China's leaders haven’t said they’re ready and willing to steer the world in place of the United States.

It’s understandable that Americans et al are concerned about losing status and face to Beijing as Trump tries to upend tradition through Twitter, just as it may make sense for Beijing to move at some point into the breech being generated by Trump’s lack of restraint. And it might be strategically sound for Xi and his comrades to seek to take advantage of the opportunity afforded by Trump's missteps and broadcast that they’re set to assume a leading role in global affairs.

But that’s not happening yet.

The usual suspect sources of State media that are regularly cited by many international media outlets—China Daily, the English version of Global Times, English-language websites of Xinhua and the like—are, at long last, carrying commentary decrying Trump’s tweets and statements about Taiwan and One-China. But those outlets are designed for foreigners to read, not China’s party cadres or Chinese citizens; they’re placeholders in lieu of actual instructions to officials and the public about the Party line. Chinese officials don’t pay attention to those editorials because they know that they don’t have to.

Major television news programs are starting to talk about Trump and dismiss some of his more outlandish statements; yet nowhere are there signs or statements from Chinese officials that they plan to, say, introduce a new strategy for bringing peace to Syria, or want to convene a global summit on climate change. For all the claims that China is blazing new paths where renewable energy is concerned, there’s ample local evidence arguing against that view. China is still far the follower, reluctant to step out in front for all sorts of important reasons, including the depth of its own domestic challenges.

Far more important in this context of what Beijing thinks is that the authoritative outlets here in China (Peoples’ Daily, in particular) have been reticent to comment on Trump. That’s not a strategy by Beijing to bide its time, but a clear sign that there’s a lack of consensus in China’s leadership about how to cope with the soon-to-be new American chief executive. Officials here depend on Party media to instruct, and thus far there have been no clear directives provided to them. Indeed, what little is known about the reaction in China’s inner policy circles (and there’s very little known, despite claims to the contrary) suggests that advisers here are scrambling to try to find out whether Trump is just talk. The fact is, Beijing still doesn’t quite understand Trump, and elites and advisers here are still debating how to respond. China's policymaking system is like that when confronted with the unfamiliar—not nearly as decisive as outside observers believe, and prone to conflict more than consensus. The latter so far is proving hard to come by.

That’s the real story: Not that China’s leaders are ready to take command and interested in doing so, but that they may in fact be neither.

It's The Cadres, Not The Classroom for Xi Jinping

Chinese president Xi Jinping gave an important speech this past week during a 2-day conference on China’s colleges and universities. According to a number of observers, a major message delivered there was the need to crack down on intellectuals and alternative views in the classroom--part of Beijing’s ongoing strategy to tighten social control and fight against forces promoting “Western values”.

But Xi never conveyed that sentiment. He’s got another agenda.

What Xi did say, starkly and forcefully, was that China’s universities are unique institutions, repositories of Chinese socialism; that political and ideological control of China’s universities had to be strengthened because their role was to mold and shape a moral individual; that one of the major means of doing that—namely, Marxism and “socialist core values” [社会主义核心价值观]—needed to be taught with more vigor to students and instructors alike; and that colleges in China needed to follow the leadership of the Communist party first and foremost.

In other words, Party officials at universities charged with those responsibilities weren’t doing their jobs. If they had been doing so, Xi wouldn’t have needed to give the speech—and with 4 members of the Standing Committee in attendance, there’s clearly high-level support for his stand on those shortcomings.

Xi’s target isn’t intellectuals or instructors per se; it’s university cadres whose inattention creates problems (corruption for one—witness anti-graft czar Wang Qishan’s presence and recent visits) and whose adherence to Beijing’s edicts is therefore suspect. Xi’s speech is another in a series of his wake-up calls designed to scold and school officials (in this case, Party administrators at Chinese colleges) to start taking their portfolios seriously—or suffer the consequences.

There’s ample reason for Xi’s concern with cadre performance, because many officials have grown accustomed to more autonomy in their political affairs than Xi and his supporters are comfortable with. Indeed, already some Chinese officials are interpreting Xi’s speech differently, with the Minister of Education arguing that subversion often starts at the campus gate, while conceding that the Cultural Revolution “pretty much wrecked ideological work” [文化大革命”对意识形态工作造成了巨大破坏]—a position at odds with much of Xi’s own take. Vice Premier Liu Yandong [刘延东] spoke the same day as Xi about the importance of “running a socialist university with Chinese characteristics” [办好中国特色社会主义高校], but emphasized universities as “crucial cultivators of talent” [要以人才培养为中心] not apparently as places where ideology should be central. So there's pushback of sorts, as one should expect. Xi can cope with resistance and even opposition; what he clearly loathes is simple disregard for one's responsibilities as a Communist party member in seeing socialism through.

Still, there's nothing in what Xi said during his speech that should make anyone sanguine about his view of the state and the role of Chinese universities. As with many other areas of contemporary life in China, Xi is arguing for more Party control and guidance, not less. This is not Xi going soft, but continuing to work for a hardline solution. But he's looking to crack down on cadres because they're causing the problem, not the classroom.

It’s not clear yet how increasing the Party’s role in Chinese universities will play in the provinces. Recent efforts by Beijing to try to manage national education haven’t ended well for the local cadres tasked with implementing them. Some are already subscribing to a harder line than even Xi seems to be urging.

But what should be apparent is that while Xi conceives of the Communist party as the answer to what ails China, he also thinks it’s the core problem that needs solving. Much of Xi’s tenure thus far has been a course in trying to resolve this conundrum. The final grades for that aren’t yet in.

Nanjing Tries To Tackle Poverty By Being Different--And Not Screwing Up

The front page of Wednesday’s edition of Nanjing Daily [南京日报] announces that the city will move into a new stage of the national “poverty alleviation” [扶贫] programs being pushed by Beijing. In Nanjing’s case, that means building “a long-term mechanism” [长效机制] by which low-income residents left behind by economic development will be provided ongoing assistance. The approach in Nanjing will be nuanced, the article notes, with some areas receiving more infrastructure, construction, and public utility projects, while others will get direct subsidies, disaster relief aid, and training for better employment and entrepreneurial opportunities—an attempt, in other words, to meet local challenges in Nanjing locally.

Unmentioned in the announcement is perhaps an even greater challenge for Nanjing: keeping local government officials from stealing the money being allocated for this program.

That’s at least the clear impression any reader of the Communist party’s flagship newspaper People’s Daily [人民日报] gets from news coverage of this national initiative as it’s been applied elsewhere in China over the past few years.  It’s not been a happy story of socialism in action thus far.

Back in November, China’s Central Discipline and Inspection Commission [中央纪委] listed 9 typical cases where poverty alleviation funds were diverted for personal use, often blatantly—transgressions so egregious that the national evening news mentioned them.

For example, in a village in Hebei province, the party branch’s director siphoned off monies allocated to assist the indigent and disabled, using the name of his wife, daughter, and mother as deserving applicants, all of whom were in fine fettle. Officials in Ruicheng county in Shanxi province used funds allocated for benefits for themselves over a 2 year period, while awarding contracts for building renovation work to friends and receiving kickbacks in the process. A different county in a different province—Linquan county in Anhui--saw similar practices there, though in that instance it was continuing to claim rural assistance payments for already unqualified relatives even after they had died.

More of the same sort of malfeasance was found in Shandong province where, for a period of 5 years, officials in the city of Qingzhou skimmed off subsistence payments to pensioners seeking poverty relief.

And in an especially obnoxious instance, officials in a township in Hunan province not only applied for and were awarded funds for the resettlement of migrants that evidently didn’t exist in the numbers claimed and for disaster relief for a disaster that may not have happened, they also stole the money that Beijing provided for these fictions for themselves.

From forestry projects in Qinghai that saw walnut seedlings perish because funds were pilfered; to villages in Yunnan where officials spent monies allocated to rural cooperatives for medical care on air tickets and travel accommodations for themselves and their relatives; and in the province of ever-growing economic powerhouse Guangdong, where from January to October of this year alone, 344 cases of corruption were unearthed and People’s Daily stated that “those who are already rescued aren’t in need of further rescue” [导致该救助的没救助,不该救助的被救助]---few local leaders granted poverty alleviation support for their residents in recent years were ever in danger of impoverishing themselves or their relatives. Not for the first time in China, central government relief from local hardships provided excellent opportunities to resident cadres for personal enrichment.  

As ever, Nanjing is endeavoring to be different.

According to the article, the city has spent 2 years assembling data on residents to gain a clearer idea of the nature of the problem Nanjing faces. Instead of simply submitting requests to get funds, cadres and bureaucrats here are attempting to know what they need. With more precise statistics in hand, Nanjing officials are also “pulling away from the idea of ‘relief’ as the approach to solve the problem of poverty [and instead] pay more attention to using development as a means of not ending poverty but reducing the existing income gap”. Instead of looking to construct new institutions or reformat existing administrative organizations to incorporate these new tasks—the typical approach in China where nationally-funded initiatives are concerned—Nanjing “will pay more attention to long-term policy innovation”. That strategy is different from the one-off attempt to payoff deserving residents--which often ends up just robbing the poor to enrich the rich.

In one sense, this is Nanjing playing the part of innovator, leading a different sort of reform instead of slipstreaming behind change that’s been authorized by Beijing. That's been the nature of post-Mao reform in China: localities and provinces desperate for solutions and, when to comes to policy initiatives, asking for forgiveness from the central government for acting unilaterally, instead of permission ahead of time.

But it’s also officials here trying to learn from the errors of others, instead of experimenting simply because something might work and everyone's desperate. Nanjing cadres and bureaucrats aren't fools: They need only look around to see what went wrong elsewhere to find that corruption got in the way of performance, and they’re clearly trying not to make the same stupid mistakes. Their approach may not be exciting or necessarily path-breaking, but at least it’s safe because its potentially clean and possibly quite promising because the policy is walking another path. Frankly, in an era of crackdowns and centralisation where the only reform is of the conservative stripe, that's an interesting move in itself.