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Have
China
Scholars All Been Bought?
April 2007
by Carsten A. Holz
Academics who study
China, which includes the author, habitually please the Chinese Communist Party,
sometimes consciously, and often unconsciously. Our incentives are to conform,
and we do so in numerous ways: through the research questions we ask or don’t
ask, through the facts we report or ignore, through our use of language, and
through what and how we teach.
FRED HARPER
Foreign academics must cooperate with academics in
China to collect data and co-author research. Surveys are conducted in a manner
that is acceptable to the Party, and their content is limited to politically
acceptable questions. For academics in China, such choices come naturally. The
Western side plays along.
China
researchers are equally constrained in their solo research. Some
Western China
scholars have relatives in
China.
Others own apartments there. Those
China
scholars whose mother tongue is not Chinese have studied the language for years
and have built their careers on this large and nontransferable investment. We
benefit from our connections in
China
to obtain information and insights, and we protect these connections. Everybody
is happy, Western readers for the up-to-date view from academia, we ourselves
for prospering in our jobs, and the Party for getting us to do its advertising.
China
is fairly unique in that the incentives for academics all go one way: One does
not upset the Party.
What happens when we don’t play along is all too obvious. We can’t attract
Chinese collaborators. When we poke around in
China
to do research we run into trouble. Li Shaomin, associate professor in the
marketing department of
City
University
in
Hong Kong
and a
U.S.
citizen, spent five months in a Chinese jail on charges of “endangering state
security.” In his own words, his crimes were his critical views of
China’s
political system, his visits to
Taiwan,
his use of Taiwanese funds to conduct research on politically sensitive issues,
and his collecting research data in
China.
City
University
offered no support, and once he was released he went to teach at
Old
Dominion
University
in
Virginia.
One may wonder what five months in the hands of Chinese secret police does to
one’s psyche, and what means the Party used to silence Mr. Li. To academics in
Hong Kong,
the signal was not lost.
China researchers across different disciplines may not all be equally affected.
Economists and political scientists are likely to come up against the Party
constraint frequently, and perhaps severely. But even sociologists or
ethnographers can reach the forbidden zone when doing network studies or
examining ethnic minority cultures.
Our self-censorship takes many forms. We ask Western instead of China-relevant
questions. We try to explain the profitability of state-owned enterprises (SOEs)
by basic economic factors, when it may make more sense to explain it by the
quality of enterprise management (hand-picked by the Party’s “Organization
Department”), or by the political constraints an enterprise faces, or by the
political and bureaucratic channels through which an enterprise interacts with
its owners, employees, suppliers and buyers. But how to collect systematic
information about the influence of the Party on the operation of a state-owned
or state-controlled enterprise, when these are typically matters that nobody in
the enterprise will speak about?
We talk about economic institutions and their development over time as if they
were institutions in the West. “Price administration” regulations, central and
local, abound, giving officials far-reaching powers to interfere in the
price-setting process. Yet we accept official statistics that show 90% of all
prices, by trading value, to be market-determined. We do not question the
meaning of the Chinese word shichang, translated as “market,” but presume
it to be the same as in the West.
Similarly, we take at face value
China’s
Company Law, which makes no mention of the Party, even though the Party is
likely to still call the shots in the companies organized under the Company Law.
Only if one digs deeper will one find unambiguous evidence: The Shaanxi
Provincial Party Committee and the Shaanxi government in a joint circular of
2006 explicitly require the Party cell in state-owned enterprises (including
“companies”) to participate in all major enterprise decisions; the circular also
requests that in all provincial state-owned enterprises the chairman of the
board of directors and the Party secretary, in principle, are one and the same
person. At the national level, the leadership of the 50 largest central
state-owned enterprises—enterprises that invest around the world—is directly
appointed by the Politburo. Economists do not ask what it means if the Party
center increasingly runs enterprises in the
U.S.
and
Europe.
The governor and Party secretary of China’s central bank, Zhou Xiaochuan, writes
extensively in Chinese about “comprehensively accelerating central bank work”
based on the “three represents” (the Party represents the “advanced productive
forces, the advanced Chinese culture and the basic interests of the Chinese
people”). He describes the three represents as “guiding macroeconomic policy” in
ways that defy any Western concept of logic. And yet we take this person as
seriously as if we were dealing with the governor of a Western central bank, as
if
China’s
central bank were truly setting monetary policy, and as if the channels through
which monetary policy operates in
China
and the impact monetary policy has on the economy are the same as in the West.
Are we naïve? Or are we justified in ignoring the central bank governor’s
second—or rather, first—life as Party secretary? Are we subconsciously shutting
out something that we do not comprehend, or something we do not want to see
because it doesn’t fit into our neat, Western economic concepts?
Article after article pores over the potential economic reasons for the increase
in income inequality in
China.
We ignore the fact that of the 3,220 Chinese citizens with a personal wealth of
100 million yuan ($13 million) or more, 2, 932 are children of high-level
cadres. Of the key positions in the five industrial sectors—finance, foreign
trade, land development, large-scale engineering and securities—85% to 90% are
held by children of high-level cadres.
With the introduction of each new element of reform and transition, cadres
enrich themselves: the dual track price system, the nonperforming loans, the
asset-stripping of SOEs, the misuse of funds in investment companies and in
private pension accounts. The overwhelmingly irregular transformation of rural
into urban land may well qualify as “systematic looting” by local “leaders.”
Local cadres are heavily invested in the small, unsafe coal mines they are
supposed to close, and nobody knows how they obtained their stakes in these
operations.
A general dearth of economic information shapes our research. Statistics on
specific current issues are collected by the National Bureau of Statistics on
special request of the Party Central Committee and the State Council. None of
this information is likely to be available to the public. The quality of the
statistics that are published comes with a large question mark. Outside the
realm of official statistics, government departments at all levels collect and
control internal information. What is published tends to be propaganda—pieces of
information released with an ulterior objective in mind. One solution for
China
economists then is to resign themselves to conducting sterilized surveys and to
building abstract models on the basis of convenient assumptions—of perfect
competition, profit maximization given a production technology, household
utility maximization with respect to consumption and subject to financial
constraints, etc. How much this can tell us about
China
is unclear.
Other
China economists openly accept favors from the Party. We can use our connections
to link up with government cadres. We may be hosted in field research by local
governments and local Party committees. A local Party committee, at one point,
helped me out by providing a car, a Party cadre and a local government official.
They directed me to enterprise managers who, presumably, gave all the right
answers. The hosts were invariably highly supportive, but I ended up working in
exactly the box in which they were thinking and operating. (This seems to be the
only research project that I never completed.) Furthermore, those who go to the
field and interview cadres may not only unwillingly become a tool of the Party,
but also a tool in departmental infighting.
Our use of language to conform to the image the Party wishes to project is
pervasive. Would the description “a secret society characterized by an attitude
of popular hostility to law and government” not properly describe the secrecy of
the Party’s operations, its supremacy above the law and its total control of
government? In Webster’s New World College Dictionary, this is the definition of
“mafia.”
We speak of the Chinese “government” without further qualification when more
than 95% of the “leadership cadres” are Party members, key decisions are reached
by leadership cadres in their function as members of Party work committees, the
staff of the government Personnel Ministry is virtually identical to the staff
of the Party Organization Department, the staff of the Supervision Ministry is
virtually identical to the staff of the Party Disciplinary Commission, and the
staff of the PRC Central Military Commission is usually 100% identical to the
staff of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission. Does
China’s
government actually govern
China,
or is it merely an organ that implements Party decisions? By using the word
“government,” is it correct to grant the Chinese “government” this association
with other, in particular Western, governments, or would it not be more accurate
to call it the “government with Chinese characteristics” or the “mafia’s front
man”? Who questions the legitimacy of the Party leadership to rule
China,
and to rule it the way it does?
The Party’s—or, the mafia’s—terminology pervades our writing and teaching. We do
not ask if the Chinese Communist Party is communist, the People’s Congresses are
congresses of the people, the People’s Liberation Army is liberating or
suppressing the people, or if the judges are not all appointed by the Party and
answer to the Party. We say “Tiananmen incident,” in conformance with Party
terminology, but called it “Tiananmen massacre” right after the 1989 Tiananmen
massacre, when “incident” would have made us look too submissive to the Party.
Which Western textbook on China’s political system elaborates on the Party’s
selection and de facto appointment of government officials and parliamentary
delegates, and, furthermore, points out these procedures as different from how
we view political parties, government and parliament in the West? By following
the Party’s lead in giving the names of Western institutions to fake Chinese
imitations, we sanctify the Party’s pretenses. We are not even willing to call
China
what its own constitution calls it: a dictatorship (a “people’s democratic
dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and
peasants, which is in essence the dictatorship of the proletariat”).
Who lays out the systematic sale of leadership positions across Chinese
governments and Party committees? The
Heilongjiang
scandal provides the going price list from the province down to the county
level, a list not to be found in any textbook. The publicly known scope of the
sale of positions does not leave much room for interpretation. For these
salesmen and saleswomen of government positions to have nothing to fear, the
rule of the mafia and its code of silence must be powerful beyond imagination.
What is not normal is accepted as normal for
China.
Hackers were collecting the incoming emails of a faculty member of the
University
of
Hong Kong
from the university’s server until they were found out in June 2005, when they
accidentally deleted emails. The hackers came from three mainland Internet
provider addresses, and all three IP addresses are state telecommunications
firms. Within
China,
the staff of the foreign students’ dormitories includes public security
officials who keep tabs on foreign students and compile each student’s file. In
a
Shanghai
institution of tertiary education, typing “Jiang Zemin” into a search engine
from a computer located on campus, three times in a row, leads to the automatic
shutdown of access to that search engine for the whole campus. The Party is
rumored to employ tens of thousands of Internet “police.” Phone calls are
listened to, if not systematically recorded. Emails are filtered and sometimes
not delivered. Who will not learn to instinctively avoid what the Party does not
want them to think or do?
Party propaganda has found its way deeply into our thinking. The importance of
“social stability” and nowadays a “harmonious society” are accepted
unconditionally as important for
China. But is a country with more than 200 incidents of social unrest every day
really socially stable, and its society harmonious? Or does “socially stable”
mean no more than acceptance of the rule of the mafia?
“Local government bad, central government good” is another propaganda truism
that is accepted unquestioningly in the foreign research community, informing
and shaping research questions. Yet, viewing the Party as a mafia, there is no
room for such niceties, and reporting outside academia indeed suggests that the
center hides a rather hideous second face, and inevitably does so for a purpose.
We see the “ends”—successful reform—and don’t question the “means.” The Party’s
growth mantra is faithfully accepted as the overarching objective for the
country and the one measure of successful reform. Nobody lingers on the
political mechanisms through which growth is achieved. The mafia runs
China
rather efficiently, so why worry about how it is done, and what the “side
effects” are? We obviously know of the labor camps into which people disappear
without judiciary review, of torture inflicted by the personnel of state
“security” organs, and of the treatment of Falun Gong, but choose to move on
with our sterilized research and teaching. We ignore that
China’s
political system is responsible for 30 million dead from starvation in the Great
Leap Forward, and 750,000 to 1.5 million murders during the Cultural Revolution.
What can make Western academics stop and think twice about who they have bedded
down with?
If academics don’t, who will? The World Bank and other international
organizations won’t because they profit from dealing with
China.
Their banking relationship depends on amicable cooperation with the Party, and a
de facto requirement of their research collaboration is that the final report
and the public statements are acceptable to Party censors. The research
departments of Western investment banks won’t because the banks’ other arms
likely depend on business with
China.
Does this all matter? Does it matter if
China
researchers ignore the political context in which they operate and the political
constraints that shape their work? Does it matter if we present China to the
West the way the Party leadership must like us to present China, providing
narrow answers to our self-censored research questions and offering a sanitized
picture of China’s political system?
The size of China’s economy will exceed that of the U.S., in purchasing power
terms, by 2008 or 2009. China is a country with which Western economies are
increasingly intertwined: A quarter of Chinese industry is foreign-owned and we
depend on Chinese industry for cheap consumer goods. Ultimately, our pensions,
invested in multinationals that increasingly produce in China, depend on the
continued economic rise of China. But does the West understand that country and
its rulers? At what point, and through what channels, will the Party leadership
with its different views of human rights and the citizens’ rights affect our
choices of political organization and political freedoms in the West (as it has
affected academic research and teaching)? And to what extent are China
researchers guilty of putting their own rice bowl before honest thinking and
teaching?
Mr. Holz is an economist and professor in the
social science division of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
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