China's Peaceful Rise in a Global Context: A Domestic Aspect of China's Road Map to Democratization

China’s Peaceful Rise in a Global Context China’s Peaceful Rise in a Global Context A Domestic Aspect of China’s Road...

Author: Jinghao Zhou

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China’s Peaceful Rise in a Global Context

China’s Peaceful Rise in a Global Context A Domestic Aspect of China’s Road Map to Democratization

Jinghao Zhou

Lexington Books A division of ROW M A N & L I T T L E F I E L D P U B L I S H E R S , I N C .

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zhou, Jinghao, 1955China’s peaceful rise in a global context : a domestic aspect of China’s road map to democratization / Jinghao Zhou. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-3337-8 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-3339-2 (electronic) 1. Democracy--China. 2. Political culture--China. 3. China--Social policy. 4. China--Politics and government--2002- I. Title. JQ1516.Z4498 2010 320.951--dc22 2009052703

 ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

This book is solely dedicated to my beloved wife

SAI GONG (1956-2007)

My mind, spirit, and soul will be with you for all eternity on earth and in heaven. . .

Contents

Dedication

v

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xiii

â•‡ 1â•‡â•‡ China’s Peaceful Rise in a Global Context

1

â•‡ 2â•‡â•‡ China’s Potential Threat to the Global Order

23

â•‡ 3â•‡â•‡ Corruption and Social Instability

41

â•‡ 4â•‡â•‡ Prostitution and Corruption

71

â•‡ 5â•‡â•‡ Freedom of Media: The Fourth Power of Modern Democracy

101

â•‡ 6â•‡â•‡ Citizen Participation: The Consciousness of Democratization

133

â•‡ 7â•‡â•‡ Religious Support: An Inseparable Part of Modern Democracy

165

Conclusion

191

Bibliography

195

Index

213

About the Author

221

vii

Preface

I used to believe in Marxism. After the Great Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, I revisited Marxism and its practice in China and concluded that communism is not only a utopia, but also a tyranny. Thus, I began to challenge Marxism and advocate China’s democratization. My basic assumption is that the modern democratic system is the best political system in the world, and the Communist Party of China (CPC) is the major obstacle to the process of China’s democratization. The triumph of democracy in China means that the CPC surrenders its power, so it is impossible to democratize China within the current framework of the Chinese political system. Thus, China will not reach the goal of democratization until the party system is abolished. My books Remaking China’s Public Philosophy for the Twenty-first Century (2003) and Remaking China’s Public Philosophy and Chinese Women’s Liberation: The Volatile Mixing of Confucianism, Marxism, and Feminism (2006), along with other articles, attempts to contend my arguments. However, in the past few years, I have observed democracy in the United States, kept watching the changes of the CPC and China, and digested different theories of modern democracy in general and China’s democratization in particular. All these invited me to reevaluate my assumptions. As a result, I have been convinced that it is necessary for me to amend my old assumptions in order to fit in the reality of Chinese society. There are sufficient evidences that suggest that China’s democratization must be rooted in China’s soil instead of importing foreign democracy to China. I have believed that it is not the best solution to dissolve the CPC during the transition from the authoritarian regime to a democratic one because the CPC is still in power and China needs to use the CPC to support its modernizaix

x

Preface

tion and liberalization during the transition. Any attempt to dissolve the one-party system in present-day China will have poor prospects. The change of my viewpoint does not mean that I have lost faith in modern democracy. However, the alteration of my political viewpoints does reflect my new exploration of democratic theory and practice in the West and in China, reflects my observations of China’s emergence in the international society, and reflects the change of the CPC in the recent years. Although the CPC has not fundamentally changed its nature, the public behavior of the CPC has dramatically departed from its classic theory—Marxism. In the post-Mao era, the CPC has been making efforts in leading its country toward prosperity and becoming an insider of the international society. China is rising and becoming a world superpower, but China’s power is fragile. Although there are massive amounts of literature discussing China’s rise and the relationship between China’s rise and the existing global order, there is no agreement on what is China’s central problem and why China is a potential threat to the West. The following chapters endeavor to challenge both the theories of “China’s threat” and “peaceful rise” and open a new perspective for readers to evaluate China’s rise in a global context by asserting that the current communist political system is China’s central problem among all other domestic problems. The communist political system creates China’s rampant government corruption which seriously contributes to social instability and will possibly cause China’s social crash. Unlike the conventional viewpoints, I contend that China’s potential threat to the existing global order is not derived from her rapid economic growth and military expansion, but from China’s potential domestic chaos. A strong democratic China will contribute to the global peace, but the collapse of China will gravely threaten Western societies. In order to guarantee China’s peaceful rise in a global context, it is necessary and urgent to accelerate China’s democratization and maintain China’s social stability at the same time. Although there is much literature available in China addressing the issue of the road toward China’s democratization, there are five models of Chinese democracy that are the most popular. The first model is the primacy of rule of law. The second model is the primacy of the inner-party democracy. The third model is the balance between the inner-party democracy and the civil society. The fourth model is the natural evolution of Chinese democracy. The fifth model is the primacy of protecting individual rights. Each of these five models has its own emphasis that shows its advantages and disadvantages. No matter what approach we take to promote China’s democratization, to be sure, within the current framework of the Chinese political system, realistically, it is the best to take a gradual approach to promote China’s democratization instead of dissolving the one-party system overnight. China must take two-step to complete the transition from the authoritarian

Preface

xi

regime to democratic one. By taking the two-step theory, the first step for promoting China’s democratization is to exercise freedom of media, increase the consciousness of citizen participation, and practice religious rights. President Barack Obama said in the town hall meeting with Chinese college students in November 15, 2009, that freedom of expression, worship, and political participation are universal rights. They should be available to all people, whether they are in the United States, China, or any nation. My two-step theory is coincidentally compatible with Obama’s idea. I expect that, through all necessary democratic exercises at the first stage, China will be able to gradually arrive in a full democratic society. By that time, hopefully, as one of several political parties, the CPC will join in the political competition in the national election. It is also my hope that my perspective will benefit both China and the West, by helping the United States to view more objectively China’s rise in order to make the right foreign policy toward China and also help China to develop a real harmonious society in order to make a smooth transition from the authoritarian regime to the democratic one. Although my perspective of the road toward China’s democratization—two-step theory—is a gradual reform approach, it is still very difficult for the Chinese people to fulfill it within the current political system. It must be noted that it is not a task for any single top leader of the CPC to be able to accomplish, because any top leader of the CPC will have grown up in the communist system, will inherit the system, and will be conditioned by the system. Even if it is necessary to have a Chinese Mikhail Gorbachev to launch a fundamental political reform, the result of the reform at this stage is not necessarily good for the most populated country in the world. Jinghao Zhou In my unforgettable home 211 Pulteney Street, #28 Geneva, NY 14456, U.S.A.

Acknowledgments

It is my beloved wife Sai Gong whose eternal love, spirit, and soul, generated my determination to conduct this project in my most difficult time. I owe an unrepayable debt to my wife for the rest of my life. Without her true love, selfless devotion, sacred self-sacrifice, it would be impossible for me to complete my previous books and other academic works as they are engraved with my wife’s wishes and visions. Because like all other human beings, I was born from dust and will leave the earth with nothing, writing a book with my love and remaining energy is the only way for me to commemorate our common journey, express my deepest love for my wife, repay a bit of my wife’s incomparable grace, extend her heavenly wishes, and reaffirm my unshakable commitment to my wife. This book is solely dedicated to my beloved wife Sai Gong. I am grateful to Hobart and William Smith Colleges for their generous and consistent support which has enabled me to complete this project. I want to express my appreciation to Derek H. Davis for reading my book proposal and his inspiring comments. My gratitude is due to Sylvia A. Macey for reading my manuscript and making corrections. My thanks are extended to Taylor A. Barnette, a student of mine at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, for reading the first draft of my manuscript, making corrections, and offering fresh critiques. I have also significantly benefited from outside reviewers’ comments and suggestions that help me to rethink my perspectives and reconstruct the chapters. Finally, I would like to thank The Journal of Comparative Asian Development, China: An International Journal, American Journal of Chinese Studies, and Asian Perspective for their kind permission which allowed me to revise four published articles and include them in this book. “Anticorruption and xiii

xiv

Acknowledgments

Building a Harmonious Society” was published in The Journal of Comparative Asian Development 5, no. 1 (Fall 2006):1–25; “Chinese Prostitution, Its Consequence, and the Solution in the Post Mao Era” was published in China: An International Journal 4, no. 2 (Sept. 2006): 238–62; “The Role of Chinese Christianity in the Process of China’s Democratization” was published in American Journal of Chinese Studies 13 (April 2006): 117–36; and “Does China’s Rise Threaten the United States?” was published in Asian Perspective 32, no. 3 (2008): 171–182.

1 China’s Peaceful Rise in a Global Context

Since the Chinese government launched the reform movement, China’s economy has been taking off with extraordinary speed for three decades. As early as 1993 David Shambaugh predicted that in the early twenty-first century China will surpass the European Union and the United States, becoming the world’s leading trader, the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves, the world’s largest consumer, the world’s largest military establishment, and a major source of high technology and scientific advancement.1 In 2007, China overtook Germany to become the third largest economy and the second largest trading nation in the world.2 In the beginning of 2008, Fareed Zakaria in the cover story of Newsweek, “The Rise of a Fierce Yet Fragile Superpower,” confirmed that the advent of China as a global power was no longer a forecast but a reality.3 The Beijing 2008 Olympics Games clearly indicated that it was China’s moment and a blaze of glorious China was back to the world stage.4 In 2010, Shanghai will host the World Expo and, now, Shanghai is spending $45 billion, even more than was spent on the Beijing Olympics, to upgrade Shanghai’s infrastructure and build new transportation links. The Shanghai government has promised it will be the most extravagant Expo ever.5 According to a 2008 poll, more than 40 percent of participants already viewed China as a major economic power rather than only a rising power.6 It is widely believed that “China will replace the United States as the largest economy by 2025–2040.”7 While the European Union, the United States, and Japan’s economy remain sluggish during the global economic recession, China’s economy is expected to achieve a growth of about 10 percent in 2010, so China will make a significant contribution to the global economy in the recovery process of the world economic crisis. China’s emergence as a great power has become inevitable.8 1

2

Chapter 1

China’s rise is not a self-secluded path, but has a profound impact on the international community. While China rapidly expands its economic power, the role of the U.S. economy has been gradually declining. The news about China’s rise is filling domestic and foreign media.9 One can find news about China everywhere, with descriptions such as “the Chinese century,” “the Chinese miracle,” “China’s rise,” “China’s collapse,” and “China’s threat.” In 2005, Lev Navrozov in Newsweek raised a serious question, “does the future belong to China?” In the beginning of 2007, Michael Elliott, in his article The Chinese Century, continued to explore these worries by asking: Is this century the Chinese century? Can China’s rise be managed peacefully by the international system? Will China threaten the interests of established powers?10 It is time for the United States to make the necessary and appropriate adjustments to China. According to former Deputy Secretary of State, Robert B. Zoellick, how we deal with China’s rising power is a central question in the process of American foreign policy making.11 U.S. foreign policy toward China is based on the analysis of China’s rise. There are two opposing theories as to how to view China’s rise: First, in the United States there are a number of speculations, but the prevalent public perspective towards China’s rise is pessimistic seeing China’s rise as a threat to the United States and only a very small percentage of American people considered China as an ally. Conventional wisdom holds that a strong China will more likely threaten the United States than a weak China. A survey conducted in 2007 indicates that 70 percent of participants viewed China’s rise as a military power as a serious potential threat” when it becomes a global economic powerhouse. Second, in order to respond to the theory of China’s threat, the Chinese political elites and the government insist that China will rise peacefully in a global context, because China needs a peaceful international environment to develop, so she will not seek hegemony in the world. In addition, China’s development will rely more on its own resources and market.12 If necessary, China is able to gain natural resources through mutual and equal international trading. The judgments for both theories of China’s threat and peaceful rise are largely based on the examination of the relations of China with the international societies, particularly the United States. Americans assume that the United States is strategically dominant in East Asia and the Eastern Pacific (China’s backyard) and it should retain its dominance there. However, China’s rise has actually weakened the U.S. position. They have not given enough attention to the issue of how China’s domestic aspect affects China’s rise in a global context. On the one hand, China’s foreign policy is the extension of China’s domestic policy. Since it is an obvious fact that China’s economic and military power still lags behind the United States, the theory of China being a threat is not convincing if it does not take China’s domestic problems into consideration. On the other hand, China’s rise is both a


3

political and an economic process. Whether China will rise peacefully is determined by many facts. In addition to the degree of China’s economic and military power, China’s actual international behavior is the direct factor that affects China’s relations to the international society. However, China’s international behavior is essentially determined by the nature of the Chinese political system. While developing the “peaceful rise theory,” the Chinese government has not seriously addressed the issue of its political reform. This is the main reason that explains why the theory of China’s peaceful rise could not attract the international audience and many Americans are still skeptical about China’s rise. On the U.S. side, American scholars and policy makers are mainly concerned about the rapid development of the Chinese economy and her military force,13 and have paid little attention to the central problem to China’s peaceful rise, i.e., the current Chinese communist political system. Instead, they have highlighted specific economic issues, such as international trade deficit, currency exchange rates, intellectual property rights, and the quality of Chinese products. Apparently, the current literature has given little attention to the issue of the relationship between China’s domestic problems and China’s peaceful rise. Some American politicians are even ignoring China’s democratization and believe that China will democratize on its own and does not need any hard push from the outside to get it moving in that direction. Some commentators even suggest that we have to accept the current Chinese political system in order to cooperate with the Chinese government.14 This book asserts that both the theories of “China threat” and “peaceful rise” failed to address China’s central domestic problem. Thus, both theories are not convincing. I will attempt to develop the third view of China’s rise from the angle of a domestic perspective and contend that China’s potential threat to the existing global order is not derived from her rapid economic growth and military expansion, but from China’s potential domestic chaos. A strong democratic China will contribute to the global peace, but the collapse of China will gravely threaten Western societies. The Chinese communist political system directly contributes to social instability and will possibly cause China’s social crash. China’s democratization is the key to ensure China’s peaceful rise in a global context. If the CPC does not fundamentally reform its political system, China’s future will be decay that will possibly pose a threat to the United States.15 However, the CPC is still in power; any attempt to dissolve the one-party system in present-day China will have poor prospects. China must take two steps—a gradual reform approach—to complete the transition from the authoritarian regime to a democratic one. By taking the two step theory, the first step for promoting China’s democratization is to exercise freedom of media, increase the consciousness of citizen participation, and practice religious rights. Through all these democratic

4

Chapter 1

exercises, China will gradually be able to arrive in a full democratic society. This two-step theory is good for the United States to make right foreign policy toward China and for China to develop a real democratic harmonious society. This chapter will examine China’s economic development in a global context and argue that China’s rise is inevitable and has unavoidably intensified competition between China and Western societies including the United States, but it does not necessarily threaten the United States.

Has China Become a World Superpower? To see if China has become a world superpower, it is necessary to examine many aspects of China, including but not limited to China’s national economy, conventional military force, nuclear weapon capability, strategic and geographic location, the influence of foreign policy, the nature of political system, and the role of Chinese culture. The national economy is the basic criterion among all these aspects. China was an economic dragon, but gradually became a weak country starting in the seventeenth century. The nationalist government between 1912 and 1949 spent most of the time launching three civil wars, trying to eliminate the CPC instead of promoting economic development. Jiang Jieshi left a terrible mess when the nationalist government departed the mainland for Taiwan. Under the Mao regime, Mao never stopped campaigning class struggles and invested very little effort to improving the Chinese economy. As a result, before the reform movement, China was on the verge of economic bankruptcy and greatly lacked material goods. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping launched the second communist revolution—the reform movement, thereby transforming China from a poor country to an industrialized one and bringing China back into the spotlight of the world’s stage. Since then the growth of China’s economy has been astonishing. The growth rates of Chinese economy have been about 10 percent on average per year for more than twenty-five years.16 China’s economy today is ten times larger than it was in 1978 and three times that of India, making up about 13 percent of the world economy in terms of gross domestic product (GDP).17 China is the fastest growing economy in the world and has become the world’s third largest economy, becoming the second largest economy soon. It is predicted that the Chinese economy will continue to grow at 8 percent or above annually for the next five to ten years. During the recent economic recession, the world economic crisis has not affected the Chinese economy much. China was able to keep its economy growing18 and retained 7.9 percent growth rate in the second quarter of 2009 while the global economy grew by 1.6 percent in the second quarter.19 Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the central bank pointed out that the Chinese


5

economy was stabilizing and recovering in the face of the global economic crisis. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) in July 2009 declared that the Chinese economy has begun recovering. French newspapers claimed that China’s economy is as if a light in the dark. The German Nulunbao Daily claims that the hope of world economy is in China. No country in world history has sustained such high economic growth rates for three decades. China is now a major global player.20 What China says and does has an effect on international finance and international economy. China is a giant of world incorporation. China is the largest maker of toys, clothing, and electronic products, and is now making additional efforts to develop in automobiles, computers, biotechnology, aerospace, and telecommunications.21 Some Chinese products dominate the U.S. market—about 90 percent of toys, 30 percent of furniture, and about 90 percent of Walmart products are produced in China. It is predicted that about half the clothing in the world market will come from China in the next five years. Today, China assembles about 80 percent of the world’s notebook and desktop computers and has become the world’s largest notebook maker.22 China has become the second largest vehicle market after the United States. In 2006, the U.S. overall vehicle sales, including tracks and buses, totaled 16.5 million units, China sold 7.2 million units, and Japan declined to 5.7 million units.23 Meanwhile, The United States is losing its current position as the leading manufacturing country. There were 17 million employees in its manufacturing industry in 1997, but that has dropped to 14 million employees in 2007. In December 2004, IBM sold its personal computer business for a 1.75 billion dollar deal to the Chinese Lenovo Group. China has become the sixth-biggest foreign investor in the world and “overtook the United States as Africa’s top trading partner last year.”24 This signifies that China is making great efforts to integrate itself into the world economy, and will possibly purchase more U.S. companies in the near future. China was the second largest global trader with her total foreign trade totaling 1.97 trillion U.S. dollars during the first eleven months of 2007, up 23.6 percent from 2006. According to the World Trade Organization, for the first time, China has become the world’s biggest exporter in the first half of 2009. From January through June 2009, China’s total export volume amounted to $521.7 billion, slightly exceeding Germany’s exports, which totaled $521.6 billion.25 China is also the largest surplus country. The U.S. goods trade deficit with China was 201.5 billion dollars in 2005, 232.5 billion dollars in 2006,26 240 billion dollars in 2007, and reached 268 billion dollars in 2008, the highest annual imbalance between the two countries.27 China’s foreign reserves hit 1.9537 trillion U.S. dollars at the end of March of 2009, becoming the largest in the world.28 China is second only

6

Chapter 1

to the United States as the recipient of foreign direct investment with $650 billion foreign direct investment, which reflects China’s economy has been integrated into the world economy.29 Foreign investment based companies produce roughly 33 percent of China’s output.30 China is moving rapidly to dominate the global market, not just for labor-intensive manufactured goods, but also for more advanced products, including mobile telephones, laptop computers, and digital cameras. The United States is a major market for such goods. In 2004, China exported to the United States about 11 million notebook computers, 15 million display units, 378 million mobile phones, 43 million DVD players, and 33 million CD players. The majority of the Chinese people are becoming wealthier. The National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS) estimated that about 13 percent of the country’s urban households, or 24.5 million households with a total of 75 million people joined the middle class in 2007. Chinese families with assets valued from 150,000 ($18,137) to 300,000 yuan ($36,275) are classified as middle class. The number of middle class is expected to increase to 25 percent by 2010 and 40 percent by 2020. It is worth noting that China’s middle class will unlikely support China’s political reform but become the main supporters of the CPC because they have greatly benefited from the current political system. Thus, they want to see this system last longer. However, the growth of the Chinese middle class contributes to the consumer market. Chinese consumers’ confidence has noticeably increased as evidenced by the fact that the consumer confidence index in China stood at 106.9 in 2006, while it was 82 in the United States.31 According to a Gallup survey conducted in June 2009, “55 percent of respondents in the second quarter of 2009 agreed or strongly agreed that the Chinese economy would be getting better in twelve months, roughly the same percentage who said so in the third quarter 2008.”32 Chinese consumers scoop up 12 percent of the world’s luxury goods compared to 17 percent by U.S. consumers. Walmart has opened more than eighty stores in China, targeting China’s upper middle class. With the economy booming, China has attracted tourists from around the world and has become the fourth largest tourist destination, with about 16 million foreigners among a total of 120 million tourists. China’s total tourism revenue exceeded 1 trillion yuan in 2007 for the first time and reached 1.16 trillion yuan in 2008, an increase of 5.8 percent over 2007.33 China has built 34,000 kilometers of highways, which will be doubled by 2020. China also has planned to spend 140 billion yuan to build forty-eight airports between by 2010, and the number of airports will rise from 142 to 190. Accordingly, China will buy 100 airplanes and recruit 1,000 new pilots each year until 2010.34 A strong nation is usually supported by a strong military force and advanced education and technology. China has a huge conventional army in both size and cost. China’s military budget has risen by double digits since


7

1989. In 2007, the Fifth Session of the Tenth National People’s Congress announced that the country’s military budget for 2007 was 350.92 billion yuan, roughly $44.94 billion U.S. dollars, almost an 18 percent increase over 2006. According to Jiang Enzhu, spokesman of the National People’s Congress, China’s defense budget for 2008 continued to grow 17.6 percent in 2008 and reach 417.769 billion yuan, a rise of 62.379 billion yuan from the actual military spending in 2007.35 China’s total education expenditures increased from 2.1 percent of GDP in 1999 to 3 percent of GDP in 2006. China’s education budget in 2008 was 56.2 billion yuan (about US$8.11 billion), this figure is a 45 percent increase over the year of 2007. China devotes more and more energy and resources to developing its space program. China aims to enable its astronauts to engage in extra-vehicular operations, conduct experiments on spacecraft rendezvous, and make breakthroughs in developing basic technologies for sending astronauts to the moon.36 The Chinese government has planed to establish a space station by 2020 and eventually put a man on the moon. 37 In January 2007, China used a ground-based missile to destroy one of its aging satellites orbiting more than 500 miles in space. This is a strong signal to the international society that no one country owns space and China has the capability to compete with other countries during wartime. Military specialist Paul Godwin points out that China is currently finding ways to get around the disparity of military might between China and the United States by exploiting perceived U.S. military vulnerabilities.38 This will seriously challenge the military hegemony of the United States in the Pacific and potentially alter the balance of military power in the world. A great China is emerging and it is playing a more important role in the global economy. Hong Kong and Macao have returned to mainland China, and there is little doubt that Taiwan will eventually follow it regardless of international pressures. China gains voting powers in various international organizations and also buys powers from other countries. In short, “China has entered the most robust stage of its industrial revolution.”39 In the past two decades “China has experienced the same degree of industrialization, urbanization and social transformation as Europe did in two centuries.”40 Benjamin Schwarz envisages that China will eventually emerge as an economic and military power to challenge America’s preponderant position.41 If Chinese economy continues to grow at such astronomical levels, China will be in the position to supersede the United States in the next few decades. Some claim that China is only one step away from United States-China G-2 era and suggest to form a Group of Two (G-2) consisting of the United States and China.42 John Ikenberry claims that the American era is coming to an end and the United States unipolar moment will inevitably pass.43 Kenneth Lieberthal predicts that “the twenty-first century is China’s century.”44

8

Chapter 1

Does China’s Rise Threaten the United States? China’s rise has an immediate impact on every aspect of Western societies, both in opportunities and in challenges for other countries. In the world’s history, “There have been two great shifts of power on the world stage during the past five centuries: the rise of Europe following the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the United States after its Civil War.”45 Now, a new power shift is underway, and its center stage is the reemerging power of China. In the world’s history, power transitions usually come with international conflicts. Rising powers want to gain more authority in the global system, and declining countries are afraid of loss of their dominant position. Many scholars remind us that rising powers are more likely to launch war; Germany and Japan brought the world into the two most devastating world wars. Thus, conflict, even a war, between a rising power and a declining power is likely to happen. Not surprisingly, Westerners worry that historical tragedies will repeat between the United States and China, if the Chinese economy continues to rapidly grow for the next few decades. Many Americans tend to think of China as confrontational.46 They believe that China’s rise is weakening Western societies and fostering fears in the United States and the Asia-Pacific region.47 As early as 1997, Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro in their book The Coming Conflict with China set forth the theory of war between China and the United States. In 2005, Robert D. Kaplan pointed out that whether or not there will be a Sino-American war is no longer a question. The remaining question is how the United States should fight China.48 Since Hu Jintao took over power, he has taken more hawkish attitudes towards the United States and sometimes showed a direct opposition to the United States and Europe.49 Fereed Zakaria points out that “When a new power rises it inevitably disturbs the balance of power.”50 John Mearsheimer warned that “The United States and China are likely to engage in an intense security competition with considerable potential for war.”51 Thus, Susan L. Shirk, former deputy assistant secretary for China in the Bureau of East Asia, suggests that “China needs to reassure the United States that China’s rise is not a threat and will not challenge America’s dominant position.”52 China is rising, but “not all power transitions generate war or overturn the old order.”53 Whether or not China threatens the United States is not determined by China’s economic strength but by the essence of China’s political system. Objectively, China’s current economic power and soft power are unable to challenge the United States. Moreover, the motivation of China’s rise does not aim to alter the current global order but to improve the living standard of the Chinese people. In March 2007, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao pointed out that Washington should not fear China’s growing defense spending, should not fear that Beijing’s overseas invest-


9

ments will destabilize the dollar, and should not even fear the successful missile test in January 2007.54 The first basic argument of the China threat theory has to do with China’s economy. Without a doubt, China has become a great competitor in the economic arena to the United States. In March of 2009 the governor of China’s central bank, Zhou Xiaochuan, posted an essay on the website of the People’s Bank of China, challenging the global hegemony of the U.S. dollar and suggesting to gradually replace it with a super-sovereign currency. China’s challenge is not only real, but serious. However, several factors must be considered when we discuss the development of the Chinese economy. First of all, there are many more statistics that come to the front of arguments questioning the size of the Chinese economy. In 2007, the World Bank shrunk China’s economy by nearly 40 percent. The new data is widely believed more reliable and accurate than previous estimates. It means that China’s economy actually is about 40 percent smaller than we thought.55 Second, the U.S. economy is currently about eight times the size of China’s. Obviously, China will take a long time to surpass the United States. In addition, China has a population of 1.3 billion. When China’s GDP is divided by 1.3 billion, it greatly decreases in value. China’s per capita GDP surpassed $1,000 in 2003 and reached $1,714 in 2005, but China will not become moderately prosperous by 2020.56 In 2007, its per capita GDP was only $2,000—compared to $42,000 in the United States. China’s per capita income is only one-nineteenth that in the United States.57 At present, China does not rank among the 100 richest nations based on per capita. Among the 1.3 billion population, about 900 million Chinese people live in rural areas, 400 million people live on less than $2 a day, and 200 million people live on less than a dollar a day.58 Thus, China is still a developing country and will not become a superpower overnight. It will take at least twenty-five years or longer for China to become a regional power, giving the United States sufficient time to comprehend the implications of China’s rise before China reaches that point. Clearly there is no solid foundation to claim that China’s economic development threatens Western societies. Third, China’s rise is actually within the Western-orientated system. This Western-oriented system is the product of farsighted U.S. leadership and the best social and political system in the world, so it is very solid and difficult to overthrow. Germany, Italy, and Japan merged into the democratic system after the two bloody world wars; the former Soviet Union and East European socialist campus collapsed in the 1990s after the Cold War.59 The Western-oriented system is valuable to China and already benefits Chinese market economy. The most farsighted Chinese leaders understand that globalization has changed the game and realize that “no major state can modernize without integrating into the globalized capitalist system.”60 In fact, the Western oriented-system is already starting to facilitate China’s development. China is

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working with this system instead of overthrowing it.61 Since the reform movement began, the Chinese government has carried out market economy. The Chinese market economy is very competitive. A new poll of twenty countries around the world, conducted by the international polling firm GlobeScan, finds the highest level of support for the free enterprise system was China, with 74 percent respondents agreeing that market economy is the best economic system. Others that were nearly as enthusiastic were the Philippines (73 percent), the United States (71 percent), and India (70 percent). France was the one country where most did not agree with this proposition. Only 36 percent of the French people agreed that the free market economy is the best system, while 50 percent disagreed.62 These data suggest that China’s market economy is rooted in the grassroots of Chinese society. Market economy is the fundamental driving force of society which will ultimately drive the Chinese economy from the socialism based market economy to the capitalist-based market economy. John Ikenberry notes that the road to the East runs through the West but China’s road to world power runs through the West. China can rise up only through this system. If the United States wants to preserve its leadership of the world, Washington has to strengthen the Western-oriented system and bring China into the system. If China continues to follow the existing global order and integrate itself into the Western-oriented system, the United States and other Western societies can live along with China and the leadership of the United States will remain strong, even though the U.S.’s global economic position may be weakening.63 The second argument of the China threat theory has to do with the motivation of China’s rise. Many Americans think that China is seeking at least a regional superpower and seems ready to challenge the goal of U.S. foreign policy64 and China is trying to drive the United States out of Asia by a combination of military, diplomatic, and economic pressure.65 According to a 2004 Pentagon report, China has the world’s second-largest defense budget. China’s military expenditures reached between 50–70 billion U.S. dollars. This very much worries the Pentagon and drives the Pentagon to believe China is a threat to the United States. In addition, American officials have confirmed that China has deployed a long range missile program which can carry twenty-one nuclear missiles that can reach American cities. If one Chinese missile hit the United States, many U.S. cities would be paralyzed. Bill Gertz, in his book The China Threat: How the People’s Republic Targets America, revealed the so-called inside story that Communist China could attack the United States with nuclear weapons if U.S. forces would defend Taiwan in a regional conflict.66 Therefore, China is turning commercial might into real political muscle as it tries to challenge Western governments. There is no guarantee that China’s growing power will translate into peace. Recently, Chinese General Liang Guanglie confirmed China plans to


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build multiple aircraft carriers in order to enhance China’s navy’s power. Michael Ledeen warned that “the world should prepare for some difficult and dangerous confrontations with the People’s Republic.”67 The conventional wisdom that the war on terrorism had united the United States and China against a common enemy is only a rosy scenario, according to Max Boot, which is being undermined almost daily by Beijing’s actions. America will face a less friendly China in the future.68 The United States released its new National Intelligence Strategy document in August of 2009 which suggests that China’s natural resource-focused diplomacy and military modernization make it a global challenge. According to the report China is one of Washington’s main challengers. However, from a different perspective, it is a normal process for a rising country to go through several different stages: preparation for becoming a world power, conflicting with the international society, and being accepted by the international society. It takes about several decades or even longer for the international society to accept a rising country. China now is in the second stage in which there are a variety of conflicts between China and the international society, especially between China and developed countries and its bordering countries no matter how the conflict will come out. In the past decade the characteristic of China’s regional politics was economized. In the next decade China’s regional economy would be politicized, which would contribute to instability in Asian security and even generate an origin of conflict. Chinese military power is relatively small in comparison with the U.S. military power.69 China spends only one-eighth of the United States’ military budget. Although China has nuclear weapons capability, its army does have a large contingent of soldiers, and China is much stronger and faces fewer threats than they did in the past, the Chinese army is still illequipped. China does not have a large navy and its air force does not have any long range bombers. China does not even have one aircraft carrier. Although China will most likely have more submarines than the United States by the end of this decade, they will still lag behind in overall ability.70 In light of all of this, China has a long way to go, if it wants to become the military hegemony in the Pacific and to ultimately overtake the United States in this region. Despite widespread fears about the motivation of China’s rise, the Chinese government remains committed to a peaceful rise.71 Due to the fact that China is a nondemocratic country, it is understandable that China’s rise unavoidably causes other countries to worry, but the Chinese government does not believe that its future depends on overturning the fundamental order of the international system.72 In response to Westerners’ concerns, the Chinese government has quietly modified the term of “peaceful rise” or “peaceful ascension” into “peaceful development.”73 Practically,

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China really needs a peaceful international environment. In order for the CPC to survive into the twenty-first century, the CPC has realized that China must make peace with the international society and develop a harmonious society at home. The Sixth Plenary Session of the Sixteenth Central Committee of the CPC passed the “Resolution of the CPC Central Committee on Major Issues Regarding the Building of a Harmonious Socialist Society” in October 2006, placing “building a harmonious society” top on its work agenda. China has tried to make peace with neighboring countries and cooperate with Western governments on a broad range of issues. Theoretically, the global village is an international family. If every member of the family becomes strong, the international family would become stronger. Every nation has its own national interests, so real conflicts between different nations are inevitable. In addition, there are many common interests between China and the United States.74 On the one hand, China-U.S. relations are critical not only to both countries but also to the entire international society. David M. Lampton notes that “there is no global issue that can be effectively tackled without Sino-American cooperation.”75 On the other hand, it is one of the greatest challenges for the United States to coexist with China in the twentyfirst century.76 To be sure, they share mutual benefits. Economically, Chinese economy heavily relies on Western expertise, Chinese foreign trade largely depends on foreign-invested companies, and about 30 percent of China’s total exports are produced by foreign-funded enterprises. All of this makes China sensitive to the ups and downs of the international economy, and in particular that of American economy. If the U.S. economy has troubles, it hurts China’s economic growth. In turn, China is the largest market of the United States. Sara Bongiorni offers her true family story that she and her family wanted to spend a year without buying anything made in China. Bongiorni discovered it was not only difficult, but also not worthwhile to do so, because she finds that there are vast consumer areas that are nearly all Chinese-dominated. Thus, it is really difficult for Western societies to exclude China in globalization.77 Politically, China and Western societies need to work closely together in order to maintain the global peace. China has successfully worked with Western governments and hosted the six party talks. As a result, North Korea had agreed fully to disable its nuclear programs by the end of 2007.78 After North Korea withdrew from the six party talks, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao visited Pyongyang in October 2009 and convinced Kin Hong II to rejoin talks over its nuclear weapons programs. China took tough actions on Iran’s nuclear program showing the seriousness of China’s commitment to nonproliferation. The United States and China share many common interests of a broad range, including the fields of energy, environment, nuclear proliferation, human rights, anticorruption, social welfare, and the


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role of nongovernmental organizations, AIDS, avian flu epidemics, global warming, UN reform, and the fields of counterterrorism. China and the United States have recently signed an agreement to open a military hot line between their defense departments. This is a good sign indicating the cooperation of the two countries in a broad range. Fourth, a hostile relationship with China would damage both interests of China and the United States, and make it impossible for the two countries to jointly work on global issues. John Ikenberry believes that the United States cannot stop China’s rise.79 As early as sixty years ago, an Australian ambassador warned the United States that it was very dangerous to be hostile to China and suggested it keep China as a friend, because China might easily become a very powerful military nation in fifty years. Tony Blair points out that in the age of globalization nothing will work well without China’s full engagement.80 If the United States tries to keep China weak, it would not only create hostility, but also increase China’s domestic instability which would negatively affect the global peace and development. The most important thing for the United States to do is not to block China from becoming a powerful country, but to learn to live with the rising China. In the meantime, the United States should urge the Chinese government to become a responsible, accountable, and democratic stakeholder.81 If China becomes a responsible and democratic country, the United States can focus on sharing common interests in fighting terrorism and promoting world peace. According to the Chinese government, “China’s relationship with the United States is a top priority.”82 Hu Jintao has promised that China would develop a friendly relationship with the United States. China and the United States must become not only stakeholders, but also partners in constructive cooperation. When Hu Jintao visited the White House lawn in 2006, Bush deliberately used the word “stakeholder” to describe the relationship between the two countries and pointed out that “as stakeholders in the international system, our two nations share many strategic interests.”83 Objectively, since the China-United States relations were normalized in the 1970s, the two countries have gone through several crises, including the Tiananmen Square Incident of 1989, the Taiwan Strait missile crisis in 1995, the incident of bombing the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, and the spy plane incident over Hainan Island in 2001, but the Chinese government has realized that the diplomatic approach is the best way to reduce the risk of international conflict that could lead to domestic disorder. Since the end of the 1990s, the Chinese government has tried to avoid public confrontation with Washington, in order to convince the United States that China is not a threat but a contributor to the global peace. Although in September of 2009 China and the United States had a serious dispute about tires, chickens, and cars after President Obama announced that the United States would levy tariffs of up to 35 percent on

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tires from China, the two governments realized it would hurt the two countries’ interests if they continued to deepen the dispute. Thus, both governments made efforts to repair the damage of the dispute. Chinese President Hu Jintao and U.S. President Obama met in New York on September 22, 2009 and both sides exchanged constructive views on China-United States relations. Hu pointed out that a good relationship between China and the United States would be very important not only to the two countries, but is also to global peace, stability, and prosperity. 84 In return, President Barack Obama declined to meet with the Dalai Lama before his official trip to China in November.85 When President Barack Obama visited China in November of 2009, he repeatedly emphasized the need for bilateral efforts, especially on issues such as climate change and the reduction of greenhouse gases and pointed out that “We know more is to be gained when great powers cooperate rather than collide.”86 The third argument of the China threat theory has to do with soft power. Many Westerners see that China has expanded its soft power in the international society by spreading its culture to the West, providing scholarships for students to go to China to study, financially aiding many countries, uniting Hong Kong and Macao, and playing critical roles inside many international organizations. China joined the WTO in 2001, attended the Group of Seven major industrial nation meetings, hosted the Olympic Games in 2008, and will host the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. The Chinese government clearly understands that China is unable to buy the world even it became a wealthy country. The Chinese government has recently invested 45 billion RMB in mainland media organizations to project China’s image abroad and planned to increase its foreign media activities by launching an international TV station modeled along the lines of CNN and AI Jazeera. Xinhua has a plan to expand its overseas bureaus from about 100 to 186 and create an Asia-based twenty-four-hour television station to broadcast global news to an international audience. In 2009, the CCTV hired 100 new foreign staff and added an Arabic-language channel that reaches 300 million people in twenty-two countries. Xinhua added 117 bureaus around the world reporting in eight different languages.87 The question is whether this help burnish China’s image with a skeptical audience because China’s problem is not a lack of TV channels or media outlets that present China’s case to foreigners, but the lack of any media outlets that present China’s case well. In other words, if the Chinese official media is run in the same manner only for the CPC’s propaganda, it will be doomed to failure. According to Joshua Kurlantzick, China is emphasizing soft-power strategies. By contrast, America’s weakness is its soft power.88 Since the Iraq war began in 2003, the United States has suffered a serious setback in terms of soft power. Driving China forward in its emphasis on employing soft power is not only a desire to advance its particular brand of political philosophy,


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but a deeper desire to rebuild national credibility greatly tarnished over the past 150 years. A hot-selling book Unhappy China published in 2009 argues that China should use its growing power to be more assertive and lead the world. As a matter of fact, China is gaining soft power but China is still learning how to conduct itself on the world stage and will inevitably make its own mistakes.89 Culturally, China does not have cultural industries like Hollywood; politically, China suffers from corruption, inequality, and a lack of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. In order to compare the soft power of the United States with China, Japan, and South Korea in five areas, political, cultural, diplomatic, economic, and human capital, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the South Korea-based East Asia Institute conducted a survey in February of 2009 before the Tibet Incident, has found that in none of the surveyed regions was China seen as more “attractive” than the United States.90 The term soft power has a broad meaning. According to Joseph S. Nye, “soft power is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies.”91 Soft power includes various aspects, but two things are very basic. The first basic aspect of the soft power is education. China’s educational system is far behind the level of developed countries’ systems. The Chinese government spending for education is less than four percent of their gross national product (GNP), while the world average is 5.1 percent of GNP.92 Based on the total educational investment, each Chinese person spends only 32 yuan (about U.S. $5.3) per year for education. Another basic aspect of the soft power is cultural influence around the world. There is no doubt that the CPC is trying to expand Chinese cultural influence around the world by setting up Confucius Institutes that teach Western people about Confucianism and change the value standard of Western people.93 However, the overwhelming evidence suggests that Chinese traditional culture is waning and becoming unpopular on the mainland. In 2008, a book about 2,500-year-old Confucian teaching written by Yu Dan was selected as China’s best-selling non-fiction title, but it does not suggest that the Chinese people have become enthusiastic over Chinese traditional culture. On the contrary, it reflects that the Chinese people demand social order, values, ethics, and justice with the rapid growth corruption, social degradation, and inequality, because Yu Dan connects basic Confucian ideas with contemporary issues and appeals to a Chinese audience.94 Beijing Opera, a national treasure with a history of 200 years, was the most popular form of entertainment and, favored by the people from all ranks of Chinese society. Every city used to have at least one Beijing Opera troupe. However, the Beijing Opera has gone out business in many Chinese cities. Even in Beijing, the capital of China, the Beijing Opera performed only at two small theaters. The average monthly salary of a Beijing Opera

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performer is about 2,000 yuan, less than a taxi driver’s income.95 Interestingly enough, the majority of people in the audience are foreigners and old people. Chinese young people are much more favorable toward American rock and popular music. Although China’s Ministry of Education recently announced a pilot project that requires 200 primary schools to include Beijing Opera as part of their music curriculum, many school teachers and parents responded to this proposal negatively, arguing that Beijing Opera is too difficult to learn in any meaningful way for primary school children.96 It should be noted that contemporary society is in the era of globalization. The world culture is transnational during the globalization. The decline in interest in Chinese traditional culture is an inevitable result of tension between Western culture and the Chinese indigenous culture. Western culture, including material and ideological cultures, is everywhere in China—McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Walmart, Nike, Rebok, Holiday Inn, Ramada Inn, Hilton, and the Grand Hyatt. There are more than 200 five star hotels in China, two-thirds are foreign investments. CNN and many other Western TV stations are broadcasting in China. Western print media (e.g., Financial Times) are allowed to print in China. Japanese Sony Company established the first joint-venture TV station in November 2004. The Chinese people, especially the youth, are increasingly becoming ensconced in Western culture, particularly American culture, including individual rights, material abundance, advanced technology, and popular culture. According to investigation, the most popular key words on the Internet for Chinese netizens are closely associated with Western cultures, such as stock, the United States, American music, the NBA, chat room, game, dog, coffee, hair styles, makeup, and women’s health, to name a few. Many of the Chinese movie theaters only show American films instead of Chinese movies. The Rolling Stones visited Shanghai in April 2006, filling the 8,500-seat Shanghai Grand Stage each day they performed, although the admission tickets were very expensive in terms of Chinese income, ranging from 300 yuan (US$37.28) to 1800 yuan for each ticket.97 When Karen O of the arty New York rock band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs performed in Beijing in October 2007, it attracted 10,000 mud-soaked fans.98 It is understandable that China’s public media sometimes still shows their discomfort with U.S. global predominance and hope the government shows its strong side and stands up to the United States. It is not easy for the Chinese government to balance the national interests and the public opinion. In order to avoid a disastrous war between China and the United States, it is a very important task to build up a relationship of trust between the two countries. Generally speaking, the Chinese people understand the United States more than American people understand the Chinese. According to the survey, conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Asia Society in 2006, more Chinese people trust the United States than American people


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trust China.99 In the United States, “Congressional staffers hold a much lower opinion of China than the other samples. The general public with a higher income are more likely to hold a negative opinion of China than those in the lower income bracket. Caucasian Americans are also more likely to hold an unfavorable opinion than Hispanic and African Americans.”100 Thus, the United States should make efforts to understand China’s historical social and political transformation and its significant consequences.

Conclusion A world fundamentally has been transformed since the end of the Cold War. The center of the world is moving to Asia. China is the fastest growing economy in the world. If China is able to maintain its economic growth, China will possibly become the world’s largest economy in thirty years. However, it is still uncertain if China will become a world superpower because world superpower is an integrated conception including economic, political, and cultural power as well. China’s is rising, but China’s power is still limited at present time in comparison with United States from various perspectives. In chapter 2, China’s Potential Threat to the Global Order, I will examine China’s domestic problems and argue that the current Chinese political system is the central problem among all other problems and would possibly bring China to chaos if China could not fundamentally reform its political system. A strong China is good for the international society but a chaotic China could be a deadly threat to the global peace. China’s potential threat to the existing global order is China’s current political system. The key to China’s peaceful rise in a global context is to promote China’s democratization. In chapter 3, Political Corruption and Social Instability, I will discuss the current major social problems in China, study the relationship between political corruption and other social problems, and argue that political corruption is a serious problem which directly causes social conflicts and damages the Chinese government’s legitimacy, and thus indirectly disturbs the existing global order. In chapter 4, Prostitution and Corruption, I will argue that the revival of Chinese prostitution is one unique characteristic of political corruption of present-day China, and political corruption along with prostitution has destroyed traditional Chinese moral and social order, contributed to widely spread of sexually transmitted diseases, caused wasteful government spending, intensified the relationship between the government and the Chinese people, and contributed to social instability in China. In chapter 5, Freedom of Media: the Fourth Power of Modern Democracy, I will discuss the realistic and workable solution for the Chinese people to steadily develop a democratic system within the framework of the current

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political system and argue that the CPC is still in power and not ready to adopt a Western democratic system. China needs to use the CPC to support its modernization and liberalization during the transition. Any attempts to dissolve the one-party system in present-day China will have poor prospects. China’s democracy should begin with freedom of the media. Although the fourth power—freedom of the media—is an invisible and unauthoritative power, it is a great tool to enable the Chinese people to promote the process of China’s democratization. In chapter 6, Citizen Participation: The Consciousness of China’s Democratization, I will discuss the relationship between the freedom of media and citizen participation, examine the history of citizen participation and the development of the theory of citizen participation in the West, discuss the forms of citizen participation, analyze the differences and similarities of citizen participation in democratic societies, diagnose the problems of citizen participation in China, and offer workable suggestions for promoting citizen participation in the Chinese context. In chapter 7, Religious Support: An Inseparable Part of Modern Democracy, I will argue that that the Chinese people are a religious people. Since religion and democratization are the two sides of the same coin, there is no Chinese democracy without religious coordination, but the role of Chinese religions in the process of China’s democratization cannot be overestimated within the current political system. It is necessary to promote religious freedom along with freedom of media and citizen participation in order to accelerate the process of China’s democratization.

Notes â•‡â•‡ 1.â•‡ David Shambaugh, “Introduction: The Emergence of ‘Greater China,’” China Quarterly 136 (Dec. 1993), 653. â•‡â•‡ 2.â•‡ Jianwei Wang, “China’s Peaceful Rise: A Comparative Study,” EAI Fellows Program Working paper www.eai.or.kr/data/bbs/eng_report/2009052017544710.pdf (22 October 2009): 1. â•‡â•‡ 3.â•‡ Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of a Fierce Yet Fragile Superpower,” Newsweek (December 31, 2007–January 7, 2008): 6. â•‡â•‡ 4.â•‡ Hannah Beech, “Let China’s Games Begin,” Time, Friday, August 8, 2008. â•‡â•‡ 5.â•‡ David Barboza, “Shanghai Buys Itself a Makeover before a Fair,” New York Times, 30 May 2009. â•‡â•‡ 6.â•‡ Quoted in Wang, “China’s Peaceful Rise: A Comparative Study,” working paper, www.eai.or.kr/data/bbs/eng_report/2009052017544710.pdf (22 October 2009). â•‡â•‡ 7.â•‡ Ibid. â•‡â•‡ 8.â•‡ Benjamin Schwarz, “Managing China’s Rise,” Atlantic, June 2005. â•‡â•‡ 9.â•‡ Joshua Kurlantzick, Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power Is Transforming the World (Boston: Yale University Press, 2007), 23.


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â•‡ 10.â•‡ See Michael Elliott, “The Chinese Century,” Time, 169 no. 4 (22 January 2007): 4. â•‡ 11.â•‡ Robert B. Zoellick, “Whiter China: From Membership to Responsibility?” U.S. Department of State, www.state.gov/s/d/rem/53682.htm (3 Feb. 2008). â•‡ 12.â•‡ Ming Xia “‘China Threat’ or ‘Peaceful Rise of China’?” New York Times, www .nytimes.com/ref/college/coll-china-politics-007.html (22 October 2009). â•‡ 13.â•‡ Trudy Kuehner, “Understanding China: A History Institute Report,” Newsletter of RPRI’s Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education 12, no. 1 (March 2007). â•‡ 14.â•‡ Quoted in Baker Peter and Gleen Kessler, “Bush Carries to China A Delicate Diplomacy U.S. Criticism Muted on Democracy, Human Rights,” Washington Post, 13 November 2005. â•‡ 15.â•‡ Minxin Pei, “The Dark Side of China’s Rise,” Foreign Policy (March/April 2006). â•‡ 16.â•‡ David Pan, “Damn Lies and Chinese Statistics,” Asia Times, 19 August 2006. â•‡ 17.â•‡ Nicholas R. Lardy, “China’s Economy: Problems and Prospects,” China Digital Times, chinadigitaltimes.net/2007/02/chinas_economy_problems_and _prospects_nicholas_r_lardy.php (5 Feb. 2008). â•‡ 18.â•‡ “China’s Spirit, a ‘Great Wall’ at Heart Built to Ward Off Global Crisis,” People’s Daily, 30 July 2009. â•‡ 19.â•‡ “Leninist China Faces Its Capitalist Crisis,” Guardian, 17 August 2009. â•‡ 20.â•‡ Tony Blair, “We Can Help China Embrace the Future,” Wall Street Journal, 26 August 2008. â•‡ 21.â•‡ Ted Fishman, China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World (New York: Scribner, 2005). â•‡ 22.â•‡ Tom Miller, “Trading with the Dragon, Part 1: Manufacturing that Doesn’t Compute,” Asia Times, 22 November 2006. â•‡ 23.â•‡ “China now second largest vehicle market,” China Daily, 12 January 2007. â•‡ 24.â•‡ Christian Lowe, “Expansive China Faces Grass-Roots Resentment,” Reuters, 17 August 2009. â•‡ 25.â•‡ Alan M. Field, “China Becomes the World’s Largest Exporter,” Journal of Commerce Online, 26 August 2009. â•‡ 26.â•‡ “US Trade Deficit Breaks New High In 2006,” www.rawstory.com/news/2007 /US_trade_deficit_breaks_new_high_0213.html (4 Feb. 2008). â•‡ 27.â•‡ The sources come from “Office of the United States Trade Representative: Executive Office of the President,” www.ustr.gov/countries-regions/china (1 September 2009). â•‡ 28.â•‡ “China’s Foreign Reserves Hit $1.95 Trillion At End Of March,” China View, 11 April 2009. â•‡ 29.â•‡ Lardy, “China’s Economy.” â•‡ 30.â•‡ Kuehner, “Understanding China.” â•‡ 31.â•‡ “Higher Chinese consumer confidence,” Xinhua, www.chinadaily.com.cn /bizchina/2006-09/28/content_698635.htm (22 Feb. 2008). â•‡ 32.â•‡ “Chinese Consumer Confidence Up Across 16 Cities,” GALLUP, 13 August 2009. â•‡ 33.â•‡ “China 2008 Tourism Revenue Reached CNY1.16 Trillion,” China Hospitality News, 3 February 2009.

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â•‡ 34.â•‡ “Fears For Environment As China Plans 48 New Airports: Jonathan Watts In Beijing,” Guardian, 10 May 2006. â•‡ 35.â•‡ Xinhua, “China’s Defense Budget To Grow 17.6 Percent In 2008,” China Daily, 4 March 2008. â•‡ 36.â•‡ John Ng, “Aiming for the Stars,” Asia Times, 14 Oct. 2006. â•‡ 37.â•‡ “China’s Space Program,” The New York Times, 1 September 2009. â•‡ 38.â•‡ Peter Van Ness, “China’s Response to the Bush Doctrine,” World Policy Journal (Winter 2004/2005): 44. â•‡ 39.â•‡ Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley, “As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes,” New York Times, 26 August 2007. â•‡ 40.â•‡ Zakaria, “The Rise of a Fierce Yet Fragile Superpower.” â•‡ 41.â•‡ Benjamin Schwarz, “Contending effectively with China’s ambitions requires a better understanding of our own: Managing China’s Rise,” The Atlantic.com www .theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200506/schwarz (10 Feb. 2008). â•‡ 42.â•‡ Jonas Parello-Plesner, “An Illusion of Global Governance,” Asia Times, 2 May 2009. â•‡ 43.â•‡ John Ikenberry, “The Rise of China and the Future of the West,” Foreign Affairs, January/February, 2008. â•‡ 44.â•‡ Quoted in James Kynce, China: Shakes the World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), xiii. â•‡ 45.â•‡ Li Yi, Structure and Evolution of Chinese Social Stratification (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2005). â•‡ 46.â•‡ Edward Wong, “Getting in Shape for Games, China Strengthens Ties With Neighbors,” New York Times, 5 August 2008. â•‡ 47.â•‡ Jeffrey A. Bader, John L. Thornton, and Richard C. Bush III, “Confronting the China Challenge,” Baltimore Sun, 20 April 2007. â•‡ 48.â•‡ Robert D. Kaplan, “How We Would Fight China,” Atlantic Monthly, 28 April 2005. â•‡ 49.â•‡ Wong, “Getting in Shape for Games, China Strengthens Ties With Neighbors,” New York Times, 5 August 2008. â•‡ 50.â•‡ Zakaria, “The Rise of a Fierce Yet Fragile Superpower.” â•‡ 51.â•‡ Quoted in Ikenberry, “The Rise of China and the Future of the West.” â•‡ 52.â•‡ Susan L. Shirk, China Fragile Superpower: How China’s Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 9. â•‡ 53.â•‡ Ikenberry, “The Rise of China and the Future of the West.” â•‡ 54.â•‡ “China Maps Slow Path to Democracy,” Los Angeles Times, 17 March 2007. â•‡ 55.â•‡ Walter Russell Mead, “The great fall of China,” Los Angels Times, 30 December 2007. â•‡ 56.â•‡ John O’Neil, “China’s President Ends U.S. Visit With Yale Speech.” New York Times, 21 April 2006. â•‡ 57.â•‡ C. Fred Bergsten, Bates Gill, Nicholas R. Lardy, and Derek Mitchell. China, The Balance Sheet: What the World Needs to Know Now About the Emerging Superpower (New York: Public Affairs, 2006), 4. â•‡ 58.â•‡ Zoellick, “Whiter China.” â•‡ 59.â•‡ Ikenberry, “The Rise of China and the Future of the West.” â•‡ 60.â•‡ Zoellick, “Whiter China.”


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â•‡ 61.â•‡ Ikenberry, “The Rise of China and the Future of the West.” â•‡ 62.â•‡ “20-Nation Poll Finds Strong Global Consensus: Support for Free Market System,” www.globescan.com/news_archives/pipa_market.html (2 Feb. 2008). â•‡ 63.â•‡ Ikenberry, “The Rise of China and the Future of the West.” â•‡ 64.â•‡ Elliott, “The Chinese Century,” 1. â•‡ 65.â•‡ Max Boot, “Project for a New Chinese Century,” Weekly Standard 11, no. 4, 10 October 2005. â•‡ 66.â•‡ See Bill Gertz, The China Threat: How the People’s Republic Targets America (Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2000). â•‡ 67.â•‡ Michael A. Ledeen, “Beijing Embraces Classical Fascism,” Far Eastern Economic Review 171, no. 4 (May 2008). â•‡ 68.â•‡ Boot, “Project for a New Chinese Century.” â•‡ 69.â•‡ Kuehner, “Understanding China: A History Institute Report.” â•‡ 70.â•‡ David Lague, “Chinese Submarine Fleet Is Growing,” New York Times, 25 February 2008. â•‡ 71.â•‡ Zheng Bijian, “China’s Peaceful Rise, to Great-Power Statues,” Foreign Affairs (September/October 2005), www.foreignaffairs.org/20050901faessay84502/ zheng-bijian/china-s-peaceful-rise-to-great-power-status.html (10 Feb. 2008). â•‡ 72.â•‡ Robert Novak, “Is China a threat?” Townhall.com, 27 October 2005. â•‡ 73.â•‡ Robert Harmann, “Back to the Future,” Asia Times, 16 March 2007. â•‡ 74.â•‡ Zoellick, “Whiter China: From Membership to Responsibility?” â•‡ 75.â•‡ David M. Lampton, “The United States and China: Competitors, Partners, or Both,” www.comw.org/cmp/fulltext/uspolicy.html (10 Feb 2008). â•‡ 76.â•‡ John S. Gregory, The West and China since 1500 (Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1. â•‡ 77.â•‡ See Sara Bongiorni, A Year Without “Made in China”: One Family’s True Life Adventure in the Global Economy (Medford, N.J.: Wiley, 2007), 80. â•‡ 78.â•‡ Laura MacInnis, “N. Korea Agrees to Disable Nuclear Program in 2007,” Reuters, 2 September 2007. â•‡ 79.â•‡ Ikenberry, “The Rise of China and the Future of the West.” â•‡ 80.â•‡ Tony Blair, “We Can Help China Embrace the Future,” Wall Street Journal, 26 August 2008. â•‡ 81.â•‡ Glenn Kessler, “U.S., China Stand Together But Are Not Equal,”Washington Post, 20 April 2006. â•‡ 82.â•‡ Baker and Kessler, “Bush, Hu Produce Summit of Symbols Protester Screams at Chinese President,” Washington Post, 21 April 2006. â•‡ 83.â•‡ O’Neil, “China’s President Ends U.S. Visit With Yale Speech.” â•‡ 84.â•‡ “Chinese President Hu Jintao Meets with His U.S. Counterpart Obama,” www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx/t606750.htm (25 October 2009). â•‡ 85.â•‡ “U.S. Softens Tone To Improve China Relations,” Reuters, 11, October 2009. â•‡ 86.â•‡ David Barboza and Mark McDonald, “Obama Pushes Rights With Chinese Students,” New York Times, 17 November 2009. â•‡ 87.â•‡ Kent Ewing, “China’s Media Blitz Needs Fact-Checking,” Asia Times, 17 October 2009. â•‡ 88.â•‡ Kurlantzick, Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power Is Transforming the World. â•‡ 89.â•‡ Ibid.

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â•‡ 90.â•‡ “America’s Soft Power is Still Supreme in Asia,? USC U.S.-China Institute, 19 June 2009. china.usc.edu/ShowArticle.aspx?articleID=1101&AspxAutoDetectCookie Support=1 (16 August 2009) â•‡ 91.â•‡ Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), 12. â•‡ 92.â•‡ Stanley Rosen, “Education and Economic Reform,” in The China Handbook, ed. Christopher Hudson (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997), 250. â•‡ 93.â•‡ Kuehner, “Understanding China: A History Institute Report.” â•‡ 94.â•‡ John Liu, “Confucius TV Spin-Off Leads China’s Non-Fiction: Top 10 Books,” Bloomberg News, July 17, 2008. â•‡ 95.â•‡ Pallavi Aiyar, “Peking Opera Tries to Regain Its Voice,” Asia Times, 19 July 2008. â•‡ 96.â•‡ Ibid. â•‡ 97.â•‡ Asia Pulse, “Rolling Stones to Rock Shanghai,” Asia Times, 15 March 2006. â•‡ 98.â•‡ Ben Sisario, “For All the Rock in China,” New York Times, 25 November 2007. â•‡ 99.â•‡ Jim Lbe, “Two Countries, One Survey,” Asia Times, 12 December 2007. 100.â•‡ Committee of 100, “2007 Survey: Hope and Fear: American and Chinese Attitudes toward Each Other, Parallel Survey on Issues Concerning U.S.-China Relations.”

2 China’s Potential Threat to the Global Order

China’s rise does not threaten the United States, not only because China is incapable of challenging the U.S. superpower based on its economic capability and soft power, but also China has no intention to have conflict with United States in order to continue to make China strong. Moreover, the Chinese government has been tangled with massive domestic problems while China is rising. Some warn that China is heading for big trouble.1 On the one hand, the domestic problems seriously challenge the CPC’s legitimacy and increase social instability. China’s ambitions are unlikely to be realized until it resolves those issues.2 This is why the CPC makes the task of developing a “harmonious society” the top priority of the party’s work agenda. The question is whether it is possible for the CPC to realize a “harmonious society.” On the other hand, if the Chinese government is unable to appropriately deal with the domestic problems, the Chinese society could collapse and Maoists could take the opportunity to regain their power. Some expect a terminal crisis in China within the next ten to twenty years.3 Gordon G. Chang in his 2001 book Coming Collapse of China claimed that China is on the verge of collapse.4 China is a huge country and part of the global village. China’s great success could be a contribution to the global village. By the same token, China’s problems could be a burden to the world. If the theory of collapse comes true, the collapse of China would fatally threaten the United States and damage the existing global order. Thus, China’s problems worry both Chinese leaders and Western societies, because the problems do not only challenge the communist regime, but also disturb other countries, especially developed countries.5 If the United States could not recognize and correctly diagnose China’s internal problems, the United States could not 23

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implement the right foreign policy towards China and even overreact to China’s rise by flaunting U.S. military strength and using economic sanctions. If China could not deal properly with the problems, “harmonious society” would be a novel version. This chapter will examine China’s domestic problems and argue that the Chinese communist political system is the central problem among all other domestic problems. It is almost impossible for the CPC to fundamentally solve China’s current problems and even possibly cause the country to collapse, if the Chinese government could not launch a serious political reform. China’s potential threat to the existing global order is not derived from her rapid economic growth and military expansion, but from China’s potential domestic chaos.

China’s Massive Social Problems Some Western scholars have examined China’s domestic problems from different perspectives. For example, James Mann in his book The China Fantasy, systematically discusses eight of China’s internal problems,6 and Peter Navarro in his book The Coming China Wars examines eight policy areas which could trigger the China wars.7 However, the critical question remains: What is the central problem among all of China’s internal problems? It is impossible to fundamentally resolve all of China’s internal problems and guarantee China’s peaceful rise without recognizing the central problem among all domestic problems. The development of China’s economy is imbalance. China’s reform movement is lacking coordination between economic and social development, between high GDP growth and social progress, between upgrading technology and increasing job opportunities, between keeping development momentum in the coastal areas and speeding up development in inland China, between fostering urbanization and nurturing agricultural areas, between attracting more foreign investment and enhancing the competitiveness of indigenous enterprises, between deepening reform and preserving social stability, between opening domestic markets and solidifying independence, and between promoting market-oriented competition and taking care of the disadvantaged people. The huge difference is obvious between rural and urban Chinas, northern and southern Chinas, and western and eastern Chinas. All these differences imply that the reform movement creates many Chinas, and many areas of China are undeveloped. This indicates that China is fragile but could also easily trigger social conflicts. China’s natural resources insufficiently meet its growing demands. Only about 15 percent of China’s land is arable, but the Chinese government is required to feed a population of 1.3 billion. According to United Nations’ reports, elderly Chinese will reach 134 million by 2030, accounting for

China’s Potential Threat to the Global Order

25

about 25 percent of the total of China’s population. China will become the largest aging country in the world. It is a very difficult task for the Chinese government to keep such a large population fed, clothed, and sheltered, and to satisfy the basic needs of the people without discontent. In addition, China’s output has more than doubled in size in the past three decades. Overcapacity causes huge waste, losses, and even closures, and also leads to rising unemployment.8 China’s limited resources cannot afford the overheated economic growth. China’s economic growth is driving its thirst for energy and it has become the world’s second-largest oil consumer. Today, China consumes six million barrels every day and this will be doubled in ten years, but the output of China’s oil does not meet the needs of China’s consumption. China imported 178.9 million metric tons of crude oil in 2008, up from 91 million tons in 2003.9 It seems that a gasoline war between the United States and China is inevitable in the future. It is no longer true that the United States has only 5 percent of the world’s population but consumes a third or more of the Earth’s resources. China has now overtaken America as the world’s leading resource consumer. If China’s economy continues to expand at 8 percent per year for two decades, China’s resource consumption per person will be the same as that in the United States today. By that time, 1.45 billion Chinese people will consume the equivalent of two-thirds of the current world grain harvest and use 99 million barrels of oil a day, but the world currently produces only 84 million barrels daily.10 China’s rise is parallel to environment degradation. While the Chinese economy is developing, China’s environmental problems are becoming severe. Polluted air and water are everywhere and have become part of the daily life of Chinese people and no one can escape from China’s pollution. Before the 2008 Being Olympic Games, the Chinese government removed roughly two million vehicles from city streets and shut down many factories in Beijing in order to meet the antipollution standards of the United Nations.11 Beijing sky became blue for 146 out of 181 days in the first half of the year. These days of the blue sky were more than the total amount of “blue sky” days in the past ten years, but the government only took this action for a short period of time. It takes a long time to fix the environmental problems, partly because Chinese factories have adopted old technology and many manufacturers lack measures in protecting the environment. Seventy-five percent of surface water flowing through urban areas of China is not suitable for drinking, and 90 percent of urban ground water is contaminated. Sixteen cities among the world’s twenty most air-polluted cities are in China. The Yangtze River and Yellow River provide drinking water for tens of millions of the Chinese people, but more than 10,500 chemical companies are located in these areas. Any single accident could lead to disastrous consequences.12 The harbors of the Yangtze River and the Yellow River are already listed as dead zones by the United Nations—low oxygen-

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ated areas and deoxygenated zones in which fish and shrimp can not survive, and even sea plants cannot grow. China's carbon dioxide emissions are growing far faster than anticipated. China has surpassed the United States as the world's largest producer of carbon dioxide and received much criticism from the international society. Although it is also true that China’s carbon dioxide pollution is caused by the manufacturing of goods for developed countries, China must find a solution to resolve it.13 It is both a domestic and an international issue to resolve environmental problems. Domestically, China’s environmental problems have directly damaged Chinese people’s health. According to the Ministry of Health, pollution has become the leading cause of cancers and is also responsible for between 300,000 and 500,000 premature deaths annually from other pollution-related diseases. About 10 percent China’s social protests are related to pollution. Internationally, the environmental issue is one of the hottest topics between China and the United States because it is relevant to all other issues. For example, why is the cost of Chinese products so low? Not only do Chinese enterprises buy cheap worker forces but they also save the cost of environmental protection. Under the Obama administration, the U.S. government has paid more attention to climate changes and makes climate change a national priority.14 If the Chinese government does not handle the environmental issue well, it would seriously distort China’s image, hurt their relations with other countries, and greatly cost China’s GDP, about £160 billion annually.15 Although the Chinese government has realized the severe consequences of the environmental degradation and launched the second economic transformation from a polluted economy to a green economy, a significant percentage of enterprises, especially private enterprises, are not aware of the urgency of treating environmental problems. Western industrial countries began dealing with environmental problems when their economies matured and their countries became rich, but China has to handle their environmental problems while they are still poor. China spends five billion U.S. dollars per year to deal with the consequences of its environmental problems. Although it is already a heavy burden for China to handle environmental problems, this amount of money is still very small in comparison to America’s 250 billion per year. To make maximum profits, many Chinese enterprises try to circumvent government regulations. It is possible that China’s environment will become worse before getting better. Severe water shortages could turn more farmland into desert. China’s environmental problem has become global. Because China is the world’s biggest producer of greenhouse gasses, it is one of the most important issues for the world to see how China plays on climate change. Recently, more than twenty diplomats were in Beijing monitoring the Chinese position on the eve of United Nations summit.16 In Hu Jintao’s speech at the United Nations Gen-


27

eral Assembly in September 2009, he promised that the CPC will fulfill its responsibility and promote common development.17 The Chinese government made an announcement ten days before the Copenhagen Climate Conference that Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao would attend the climate treaty talks in Copenhagen in December and the government would pledge to cut the amount of carbon dioxide emitted for each unit of national income 40 to 45 percent by 2020. According to Xinhua Agency, this is a voluntary action taken by the Chinese government based on its own national conditions and is a major contribution to the global effort in tackling climate change.18 The unemployment rate is also soaring. By July 2009, China’s registered unemployment rate in urban areas is only about 4.3 percent but, actual unemployment rate is about 8 percent. Among xia gang (laid off) workers, about 34 percent have no retirement pension, and 34.1 percent have no medical insurance. Most of xia gang workers have not received any support from their relatives, nor have they borrowed money from anyone. After xia gang, they have experienced difficulty in finding new jobs, because they are older and have fewer professional skills. The majority of xia gang workers are women. The women’s unemployment rate is over 60 percent among the total unemployed. Females find it more difficult to find jobs, due to age, education, and discrimination. Although more than 50 percent xia gang women are over forty years old, many of xia gang women are under age thirty. Only about 47 percent of xia gang women are able to find jobs. During the economic recession, manufacturing jobs in the Pearl River Delta and all along the once-booming coast quickly disappeared at a stunning pace. According to Chinese National Bureau of Statistics, there were 225.42 million peasant workers in China in 2008 but, about 70 million migrant workers have been forced to return to rural areas before the Spring Festival of 2009. About 20 percent of them have not returned to city. Some observers reported that by July of 2009, about half of 140 million peasant jobs have evaporated.19 College graduates have an even more difficult time in finding jobs. In 2005, about 60 percent of the graduates among 4.13 million graduates found jobs after graduation, about 15 percent of graduates did not want to work immediately, and 27 percent of graduates could not find jobs. In 2009, about 4.15 million college graduates found jobs, or about 68 percent of the total college graduates, so about 30 percent of college graduates were still unable to find jobs, accounting for about one million graduates. The latest “2009 Social Blue Book” issued by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences warned the urban unemployment rate could reach 9.4 in 2010. China’s corruption has become systematic and institutionalized. Deng Xiaoping set forth a slogan “to be rich is glorious” and encouraged a small percentage of Chinese people to become rich first. However, to attain their wealth, some of them flouted the law. Smuggling, tax evasion, loan fraud,

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and triad (criminal) links were commonplace. A survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences last year found that nearly half of the 7,063 families polled thought the rich had acquired their wealth illegally.20 In December 2007, when China’s new National Bureau of Corruption Prevention opened a website for citizens to reveal corruption, according to a Western observer, the site was immediately deluged by massive Chinese netizens, causing several crashes during the first two days of operation, so the Chinese government had to adjust the site to handle the unexpected volume.21 This indicates how serious corruption is in China and how much the Chinese people are concerned with the widespread corruption. This rampant corruption severely damages the CPC’s reputation, ruins the faith of CPC’s members, and reduces the capability of the CPC’s power. If the government cannot effectively control its corruption through political reform, it might trigger a massive movement against the communist regime. The next chapter will discuss China’s corruption in detail. The gap between the rich and the poor has greatly widened. While China was becoming rich, the number of rich Chinese people surpassed the British and is now listed at number four in the world, just next to Japan. It is expected to be in first place in 2013. Accordingly, the gap between the rich and poor is significantly widening. This is partly the result of government corruption. Some businessmen and officials have become extremely rich while the working class becomes relatively poor. Investigations have shown that about 0.4 percent of Chinese rich families possess 70 percent China’s property. Recent reports and discussions have revealed that 91 percent of the wealthy people who own more than 100 million yuan are the children of Chinese senior officials. This information was circulated broadly on the Internet.Â€ Those people who work in the monopolized industry sector can make a decent salary: highway toll clerks can make 8,000 yuan per month, while the average income for Beijing residents was 1,700 yuan in 2006. The life style of the wealthy is extremely luxurious and wasteful. Beijing Club membership fee, for example, is 80,000 yuan, equivalent to about 11,000 U.S. dollars. In the Jing An district of Shanghai, housing prices are about 20,000 yuan per square meter. A common Chinese citizen can only buy a 100-square-meter-size house by using his or her lifetime income, if he or she does not spend a single penny for one hundred years. On average, college tuition costs about 10,000 yuan per student for each year, having increased twenty-five times in eighteen years. Some students from wealthy families spend about 2,000 yuan for personal expenses every month, but some from the countryside can only afford 10 yuan every month. In presentday China, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In order to protect their special interests, the rich people do not only seek their representative in political sphere, but also expend their influence to the academic sphere by using their financial power. Money speaks pretty loud. As a result, the


29

economic law dysfunctions and government regulations always are on the side of the rich. The core of equality and justice of the socialist market economy has become invalid. This is fueling the sentiment of hating the rich people and, obviously, contributes to social unrest. The reform movement creates a large number of disadvantaged people. During the Mao regime, more than 80 percent of the Chinese population lived in the countryside and 90 percent of rural residents were employed in agriculture. Economic development has greatly accelerated urbanization. As a result of urbanization, the peasants’ lands have been gradually taken away, and a large number of peasants have been driven to urban areas. Under new government policy, “local governments in those provinces allow peasants to register as urban residents and have the same rights to housing, education, medical care, and social security.”22 The urban population expanded from 172 million in 1978 to 400 million in 2000.23 The urbanization level in China is expected to reach 50 percent by 2015.24 As a result, China’s floating population has been increasing rapidly, expanding from 80 million in 1994 to 140 million in 2003. According to the results of China's Fifth Population Census, China's transient population reached 140 million in 2003.25 Although there is no clear census of the floating population of today’s China, it can be estimated that the total of China’s floating population could be around 250 million. Some of the urban jobs are more open to migrants, such as domestic service, the textile industries, and the trading sector.26 Migrant workers are badly needed in China's Pearl River Delta Region for its booming manufacturing and tertiary industry. The numbers of migrant workers have dramatically increased especially in special economic zones and the east coast areas of China. Migrant workers usually receive less pay in comparison with urban workers. On average, the typical monthly salary is 800 yuan for experienced workers, with the highest monthly salary at 2,000 yuan.27 If China’s urbanization continues its rapid growth, most of its people will very soon live in urban areas settlements. Facing this great change, however, the government and scholars only worry about whether the world will have enough natural resources to sustain the new world city’s way of life, but they have not thought much about whether the world’s cultural, psychological, and spiritual resources are sufficient for the new world city to survive.28 In addition, the immigrant movement not only results in many social problems, such as domestic violence, adultery, intoxication, addiction to drugs, drug traffic, human traffic, kidnapping, suicides, concubinage, and prostitution, but also reduces internal immigrants’ benefits, which creates more social conflicts and a potential social crisis. Social conflict and massive protests have dramatically increased. Government corruption and social inequality have directly contributed to social unrest. Chinese official data demonstrates that unrest began rising rapidly between 1993 and 1995. The government admits to a nationwide increase

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of 268 percent in mass incidents from 8,700 in 1993 to 32,000 in 1999,29 from 58,000 incidents in 2003 to 87,000 in 2005.30 Local protests have become common in China, but the Chinese government is making broader efforts to increase security and curb public protests.31 During these protests, 1,740 people were injured, 102 people killed, 186 police were injured and 23 killed. All these incidents cost approximately 40 billion yuan, the equivalent of 4.5 billion U.S. dollars. A recent police report indicates that the protests are not only growing in number, but also are increasing in size and becoming better organized.32 These protests take various forms from peaceful small group petitions to marches and rallies, labor strikes, student demonstrations, and even armed fighting and riots. These protests also indicate Chinese citizens are now simply much less willing to tolerate unjust actions by the government. China is entering a peak period for mass incidents and in the next several years may face even more conflicts that will greatly test the governing abilities of all levels of the CPC.33 The Xinjiang riot is one of the country’s bloodiest ethnic conflicts in recent years. No matter how the Tibet and Xin Jiang incidents happened, these ethnic unrests shake China’s self-image and contribute to its national stability. It also indicates that tension between the government and the people is growing and the novel version of the “harmonious society” has failed. Obviously, China has become unprecedentedly prosperous and very vulnerable. The social unrest could continue to contribute internal strife, economic downturn, and uneven growth. The widespread social unrest shakes the Chinese people’s faith and could bring China to a chaos if the government could not take decisive actions to remove the fundamental causes of the social protests. The health care system is deteriorated. The middle class is the foundation of developed countries, but low income people are the majority in China. For example, in China’s most developed city, Shanghai, with 13 million residents, 10 percent of its total population or 1.4 million people have a monthly income below 450 yuan. However, medical expenses and educational expenses for low-income people are the same as for high-income people. This is unfair to the poor. Four out five people in China now die from noncommunicable diseases: cancer, heart disease, and strokes. Treatment for these is expensive and likely to last for years. Basic health care is simply unaffordable for millions of Chinese people. If they become chronically ill, they could face bankruptcy. Basically, medical insurance only covers urban employees and not rural farmers. A survey conducted in 2008 shows that anywhere from 45–60 percent of urban residents and 80–90 percent of the rural population do not have any form of a medical insurance. Because medical expenses for the majority of the Chinese people is too expensive, 36 percent of patients in cities and 39 percent in the rural areas choose not to see a doctor when


31

they fall ill, and about 28 percent of those who are admitted to the hospital have no choice left.34 Although seven hundred million rural people across China have signed up for a new rural health care insurance, only a small percentage of medical bills can be covered for some cases.35 In addition, the Chinese medical system is abused by some doctors who over prescribe medicine and conduct unnecessary tests to increase profits. Pharmaceutical companies know that doctors’ incomes are low, so “they offer them incentives to sell more of their medicines.”36 When the World Health Organization (WHO) ranked the public health systems of 190 countries in 2007, China was placed at 144, behind some of Africa’s poorest countries.

China’s Central Domestic Problem Many Western and Chinese scholars, such as Penelope B. Prime, Charles Wolf, Peter Navarro, and other prominent scholars, have addressed China’s problems and resolutions from different approaches,37 but a central question has not been answered: What is the most critical problem that would seriously affect China’s social stability and possibly bring China to a collapse? The CPC has been aware of the possible deadly consequences of domestic problems but, it has rejected that China’s central problem is the current political system, although “Chinese leaders are haunted by the fear that their days in power are numbered.”38 The current Chinese communist political system is the central problem among all of China’s domestic problems. First, all China’s domestic problems are ultimately derived from government policy. In China, theoretically, the government is separate from the CPC. Practically, the CPC is above the government. All important government posts are appointed by the CPC, all major government decisions are made by the CPC, and all important government decisions actually come from the CPC. Ultimately, the lack of a democratic system is inhibiting China’s economic efficiency and creating social tension. Second, all problems stated above are government policy related. A good government policy should represent the interests of the majority of the people. To do so, the government policy making process must go through the majority of the people, but the policy making process in China is limited to a small group of the CPC. The CPC continues to exercise monopoly power on political decision making. The decision-making process can be roughly divided into three stages: agenda setting, decision making, and policy implementation.39 In China, participation is limited to the implementation stage rather than the policy making stage, so some scholars reject applying the notion of political participation to studies of communist soci-

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eties. Thus, nobody knows what is going on with government policies until they are announced. It is very difficult to predict the result of government policy and to make adjustments to a bad government policy. When a bad government policy merges, the damage is already done. Third, the one-party system directly produces some serious problems. For example, the one-party system interrupts market economy, results in social protests and violent incident, widens the gap between the rich and poor, and directly creates government corruption and protects corrupt officials. It is impossible to significantly slow down the spreading of China’s corruption within the current political system, because the mechanism of combating official corruption is totally dysfunctional under the one-party system. Under the one-party system, the judiciary system is paralyzed, a power checking system does not exist, and public media is censored by the CPC. Fourth, China’s democratization is the only solution to resolve all China’s domestic problems, but the CPC continues to resist this fundamental political change. Modern democracy is the best social and political system in the world and it may constitute the “final form of human government” and the “end of history.”40 According to Samuel P. Huntington, a competitive two-party system that could peacefully integrate new groups and demands into politics. The democratic movement has become global in scope since the third democratic wave began in 1974.41 Since then, more than thirty countries have “shifted from authoritarianism to democracy.”42 Francis Fukuyama has predicted that “free democratic governments [will] continue to spread to more and more countries around the world.”43 China’s transformation is not yet complete. China’s reform movement is basically limited to the economic area. China has fueled its remarkable economic rise for three decades. The evidence of China’s rise is everywhere, but economic importance does not automatically translate into political power.44 China is strong economically but weak politically. When most people look at China’s course over the last decades, they are struck by the interesting phenomenon: Chinese continues to keep dramatic economic growth while maintaining its CPC’s dictatorship.45 China’s economic reform does not synchronize with the current political system. According to Tony Blair, “there remain issues of human rights and political and religious freedom to be resolved.”46 The CPC offers a recipe for China’s peaceful rise, i.e., building a harmonious society is above all needs of development and is a major strategic goal for China’s rise.47 Hu Jintao urged building a social justice guarantee system based on "equal rights, equal opportunities, fair rules and fair distribution."48 This landmark policy mapped out guidelines for the country's sustainable social and economic development by 2020.49 The seventeenth National Congress of the CPC in 2007 continued to assert the significance of building a harmonious society. However, it is naïve to develop a harmonious


33

society under the one-party system. The one-party system does not help to build up a harmonious society but to destroy it. Although harmonious society and democratic system share something in common, they are fundamentally different. Harmony is one of the basic characteristics of democratization. A real harmonious society is based on a democratic system and comes with six characteristics: democratic rule by law, justice and righteousness, trust and love for each other, vitality, peacefulness and stability, and harmony between human society and natural society. A modern democratic government encourages its citizens to actively participate in the policy making process through a multiparty and free election system in a well developed civil society. Modern democracy guarantees individual rights, moderates conflicts, regulates political competition, makes government more legitimate, improves the quality of government, provides the best means for supervising the great bureaucracies of the modern state, and prevents government leaders from abusing their powers, recruits political leaders from a large pool, guarantees social stability and harmonious social relations.50 However, the concept of the harmonious society that the CPC proposed is rooted in traditional Chinese culture. If one uses one single vocabulary to describe the characteristics of the traditional Chinese culture and Chinese society, it is a Confucian society. Traditional Chinese culture is group-orientated and essentially hostile to individualism, though the Confucian selfcultivation tradition in the nineteenth-century neo-Confucian stage reflected modern liberalism.51 As early as in the 1920s, Chen Duxiou, one of the founders of the Communist party, pointed out that Confucius tried to justify absolute rule and advocated unlimited authority for the monarchal government by man instead of by law. According to Chen, Confucianism did not fit the needs of modern society, because Confucianism preached the morality of meek compliance, made the Chinese people too meek and passive to survive in the modern world, and upheld a caste system and the inequality of status of individuals in the state. Essentially, Confucianism is an obstacle to the adoption of individual rights and a democratic system.52 For more than two thousand years, from Confucius to the leaders of the Taiping Uprising, from Sun Yet-sen to Mao Zedong, every leader of Chinese revolutionaries advocated a harmonious society, but failed. The new order of the Chinese market economy seems compatible with the vision of a traditional Chinese ideal society—harmonious society, however, Hua Shiping suggests that China’s evolution in the direction of Western-style liberal democratic capitalism is not very likely.53 Chinese official ideology in imperial China was not compatible with democracy, and Maoism is just the opposite of modern democracy. Maoist China “has developed no concept of limited government, or protections of individual rights, or independence of the judiciary and the media.”54 Al-

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though the Chinese people have been struggling for democracy since 1898, they have made little progress in political freedom.55 The nationalist government was an authoritarian regime. The Maoist China carried out a dictatorship system. In the post Mao era, as the people of China grow in prosperity, their demands for political freedom grow as well.56 The first wave of the Chinese democratic movement after the reform movement took place in 1979. Deng Xiaoping actually used this movement to wipe out his political enemies and strengthen his power. Due to serious government corruption, China launched the second wave of democracy in 1989. By that time, Deng had already stabilized his power; thus the democratic movement was no longer helpful, but was a threat to his power. In order to retain his power, Deng did not hesitate to sacrifice his previous supporters—Chinese students, and suppressed the Tiananmen Democratic Movement of 1989 where several hundreds of protesters were killed in Tiananmen Square in 4 June 1989. Recently, the CPC shows some signals indicating that the Chinese government is preparing for a political reform. On 29 December 2006, the CPC’s organ’s newspaper, Beijing Daily, published an article entitled “Democracy is Good” (minzhu shi ge hao dongxi) written by Yu Keping, a member of Hu Jintao’s think tank, in which Yu has recognized that democracy is the best political system in the world and sketched the blueprint of Hu Jintao’s political reform. The CPC top think-tank in the Central Party School wrote a report in 2008, “Comprehensive Political System Reform Plan,” that warns that China would risk dangerous instability without embracing democratic reforms to limit the power of the CPC and suggests the CPC speed up the process of building a modern civil society while fully implementing the principle of rule of law.57 Nevertheless, it is over optimistic that China “will become democratic by 2011,” and the one-party system will be history by that time.58 In fact, “many inside and outside China remain skeptical about the prospects for political reform.”59 There is no evidence suggesting that China will become a democratic society in the near future. The CPC understands that the economic recession will lead to social unrest, but have not realized that the deficiency of the political system will cost more. However, the current Chinese government does not see it is necessary to fight against democracy around the globe. The CPC is changing, and China is no longer a typical communist country. A typical communist country is characterized as the sole leadership of the communist party, dominant public ownership, and official Marxist ideology. The Chinese communist system is decaying, party members no longer believe in communism, the Chinese people have lost interest in joining the party, and public ownership is dissolving. The party is losing control, and the party’s censorship system is being undermined due to the development of better communication, including satellite television, the Internet, international telecommunication, and international travel. The leaders of China have also changed their


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tone and have begun talking about so-called democracy. When Chinese premier Wen Jiabao met with journalists in the Great Hall of the People, he made interesting points that “Democracy, human rights and rule of law are not exclusive to Western countries, but rather are a product of human development and history.”60 According to Hu Jintao, China is committed to democracy and promised that China will gradually expand democracy and freedom for the Chinese citizens.61 Chinese democratization is under way but China’s road to democracy is not necessarily the Western path.62 In reality, the CPC continues to resist fundamental political changes. China is still an authoritarian communist regime and no one can argue that China is ruled by the people and laws. The CPC shows no sign of surrendering its powers at present. The Chinese government has suppressed democratic movement at home and challenged global democratic order abroad.63 John L. Thornton, Professor of public policy at Tsinghua University, has observed that the CPC “has a monopoly on political power, and the country lacks freedom of speech, an independent judiciary, and other fundamental attributes of a pluralistic liberal system.”64 When China makes foreign policy, the Chinese government also views that the CPC’s interest is the top priority. In July 2009 State Councilor Dai Bingguos points out at the China-U.S. Strategic and Economic Dialogue that it is important to defend “China’s core interest” in order to ensure a healthy and stable United States-China relationship. According to Dai, China’s number one core interest is to maintain its fundamental system and state security; next is state sovereignty and territorial integrity; and third is the continued stable development of the economy and society.65 What is the basic Chinese system? Obviously, that is the one-party system. It means that the one ruling party’s interest is superior to all. Many scholars and politicians have assumed that capitalism will inevitably lead to democracy, but it is not the case in China. While China shows its rising economic power, the government has continued to suppress a Chinese democratic movement. More than four dozen online dissidents were jailed and more than 2,500 Web sites were blocked in 2007.66 Some observed that “China is in the midst of what the Chinese call da ya, which literally means ‘beat and compress.’”67 Open consult and democratic system are the two foundations of market economy. But consult in China is only an empty slogan and political reform is actually dead. At the eve of the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 300 eminent Chinese scholars and politicians in October 2008 released Charter 08, calling for political reform and an end to the one-party system. Since Charter 08 was released, it has already obtained over 7,000 signatures from people of all levels of society, but the Chinese government regards it as a document that agitates the Chinese people to overthrow the government. The main author of Charter 08 Liu Xiaobo was arrested in July 2009. Many Chinese Universities require students to boycott Charter 08. The Beijing University Law

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School, acting in opposition to requests for a constitutional government, distributed a notice requiring students to resist, stay away from these actions, and reject any harmful information through various news media.68 Obviously, China is politically very fragile.69 Wealth and democracy are correlated; increased wealth makes the country closer to democracy. Chinese leaders face a troubling paradox: the more prosperous China becomes, the more insecure they feel. Susan L. Shirk notes that the CPC has actually “boxed themselves into a dangerous corner. They are their own worst enemy.”70 The greatest risks to China’s rise are more political than economic. That is why the CPC fears its own citizens when dealing with Western societies. If the CPC is not willing to accelerate the process of democratization, China’s domestic conflict could not only trigger serious social chaos, but could also threaten the existing global order. In this sense, China’s political reform will directly determine whether China is able to gradually resolve all other internal problems and whether China can keep its promise in making peace with the international society. From the viewpoint of Western societies, “the West needs a strong partnership with China, not just economically but politically and culturally.”71 Therefore, it is most important to resolve China’s domestic problems and soften domestic conflict by promoting China’s democratization in order to guarantee China’s peaceful rise in a global context.

Conclusion China is rising, but China’s changes are largely limited to the economic area. China’s transition is far away from the completion. China has been making progress but, at the same time, creating tons of problems. The stagnation of political problems is the central problem among all other social problems. A strong democratic China would benefit the majority of the Chinese people and contribute to the international peace. However, as an economic giant without the support of its democratic system, China could be a potential threat to the existing global order. Moreover, if the Chinese government ignores political reform, it could interrupt the growth of the Chinese economy, deepen social conflict, destroy social justice, and even bring China into chaos. If this occurred, a chaotic China would become a threat to the international society. Thus, promoting China’s democratization is the task for preventing China from becoming a threat to the international society.

Notes â•‡ 1.â•‡ “Leninist China Faces Its Capitalist Crisis,” Guardian, 17 August 2009.


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â•‡ 2.â•‡ Michael Wines and Edward Wong, “An Unsure China Steps Onto the Global Stage,” New York Times, 1 April 2009. â•‡ 3.â•‡ Jack A. Goldstone, “The Coming Chinese Collapse,” Foreign Policy 99 (Summer 1995): 43. â•‡ 4.â•‡ Gordon Chang, The Coming Collapse of China (New York: Random House, 2001), 91. â•‡ 5.â•‡ C. Fred Bergsten, Bates Gill, Nicholas R. Lardy, and Derek Mitchell. China, The Balance Sheet: What the World Needs to Know Now About the Emerging Superpower (New York: Public Affairs, 2006), 8. â•‡ 6.â•‡ See James Mann, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression (New York: Viking, 2007). â•‡ 7.â•‡ Peter Navarro, The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought, How They Can Be Won (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: FT Press, 2006). â•‡ 8.â•‡ Peter S. Goodman, “Too Fast in China? Stunning Growth May Have a Built-In Problem,” Washington Post, 26 January 2006. â•‡ 9.â•‡ “China crude oil imports grow 9.6 percent in 2008,” Market Watch, 13 January 2009. 10.â•‡ Lester R. Brown, “A New World Order,” Guardian, 25 January 2006. 11.â•‡ Jim Yardley, “China Announces More Pollution Controls,” New York Times, 1 August 2008. 12.â•‡ Associated Press, “China Risks Environmental Collapse,” Washington Post, 12 March 2006. 13.â•‡ Duncan Clark, “West Blamed for Rapid Increase in China’s Co2,” the Guardian, 23 February 2009. 14.â•‡ “Obama Makes Climate Change a National Priority,” America.gov. 27 January 2009, www.america.gov/st/energy-english/2009/January/20090127161856lcnirellep9 .743899e-02.html (22 August 2009) 15.â•‡ Tania Branigan, “China Pays High Environmental and Social Price for Reliance on Coal Pollution,” Guardian, 27 October 2008. 16.â•‡ Ian Katz, “Copenhagen Begins in Beijing,” Guardian, 16 September 2009. 17.â•‡ “Hu Jintao’s Speech on Climate Change,” New York Times, 22 September 2009. 18.â•‡ “China Announces Targets On Carbon Emission Cuts,” www.Chinaview.cn, 26 November 2009, www.xinhuanet.com/english/ (27 November 2009) 19.â•‡ Andrew Jacobs, “China Fears Tremors As Jobs Vanish From Coast,” New York Times, 22 February 2009. 20.â•‡ Quoted in Kent Ewing, “Resentment Builds Against China's Wealthy By Kent Ewing,” Asia Times, 1 March 2007, www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/ IC01Cb02.html (20 March 2008). 21.â•‡ Edward Cody, “Corruption Complaints Crash Chinese Web Site,” Washington Post, 19 December 2007. 22.â•‡ Joseph Kahn, “China to Drop Urbanite-Peasant Legal Differences,” New York Times, 3 November 2005. 23.â•‡ Cheng Li, Rediscovering China: Dynamics and Dilemmas of Reform (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1997), 156. 24.â•‡ Wu Bangguo, “Chinese Economy in the Twenty-first Century,” Presidents and Prime Ministers 9 (Jan. 2000): 23.

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25.â•‡ “China's Floating Population Tops 140 Million,” People’s Daily, 27 July 2006. 26.â•‡ Song Lina, “The Role of Women in Labor Migration: A Case Study in Northern China,” in Women of China: Economic and Social Transformation, eds. Jackie West, Zhao Minghua, Chang Xiangqun, and Cheng Yuan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 72. 27.â•‡ “China's Migrant Workers Called Upon to Shore Up Labor Shortages,” China Daily, 13 February 2006. 28.â•‡ Alice Xin Liu, “Charles Horner’s Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate,” 7 August 2009, www.danwei.org/china_books/charles_horners_rising_china_a.php (1 September 2009). 29.â•‡ Murray Scot Tanner, “China Rethinks Unrest,” Washington Quarterly 27, no. 3 (2004): 138. 30.â•‡ Thomas Lum, “Social Unrest in China,” Congressional Research Service—Library of Congress, CRS Report for Congress, 8 May 2006. 31.â•‡ Jim Yardley, “China Blocks U.S. Legislators Meeting,” New York Times, July 2, 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/world/asia/02beijing.html (15 August 2008). 32.â•‡ Tanner, “China Rethinks Unrest,” 137. 33.â•‡ Jane Macartney, “China Fears Year Of Conflict As Millions Struggle To Find Jobs,” Times Online, 7 January 2009. 34.â•‡ “The Medical Reform Controversy,” Beijing Review 48, no. 38 (September 2005). 35.â•‡ “China’s Punctured Health Care System,” BBC News, 8 June 2008. 36.â•‡ Michael Dobie, “Why China’s Health Care System Needs Fixing,” International Development Research Center, Ottawa, Canada, 2 February 2001. 37.â•‡ Penelope B. Prime, “China’s Economic progress: Is It Sustainable?” in China Briefing: The Contradictions of Change, ed. William Joseph (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1997); Charles Wolf, Jr., K. C. Yeh, Benjamin Zycher, Nicholas Eberstadt, Sung-Ho Lee, Fault Lines in China‘s Economic Terrai. (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand, 2003); Peter Navarro, The Coming China Wars; Social Science Academy of China: Blue Book of China, news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2006-12/26/content_5531627.htm (5 March 2007). 38.â•‡ Susan L. Shirk, China Fragile Superpower: How China’s Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6. 39.â•‡ See Tianjian Shi, Political Participation in Beijing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 40.â•‡ Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992), 34. 41.â•‡ Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 5. 42.â•‡ Ibid. 43.â•‡ Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 34. 44.â•‡ Michael Wines and Edward Wong, “An Unsure China Steps Onto the Global Stage,” New York Times, 1 April 2009. 45.â•‡ Arthur Waldron, “China's Roles in World Democracy” (Speech Delivered at the First Biennial Conference of the World Forum for Democratization in Asia, Taipei, Taiwan, Published on 17 October 2005), 16.


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46.â•‡ Tony Blair, “We Can Help China Embrace the Future,” Wall Street Journal, 26 August 2008. 47.â•‡ Xing Zhigang, “Plan unveiled to build harmonious society,” China Daily, 12 October 2006. 48.â•‡ “Party to focus on social harmony,” China Daily, 9 October 2006. 49.â•‡ Xing Zhigang, “Plan unveiled to build harmonious society,” China Daily, 12 October 2006. 50.â•‡ Andrew J. Nathan, Chinese Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1985), 225. 51.â•‡ See De Bary, The Liberal Tradition in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 21 and 43. According to William Theodore De Bary, “The thought of Chu Hsi [Zhu Xi] begins and ends with the aim of ‘learning for the sake of one’s self’ a phrase which recalls Confucius’s dictum in the Analects that learning should be for the sake of oneself and not for the pleasing of others. . . . When Western notions of liberalism and individualism reached East Asia in the nineteenth century, [they] emphasized the discrete or isolated individual. This contrasts with the Confucian personalism [that] conceived of the person as a member of the large human body, never abstracted from society, but always living in a dynamic relation to others, to a biological and historical continuum, and to the organic process of the Way. In fact the importance of individual autonomy or being able to follow one’s own inclination was not foreign to traditional ways of thinking, but there may indeed be a certain neo-Confucian predilection expressed in the choice of these terms to represent the nineteenth century.” 52.â•‡ William Theodore De Bary, Confucianism and Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 53.â•‡ Shiping Hua, “A Perfect World,” Wilson Quarterly (Autumn 2005): 63. 54.â•‡ Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro, The Coming Conflict with China (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 15–17. 55.â•‡ Trudy Kuehner, “Understanding China: A History Institute Report,” The Newsletter of RPRI’s Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education 12, no. 1 (March 2007). 56.â•‡ Hunt Terence, “Bush Urges China to Grant More Freedoms,” Washington Post, 16 November 2005. 57.â•‡ Chris Buckley, “China Think-Tank Issues Political Reform Blueprint,” China Post, 20 February 2008. 58.â•‡ Shaohua Hu, Explaining Chinese Democratization (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2000), 160. 59.â•‡ John L. Thornton, “Long Time Coming: The Prospects for Democracy in China,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2008. 60.â•‡ “China Maps Slow Path to Democracy,” Los Angeles Times, 17 March 2007. 61.â•‡ John O’Neil, “China's President Ends U.S. Visit With Yale Speech,” New York Times, 21 April 2006. 62.â•‡ “China Maps Slow Path to Democracy,” Los Angeles Times, 17 March 2007. 63.â•‡ Max Boot, “Project for a New Chinese Century,” Weekly Standard 11, no. 4 (10 October 2005). 64.â•‡ John L. Thornton, “Long Time Coming: The Prospects for Democracy in China,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2008. 65.â•‡ Dai Bingguo, “The Core Interests of the People’s Republic of China,” China Digital Time, 16 August 2009.

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66.â•‡ Michiko Kakutani, “Review of out of Mao’s Shadow,” New York Times, 15 July 2008. 67.â•‡ Malcolm Moore, “China Moves Into Beat and Compress Mode,” Daily Telegraph, 21 August 2009. 68.â•‡ “Peking University Law School Requires Students to Boycott Charter 08,” China Digital Times, chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/01/beijing-university-law-school -requires-students-to-boycott-the-charter-08/ (22 August 2009) 69.â•‡ Bergsten, Lardy, and Mitchell, China, The Balance Sheet: What the World Needs to Know Now About the Emerging Superpower, 76. 70.â•‡ Shirk, China Fragile Superpower, 28. 71.â•‡ Tony Blair, “We Can Help China Embrace the Future.”

3 Corruption and Social Instability

The symptom of lack of political change is the rampant corruption that may limit its ability to achieve its ambitious goal. Corruption is not confined to one particular place in the world and has existed in every country throughout history.1 Corruption is a serious social problem in the post-Mao era, but the topic of corruption remains sensitive in Mainland China.2 Abroad, Western scholars have not paid enough attention to the relationship between anticorruption and the building of a harmonious society. In China, only about forty-five articles on corruption were published in Chinese publications from 2003 to 2007 and most of these articles were not written by political scientists. This would indicate that corruption is not viewed as an important subject of Chinese political science. In these articles, the authors discussed some interesting issues and offered some suggestions for anticorruption but, they adopt Marxism as the guiding principle of their studies and insist that the leadership of the CPC is the precondition to win the battle of anticorruption.3 Objectively, it is difficult for scholars in mainland China to discuss the real causes of corruption due to the limitation of their theoretical framework. In the previous chapter it was made clear that the current Chinese political system is the central problem among all other problems and the Chinese government is unable to fundamentally resolve its massive problems within the current Chinese political system. This chapter attempts to examine the relationships between Chinese communist politics and corruption and social instability, and will argue that China’s corruption is directly derived from the current political system and, in turn, corruption seriously threatens the process of building a harmonious society. If the Chinese government could not effectively minimize corruption, foreign investors might drop 41

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their capital, the government could be paralyzed, Chinese market economy could not function normally, and the Chinese people might launch a massive demonstration movement, like the Tiananmen Square Incident of 1989, and, of course the result is deadly severe. The primary source of corruption is not the reform movement, but the current political system. Thus, political reform, along with changing the cultural value standard, is the key to the battle for anticorruption. The following questions will also be addressed: What is the real cause of corruption behind the reform movement? How can it happen that Chinese officials conduct corrupt activities without check? Why has corruption been allowed to run rampant in the post-Mao era? Can the Chinese government win the battle of anticorruption within the current political system? In the contemporary Chinese context, financial bribery and sex bribery are the two basic forms of corruption. The focus of this chapter will be on the discussion of financial bribery.

Corruption Threatens China’s Social Stability Corruption was not a serious issue under Mao’s regime, but it has permeated every sphere of society in the post-Mao era, including politics, business, personal relationships, and education.4 According to the annual survey of the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index published by the Berlin-based organization Transparency International, China received 3.6 points in 2008.5 A score of 5.0 is the number Transparency International considers as the borderline figure that distinguishes countries that do or do not have a serious corruption problem. China’s corruption has crossed the borderline and become one of the most corrupt countries in Asia. In comparison to Western societies, the Chinese people are more tolerant of some forms of corruption. Chinese government employees can “divert public funds for personal use for limited time”6 and take bribes for turning a blind eye to illegal activities going on in their area of jurisdiction. It has become popular for local Chinese governments to use public funds to build apartments for employees and give themselves bonuses. For example, Chinese official auditors found that China’s General Administration of Sports kept an Olympic fund of $15.8 million to make loans or build houses for staff members.7 Chinese auditors have also uncovered $35 billion dollars of funds illegally spent by government offices in the first eleven months of 2005.8 Some Chinese officials accumulate wealth through embezzlement and trade their power in different kinds of businesses for personal gain. When investigators searched the house of the Mayor of Shenyang, they found six million yuan worth of gold bars, 150 Rolex watches, and many antiques.9

Corruption and Social Instability

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In present-day China, money can buy power which can be converted into money. Power lubricates business, through changing registration (hukou), processing law suits, leasing land, obtaining loans, getting promotions, promoting the stock market, reducing taxes, and winning public bids to get contracts. The level of corruption is in direct proportion to the expense of enterprise in dealing with officials. When enterprises spend more money to deal with government officials, it signifies that the government is more corrupt. The terminology guandao is well-known to the Chinese people; it refers to all government officials who run businesses by using their power to conduct business, thus making unlawful profits.10 Zengke He observes that “Officials engaged in speculation (“Guan Dao” and “Guan Shang”) emerged the newest new rich becoming one of the major objects of public indignation in the 1989 anticorruption demonstration.”11 Corruption is also visible in the judiciary area, including embezzlement and bribery, abuse of fair procedures, and misuse of power for personal gains. According to a Chinese official report, in 2003, 1.05 million Chinese people were addicted to drugs. The Chinese police department established drug rehabilitation centers and charged patients 6,000 yuan for every three months. Some of the rehabilitation centers actually did not provide treatments although they charged the patients anyway. Money can facilitate the process of prosecution, reduce sentences, and buy special services in jail, such as special rooms, care, and sex. About 470 judges were punished for corruption in 2004 and about 218 judges were prosecuted in 2007.12 In short, corruption has become a way of life for officials, especially at the local level.13 In 1985, the Supreme People’s Court described corruption as activities conducted by government officials who “use their position to acquire public property by misappropriation, embezzlement, theft, fraud, or other illegal methods.”14 Corruption refers to the misuse of their power by public officials for private gain, thus deviating from the public good.15 Yan Yiming points out that corrupt activities aim to gain private profits by using public power.16 The Berlin-based organization Transparency International defines corruption as “the abuse of public office for private gain, and measures the degree to which corruption is perceived to exist among a country’s public officials and politicians.”17 Samuel P. Huntington notes that “Corruption is behavior of public officials which deviates from accepted norms in order to serve private ends.”18 These statements imply that corruption “only involves the behavior of an official in his or her public role.”19 If an official fights with a lover or abuses a child, it can be considered as wrong doing but not corruption.20 When public officials misuse their power for private gain, they are certainly in violation of the legal codes which regulate public officials. Corruption is illegal conduct and subject to criminal punishment. According to the Criminal Laws of China, crimes were divided into eight categories related to politics: public security, socialist economic order, individual

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rights, property, social order, marriage and family, and dereliction of duties.21 If the criminal law is applied to corrupt activities, corruption is an economic crime. Chinese officials hold power, make laws and policies, and run businesses, institutions, organizations, and governments, so that they are able to serve the people to make society better. However, they can also easily hurt public interests if they desire. The consequence of massive corruption in China is grave, undermining the government’s legitimacy, causing the government’s inefficiency, restricting the development of economy, disturbing market order, widening the disparity between the poor and the rich, and creating serious social discrepancy and conflict. Therefore, corruption has become a real threat to the social stability of Chinese society. Corruption undermines the legitimacy of the party/state by reducing public trust.22 Legitimacy is the necessary precondition for every government to maintain social stability and the authority of the government. A legitimate government should represent the majority of the people, but corrupt activities result in losing the credibility and accountability of the CPC. The CPC has been confronting many crises, but corruption and organized crime are the two serious challenges to the CPC. In the post-Mao era, the two separated challenges have emerged into one—group-oriented corruption activities. The organized corruption is not for individual gain; rather members of a group share information, risk, and mutual benefits in order to “enhance organizational performance and efficiency for the benefit of the organization’s employees.”23 Illegal factories are protected by local governments; gambling and prostitution are protected by police and the tax bureau; and smuggling is aided by police and customs. According to Min Xia, “Chinese organized crime groups have become active in controlling the black markets of illicit goods (drugs, prostitution, smuggling goods, human smuggling, etc.), infiltrating the state (especially the local states) and seeking global alliances with transnational organized crime syndicates.”24 Corruption directly contributes to the instability of Chinese society and delays the process of China’s democratization by eroding the people’s trust, shrinking civil society, reducing the effective domain of public participation, and creating inefficiencies in deliveries of public services.25 Corruption significantly contributes to the wider social unrest and makes the social and political balance in the country more fragile.26 Chinese official corruption was one of the main grievances of the Tiananmen Square Incident of 1989. It should be noted that much of the Chinese corruption has become the principal affliction leading to social upheaval.27 China’s social unrest reflects side effects worsened by local corruption. Many peasant riots in the past several years, according to Edward Cody, were triggered by anger over land confiscation in which, “country officials took money from business developers in return for favorable deals.”28 Corruption among the Chinese govern-


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ment and party officials is a major reason for dissatisfaction among the 1.3 billion Chinese people during the transition from socialism to a market economy.29 Albert Keidel suggests that “efforts to combat corruption coupled with further reforms to strengthen dispute resolution tools could mitigate social unrest.” The CPC publicly has acknowledged that the government corruption “seriously damages the Party’s flesh-and-blood bond with the people and seriously affects the solidity of the Party’s ruling status.”30 The CPC cannot survive without the triumph of anticorruption.31 Sun Liping, Chinese professor at Qing Hua University, argues that the most serious threat to China society is not social unrest but social collapse. Social unrest means serious social conflicts that will threaten the basic framework of a regime and political system, but social collapse means that the cells of a society is dead and lost its function.32 The signs of social collapse have been appearing in China. The most serious problem is that government corruption is totally out of control, spreading to every sphere of Chinese society: the hidden rules have become a common phenomenon; the bottom line of moral behavior has disappeared; a group of special interests has emerged; and the systematic falsification of statistic data indicates that the entire information system of Chinese society has fundamentally distorted. Corruption obstructs the development of Chinese economy. There is a close relationship between corruption and inefficiency. The more corrupt the government is, the less efficient the government is. Some Chinese officials concentrate on their personal profits instead of serving the people. As a result, corrupt activities undermine rational economic choices, hurt people’s confidence in the market economy and the already banking system, and increase unemployment rates. Corrupt activities also slow down the implementation of the open door policy and interrupt the process of attracting foreign investment. A recent study shows that outsiders investing in China, as compared with an uncorrupt country, would spend an additional 20 percent (private) tax on their investment.33 According to Shangjin Wei’s investigation, corruption significantly reduces inward foreign direct investment.34 Meanwhile, the corrupt social environment has also influenced foreign investors and driven international companies to follow Chinese hidden rules. Foreign companies have realized that you have to offer a bribe if you want to make your business happen and that you can make great profits if you follow the hidden rules to deal with Chinese officials. In order to secure a huge real estate deal in Shanghai, Morgan Stanley, offered cash and gifts to Chinese officials. This violated the United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars American business people from bribing foreign officials.35 According to the U.S. Justice Department in August 2009, United States-based valve manufacturers, Control Components Inc. (CCI), was in-

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volved in a bribery case. From 2003 through 2007, the CCI paid approximately $4.9 million in bribes to officials of various foreign State-owned companies and approximately $1.95 million in bribes to officers and employees of foreign companies.36 China National Offshore Oil Corp, along with eight other Chinese firms, accepted bribes from the CCI.37 Corrupt activities have eaten away at the achievement of economic growth. Corrupt officials bribe public money. According to Professor Wang Zhen at Beijing University, every year about 600 billion yuan flowed to gambling places in Hong Kong, Macao, Vietnam, and Russia. About 30 percent of this amount of money comes from corrupt officials, eventually from people’s tax dollars. The former Mayor of Shen Yan City, Ma Xiandong, went to Hong Kong and Macao for gambling more than ten times between 1998 and 1999 and lost more than 4 million yuan. Former Director of Transportation Bureau of Ji Ling Province, Cai Haowen, went abroad for gambling and lost more than 3 million yuan. Research conducted by Fawan Newspaper in 2008 found that Chinese officials’ appetite for money had grown three times more than in 2007. Before the reform movement, a 10,000 yuan bribery case was the biggest and deserved the death penalty. In the post-Mao period, a billion yuan bribery case is no longer strange to the Chinese people. The average bribe in 2008 was 8.84 million yuan, more than three times the 2.53 million yuan amount in 2007.38 According to CNN, New Jersey, Mayor Peter Cammarano III resigned and was arrested in July 2009 in a corruption scandal because he was accused with taking about $25,000 in bribes from a government witness posing as a real estate developer. When this breaking news posted on the website cnn.politics.com, the massive number of Chinese netizens laughed at this news mocking in this way: this amount of money is not enough for corrupt Chinese officials to eat a meal. Tax fraud is the most common form of corruption in China. One common way is through the forging of export certificates. By using these fake export certificates, one can receive lucrative tax returns. Some experts estimate that these tax returns could total some 4.4 billion yuan per year. Tax fraud not only takes money from the government, but it also noticeably affects China’s economy by increasing its export figures and changing the balance of trade. By 2003, fifty-five Chinese hotels at the national and provincial levels had a deficit of 12.4 billion yuan, because many high officials only paid half price for full service or even receiving free service. In 2003, the Chinese prosecution bureau oversaw some 335 corruption cases and 79 of which were cases involving over one million yuan.39 Between 2003 and 2008, Chinese courts convicted more than 120,000 officials on corruption charges, an increase of 12 percent over the preceding five year period.40 According to the Chinese official newspaper China Daily, in the past three decades, more than 4,000 corrupt Chinese officials fled from China to for-


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eign countries, carrying more than 50 billion U.S. dollars.41 Most of them fled to the United States, Canada, and European countries. Although the Chinese government has recently announced that the Chinese government approved the first extradition treaty with Spain in 29 April 2006, there is no extradition treaty between China and major developed countries. Thus, some developed countries have become a safe harbor for Chinese corrupt officials. According to Xinhua News Agency, China wants extradition treaties with the West and has called on Western governments to put aside fears about the death penalty and sign extradition treaties, but it takes time to complete the process.42 It is estimated that from 1989 to 1999 the number of corrupt Chinese officials increased by 1 percent. Correspondingly, the economic damage in terms of GDP increased 0.97 percent. During that period of time, China lost anywhere between 223.3 and 1,271 billion yuan.43 According to Hu Angang, a prominent Chinese economist and Director and Professor of the Center for China Study, over the late 1990s the cumulative annual cost of corruption was between 13.3 percent and 16.9 percent of GDP and is still around that level today. Chinese corruption, including bribery, smuggling, tax fraud, and embezzlement, has cost about 98.8 billion yuan every year over the past two decades, making up between 13.2 percent and 16.8 percent of China’s total GDP.44 In addition, in 2004, 2.5 billion yuan of public funds was misused by party officials. 45 Another 1.46 billion yuan was used to buy commercial insurance for staffers.46 According to a Chinese official report, “Chinese auditors have uncovered $35 billion of funds illegally spent by government offices in the first 11 months of 2005.”47 Therefore, as Chengze Simon Fan and Herschel Crossman note, corruption has become a barrier to China’s economic progress and social stability.48 Corruption has destroyed the CPC’s credibility. According to a survey conducted by a Chinese official magazine Xiao Kang, the CPC is losing its credibility. About 90 percent participants of the survey believe China’s prostitutes are better trusted than Chinese politicians, just next to farmers and religious workers.49 More than 91 percent of respondents said they no longer believe government statistics, because such data is “all or mostly fabricated.” By comparison, in the 2007 survey, only 79 percent of the respondents said they do not trust government statistics. The sharp decline indicates a “significant drain” of government credibility.50 It is not strange for the Chinese people to trust peasants and religious workers, because religious workers are sincere, and peasants are less sophisticated and their behaviors are more honest than urban residents. However, it is the first time for prostitutes to receive such an honor. The poll result is obviously shocking because prostitutes are illegal in China and they were viewed as being shameless without affections for a thousand years in Chinese history. The fact that the Chinese people would rather trust prostitutes than Chinese of-

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ficials indicates that the CPC, as ruling party, has already lost its credibility putting the legitimacy of the Chinese government in question. The Chinese people are crying out “where are honest officials?” Six elderly people from Dong Nan village in Shangdong province were very disappointed after finding out that that the head of the village embezzled 50 million yuan from the village’s public property. They felt helpless and in August 5, 2009 they posted an announcement of searching for honest and upright officials by offering five million yuan. Although six elderly villagers could not afford five million yuan, they wanted to make a clear statement that the local officials were not honest and upright officials and they do not represent the interests of common villagers. A Hong Kong based Political and Economic Risk Consulting Company, published a report about seventeen country’s corruption situation, indicating that public confidence in the Chinese government dropped considerably in 2009. Nearly half of the respondents said that individuals, business firms, and the government are all losing their credibility. Will China’s rampant corruption end the rule of the CPC? The consequences of China’s corruption could be grave.51 According to some American scholars, “although the party’s inability to control corruption has undoubtedly damaged its reputation, the problem does not yet pose an imminent threat to its ruling status.”52 If we take a look at the collapse of every dynasty in imperial Chinese history from the initial Shang Dynasty to the final Qing Dynasty, we find that every dynasty’s collapse was accompanied by government corruption, although every dynasty made different failures in addition to their corruption. The Revolution of 1911 benefited from the Qing government’s corruption but, unfortunately, the nationalist government could not avoid the same mistake. Jiang Jieshi, the top leader of the nationalist party and government, was not accused of corruption, but he did nothing to prevent it. This is one of the most important reasons why the nationalist government lost popular support from the Chinese people, and the Chinese people finally turned to socialism and supported the CPC to drive the nationalist government out of mainland China. During the first twenty-six years of the CPC’s reign, the CPC remembered these historical lessons, trying to prevent government corruption. The party members and government officials disciplined themselves very much during that period of time, so the corruption rate was relatively very low. Corruption has become epidemic and systematic during the post-Mao era. The former president of China, Jiang Zemin, publicly acknowledged that corruption in the CPC is very serious. According to Jiang, “If we do not crack down on corruption, the flesh-and-blood ties between the party and the people will suffer a lot and the party will be in danger of losing its ruling position, or possibly heading for self-destruction.” President Hu Jintao warned that corruption threatened to undermine its hold on power and


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fighting against corruption is the key to maintaining the “advanced nature” of the CPC and its survival.53 In 2008, China’s vice president Zeng Qinghong warned the 70 million members of the ruling communist party that the painful lessons from the collapse of other communist parties in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe could not be ignored and China’s officials must realize that the party’s status as a party in power does not necessarily last as long as the party does.54

The Reform Movement is not the Primary Source of Corruption Every legitimate government should take responsibility to campaign against corruption. According to Tsao King Kwun, “No political regime can tolerate that level of corruption so they have to be serious.”55 The CPC has clearly seen that corruption threatens the party’s ability to stay in power.56 The top leader of China warned that corruption undermined its hold on power and urged the government to remove the soil that generates corruption.57 But, what are the effective measures that can control corruption? Since corrupt activities are conducted by officials, the question should be turned into this one: what are the most effective measures to prevent officials from becoming corrupt officials? Anticorruption battles under the Mao regime basically relied on the mass movement, political education, and party and administrative disciplinary measures. Since China launched the reform movement, the central government has tried to minimize corruption in order to restore the reputation of the government, but achievement of anticorruption is little. Many scholars feel that the measures of anticorruption are not adequate to clean up the government’s mess, and the majority of the Chinese people feel hopeless in trying to institute anticorruption methods.58 Chinese scholars have examined the causes of corruption and offered constructive suggestions for anticorruption, including developing independent judiciary systems and supervisory systems, perfecting the legal system, increasing government employees’ salaries, cultivating people’s moral standards, deepening the reform movement, promoting citizen participation, introducing a competition mechanism into the hiring process to improve the quality of government officials, and increasing corruption costs.59 Zhu Houlun emphasizes three important measures: develop education, establish an anticorruption system, and expand supervisory roles.60 However, their analyses are guided by Marxism and unable to go beyond their limits under the party censorship. Corruption exists in all societies, but why is corruption more common in some societies than in others and more common at some times in the evolution of a society than at other times?61 Under what conditions does cor-

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ruption thrive? Why has corruption become so rampant in the post-Mao era? The solution of anticorruption in different countries must be different, because the roots of corruption in different countries are different. Marxists believe that the roots of corruption are the exploitative structures of the capitalist system, thus, corruption would disappear in socialist societies. If corruption is found in socialist societies, Li Cuping notes, “it must be a residue of the feudal past or a by-product of the polluting influence of the West.”62 On the other hand, according to Marxism, economy is the base of a society. Some Chinese scholars argue that the deep roots of corruption derive from the economic system, although corruption is a political phenomenon.63 The source of corruption is neither from the CPC nor from the communist political system, but from the reformed economic system in the post-Mao era. They suggest that corruption may be more prevalent during the transition of modernization.64 The collapse of the former Soviet Union triggered the waves of reform movement worldwide in the 1990s. Since then, market liberalization and privatization have significantly increased corruption.65 The poor economic condition only provides few accessible targets for corruption, but the reform movement creates many more opportunities and the sources of wealth and power for corruption. When a country buys modernization at the price of the decay of political institutions, corruption “becomes an alternative means of making demands upon the system.”66 Professor Wu Jinglian points out that it is the reform movement which creates an interest group and, in fact, this group hurts real reform.67 Before the reform movement, China had a low level of production and, accordingly, a lower incidence of corruption.68 In 1951, People’s Daily reported 1,670 cases of corruption in twenty-seven central government bodies.69 At that time, the Chinese government implemented a very harsh policy. Whoever earned bribes over ten thousand yuan (about $1,250) would be sentenced to death. The economic crime rate was 30 per 100,000 in 1956. The level of corruption remained low in the 1960s and early 1970s, with the corruption rate on average about 50 per 100,000 in early 1970s.70 Michael Johnston and Yufan Hao point out that corruption in the Mao regime was discreet and was nonmonetary in nature,71 but corruption in the post Mao era has been becoming “more socially and politically disintegrative forms.”72 According to Julia Kwong, “The pre-1976 society had fewer cases of corruption involving less money and fewer people than did the post-1976 society.”73 The characteristic of the pre-reform corruption was power-oriented, aiming at obtaining or protecting political and bureaucratic advantage. In addition, corruption before 1979 was generally limited to “senior officials and their relatives.”74 Since the Chinese government implemented their reform policy, corruption has spread into every corner of society, even becoming “more wide-


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spread than during the Guomindang period.”75 Some Western observers have also noticed that corruption has grown hand in hand with the reform movement.76 Why does the reform movement contribute to corruption? The reform movement has introduced the market mechanism into Chinese economy. However, the function of market mechanism promotes people to make maximum profits through the market competition. On the one hand, the market economy generates the great incentive of Chinese economic growth; on the other hand, the market economy creates some loopholes for corruption and stimulates an individual’s desire to make money by illegal means. During the transition period, Chinese market economy remains irrational and has a lack of basic rules and regulations for competition, thus providing officials with new opportunities to cheat. Unlike Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, Hilton Root notes, the Chinese government “has failed to draw the distinction between the private and public roles of officials.”77 Chinese officials have access to a great amount of government capital. The market competition within the framework of socialist system does not necessarily follow the market’s own rule, because the competition is on a large scale interrupted by the planned economy system. Under this circumstance, the party power is not outside the market because the Chinese market economy is not a typical market economy, but party corporatism, in which the party still follows the Marxist dictum of being the monopoly political driver and controller of the economy and society. Businessmen seek government official help in order to make maximum profits; the government officials can trade their power in exchange for profits. Whoever has power can use market resources and make profits. To be sure, all the Chinese people try to become rich in the reform era, but Chinese officials find it easier to be able to make money by using their power. Many Chinese officials simply choose the easiest but most profitable way to become rich. This is why the cases of corruption in coastal areas are much more than that of in inland areas. Chinese officials earn low wages. An individual is more likely to commit a corrupt activity, if he/she is paid a low salary. During the reform era, since they can spend less but gain more profits through corruption, some honest officials could be “tempted to go beyond the law to preserve their standard of living.”78 If government employees are paid higher wages, they would not take the risk of losing their jobs to commit crimes of corruption. Some scholars have found that corruption in China “has worked in much the same way as methods of compensation used in Western economies.”79 They argue that the market-oriented reform movement increased both opportunities and incentives for corruption, and contributes to the epidemic of corruption among local government officials. The cases of corruption have increased during the reform era, but it does not necessarily suggest that the reform movement is the primary source of

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corruption. As a matter of fact, it is an unavoidable stage for corruption to exist because of the lacking coordination between the economic reform movement and the political reform during the period of economic boom generated by the market-oriented reform movement. The most corrupt period of time in England was the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century in the United States, because the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the periods of industrialization and modernization in these countries. While acknowledging that it is normal to have various problems during the transition of economic structure, it is necessary to fix the loopholes in order to control corruption. Indeed, the way to fix loopholes is not to stop the reform movement, but to deepen the reform movement, especially by developing a market control system, thus blocking the way for Chinese officials to exchange their power for profits, separating the party from the government and market economy, establishing a modern enterprise system to control enterprise’s corruption, and changing the Chinese political system. In short, the problems of the reform movement should be resolved through the process of both the economic reform and political reform.

Political Reform and the Anticorruption Battle Some Chinese scholars believe that politics is the central reflection of its economic system based on Marxism, so the deepest roots of corruption derive from the economic system.80 Wang Chuanli, a professor at Qinghua University, argues that corruption has nothing to do with the political system.81 Apparently, corruption is a social syndrome.82 This means that it is not a single factor, but various factors, including the level of a nation’s economy, the way income is distributed, the government’s role in the economy, the level of freedom, the gender culture, and the social order, which contributes to the development of corruption.83 Three conditions— opportunity, motivation, and dysfunctional supervisory and checking systems—are important for officials to conduct corrupt activities. The reform movement has created the opportunities for corruption and generated the strong motivation for officials to abuse power but, essentially, the private ownership system does not breed corruption. To the contrary, Daniel Kaufmann notes, “privatization transactions have been less corrupt than others.”84 Thus, the question is how to make the motivation true? In other words, what kind of social and political systems make officials able to fulfill their greedy desires?85 The economic perspective cannot provide a satisfactory answer for these questions. Corruption is a political phenomenon. The subject of every form of corruption is the officials, including officials in governments, enterprises, and different kinds of institutions. Where there is power, there is corrup-


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tion. When individuals have more power, they find it easier to conduct corrupt activities. Absolute power often results in absolute corruption. Although every case of corruption is different, the nature of corruption is the corruption of power. In this sense, corruption in China essentially is the crisis of the current political system. The anticorruption campaigns have never touched the origin of government corruption—the Chinese political system. The government’s anticorruption campaign is only a showcase which can be described as “killing a chicken to frighten monkeys.” First, the highly centralized political system creates corrupt officials. JeanJacques Rousseau, one of the most influential thinkers during the Enlightenment in eighteenth century Europe, believed that it is not corrupt men who destroy the political system, but the political system which corrupts men.86 Since corruption has persistently been growing, it indicates that the Chinese government “has deficient legal and supervisory mechanisms to control corruption.”87 Corruption is deeply rooted in hierarchical social and political systems,88 in which the individuals are relatively weak.89 In other words, a less individualistic society usually has the higher level of corruption.90 Power without check tends to corrupt; and “corruption of kingship is tyranny.”91 Carl J. Friedrich has observed that it was very popular that offices could be bought and sold under absolutism. Corruption is of the broader unspecific kind in totalitarian regimes.92 During the Republican era under the Jiang Jieshi’s rule, corruption occurred on a wide scale. Public offices were openly bought and sold for clearly marked prices. For example, according to Lucien Bianco, “three thousand yuan would buy the office of a district magistrate in Jiangxi for three months between 1930 and 1933.”93 This corruption undermined the effectiveness of the Guomindang and contributed to its demise. A similar scenario occurred in the post-Mao era. Why is the corruption in the post-Mao era similar to the Republican era? The answer is that Chinese officers in both the Republican and present day China are not elected by the people but appointed by the ruling party. To be sure, corruption in the post-Mao era is even worse than the Republican era. The current Chinese political system is a highly centralized structure in which the CPC’s power is monopolized at both the national and the grassroots levels. This highly centralized political system easily produces corruption. The most corrupt industrial areas in China are electric power, tobacco, banking and financial services, and the infrastructure, because these industries are monopolized by the CPC/state. Usually, in these areas, a big contract is worth more than 10 million yuan, so businessmen can make huge profits if they can get such a contract. In order to get such a contract, some businessmen do whatever they can, including bribing those who are in charge of the contract. According to a survey, in order to get the contract, a contractor’s bribe is usually anywhere between 10 percent and 20 percent of the total project budget.

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Important posts of government officials in China are appointed by the CPC. This hiring system does not only make it easy for higher level officials to establish a network to conduct corrupt activities, but also unavoidably attracts Chinese officials of low quality. In the period between 1987 and 1992, the number of officials under investigation at provincial and ministerial level reached 110.94 By 2001, there were about 2,000 Chinese officials at provincial level in China, but only about 20 of them were arrested in 2001, making up about 2 percent of the total Chinese officials at provincial level. Altogether there were 20,120 convicted cases, including five at provincial level, eighty-nine at city level, and 419 at county level. More than 60 percent of corrupt Chinese officials are young people between 30–42 years old and about 30 percent of the corrupt Chinese officials in these cases were under the age of 35. These young Chinese officials lack social experience and moral standards, but they have power, information, and resources. When they hold power and cannot resist temptation, they fail.95 According to the official Chinese report, the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection disciplined 164,831 party cadres, including fifteen at the ministerial level in 2004, transferred 4,775 serious offenders to the judiciary departments,96 and uncovered more than $300 million yuan in misused public funds.97 In 2005, the Commission disciplined more than 115,000 members for corruption, turned more than 15,000 of them over to the courts for prosecution, and expelled 24,000 party members out of 68 million members.98 In 2008, the Commission at different levels carried out investigations into 128,516 cases and closed 127,949 of them, punishing 133,951, and transferring 4,518 to prosecutors for criminal investigation.99 Hu Angang, economist at Qinghua University, has reached the conclusion that 90 percent of Chinese officials of local governments are corrupt.100 Second, Chinese officials have a lot of power over the people. Although China has begun a process of separation of the party from the government and market, the party/government officials have interfered with the market economy and commercial business. Following traditional Chinese ethical rules, Chinese officials can become fumu guan (parent officials) to treat their children well but, under the current political system, they can also easily misuse their power pursuing their self-interests.101 As long as the officials have the right to interfere in economic activities, officials’ power still has market value and they can trade their power for personal gains.102 Among the fifty top corrupt officials between 1990 and 2004, Yu Zhengdong was on the top of the list whose bribery totaled 4 billion yuan. The last one of the list was Wu Genyue whose bribery totaled 6 million yuan.103 It should be noted that money also speaks loudly. Rich people have penetrated into governments, trying to control politicians and direct the development of economy. Government officials become their puppets, laws and govern-


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ment regulations become their instruments for serving their interests, and mass media become their voice to propaganda. The CPC has become the largest and the most corrupt organizational machine that the absolute power combines with and the absolute corrupt machine produces countless corruption cases. The most serious corruption cases in China directly come from this machine. Corruption has become part of the Chinese political system’s DNA and the legacy of the CPC. Many high level Chinese officials had been imprisoned for corruption, including the party secretary and mayor of Beijing, Chen Xitong, a member of the Politburo. Cheng Kejie, former vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress was executed for taking bribes. In 2006, a top naval officer, Wang Shouye, was fired for seeking bribes and maintaining a mistress. A vice governor of the eastern province of Anhui was detained recently in a bribery investigation. Liu Zhihua, a vice mayor of Beijing and the top official overseeing China’s proportion for the 2008 Olympics, was also fired in June 2006 for corruption and licentiousness. Chen Liangyu, the most powerful party head of Shanghai, one of twenty-four members of the politburo of the CPC, was sentenced to eighteen years in prison in 2008. Chen was accused of helping to siphon hundreds of millions of dollars from the city’s pension fund, and also of enriching himself and relatives through shady financial and real estate deals.104 Chen is the highest-ranking official to have been punished for corruption in more than a decade.105 Most recently in 2008 and 2009, five corrupt Chinese officials at vice ministry level were arrested, including Xu Zhongheng (Mayor of Shenzhen), Wang Huayuan (the Director of Commission for Discipline Inspection of Communist Party of Zhejiang), Chen Shaoji (Chairman of Political Consultative Committee of Guangdong Province), Deng Shaodong (Assistant to Minister of China Police Department), and Huang Songyou (the Vice President of the Supreme People’s Court). In 2009, Liu Zhihua, a former vice mayor of Beijing, who oversaw construction projects for Olympic Games, was stripped from his post and has been given a suspended death sentence for a corruption case that involved bribery and lavish living. Li Peiying, the former head of state-owned Beijing airport, was convicted of bribery and embezzlement involving more than $14.6 million and executed in August 2009.106 According to Chinese official newspaper, more than 880,000 officials were punished for misconduct between July 2003 and December 2009.107 Apparently, in order to minimize official corruption in China, the first and the foremost thing to do for the CPC is to clean up the house of the CPC. Third, the current monitoring system does not work well. Unlike democratic societies, the CPC does not allow an independent anticorruption agent to exist. In China, anticorruption agencies are neither independent nor free from political influence. There are three organizations which are

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responsible for supervision, including the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the CPC, the Government Supervisory Committee, and the Prosecution Bureau. All these three institutions have played roles in anti-corruption but they are under the leadership of the CPC. In fact, these institutions lack authority because they have to obey the party’s instructions instead of being able to conduct independent investigations and prosecutions.108 The CPC’s authority is too powerful and, by contrast, the supervisory institutions are too weak. In practice, whether or not one is punished depends on who you are. The CPC often replaces legal code with the party policy, replaces judiciary power with party power, and replaces legal punishment with party discipline.109 Some scholars observe that it is a very common practice of wining and dining investigation teams and false reporting to curry superiors’ favors.110 Chinese officials can even “short-circuit corruption investigations by appealing to their protectors in the party hierarchy.”111 Although the CPC will soon have to declare all assets and investments, as well as details on their family, as part of anti-graft measures to curb corruption, it is only the first step toward political reform.112 Fourth, an unchecked party system also makes the Chinese legal system dysfunctional. Law is one of the most important forms of a social control system to safeguard the interests of the dominant group. The Chinese government paid attention to the leading officials’ corrupt activities, but gave little attention to the anticorruption regulations.113 The government relies on unwritten laws. Under the Mao regime, China had a lack of written regulations on corruption among the administrative ranks.114 In the postMao era, China still lacks clear legal and commercial codes to regulate market activities and to make distinctions between criminal and lawful activities.115 Although the Chinese government has made some good regulations curbing corruption during the reform movement, it does not necessarily mean that the government has enforced Chinese officials to follow the regulation. For example, the Chinese government promulgated the “Regulations on Reporting Major Personal Matters by Leading Officials” on 31 January 1997. In the past ten years, however, local Chinese governments just simply ignored the so-called “Sunshine” policy. Under this circumstance, the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee again called for stricter internal supervision within the Party by implementing the decadeold regulation in August 2006. Based on this regulation, all leading Chinese officials are required to “provide details of their personal affairs, including listing their investments, changes in their marital status and whether their children marry foreigners.116 Under this unchecked one-party system, it is difficult for the Chinese justice system to function well. Judges do not have the power to rule independently in China. If the CPC is unable to influence a judge’s decision, the


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CPC has the right to dismiss the judge or change policy to change the legal process. It is impossible to exercise independent judiciary power, if the CPC leads everything. Chinese courts and judges make their decisions either instructed by the CPC or based on their personal interests instead of laws. Many judges abuse the laws and have become corrupt judges. In 2003 and 2004, the presidents of the provincial high courts of Guangdong and Hunan were both found guilty of corruption. Moreover, there is a big gap between law and legal practice. Officials are normally only prosecuted for corruption in cases involving more than 2,000 yuan ($240). An ordinary citizen could be jailed for stealing public property worth considerably less.117 According to the Criminal Law of China, bribery exceeding 100,000 yuan (U.S. $14,925) is a capital offence. But, in reality, the death penalty has not been imposed on some senior party officials who have been found guilty of accepting bribes exceeding this amount. For example, Chen Xitong, mayor of Beijing, was only sentenced to 16 years in prison for taking bribes of 555,000 yuan and using 3.5 million public funds for personal purposes. Hilton Root points out that “Chen’s sentence is lenient as more junior party cadres have been given life imprisonment or the death penalty for corruption involving smaller sums.”118 Hu Angang and Guo Yong estimate that 10–20 percent of corruption cases are solved but only 6.6 percent of party officials who are disciplined for corruption receive any criminal punishment.119 Why are so many people willing to take the risk of being caught in the post-Mao era? On the one hand, the potential profits must be great enough to drive officials to test laws. On the other hand, the individuals must feel that they are unlikely to be caught and/or not severely punished even if they are caught. Under the current political system, the costs for corrupt activities are much less than gain. The chance for corrupt activities to be revealed is rare. According to Tian Jun’s investigation, only about 10–20 percent of corrupt cases are publicized. The rest of the corrupt officials, about 80 percent, remain in power and continue to conduct their criminal activities.120 The government cannot get the bribes back even when corrupt officials are brought to justice. If they got caught, the money they earned can be used by their family for several generations.121 Thus, corrupt officials clearly see that “the costs are relatively low compared to the benefits.”122 An article published by Jiancha Ribao (Prosecutor Daily) on 26 July 2006 publicly criticized that some local courts made wrong verdicts putting some corrupt officials on probation instead of imprisonment. The probationary sentence rate for corrupt officials soared from 52.6 percent in 2001 to 82.83 percent in 2005. For example, ninety-four corrupt officials in Jiangxi province in 2004, who had been bribed with more than 50 thousand yuan, were sentenced to probation. After viewing the cases, at least thirty among them should have been put in jail.123

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Finally, the centralized political system also results in an inadequate information system. The cases of government corruption are often covered by the CPC. According to The Christian Science Monitor, senior official’s cases were mainly exposed by other case investigation. Among the thirty-nine researchable cases, nineteen cases were exposed by other case involvement, accounting for 80.6 percent, and five cases exposed by informant reports, while one case was discovered through confession, with the remaining case detected by suspicion. This shows that supervision of senior officials was weak, either by the CPC or by the public.124 Although the Constitution of China provides the Chinese people with the freedom of speech and press, practically speaking, the Chinese people, including journalists and correspondents, are not allowed to freely publish articles which criticize the government’s corruption. Root points out that “inadequate information about the creditworthiness of national financial institutions and unpredictable behavior by government make long-term business calculations difficult.”125 As long as the government controls the information system, it will be difficult to control corruption. A responsible government should allow the public to participate in the supervision of officials by putting them under a microscope. Without public supervision through free media, nobody can check the behavior of the anticorruption institution. It should be alerted that Chinese gangs and corrupt officials have merged together. Gang groups have rapidly developed and tried to control incorporations and banks. So-called “mafia capitalism” has increasingly become a large part of Chinese economy. A study of 1996 estimated that the hidden economy was equivalent to 20 percent of Chinese GNP.126 Millionaires, policemen, government officials, bankers, and gangs work together to make profitable benefits. According to Yang Cheng Evening Daily, the three richest people in Chong Qing are the heads of gangs, possessing billion of dollars and running many enterprises. Some were even elected as representatives of people’s congress of Chong Qing. Now they are under investigation. Gangs have run illegal loan businesses worth as much as 30 billion yuan equivalent to a third of the city’s annual revenue.127 Law enforcement involved in gang business, work with thieves to get protection fees, protect gambling places, assist in drug traffic, and use brothels to make profits. Some heads of police bureaus actually are gangs, so it is a deadly threat to Chinese society. The CPC is willing to finally come to grips with the astounding influence of the Chinese mafia.128 In August 2009, Chongqing launched war on triads and arrested more than 1500 suspects in raids and continued to search 469 suspects from fourteen gangs.129 Wen Qiang, director of Chongqing’s judicial bureau and a former police chief in the city, was arrested. As the result of the battle, six gangsters were sentence to death for organized crime that “syndicates are muscling in to take advantage of the country’s rapid economic growth.”130


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It is the current political system which makes it possible for Chinese officials to conduct corrupt activities and to “obtain a share of the new wealth being produced by the reforms.”131 Bryan W. Husted uses the term “powerdistance” to describe how scandals involving people in authority are always covered up as long as they remain in power.132 This high-power-distance in China has also allowed for many government officials to go unpunished. The top leaders of the party, at different levels, perform the roles of prosecutor, investigator, judge, and executor of justice. The party’s judgment is always final. By the same token, politics can be used to combat corruption and even play a key role to effectively control corruption under the communist political system. Thus, the reform movement cannot be limited to economic reform, but must include a profound political reform. Zhu Xiaoqing, Deputy Attorney General of China’s Supreme People’s Prosecution Bureau announced in November of 2009 that Chinese prosecutors will enhance monitoring, wire tapping and other technologies for the detection of corrupt officials, and other job-related crimes. Although the technology can be used as a supplemental tool to help the anticorruption battle, it cannot fundamentally solve the problem of corruption. In order to efficiently control corruption, the CPC should place political reform as the top priority among reforms. Huntington believes that corruption is one symptom of the absence of effective political institutionalization.133 Anticorruption efforts must focus on institutionalization among other issues. Marxism suggests that social democracy is most immune to the “excess of corruption.”134 Reality just goes in the opposite direction. A modern capitalist democracy is the way to reduce the tendency for corruption because the basic principle of democracy is, as summarized in Abraham Lincoln’s motto, “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Under the guidance of the principle, the corruption rate in Western countries declined between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries while modern democracy was being developed.135 Obviously, it is necessary for the CPC/state to endorse political strategies to reform the current political system, carry out the democratic election system to improve the quality of Chinese officials, separate the party from the government and market, reform the government-sponsored ownership, establish various independent supervisory institutions to check the party’s power and prevent the party leaders from abusing power, expand the supervisory power (including the right to punishment and impeachment, and hiring),136 maintain the sacred purity of the Constitution, perfect legal and judiciary systems to increase the costs and risks of corrupt activities, publicize officials’ and their families’ income by filing the property declaration form,137 guarantee freedom of speech and press to publicize corrupt officials and push public officers to serve the common good, and advocate common good and mobilize all ranks of the people to follow good social

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norm. The top leader of the CPC, however, continues to insist that Marxism can maintain an advanced nature of the CPC. According to Hu Jintao, the advanced nature of the CPC was the key to its survival, because the CPC represents advanced production forces, advanced cultural forces and the overwhelming majority of Chinese people.138

The Relations of Chinese Traditional Culture to Corruption Corruption also can be viewed as a network of interpersonal interactions dealing with business.139 In this sense, in addition to the reform movement and the current political system, Chinese traditional culture also contributes to corruption. First of all, family relationships contribute to corruption. Traditional Chinese society is based on Confucianism. Loyalty and friendship are two basic principles of Confucianism which makes the Chinese family relationship tight. In present day China, Confucian ideas and familial ties continue to affect social relationship. Loyalty to one’s family and friends can easily go in the wrong direction and undermine commitment to the collective. Under the market system, Chinese officials are able to “provide their family members and friends with inside trading information, insure that they would be the first to get trading licenses, guarantee them supplies and loans for their businesses and factories, and grant them export licenses so that they can benefit from these opportunities to make profits.”140 A high percentage of corruption cases show that the corrupt official’s spouse and children played a critical role in the senior officials’ corruption. Officials may use their family members to take bribes and allow them to run illegal business. Sometimes, family members use the officials’ influence of their family members or relatives to conduct personal business to acquire illicit gains. According to an investigation, 98 percent of senior government officials have family members holding high posts within the government or businesses. Once corrupt activities are revealed, many officials are hesitant to oppose their allies, friends, and family members who might be involved in corruption scandals. Guanxi (connections) play vital roles in developing business and establishing power networks. In business practice, guanxi reduces the liquidity of financial markets and increases interest rates. Philip Tose, the chief of Peregrine, a U.S. company, has done very well in the market in China. He explains that the secret formula for his success is “to sit down over a cup of tea with the top guy; there isn’t documentation: the deal is done.”141 During the transition from the planned economy to market economy, the Chinese government has carried out shuang gui zhi (the dual track economy), which involves the coexistence of newly instituted markets with


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preexisting guanxi arrangements. Because the allocation of resources partly depends on guanxi under the shuang gui zhi, whoever has guanxi can easily allocate all kinds of resources to gain personal profits in the poorly regulated markets system. In this sense, guanxi could be dangerous without checks; and favors could also breed corruption.142 Another interesting phenomenon is that many corrupt officials abuse their power by using guanxi through their mistresses/lovers. It has become a quite common phenomenon for corrupt officials have a “love affair” outside marriage. Many people thought that having a “love affair” is a matter of private life; however, testimony in corruption cases has shown that having a “love affair” often coincided with the first steps of corruption. Corruption is essentially the crisis of human behavior. Daniel Kaufmann points out that “Nobody disputes the ethical failings associated with corruption.”143 As early as the sixteenth century, Machiavelli viewed corruption as a process of destruction of the virtue of the citizen.144 For Rousseau, corruption was “the centerpiece of a philosophical anthropology that racked the corrosion of a natural moral empathy among humans and the mergence of a bourgeois egoism.”145 Rousseau believed that there was an inner relationship between a corrupt soul and a corrupt social environment and argued that corruption is primarily moral corruption.146 In the post-Mao era, the Chinese people have been losing faith in Marxism and communism, so Chinese moral standards have become blurred. The former vice governor of Jiangxi Province, Hu Changqing, who was sentenced to death for corruption, said that China will be beaten by foreign countries. It is better for children to have foreign citizenship, because they can leave China anytime. That is why he accumulated wealth for his own personal purpose. Another corrupt official, Chen Min, before being executed, said that the socialist system has no future, because it is impossible to realize the communist society before the earth is destroyed. Guided by Deng’s pragmatic slogan of that “it does not mater whether a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice,” some social phenomenon which was viewed as wrong have returned; and some new things have merged into society, such as stocks, second jobs, and land leases, which greatly impact the social moral standard of the people. Some people even argue that bribery can enhance efficiency by cutting the considerable time needed to process permits and paperwork. In present day China, the bottom line of a moral standard is reduced compared to the traditional Chinese ethical standard. Counterfeit products flood the market, including fake art craft, fake medicine, fake food, and fake identity, etc. Li Xi, head of the Health Ministry’s discipline inspection said that 1,248 people in the medical profession were punished during 2005 for malfeasance that involved payments totaling more than $1.3 million.147 The cases of the sale of fraudulent or dangerous medicines continue to grow

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and the Chinese government cannot stop it. Zheng Xiaoyu, China’s former top drug regulator, was sentenced to death in May 2007 for taking bribes of more than 5 million yuan.148 Zheng neglected his duty to supervise the drug market, abused his power to approve untested drug, and turned a blind eye to bad practices by relatives and subordinate officials.149 Chinese universities, the so-called last oasis in China, are also filled with corruption, fake diplomas, fake academic awards, and fake essays. When officials cannot resist the temptation of money, they cross the line of moral standards, and even break legal codes. A considerable number of Chinese citizens violate laws and regulations (e.g., the Chinese government required Chinese people to pay income tax but the central government only collected a small percentage of income tax from Chinese citizens). When the level of national moral standard declines, the government’s monitors can go along with corruption and public tip-offs will receive less reliable information. If a high percentage of people in a society are involved in corrupt activities, corrupt officials will not feel shame about their own corrupt activities. John Girling puts it this way, “corruption is condoned, because everybody does it; here is a culture of corruption.”150 Apparently, increasing the basic value standard will help the battle of anticorruption. Hu Xingdong, an anticorruption expert, points out that, usually, the higher a man climbs, the more power he gets, the more supervision and self-control he needs. On the one hand, Chinese officials should be self-disciplined; on the other hand, the Chinese government is better equipped to enforce discipline to control corruption but,151 though harsh punishments do not necessarily deter criminals.152 Harsh punishment is useless without institutional reform and cultural change. Since 1978, three officials have been executed for corruption. In 2000, Wang Huazong was executed for accepting bribes of 4.8 million yuan. In September 2000, Chen Kejie, former vice chairman of the National People’s Congress, was executed, because he was accused of amassing more than five million yuan through corruption.153 These punishments for corruption are relatively severe. So why does corruption in China continue to spread? Reality suggests that no cleanup measure can be effective unless it is supported by a healthy cultural environment. In other words, Quah notes, “the stigma of corruption cannot be washed away by serving a prison sentence.”154 Therefore, an anticorruption battle is a comprehensive project. It is urgent to increase the awareness of the problem of corruption not only to corrupt officials but also to all the people of Chinese society.155 To increase the people’s awareness of anticorruption, it is necessary to get the majority of citizens to participate in the campaign against corruption, promote ethical norms, moral education, and public vigilance, and use public opinion to condemn corrupt activities. This will make every citizen realize that corruption is a high risk and low reward activity.


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Conclusion The central problem among all China’s domestic problems is the current Chinese political system. The symptom of lack of political change is the rampant of corruption. The CPC have seen the seriousness of corruption but is in a dilemma: China could collapse if the CPC could not be able to control it; however, the CPC would be dissolved if the government would launch a war seriously against government corruption, because most of high level party members are corrupted. Although the CPC has never stopped its campaigns against corruption and even committed more resources to deal with corruption cases, it has never touched the origin of government corruption—the Chinese political system. Instead, the government has spent much time protecting the special interests of the ruling class. In order to protect the special interests of the ruling class, the CPC has tried every possible means to detour the process of democratization, suppress the people’s rights to express their interest, and reject to carry many effective ways to control government corruption Western governments have taken. Clearly, what the CPC wanted is to develop a so-called harmonious society while meeting the needs of the interests of the special interest groups. However, the reality is that the two objectives cannot be reconciled between fulfilling the greatest special interests of the ruling class and promoting social stability. As long as the one-party system remains, corrupt officials have enough reasons to believe that bribing and accepting bribes would be safe if you could keep a good relationship with your boss. In order to effectively control corruption, it is necessary for the CPC to take one step further to reform its political system and introduce institutional checks and balances, as well as allow scrutiny from the media and independent anti-graft agencies.156

Notes â•‡â•‡ 1.â•‡ Kate Gillespie and Gwenn Okruhlik, “The Political Dimensions of Corruption Cleanups: A Framework for Analysis,” Comparative Politics 24, no. 1 (Oct., 1991): 77; Richard Levy, “Corruption, Economic Crime and Social Transformation since the Reforms: The Debate in China,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 33 (Jan., 1995): 1. â•‡â•‡ 2.â•‡ Alan P. L. Liu, “The Politics of Corruption in the People’s Republic of China,” American Political Science Review 77 (1983): 602. â•‡â•‡ 3.â•‡ Qi Guilian, “Lun dan qian wo guo di fan fu bei wen ti” (On the Issues of Anticorruption in China), Zhi Da Xeu Bao 1 (2005): 99; Zhu Houlun, “Yi ke xue de fa zhan guan gou zhu ke xue de chen zhi he yu fan fu bai ti xi,” (Establishing Scientific Prevent and Punishment System on Corruption Based on Scientific Theory), Xin Shi Ye 1 (2005): 30.

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â•‡â•‡ 4.â•‡ Hilton Root, “Corruption in China: Has it Become Systemic?” Asian Survey 36, no. 8 (August 1996): 749. â•‡â•‡ 5.â•‡ “Corruption Perceptions Index,” www.transparency.org/policy_research/ surveys_indices/cpi/2008 (15 September 2009). â•‡â•‡ 6.â•‡ Julia Kwong, The Political Economy of Corruption in China (New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1997), 29. â•‡â•‡ 7.â•‡ Edward Cody, “Hundreds Are Reproved By China for Corruption,” Washington Post, 17 December 2004. â•‡â•‡ 8.â•‡ Edward Cody, “China Takes Aim at Corruption,” Washington Post, 8 January 2006. â•‡â•‡ 9.â•‡ “Corruption in China: Shenyang,” wais.stanford.edu/China/china_corruption inchinashenyang3602.html (10 April 2006). â•‡ 10.â•‡ See Yan Sun, “The Chinese Protest of 1989,” The Issue of Corruption, The Regents of the University of California, 1991. â•‡ 11.â•‡ Zhengke He, “Corruption and Anti-corruption in Reform China,” Communist and Post-communist Studies 33 (2000): 250. â•‡ 12.â•‡ Eric Chi-yeung Ip, “Judicial Corruption and its Threats to National Governance in China,” JOAAG 3. No. 1 (2008): 82. â•‡ 13.â•‡ Kent Ewing, “Step by Step to Democracy in China,” Asia Times, 25 July 2008. www.atimes.com/atimes/China/JG25Ad01.html (15 August 2008). â•‡ 14.â•‡ Quoted in Levy, “Corruption, Economic Crime and Social Transformation,” 4. â•‡ 15.â•‡ According to Julia Kwong, corruption refers to misuse power in one’s public office for personal gains. See Kwong, The Political Economy of Corruption in China, 24. According to Kate Gillespie and Gwenn Okruhlik, “Corrupt behavior involves misuse of public authority for private gain.” See Kate Gillespie and Gwenn Okruhlik, “The Political Dimensions of Corruption Cleanups,” 77. John Girling defines corruption as a ‘deviation’ from the public good” and “the abuse of a public position of trust for private gain.” See John Girling, Corruption, Capitalism and Democracy (New York: Routledge, 1998), 2 and 10. â•‡ 16.â•‡ Yan Yiming, “Fu bai gen yuan de shen ceng li lun tan jiu” (Study on the Roots of Corruption), Zhong Guo Qing Nian Zheng Zhi Xue Yuan Xue Bao 4 (2004): 74. â•‡ 17.â•‡ “The 2005 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index,” www. infoplease.com/ipa/A0781359.html (9 April 2006). â•‡ 18.â•‡ Samuel P. Huntington, “Modernization and Corruption,” in Political Corruption: Concepts and Contexts, ed. Arnold J. Heidenheimer and Michael Johnston (Transaction Publishers, 2002), 253. â•‡ 19.â•‡ John Gardiner, “Defining Corruption,” in Political Corruption: Concepts and Contexts, ed. Arnold J. Heidenheimer and Michael Johnston (Transaction Publishers, 2002), 26. â•‡ 20.â•‡ J. S. Nye, “Corruption and Political Development: A Cost Benefit Analysis” in Political Corruption: A Handbook, eds. A. J. Heidenheimer, M. Johnston, and V. T. LeVine (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1989), 963. â•‡ 21.â•‡ Kwong, The Political Economy of Corruption in China, 7. â•‡ 22.â•‡ David C. Nice, “The Policy Consequences of Political Corruption,” Political Behavior 8, no. 3 (1986), 287. â•‡ 23.â•‡ John M. Kramer, “Political Corruption in the U.S.S.R.,” Western Political Quarterly 30, no. 2 (June, 1977), 213.


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â•‡ 24.â•‡ Min Xia, “China Rises Companion Political Governance Corruption and Organized Crime,” The New York Times, www.nytimes.com/ref/college/coll-china -politics-005.html (14 September 2009). â•‡ 25.â•‡ Mark E. Warren, “What Does Corruption Mean in a Democracy?” American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 2 (April 2004): 329. â•‡ 26.â•‡ Kent Ewing, “Step by Step to Democracy in China,” Asia Times, July 25, 2008. â•‡ 27.â•‡ Michael Johnston and Yufan Hao, “China’s Surge of Corruption,” Journal of Democracy 6, no. 4 (1995): 80. â•‡ 28.â•‡ Edward Cody, “China Takes Aim at Corruption,” Washington Post, 8 January 2006. â•‡ 29.â•‡ Cody, “Hundreds Are Reproved By China for Corruption,” 25. â•‡ 30.â•‡ “Party Demands Full Asset Disclosure to Curb Graft,” China Daily, 21 September 2009. â•‡ 31.â•‡ Albert Keidel, “China’s Social Unrest: The Story Behind the Stories,” Policy Brief 48, September 2006. â•‡ 32.â•‡ Sun Liping, The Biggest Threat to China is not Social Turmoil but Social Decay,” China Digital Times, chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/03/sun-liping -%e5%ad%99%e7%ab%8b%e5%b9%b3-the-biggest-threat-to-china-is-not-social -turmoil-but-social-decay/ (18 September 2009). â•‡ 33.â•‡ Daniel Kaufmann, “Corruption: The Facts,” Foreign Policy 107 (Summer, 1997): 120. â•‡ 34.â•‡ Shang-jie Wei, “Local Corruption and Global Capital Flows,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2 (2000): 303. â•‡ 35.â•‡ David Barboza, “Morgan Stanley’s Chinese Land Scandal,” New York Times, 1 March 2009. â•‡ 36.â•‡ “CCI’s Bribery Case Adds Another 3 Chinese Companies,” Global Times, 20 August 2009. â•‡ 37.â•‡ “Bribery cases prompt call for probe,” People’s Daily Online, 17 August 2009. â•‡ 38.â•‡ “Officials’ 2008 Appetite for Graft 3 times larger than 2007,” China Daily, 24 February 2009. â•‡ 39.â•‡ “Former Provincial Secretary Probed,” China Daily, 19 February 2004. â•‡ 40.â•‡ “Justice System Reports Surge in Corruption Convictions,” China Justice News Update, 45, November 2008. â•‡ 41.â•‡ “Party Demands Full Asset Disclosure to Curb Graft,” China Daily, 21 September 2009. â•‡ 42.â•‡ David Lague, “China wants extradition treaties with West,” New York Times, 28 May 2007. â•‡ 43.â•‡ Cheng Liwei and Zhang Bing, “Fu Bai dui Zheng fu de xiao li de ying xiang ji fan fu bai zhi du she ji, ” (Impact of Corruption on Government’s Efficiency and Designing the Regulation of Anti-corruption), Ha Er Bing Gong Ye Da Xue Xue Bao 7, no. 3 (2005): 20. â•‡ 44.â•‡ Liu Wenge, “Dao De Wen Hua, fu bai he jing ji zhuan xin” (Moral Culture, Corruption and Economic Transition), Jing Ji Yan Jiu 12 (2003): 26. â•‡ 45.â•‡ Indira A. R. Lakshmanan, “China Finds Roots of Corruption Run Deep,” Boston Globe, 12 August 2002.

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â•‡ 46.â•‡ “15 high-ranking CPC officials punished in 2004,” english.people.com .cn/200502/16/eng20050216_173652.html (10 April 2006). â•‡ 47.â•‡ AFP, “Chinese auditors uncover $35bn scam,” Al Jazeera, December 26, 2005, english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/CDED9FD1-A48B-46C8-B80A-9A3B7263944A.htm (9 April 2006). â•‡ 48.â•‡ Chengze Simon Fan and Herschel I. Crossman, “Entrepreneurial Graft in China,” Providence Journal, 3 May 2001. â•‡ 49.â•‡ “China ‘trusts prostitutes more,’” BBC News, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific /8183502.stm (16 August 2009). â•‡ 50.â•‡ Wu Zhong, “Sex and China’s Credibility Gap,” Asia Times, 12 August 2009. â•‡ 51.â•‡ Will Hutton, “Power, corruption and lies,” Guardian, www.guardian.co.uk (6 April 2006). â•‡ 52.â•‡ C. Fred Bergsten, Bates Gill, Nicholas R. Lardy, and Derek Mitchell. China The Balance Sheet: What the World Needs to Know Now About the Emerging Superpower (New York: Public Affairs, 2006), 45. â•‡ 53.â•‡ Joseph Kahn, “China’s Leader Pushes Doctrine While Warning of Corruption,” The New York Times, 1 July 2006. â•‡ 54.â•‡ Quoted in Jim Yardley, “China’s Leaders Are Resilient in Face of Change,” New York Times, 6 August 2008. â•‡ 55.â•‡ Noah J. Smith, “China’s Corruption Crackdown Sifts out Select Targets,” Christian Science Monitor, 19 February 2000. â•‡ 56.â•‡ Chen Chunren, “Jia qiang zhi du wen ming jian she: e zhi fu bai di gen ben tu jing” (Strengthen Institutional Reform: the Fundamental Way to Minimize Corruption), Hu Nan Ke Ji Da Xue Xue Bao 6 (2004): 72. â•‡ 57.â•‡ Joseph Kahn, “China’s Leader Pushes Doctrine While Warning of Corruption,” New York Times, 1 July 2006. â•‡ 58.â•‡ Yufan Hao and Michael Johnston, “Corruption and the Future of Economic Reform in China,” in Political Corruption: Concepts and Contexts, ed. Arnold J. Heidenheimer and Michael Johnston (Transaction Publishers, 2002), 596. â•‡ 59.â•‡ Liu Shuqian, “Zhong Guo she hui zhuan xing qi de xing zheng fu bai j qi zhi li” (Corruption and its Control during the Transition in China), Guang Zhou Da Xue Xue Bao 1 (2004): 76. Tian Jun, “Gou jia gui fan ji zhi, ti gao fu bai chen ben” (Establishing Standard Mechanisms to Increase Corruption Costs), Shanghai Shi Fan Da Xue Xue Bao, 6 (2004): 42. â•‡ 60.â•‡ Zhu Houlun, “Yi ke xue de fa zhan guan gou zhu ke xue de chen zhi he yu fan fu bai ti xi,” 30. â•‡ 61.â•‡ Huntington, “Modernization and Corruption,” 253. S. T. Quah asks, “How do we explain the different levels of corruption in Asian countries?” See Jon S. T. Quah, “Responses to Corruption in Asian Societies,” in Political Corruption: Concepts and Contexts, ed. Arnold J. Heidenheimer and Michael Johnston (Transaction Publishers, 2002), 514. John Girling asks, “Why does corruption occur on a massive scale in some countries and much less so in others?” See Girling, Corruption, Capitalism and Democracy, 7. â•‡ 62.â•‡ Liu Cuiping, “On the Identity Between Opposing Bourgeois Liberation and Anti Corruption,” Guangming Daily, 30 June 1990. â•‡ 63.â•‡ Liu, “Zhong Guo she hui zhuan xing qi de xing zheng fu bai j qi zhi li” (Corruption and its Control during the Transition in China), 75.


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â•‡ 64.â•‡ J. C. Scott, “Corruption, Machine Political Corruption,” American Political Science Review 63 (December 1969): 42. â•‡ 65.â•‡ Kaufmann, “Corruption: The Facts,” 120. â•‡ 66.â•‡ Huntington, “Modernization and Corruption,” 251. â•‡ 67.â•‡ Wu Jinglian, “Zhong guo fu bai de zhi li” (Anticorruption in China), Zhan Lue Guan Li 2 (2003): 23. â•‡ 68.â•‡ Kwong, The Political Economy of Corruption in China, 145. â•‡ 69.â•‡ Quoted in Gong Ting, The Politics of Corruption in Contemporary China (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994), 61. â•‡ 70.â•‡ Kwong, The Political Economy of Corruption in China, 83. â•‡ 71.â•‡ Minxin Pei, “The Roots of China’s Corruption,” Far Eastern Economic Review 15, no. 6 (2000): 29. â•‡ 72.â•‡ Johnston and Hao, “China’s Surge of Corruption,” 80. â•‡ 73.â•‡ Kwong, The Political Economy of Corruption in China, 144. â•‡ 74.â•‡ Hao and Johnston, “Corruption and the Future of Economic Reform in China,” 596. â•‡ 75.â•‡ Kwong, The Political Economy of Corruption in China, 85. â•‡ 76.â•‡ Al Jazeera, “Corruption is Endemic and has Grown Hand in Hand with Reforms,” english.aljazeera.net/HomePage (14 September 2006). â•‡ 77.â•‡ Root, “Corruption in China: Has it Become Systemic?” 749. â•‡ 78.â•‡ Quah, “Responses to Corruption in Asian Societies,” 516. â•‡ 79.â•‡ Fan and Grossman, “Entrepreneurial Graft in China,” 1. â•‡ 80.â•‡ Liu, “Zhong Guo she hui zhuan xing qi de xing zheng fu bai j qi zhi li” (Corruption and its Control during the Transition in China), 75. â•‡ 81.â•‡ Wang Chuanli, “Tou Shi fu bai gai nian di si ge shi jiao” (Four Perspectives on Study of Corruption), Beijing Ke Ji Da Xue Xue Bao 3 (2004): 18. â•‡ 82.â•‡ Girling, Corruption, Capitalism and Democracy, ix. â•‡ 83.â•‡ Bryan W. Husted and Instituto Tecnologico Y de Estudios, “Wealth, Culture, and Corruption,” Journal of International Business Studies 30, no. 2 (2nd Qtr., 1999): 342. They hypothesize that 1) the higher the level of economic development, the lower the level of corruption in a country; 2) the greater the inequality in the distribution of income, the higher the level of corruption in a country; 3) the larger the government’s share of GDP, the higher the level of corruption in the country; 4) the higher the power distance in a country, the higher the level of corruption in a country; 5) the less individualistic a society, the higher the level of corruption in a country; 6) the greater the masculinity of a culture, the higher level of corruption in a country; and 7) the greater the level of uncertainty avoidance in a nation, the higher the level of corruption. â•‡ 84.â•‡ Kaufmann, “Corruption: The Facts,” 121. â•‡ 85.â•‡ Wu, “Zhong guo fu bai de zhi li” (Anticorruption in China), 22. â•‡ 86.â•‡ Carl J. Friedrich, “Corruption Concepts in Historical Perspective,” in Political Corruption: Concepts and Contexts, ed. Arnold J. Heidenheimer and Michael Johnston (Transaction Publishers, 2002), 19. â•‡ 87.â•‡ Quah, “Responses to Corruption in Asian Societies,” 515. Hao and Johnston, “Corruption and the Future of Economic Reform in China,” 586. â•‡ 88.â•‡ John Hagan, Structural Criminology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989).

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â•‡ 89.â•‡ Kenneth J. Meier and Thomas M. Holbrook, “‘I Seen My Opportunities and I Took ‘Em:’ Political Corruption in the American States,” Journal of Politics 54, no. 1 (Feb., 1992): 138. â•‡ 90.â•‡ Bryan W. Husted, “Wealth, Culture, and Corruption,” Journal of international Business Studies 30, no. 2. (1999): 344. â•‡ 91.â•‡ Arnold J. Heidenheimer and Michael Johnston, “Preface,” in Political Corruption: Concepts and Contexts, ed. Arnold J. Heidenheimer and Michael Johnston (Transaction Publishers, 2002), 3. â•‡ 92.â•‡ Friedrich, “Corruption Concepts in Historical Perspective,” 21. â•‡ 93.â•‡ Lucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1914–1949 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1971), 118. â•‡ 94.â•‡ “Ten Characteristics of Chinese Corruption,” english.people.com.cn /200306/12/eng20030612_118085.shtml (10 April 2006). â•‡ 95.â•‡ Deng Xiquan and Fen Xiaotian, “Fu bai zhu ti zhongqing nian qu di xian xian xiang di yuan ying feng xi” (Analyzing the Causes of Corruption among Young Chinese), Ling Nan Xue Kan 5 (2005): 191. â•‡ 96.â•‡ “15 high-ranking CPC officials punished in 2004,” People’s Daily, 16 February 2005. â•‡ 97.â•‡ Quoted in Luis Ramirez, “Communist Party Leaders Struggle to Contain Rising Corruption in China,” Voice of America, 1 March 2005. â•‡ 98.â•‡ Edward Cody, “Communist Party Says It Punished 115,000 Members,” Washington Post, 15 February 2006. â•‡ 99.â•‡ “Officials’ 2008 Appetite for Graft 3 times larger than 2007,” China Daily, 24 February 2009. 100.â•‡ Quoted in Julie Chao, “Amid Reforms, China Is Losing Its Battle With Corruption,” Cox News Service, 30 November 30, 2002. 101.â•‡ Kwong, The Political Economy of Corruption in China, 80. 102.â•‡ Yiming, “Fu bai gen yuan de shen ceng li lun tan jiu,” 73. 103.â•‡ “Who is the Most Corrupt Officials in Mainland China,” Shanghai Qiao Bao, 16 July 2004. 104.â•‡ David Baboza, “Former Party Boss in China Gets 18 Years,” New York Times, 12 April 2008. 105.â•‡ Wu Zhong, “Hu purge nets Shanghai’s biggest fish,” Asia Times, 26 September 2006. 106.â•‡ Mark McDonald, “Former Beijing Airport Director is Executed,” New York Times, 8 August 2009. 107.â•‡ “Party Demands Full Asset Disclosure to Curb Graft,” China Daily, 21 September 2009. 108.â•‡ Li Haihong, “Lun xin shi xia fu bai xian xiang di fang zhi gui ce” (On the Strategies of Anticorruption under New Circumstances), A Bei Shi Fan Gao Deng Zhuan Ke Xeu Xiao Xeu Bao 1 (2005): 44. 109.â•‡ Xiquan and Xiaotian, “Fu bai zhu ti zhongqing nian qu di xian xian xiang di yuan ying feng xi,” 190. 110.â•‡ Kwong, The Political Economy of Corruption in China, 30. 111.â•‡ Root, “Corruption in China: Has it Become Systemic?” 750. 112.â•‡ “Party Demands Full Asset Disclosure to Curb Graft,” China Daily, 21 September 2009.


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113.â•‡ Xinhua, “Voice from the Top: No Mercy for Corruption,” China Daily, 14 February 2004. 114.â•‡ Kwong, The Political Economy of Corruption in China, 131. 115.â•‡ Hao and Johnston, “Corruption and the Future of Economic Reform in China,” 594. 116.â•‡ Staff Writer, “CPC requires leading cadres to report personal affairs,” China Daily, 30 August 2006. 117.â•‡ “Systemic Corruption: Something Rotten in the State of China,” www .globalpolicy.org/nations/corrupt/2002/0215china.htm (10 April 2006). 118.â•‡ Root, “Corruption in China: Has it Become Systemic?” 752. 119.â•‡ Quoted in Chao, “Amid Reforms, China Is Losing Its Battle With Corruption,” 1. 120.â•‡ Tian Jun, “Gou jia gui fan ji zhi, ti gao fu bai chen ben” (Establishing Standard Mechanisms to Increase Corruption Costs), 42. 121.â•‡ Chen, “Jia qiang zhi du wen ming jian she: e zhi fu bai di gen ben tu jing” (Strengthen Institutional Reform: the Fundamental Way to Minimize Corruption), 72. 122.â•‡ Meier and Holbrook, “‘I Seen My Opportunities and I Took ‘Em:’ Political Corruption in the American States,” 138. 123.â•‡ www.jcrb.com/tgyq/index.htm (27 July 2006). 124.â•‡ Smith, “China’s Corruption Crackdown Sifts out Select Targets.” 125.â•‡ Root, “Corruption in China: Has it Become Systemic?” 741. 126.â•‡ Ming Xia, “Corruption and Organized Crime,” The New York Times, www. nytimes.com/ref/college/coll-china-politics-005.html (24 October 2009) 127.â•‡ “Three Billionaires in Chong Qing Are the Heads of Gang Group,” Yang Cheng Evening Daily, 9 August 2009. 128.â•‡ Willy Lam, “Hu’s Anti-Graft Drives Lack Institutional Checks and Reforms,” Jamestown Foundation, China Brief, 9, no. 17, 17 August 2009, www.jamestown.org/ programs/chinabrief/single/?tx_ttnews[tt_news]=3543 (7 January 2009). 129.â•‡ Tania Branigan, “Crusading Chinese police chief takes fight to Chongqing mafia,” Guardian, 19 August 2009. 130.â•‡ Jonathan Watts, “Chongqing gangsters get death penalty,” Guardian, 21 October 2009. 131.â•‡ Jean-Louis Rocca, ‘Corruption and Its Shadow: An Anthropological View of Corruption,” China Quarterly, 130 (June 1992), 402. 132.â•‡ Husted, “Wealth, Culture, and Corruption,” 343. According to Husted, power distance refers to “the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organizations within a country accept and accept that power is distributed unequally.” 133.â•‡ Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 9. 134.â•‡ Quoted in Girling, Corruption, Capitalism and Democracy, 160. 135.â•‡ Heidenheimer and Johnston, “Preface,” xi. 136.â•‡ Li, “Lun xin shi xia fu bai xian xiang di fang zhi gui ce,” 8. 137.â•‡ Chen, “Jia qiang zhi du wen ming jian she: e zhi fu bai di gen ben tu jing,” 74. 138.â•‡ Kahn, “China’s Leader Pushes Doctrine While Warning of Corruption.” 139.â•‡ Syril S. Belshaw, Traditional Exchange and Modern Markets (Englewood Clifts, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1965), 75.

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140.â•‡ Kwong, The Political Economy of Corruption in China, 88. 141.â•‡ The Economist, “Asian Finance: Survey,” 12 November 1994, 26. 142.â•‡ Hao and Johnston, “Corruption and the Future of Economic Reform in China,” 594. 143.â•‡ Kaufmann, “Corruption: The Facts,” 114. 144.â•‡ Friedrich, “Corruption Concepts in Historical Perspective,” 18. 145.â•‡ Warren, “What Does Corruption Mean in a Democracy?” 329. 146.â•‡ Friedrich, “Corruption Concepts in Historical Perspective,” 19. 147.â•‡ Edward Cody, “China Takes Aim at Corruption,” Washington Post, 8 January 2006. 148.â•‡ “Former SFDA chief executed for corruption,” China Daily, 10 July 2007. 149.â•‡ “Zheng Xiaoyu to go on trial for graft,” People’s Daily, 9 April 2007. 150.â•‡ Girling, Corruption, Capitalism and Democracy, 11. 151.â•‡ Yan Sun, “Reform, State, and Corruption: Is corruption Less Destructive in China than in Russia?” Comparative Politics 32, no. 1 (Oct. 1999): 2. 152.â•‡ S. S. Brier and S. E. Fienberg, “Recent Econometric Modeling of Crime and Punishment: Support for the Deterrence Hypothesis?” Evaluation Review 4 (1980): 147. 153.â•‡ Smith, “China’s Corruption Crackdown Sifts out Select Targets.” 154.â•‡ Quah, “Responses to Corruption in Asian Societies,” 519. 155.â•‡ Melinda Liu and Anthony Kuhn, “Petitioning the Emperor,” Newsweek, 29 September 2003. 156.â•‡ Willy Lam, “Hu’s Anti-Graft Drives Lack Institutional Checks and Reforms.”

4 Prostitution and Corruption

China’s corruption is systematic and permeates every sphere of Chinese society. Financial bribery only reflects one aspect of China’s corruption. The corrupt Chinese officials do not only misuse their power to gain public property, but also buy sex services using tax dollars. A great percentage of corrupt Chinese officials either have received sex bribery or used public prostitutes when they feel it is safe and convenient. As early as 2000, Zhao Dengju, China’s deputy procurator-general, pointed out that the majority of corrupt officials had improper relations with women, and sexual bribery became a popular phenomenon of China’s corruption. He suggested that it was necessary to define sexual bribery as a criminal offence.1 Some people might argue that prostitution has nothing to do with corruption, because everyone, not only Chinese officials but also common citizens, can use prostitutes. However, in reality, China’s corruption has directly promoted the sex market, and the improper sexual relations of Chinese officials have directly influenced governance. Prostitution has existed in China for more than 2,000 years. Although prostitution was already prevalent in the Tan dynasty (618–907), its growth did not reach its highest point until China was forced to open its doors to the rest of the world in the second half of the nineteenth century. Under the Mao regime between 1949 and 1976, prostitution was strictly forbidden and visibly disappeared from Chinese society. After China launched the reform movement in 1978, however, the sex market in China has been rapidly expanding with an estimated 10 million prostitutes working in China. Without a doubt, there is no one country in the world that has as many brothels and prostitutes as does China. The boom in Chinese prostitution indicates that political corruption and moral decline have become 71

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a serious problem in China. This chapter attempts to argue that the boom of the sex market is a symptom of corruption. The task of controlling prostitution should not be separated from the battle of anticorruption. The influence of Western culture cannot fully explain why prostitution is so rampant in the post-Mao era, but the market economy, the ambiguous government policy, and government corruption have contributed to the revival of prostitution in China. Thus, to effectively halt the growth of prostitution, it requires the adoption of a comprehensive approach that involves not only cultural and moral ethical areas, but also political and legal areas.

A Historical Perspective Although prostitutes come with different characteristics in different historical periods, a prostitute is one who grants sexual access for payment. Generally speaking, prostitution can be defined as the explicit exchange of sex for money.2 Similar to corruption, prostitution is one of the oldest social phenomena in the world. It is very difficult to determine exactly where prostitution originated from, but it is clear that prostitution existed in China as early as the Shang dynasty (seventeenth—eleventh century, BC).3 According to G. L. Simons, China was one of the first countries in the world to institutionalize prostitution.4 In ancient China, it was considered a “class privilege” for upper class men to visit prostitutes, so it was regarded as legitimate and socially indispensable.5 Chinese men were motivated by various reasons to visit prostitutes. In addition to men’s physical desire and male dominant psyche, Chinese men believed that they could gain more yin from prostitutes than from normal women. Since prostitutes had sex with many men, they had acquired more yang essence from them. Thus, they could give a patron more yang essence than he had lost. It is said that “the wealthy husband had his concubines and the poor man had his brothels.”6 There were entire blocks of ancient cities given the title of “pleasure quarters,” where men could go to solicit dancers, singers, and prostitutes. During the reign of Yongzheng in the early 1700s, “prostitutes and pimps had been leniently treated as members of a status group, and occupied a gray area of toleration.”7 After the First Opium War, China was forced to sign the unequal Nanking Treaty, which ceded the Chinese island of Hong Kong to Britain and opened five ports—Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai—to foreign trade and residence. All of these cities were called treaty ports, which contained large areas called concessions that were leased to foreign powers. After China signed the Nanking Treaty, other countries, including Russia, Japan, and the United States soon demanded similar treaties with China. By

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the 1860s, fourteen treaty ports were opened to the Western countries resulting in Western people, culture, and modern industry flowing into China. A market economy developed quickly and the number of night entertainment venues grew dramatically. These cities attracted Chinese prostitutes from the surrounding provinces. During that period Chinese prostitution was legal and was actually regarded as a cultural occupation.8 A high ranking prostitute was trained to be skilled in many different arts such as singing, painting, writing poetry, and playing musical instruments, as well as having some knowledge of business and being able to give management advice to her clients. The high ranking prostitute particularly targeted rich people, business men, and different ranking officials. It was not strange in premodern China for Chinese officials, business men, and wealthy men to buy prostitutes to be their concubines. China had such a tradition for a long time that privileged Chinese people used prostitutes. Shanghai has been called the key to modern China, because of “its rapid expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, its importance as an industrial and commercial centre, its extensive exposure to foreign economic and cultural influences and its role as a hotbed of the radical politics that eventually shaped the Chinese revolution.”9 Shanghai is also the key to investigating Chinese prostitution. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Shanghai “experienced a prodigious growth and diversification of its population. The opening of the city to foreign trade brought merchants, coolies, craftsmen, adventurers, and ruffians eager to make a living and hoping to make a fortune. Popular prostitution could only prosper in such a context.”10 According to the Health Officer of the International Settlement in Shanghai there were 463 brothels with 1,612 prostitutes in 1869. In 1928, there were 805 brothels with 5100 prostitutes.11 By 1935, combined estimates of licensed and unlicensed prostitutes ran to 100,000, making up 2.3 percent of the total population of Shanghai (4.2 million). In other words, one out of every forty-two city residents was directly involved in prostitution.12 Culturally and socially, prostitutes had hard lives in pre-communist China, but Chinese society as a whole had room for them to survive during that period of time. Marxist orthodoxy, however, is completely incompatible with prostitution, viewing it as a disease of the old society of capitalism. As soon as the Communist Party of China (CPC) came to power in 1949, the new government carried out an uncompromising policy towards prostitution and cracked down on every brothel in China. By November 1949, legislation was passed to close all the brothels in Beijing. The Chinese government then established eight “rehabilitation and working centres for women” for the detained female prostitutes from the city. According to Harriet Evans, within two months of the founding of the new China, a series of measures adopted by the central communist authorities outlawing prostitution resulted in the closure of some 220 brothels in Beijing, the “salvation” of 1,200 prostitutes,

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the sentencing of more than 300 brothel owners and pimps, and more than 7,000 prostitutes in Shanghai.13 On 13 November 1951, the Bureau of Public Security officially ordered the closing of all the remaining registered brothels in China.14 Throughout the country, prostitutes were rounded up and sent to special detention centers to cure them of venereal disease.15 The Chinese Government also rehabilitated female prostitutes through reeducation and reemployment programs.16 In 1958, the Chinese government announced that “prostitution was already presented to the public as a practice of the feudal past.”17 China is one of very few countries in the world “that has come close to a truly prohibitionist program.”18 When the Chinese government declared that venereal diseases no longer existed in China in 1964, Western societies were very sceptical about the government report, but a small number of doctors who visited China were convinced.19 Joshua Horn, a British physician who practiced medicine in China between 1954 and 1969, observed that, “Active venereal disease has been completely eradicated from most areas and completely controlled throughout China.”20 George Haterm, a famous American-born physician who practiced medicine in China for more than fifty years, pointed out that “New China in a short period of less than fifteen years conquered venereal disease and eradicated it from almost the whole country.”21 Some believe that it is a false statement that prostitution was eradicated during the Mao era, because it is almost impossible for any government to eradicate prostitutes under any kind of circumstances. The Mao period is the era in which government power dominated everything, so the sex market was basically located between political power and women. Many powerful officials always forced women into the sex trade from the national level to low level administration. Accordingly, many women were forced to sell their bodies in order to obtain urban residency, to be promoted, or to get a better job. Thus, the prostitutes during the Mao era came with the characteristics of official prostitutes. Thirty years after the Chinese government declaration that prostitution in China was eradicated, Western scholars have observed that prostitution is once again sweeping through China.22 Since 1978, the Chinese sex market has suddenly boomed in a short period of time during the reform movement, and prostitution has yet again become a growing epidemic that many women use as a form of steady income. Beginning in 1982, the rate of prostitution started increasing every year. A revival of wide scale prostitution since the 1980s has accelerated to a nation wide dilemma,23 but the Chinese Government did not officially acknowledge that prostitution was a serious problem until 1988, because it believes that the communist system is the best system in the world and China is not supposed to have prostitutes.24 Peter Fryer points out that “for many years during the reign of Mao, there was an official denial of the existence of prostitution and the ruling


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party’s political and ideological need even today is to maintain the denial of the existence of such activities.”25 In reality, 11,500 prostitutes were arrested in 1982. In the following year, “the number of arrests skyrocketed to 46,534.”26 In 1989, 243,183 people were charged with prostitution. Even more surprisingly, it is reported that the charges were estimated to include only about 30 percent of the prostitution activity that year. Between 1986 and 1990 the number of those engaged in prostitution increased fourfold over the previous five years despite repeated crackdowns and police raids.27 Sixty-two prison camps were set up for prostitutes between January 1986 and the end of 1987.28 According to Elaine Jeffreys, “sellers of sex can be found throughout present-day China.”29 Not only has prostitution continued to flourish, particularly in the commercial zones of the south and southeast, but its social composition has expanded. The World Health Organization estimates that six million Mainland Chinese women engage in prostitution.30 Other scholars, such as Professor Pan Suiming of People’s University in Beijing, believe the number of women who engage in commercial sex is considerably higher.31 Zhong Wei estimates that Beijing alone has at least between 200,000 and 300,000 prostitutes.32 In June 2005, China’s Ministry of Health published a document which encouraged unlicensed prostitutes to visit doctors regularly to check if they are infected with sexual diseases. This implies that the Chinese Government has officially recognized that the problem of Chinese prostitution is serious. According to three year old statistics, there are about 10 million sex workers in China.33 Chinese prostitution is for sale in barber shops, massage parlors, nightclubs, hotels, and discos. Many bars and bathhouses that offer sex services are connected with the police or members of branches of the judiciary. John Pomfret observes that prostitution and sex tourism are huge businesses in China. Almost every hotel, “from no-star dives to five-star international chains, boasts a bevy of women offering oily massages and more to travelers.”34 If there is going to be a crackdown, these bars and bathhouses will be notified beforehand and will immediately disperse the prostitutes and their clients. Some Chinese policemen and government officials “act as a protection umbrella for illegal operations at these sites.”35 In order to develop business and increase profits, some companies openly advertise in newspapers recruiting single and beautiful young women under the age of 25. The title of public relations officer is often synonymous with a company employed prostitute for internal high-ranking executives and external potential clients who are decision makers to make business happen.36 The clients of Chinese prostitutes include both Chinese and foreigners. Many large joint-venture hotels and expensive restaurants are major work locations for high-class prostitutes, whose main clients are foreigners and wealthy Chinese businessmen.

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At present, Chinese prostitution is, like a century ago, a hierarchal system. In pre-communist China, Chinese prostitutes were divided into four categories: suuyu prostitutes (employed in storytellers’ residences), yao prostitutes (employed in brothels), yeji prostitutes (street girls), and prostitutes in flower smoke rooms. In the post-Mao era, ten million sex workers are divided into seven layers: er nai (mistresses or second wives, hired prostitutes, escort girls, chink girls, barbershop girls, streetwalkers, and women who live in sheds.37 Er nai is the highest rank of Chinese prostitutes and they are basically used by Chinese government officials and wealthy Chinese people. Er nai primarily want their masters to provide them with a luxurious lifestyle. In turn, their master wants “the second wife to provide him with sex and face.”38 â†œThus, er nai usually wear well-known designer clothing and shoes. Some of er nai even help their masters run business and take bribes by misusing their master’s power.

Prostitution and the Reform Movement Historically, women who became prostitutes were unemployed and poorly educated. Under these unfortunate circumstances, some women had no choice but to join the sex industry, although it was “a painful economic choice on the part of women and their families, since it was sometimes the best or only income-producing activity available to women seeking employment.”39 In this sense, the cause of prostitution is just poverty regardless of venue. Gail Hershatter notes that “The door of the brothel is open for the wives and daughters of the poor.”40 In addition, women became prostitutes because their parents, preferring money to virtue, were willing to sell them into prostitution. Chinese prostitution in the reform era no longer represents the response of only impoverished and uneducated young women at the bottom of the urban and rural social hierarchy to the difficulties of making a livelihood. Chinese prostitutes in present-day China include “employees from state, collective and private enterprises, Party and state cadres, intellectuals, science and technology personnel, and even university students and researchers are becoming prostitutes.”41 Newsweek reported about a Chinese college student becoming a prostitute. The girl is the first member of her family to get into Wuhan University, one of the best universities in China. In Wuhan she landed work as a waitress, but the pay barely covered her tuition. A manager from a local hotel offered her a job making more than ten times what she earned waiting tables, and she felt too exhausted, alone, and embarrassed at the possibility of going home to refuse. Finally, she became a prostitute.42 Leslie Lau interviewed a multitude of Chinese prostitutes in order to uncover the true reasons why students in China all too often be-


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come entangled in such a horrendous style of wage earning. One student told Lau that “Sometimes I sleep with the men, but I never see much of the money because I have to repay debts back home. . . . Once I save enough money, I will try to get help to go home.”43 Why can the Chinese Government not effectively control the spread of prostitution in the post-Mao era? Prevalent public opinion always points its finger to Western cultural influence—“a form of spiritual pollution that comes from the West.”44 Without a doubt, there are some similarities in the historical context between the flourishing period of Chinese prostitution in the second half of the nineteenth century and the revival period in the postMao era. The Chinese government carried out an open door policy and introduced Western cultures and investment into China during both historical periods. In this sense, Western sexual conceptions might have contributed to the boom of prostitution in the reform era. Some Western scholars also acknowledge that Western culture plays a role in contributing to the revival of Chinese prostitution. Elaine Jeffreys admits that the revival of prostitution during the early 1980s was initially associated with China’s eastern coastal cities and thus “somewhat tenuously linked to the influx of foreign investment and the ‘Western ideas’.”45 David J. Lynch notes that Western culture is “transforming attitudes toward sex.”46 Influenced by Western culture, Chinese people are changing the conception of sex and rebelling against the sexual suppression under the Mao regime. The market economy opens the door for the return of pre-communist sexual liberation practices.47 Nanette Davis points out that Chinese prostitution currently “serves the dual purposes of economic prosperity and sexual liberation.”48 According to investigation, 70 percent of men and 33 percent of women have watched pornography in recent years. Under this circumstance, commercial sex has emerged to become an omnipresent feature of Chinese society.49 However, the influence of Western culture cannot fully explain why Chinese prostitution came back after Mao’s death. In fact, a high percentage of Chinese prostitutes had no contact with Western culture before they became prostitutes. However, “the cause of prostitution is in the structuring of society, and that is where the solution will reside.”50 The revival of prostitution began with the inauguration of the Chinese reform movement in the early 1980s. The causes for the return of prostitution in the reform era must therefore be in some way related to the nature of the reform movement and market economy. In the reform movement China began to carry out the market economy which gave great impetus to China and brought economic prosperity. At the same time, the market economy also gave a new public prominence to the sex market, because a market economy develops places and opportunities for the use of women as commodities for sale.51 By definition, prostitution has been defined as, “the explicit exchange of sex for

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money.”52 In the consumer world, the female body as a consumer product serves the needs of almost all sectors of the male population. In the second half of the nineteenth century, “women were regarded as objects to be invested in or battered. At its most extreme, the trade in women took the form of trading beautiful merchandise-prostitutes.”53 In the Mao era Chinese women owned their body but they did not have rights to sell their body under planned economy. In the reform era, Chinese women not only own their body but also are able to find a market to sell their body under market economy. Generally speaking, women enter prostitution in order to support and maintain their family networks both financially and socially.54 In order to promote the market economy, the reform policy in the post-Mao era has not always been favorable to Chinese women. Due to sexual prejudice and discrimination against women, some Chinese companies only hire women between eighteen and thirty years of age. Pregnant and older women are commonly discriminated against. Moreover, Chinese women began losing jobs. In 1997, more than 12 million state workers were laid off and about 800,000 government employees were put out of work in 1999. Although over 50 percent of xia gang (laid off) women are over forty years old, a great proportion are under thirty. Although they still have opportunities to find jobs, they face increasing discrimination.55 When they do find work, it is usually a job that no one else would want.56 Due to the old Chinese saying, “people laugh at the poor but do not laugh at prostitutes,”57 some xia gang women voluntarily choose to become prostitutes in order to make money to support their families. They say that they want to earn as much money as possible. Evelyn Iritani observes that “laid off workers in poorer countries, mostly women, will be forced into prostitution.”58 The commercial sex market not only provides a substantial income and employment for those directly or indirectly involved in prostitution, but also serves as a mechanism for redistributing incomes.59 Therefore, some consequences of the reform movement, including women’s unemployment and government policy, are major factors that contribute to the spread of prostitution.60 Thus, it is still very important to increase the living standard of the Chinese people in order to lessen the pressure on women to enter prostitution as a means of escaping absolute poverty.61 The reform movement and development of the market economy produced two important geographic and social trends: urbanization and migration. During the Mao regime, more than 80 percent of the Chinese population lived in the countryside and 90 percent of rural residents were employed in agriculture. Economic development has greatly accelerated urbanization. In turn, urbanization has created a large transient population, 80 million in 1994.62 Most transient people are young, with those between fifteen and thirty-five making up 80 percent of the total, but they


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have money and often seek entertainment and sexual companionship.63 Once this need was created, the open market answered it with a rapidly growing sex industry. The modern market economy drives the world economy into globalization. Present-day China has been experiencing a great transformation from a planned economy to a market economy and from centralization to liberalization. With the development of a market economy, China has become an integral part of international society; and sex workers have become part of the international migration of labor from every part of the world.64 The Chinese sex market attracts foreign prostitutes. The majority of foreign prostitutes come from Korea, Russia, and some Southeast Asian countries. Some of them come to China as visitors, some cross illegally into China, while others come to China supposedly as part of artistic performance groups. Foreign prostitutes provide a variety of services: helping men bathe, giving massages, and of course, providing sex. Foreign prostitutes used to be at the lowest end of the prostitution hierarchy in pre-communist China, but they are attracting more clients in present-day China. In addition, traffickers also play a role to contribute to the sex market. The traffickers have forced women to turn to prostitution and have also preyed on women who were both economically greedy and morally deficient. Thus, market economies and globalization work together and make it impossible to resist the growth of prostitution.

Prostitution and China’s Corruption Prostitution is a complex issue which is not caused by any one single factor. The prostitution boom in China began in the reform era and the China’s corruption boom also began in the reform era. It is not a coincidence that the boom of Chinese prostitution and corruption emerged at the same time. The revival of Chinese prostitution is not only a by-product of the market economy, but also a twin of China’s corruption. China’s corruption has significantly contributed to the prostitution boom in the post-Mao era. Government corruption demanded prostitution and, in turn, sexual bribes and prostitution promoted corruption. It might be difficult to understand in American context that sex scandal is the essential part of government corruption. Sexual scandals are not strange to American politics. Quite a few American politicians were involved in sexual scandals—from the first president George Washington to John F. Kennedy to Bill Clinton. Some American politicians also paid prostitutes—for example, former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer paid thousand dollars for sex service. Some pursued secret lovers. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford secretly went to Argentina to meet his mistress Maria Belen Chapur. However, in the

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American context most sexual scandals are separated from political corruption, (e.g., American politicians usually do not use their power in exchange sex or buy sex service by using tax dollars). Accordingly, their mistresses and prostitutes do not play a role in their political life and government affairs. Sex scandal in the American context, generally speaking, can be called pure sex scandal. To be sure, sexual harassment is a different case. By contrast, sex scandals in China always are combined with politics and the use of tax dollars. Most Chinese corrupt officials are immoral people and womanized. China’s sex market boom is not caused by sex workers, but also by the demand of the market especially by those people who hold power and money. The more corrupt officials there are, the more prostitutes there are. The increasing number of prostitutes indicates that Chinese government has become more corrupted. Corrupt officials and prostitutes share something in common. Prostitutes use their body in exchange for money and corrupt officials use their power in exchange for their personal interests especially for money. Prostitutes want to attract rich people and corrupt officials also want to recruit rich people for personal gains. Prostitutes enjoy a life of luxury and corrupt officials pursue an extravagant lifestyle by using tax dollars. However, some suggest that prostitutes are much better than corrupt officials, because prostitutes only use their own bodies in exchange for money while corrupt officials use their power and tax dollars in exchange for the greatest interests. According to a survey, about 90 percent of participants believe China’s prostitutes are better trusted than Chinese politicians, just next to farmers and religious workers.65 Indeed, the prostitution boom and corruption spreading are two deadly cancers of a society and the basic symptoms of social illness indicating that a society is eroding and declining. Corrupt officials are very lustful. Not so long ago, a communist official demanded a young waitress Deng Yujiao for sex in a karaoke bar in May 2009 but his request was rejected by Deng. Then, the official threatened Deng and beat her, trying to force her to have sex. Under this circumstance, Deng stabbed the official to death. She was immediately arrested. This incident triggered massive protest online against government corruption. Public protest influenced the wider media, hailing Deng as a hero and calling for a fair trial for Deng and harsh punishment for the government officials. Under the high pressure from public opinion, the court reached the verdict that the court found Ms. Deng guilty of causing injury with intent but freed her without a sentence on the grounds that a “mood disorder” absolved her of criminal responsibility. This was a victory for public opinion and also saved government face on behalf of the official who was killed.66 This incident not only clearly indicates how corruption closely relates to corrupt officials’ immoral sexual behavior, but also shows how the Chinese people hate corruption.


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A high percentage of Chinese officials in the post-Mao era have involved themselves in sexual misconduct, including having illicit lovers, buying er nai, and paying public prostitutes, and it has made it more difficult for the Chinese government to pass laws to punish the corrupt Chinese officials, because any government’s efforts in fighting corruption have met with resistance from corrupt Chinese officials. Under this circumstance, er nai and the other forms of prostitutes are allowed to continue their sexual activities without fear. Most corrupt officials have received sex bribery or have er nai or used public prostitutes. Sex bribery refers to those who provide free sex service in exchange for favors and those who offer favors after receiving sex service. Corrupt Chinese officials have been involved in different forms of bribery, including trading power for sex or favoring their er nai or illicit lovers for sex. The sex bribery could come from different people: business men use sex bribery in exchange for profits, prostitutes use sex bribery in exchange for a good job or money, athletes use sex bribery in exchange for biased refereeing, and some female officials voluntarily use sex bribery in exchange for a promotion rank. Some women think it is an easy business where they can obtain both a high ranking position and money. Jiang Yanping, a former storage keeper was promoted to a position as an official at the provincial level in thirteen years by providing sexual favors to high level officials. After she was arrested, Jiang continued to utilize sex bribery with the head of jail in order to receive better treatment in the jail Sex service in the post-Mao China began in karaoke bars and KTV nightclubs. The hostesses in the karaoke bars and KTV nightclubs are the most popular form of Chinese prostitute, so-called sanpei xiaojie, which refers to young women who accompany men in three ways, drinking, dancing, and singing, but they could provide sexual services upon request. Karaoke bars and KTV nightclubs are the by-product of the post-Mao era. During the Mao era, commercial sex was strictly forbidden and Chinese people’s sexual desires were suppressed. In the post-Mao era, Chinese men have attempted to recover their lost masculinity and sexual identity. The karaoke bars and KTV nightclubs perfectly meet the needs of Chinese men. Meanwhile, the market economy makes it possible for hostesses to have the sole right to claim absolute ownership of their own bodies and market them for their own use by pricing their different body parts and demanding compensation from clients according to the parts that are touched.67 The hostess sexual services provide more opportunities not only for businessmen but also for government officials and even common citizens to conduct a variety of businesses by offering sex bribes. In the beginning of the reform movement, businessmen used to get their business done at banquet tables; after the karaoke bars and KTV nightclubs emerged in China, many Chinese businessmen moved their business activities from the banquet tables to the karaoke bars.

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Gradually, the consumption of women has become part of business process and Chinese politics. Offering sex bribery has been also extended to public relations in almost every sphere of society, including governmental affairs, financial services, education, entertainment, sports, and medical services, etc. Thus, sexual attractiveness has come to be a vehicle for selling goods, getting promotions, receiving various honors, and as a means of exchange for personal interests. In order to make maximum profits and make their live better, sex workers have always tried to seduce rich and powerful men; therefore, powerful men are the most likely to be targeted for seduction. Sexual strategy also influenced college students. Many jobs now require female applicants to meet a certain standard of sexual attractiveness. In other words, beauty has become a job requirement for women. According to Tiantian Zheng, “a large number of female college graduates attached their half-naked, colorful portraits to their resumes and emphasized that they could sing and dance, and that they were beautiful, decorous, gentle, and good at socializing and drinking alcohol. Some suggested that sexual intercourse was a job requirement for women in occupations other than sex work and claimed that female employees were told they would lose their jobs if they refused to sleep with customers.”68 Some senior Chinese officials do not have a problem with rejecting monetary bribes but they are unable to resist the temptation of beauty. Some corrupt officials were good men before becoming criminals but they could not resist sexual temptation. The starting point for most corrupt officials is to accept sex bribery. About 95 percent of corrupt officials have er nai(s) and had paid sex or unpaid sex by using their power. Once tempted, corrupt officials never get out from under the scandal, and they are even controlled by sex workers or er nai in order to protect their public image. Clearly, sexual bribery is more dangerous than bribes of money. Chen Liangyu, the former head of the CPC of Shanghai, had eleven er nai, 300 million in savings, and twenty-five passports. Xu Qiyao, former Director of the Construction Bureau of Jiangsu Province had 146 er nai. Zhang Zonghai, the former Director of the Department of the Party Propaganda of Chong Qing financially sponsored seventeen unmarried college female students living in five star hotels, so that Zhang can use their bodies at any time. Li Qingshan, former Director of the Textile Bureau had sex with more than 100 women and kept a sex diary of ninety-five notebooks with details. Li Yushu, former Mayor of Le Shan City in Sichuang Province, had twenty er nai, all of them between sixteen and eighteen. Yang Feng, the former head of the party of Xuan Chen City in An Hui Province had seventy-seven er nai. Deng Baoju, the Director of Sa Jin Bank of Shenzheng spent 184 million for his fifth er nai in six months, on average, costing 230,000 yuan per day. Wu Tianxi, the former representative of National People’s Congress, vice chairman


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of the political consultative committee of Zheng Ping County, abused twentyfour female students and had sex with more than ninety virgins. As a result, he was executed. Zhang Er Jiang, former Mayor of Tianmen City, had sexual relationships with 107 women, including mistresses and sex workers.69 Many top executives of large Chinese companies including private or state-owned have several concubines in Chinese er nai. According to the official Chinese newspaper, 95 percent of corrupt Chinese officials have mistresses, and 65 percent of corrupt Chinese officials have second or third wives or even more.70 In premodern China, it was common phenomenon for Chinese officials and wealthy men to have a number of er nai or pay for high-level prostitutes. Prostitution and concubinage were completely eradicated in the first three decades of the communist regime. However, since the reform movement er nai/prostitutes have returned and become one aspect of corruption. In order to fulfil their improper physical desires, corrupt officials buy er nai, mistresses or public prostitutes either by using tax dollars or by using their political powers. In turn, their sex objects try to reach their goals of economic and political ambitions by using their bodies. In this sense, er nai is in no way different from prostitutes because both of them sell their bodies in exchange for money or material benefits. Prostitution and corruption go hand in hand in the post-Mao era. The confluence of corrupt Chinese officials and prostitutes has become a new characteristic of China’s corruption. Rampant spread of prostitution is one symptom of China’s corruption in present-day China. Two years ago it was reported that about 80 percent of corrupt officials had er nai and had paid sex but a report from the Conference of the National People’s Congress in 2009 points out that about 95 percent of corrupt officials have er nai. If it is exaggerated that there are nine corrupt officials among ten Chinese officials, it is really true that there are nine womanized among ten corrupt officials. According to Yang Zi Evening Daily, Zhou Xiude, the former director of the Jiangsu Provincial Supply Cooperative, was sentenced to life in prison for corruption.Â€During his twelve year tenure, he kept a diary of fourteen notebooks, in which he recorded his sexual life with more than 100 women, including names, places, time, and feelings and detailed stories about his sex life. He even gave a summary at the end of every year. More disgusting is that the former Director of Textile Bureau of Hai Nan Province put the pubic hairs of more than 236 prostitutes in his safety deposit box. A great percentage of corrupt officials used their power to put their er nai and public prostitutes in leadership positions. In turn, these prostitute officials further helped the corrupt officials abuse their power by making money. Yang Feng, former vice mayor of Xuan Chen City in An Hui Province, put her twenty year old er nai in the position of head of a district. Jiao Junxian, the former mayor of Jin Meng City, put a prostitute in the position of director of the TV and Publishing Bureau. Not only male, but also female

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officials could use their power in exchange for sex. For example, An Huijun, the head of the police bureau of Lo Hu district in Shen Zhen, used her power to force her male employees to provide sex service.71 Although the Chinese government warned Chinese officials to hold the party principles of public service, the majority of government officials continue to resist amending the criminal law, because many of them actually have er nai. Two major amendments to China’s Criminal Law in 1979 and 1997 failed to include sex bribery as a crime. According to Chinese criminal law, bribes take the form of cash or property, to the exclusion of other benefits—non-property benefits such as free labor, overseas tours, overseas study, and sex services can all be forms of illicit inducement. In fact, nonproperty benefits can be also turned into property or cash. Chinese scholars have called for lawmakers to formally recognize power-sex transactions as one of the forms of bribery under criminal law. Some Chinese legal experts have recommended amending Chinese bribery laws to include non-property benefits, such as free labor, overseas tours, and sex services. Jiang Wei, procurator of northeast China’s Heilongjiang province, recommended amending Chinese bribery laws to include sex services, in an effort to better implement the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC), because extending the definition of bribery will help fight corrupt officials who take advantage of their jobs to obtain other types of benefit.72 The Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Prosecution Bureau jointly in July 2007 issued a judicial interpretation to list ten “new forms” of bribery, including seeking profits through “specially related persons,” referring to close family members, relatives, lovers, and people sharing joint interests. Officials who accept sex services in exchange for power will be severely punished. According to the new interpretation, an official can be convicted for doing someone a “special favor” even if he may not have actually received a bribe.73 Because most of the lovers used their relationships to make money illegally, “Chinese authorities could put the lovers, spouses, and children of corrupt officials on trial under new rules.”74

Chinese Prostitution and STDs The systematic corruption along with the rampant spread of prostitution has inevitably and negatively affected China’s social stability and Chinese political reform, undermining the foundation of Chinese society, interrupting the market system, damaging the justice system, poisoning Chinese officials, destroying traditional Chinese social and moral order, ruining social and family structure, spreading sexually transmitted diseases, causing wasteful government spending, intensifying the relationship between the Chinese government and the Chinese people, and contributing to social insta-


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bility in China. The greatest challenges in the twenty-first century are poverty, disease, and environmental degradation.75 Sexually transmitted diseases are one of a number of common diseases which threaten the lives of human beings, social order, and values. Prostitution is not only a marker of national decay but also a site of moral danger and physical disease.76 Due to China’s lack of health and sexual education, one of the most serious immediate consequences of the revival of prostitution in the post-Mao era has been the spread of sexual diseases once again at an alarming speed.77 It is common knowledge that STDs come mainly from unprotected sex. Prostitution is a reservoir of STDs78 and the symptom of a general breakdown in sexual morality.79 Thus, prostitution “directly threatens public morals in public places, social health, women’s rights and interests, and even the social mood.”80 Gonorrhea, syphilis, granuloma inguinale, lymphogranuloma venereum, and chancroid are five main forms of STDs, but the most serious types in contemporary society are HIV/AIDS, chlamydia and human papillomavirus.81 A sample research conducted in Shanghai indicates that unprotected sex is the main cause of STDs. According to Shanghai health officials, 80 percent of females and 20 percent of males are infected by their spouses, and some 67 percent of married and 45 percent of single males are infected by prostitutes or sex partners.82 Incomplete statistics suggest the HIV infection rate is 1.5 percent among sex workers.83 The sexual transmission of HIV is rapidly increasing in China. In Shanghai, from when the virus was first detected in 1987 until 2004, there were 1,150 officially detected cases.84 In the 1980s, a small number of HIV cases were found. Most of the infected were foreigners and Chinese people who had travelled overseas. The Chinese government did not publicly acknowledge a serious AIDS problem until 2001. In June 2001, Zhang Wenkang, China’s Minister of Health, made the startling announcement that some 600,000 people had HIV/AIDS. According to the latest Chinese official report, China now has 840,000 HIV positive people out of the total population of 1.3 billion.85 Two years ago, Western scholars estimated that “one million had been infected nationwide.”86 A new study finds that the virus has spread to all provinces, and cases are rising quickly among gay men and female prostitutes. Although the number of estimated cases one million is low for a population of 1.3 billion, it has risen 8 percent since 2005.87 In the first nine months of 2008, a total of 6,897 people in China died from HIV/AIDS related issues. The high number of deaths from the deadly virus makes it the country’s leading cause of death among infectious diseases for the first time ever, surpassing both tuberculosis and rabies.88 Dai Zhicheng, director of the Health Ministry’s Committee of AIDS, points out that the number of people living with HIV/AIDS in China could exceed 10 million by 2010 if no effective preventive measures are taken to

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control the spread of HIV.89 The World Health Organization (WHO) has confirmed this prediction.90 The UN official report has reached the same conclusion that “by 2010 there could be between ten and fifteen million infected Chinese.”91 It is estimated that 68 percent of people in China living with HIV contracted it from drug use but in 18 percent of cases, the cause of infection is unclear.92 For example, Liuzhou (Guangxi), a city with 3.64 million permanent residents, has nearly 10,000 drug users, 21 percent of whom are HIV carriers.93 Although sexual intercourse is not the primary channel of HIV infection in China, at least some 11 percent of HIV infected patients have contracted it through sexual intercourse.94 It should be noted first, that drug users are more likely to be involved in higher-risk sexual behaviors than those who abstain from using drugs. In turn, these promiscuous sexual behaviors also easily lead to unhealthy lifestyles including involvement in drug use. In a research project conducted by the Research and Academic Integrity Committee at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, it was learned that drug use is extremely prevalent in the sex industry. According to a survey, 52 to 98 percent of female drug users reported that they had engaged in commercial sex. Another survey conducted in 2000 in Zhengzhou (Henan) questioned 621 female sex workers. More than ten percent said their clients were drug users. According to a report published in 2005, most prostitutes and individuals “with sexually transmitted diseases had concurrent sexual partners.”95 Second, 11 percent of the total number of HIV carriers in China is still a significant number. More importantly, according to a recent report, most of the recent infections in women have been transmitted sexually.96 Some of them belong to the high-risk group of prostitutes while others are infected by their husbands. In addition, many cases of HIV are not even reported because of embarrassment and fear of social isolation. Most unreported cases have likely been acquired through sexual intercourse. Other forms of STD have also increased sharply in the post-Mao era. While prostitution is making a huge revival in China, experts point out that unprotected sex is the primary reason “for the skyrocketing number of cases of syphilis, gonorrhea, and other sexually transmitted diseases.”97 A total of 3,186 gonococcal isolates were tested between 1993 and 1998.98 The incidence of gonorrhea increased 2.6 times during this period at an average annual rate of 11.4 percent, reaching a plateau from 1994 to 1997.99 Gonorrhea has also become very serious, although in recent years syphilis has spread very quickly and is the foremost STD in some regions. The incidence of syphilis increased approximately twenty times from 1989 to 1998, at an average annual rate of 52.7 percent.100 About 80,406 cases were reported in 1999. From 1993 to 1999, the annual average incidence growth rate of syphilis was 83.55 percent.101 From 2001 to 2005, the incidence of syphilis


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averaged 5.1–5.8 per 100,000 per year.102 A study shows that those people who have multiple sex partners or the desire to have multiple sex partners are most likely to be infected with syphilis.103 About 14.6 percent of highincome men who had sex with prostitutes have chlamydia and 5.6 percent of the partners of those men are infected. The prevalence of chlamydia across China is similar to many developed countries, but in some urban areas, it is extremely high, especially among women whose husbands are high earners and who are out of the home a number of days each month.104 Chlamydia is highest in the rapidly developing coastal region of China where 16 percent of men and 9.9 percent of women are infected.105 By the end of 2004, 1.26 million STD patients were confirmed in Guangdong Province out of the total provincial population of 110 million residents. About 0.54 percent of pregnant women were diagnosed with syphilis in the same region. Of the STD patients discovered in 2004, 67.2 percent contracted a disease through nonmarital sex.106 In 1988, China reported 56,090 STD cases, and by December 1989 the total number reached 204,077. In 2002, more than 740,000 cases of STD were reported.107 The STD rates in China have increased 100-fold since 1986 when China publicly confirmed its first cases of STDs. According to the latest statistics, nearly four million people contract STDs each year. In 1996, Chinese experts predicted that “with the number of cases rising by 18 percent annually, venereal diseases could become China’s top infectious diseases by the year 2000.”108 Present-day China has over seven million people diagnosed with STDs, making them third highest on the list of infectious diseases in the country.109 However, the incidence of STDs is likely to top all contagious diseases in China in three to five years.110

Resolutions for Controlling the Development of Prostitution The China epidemic corruption has demanded a sex market; and, in turn, the sex market contributes both to the development of corruption and STDs. If the Chinese government cannot control the current situation with respect to prostitution, the country could become the leading centre for the spread of STDs which will cause other social problems.111 There is little doubt that the Chinese government has made efforts to launch national campaigns to crack down on prostitution, but it has not established unified laws for local governments to regulate Chinese prostitutes. How can the Chinese government control the growth of Chinese prostitution within the current Chinese economic and political system? First and the foremost, it is the top priority for the CPC to take it seriously against corruption in order to effectively control the growth of prostitution,

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because they are the twin sources of China’s corruption. According to the new interpretation by the Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Prosecution Bureau, bribery includes sexual bribery, but conviction for sex bribery is still controversial in China, because corrupt officials who trade power for sex cannot easily be identified and thus punished. Therefore, conviction for sex bribery will continue to be controversial in China. Xiao Hua points out that “If there is no law, there is no crime and without a crime there is no punishment. The spread of bribery and abuse of public power in exchange for sex deals is more or less a result of the absence of legislation.”112 It is the most important task to take legal action against sex bribery in order to control the development of prostitution. Second, prostitution must be discouraged. Although it is not the most effective solution to criminalize prostitution, legal regulation is one of the measures to control the development of prostitution. Criminalization means that provisions are introduced in the criminal code to make it illegal to practice prostitution. However, supporters of the pro-sex work lobby have lobbied the UN to accept prostitution as an issue of employment and individual rights. They suggest that prostitution should be legalized, because prostitution can help some single men who have troubles finding a suitable wife, reduce the crime rate including rape and sexual harassment, create job opportunities, limit the percentage of sex workers, protect the individual rights of sex workers and sex worker’s health by recognizing prostitution as work, facilitate the implementation of HIV/AIDS prevention programs, allow policemen to concentrate on more serious problems of crime, generate additional funds for local government via the extension of the tax net, and promote the development of China’s burgeoning tourism and leisure industry. The existing international laws do not justify the measure of criminalizing prostitution. The United Nations Convention for Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation of Prostitution of Others (1949) only criminalizes the activities of those who exploit or coerce prostitutes, but leaves prostitutes themselves free from regulation. Since the late 1980s, the Chinese government has established various laws and regulations to regulate prostitution, including Security Administration Punishment Regulations (1987), Decision on Strictly Forbidding the Selling and Buying of Sex (1991), Decision on the Severe Punishment of Criminals Who Abduct and Traffic in or Kidnap Women and Children (1991), Law on Protecting the Rights and Interests of Women (1992), Revision of Criminal Law of the PRC (1997), and Regulations Concerning the Management of Public Places of Entertainment (1999). The government’s standpoint is very ambiguous. The Chinese government’s periodic crackdowns on prostitution activity seem half-hearted because China’s economy cannot produce enough legitimate jobs to absorb


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everyone who needs one.113 According to Chinese economist Yang Fan, there are 20 million prostitutes in China, earning RMB 25,000 annually, (totalling RMB 500 billion). About half of the prostitutes’ income goes to consumption of RMB 250 billion. Prostitutes also need equipment including beepers, cell phone, taxis, apartments, expensive clothes, fine cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and even bodyguards. In this sense, the sex industry is part of the Chinese economy, accounting for about 8 percent of China’s GDP.114 However, it does not necessarily mean that China needs a red light district or that the Chinese government should legalize prostitution.115 Third, it is important for prostitutes to change themselves fundamentally by changing their beliefs and their way of life. The main lesson we should learn from the Chinese Government’s efforts in eradicating Chinese prostitution in the Mao era is that it is impossible to eradicate it through coercive force. In fact, without changing the value standards of Chinese people, sexual repression under coercive force will cause more serious problems later.116 There are ways that prostitutes can restore their lives and turn to other means of employment. In retrospect, the May Fourth Movement was mainly concerned with the liberation of Chinese women’s “feet,” while the Nationalist Government was primarily concerned about the liberation of Chinese women’s “hands.” The women’s liberation today aims at the liberation of women’s “brains.”117 Influenced by communist revolutionary ideology, Chinese prostitutes were treated unfairly under the Mao regime. They were considered victims before the reform movement, but “they were not trusted by the Party as responsible people.”118 They were perceived to be law breakers who had to be put behind bars or under forced labor. In the post-Mao era, prostitutes are still judged by a simple moral standard. Many face alienation among their peers and harsh repercussions. They have become highly mobile and increasingly reluctant to take part in voluntary counseling and testing programs. Those who need medication for STD-related conditions often think twice before going to the hospital because they fear facing doctors’ apathy or remonstrations.119 Obviously, their dignity is seriously injured. The public should understand that prostitutes are a disadvantaged group that need help. Prostitutes are not prostitution.120 Prostitutes are human beings and individuals who must be respected. Elaine Jeffrey suggests that it is necessary to substitute the words prostitute/prostitution with the terms sex work/sex worker, because “the term of sex work/sex worker can avoid the pejorative moral connotation by suggesting that sexual services constitute a form of labor like any other, and that individuals have the right to control the use of their own bodies.”121 Fourth, it is necessary to work with Chinese society as a whole to reduce the demand for sexual services. Although prostitution is a social phenomenon that cannot be cured overnight, it cannot be viewed as a new domain

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of women’s work. Jeffreys argues that the Western “pro-sex work” position is simply inappropriate to the Chinese context and the Chinese government must take a tough stance in order to control the growth of prostitution effectively.122 As the prostitution industry expands, not only Chinese officials routinely engage prostitutes by using their power, but also other ranks of Chinese people are visiting brothels and spreading diseases to yet more people. Some transient members of the population pay prostitutes to satisfy sexual desires; some businessmen procure prostitutes for their clients to enhance their business opportunities; and some intellectuals visit brothels. In June 2004, a famous professor, Lu Deming, of the Department of Economics at Fudan University was caught with a Chinese prostitute. The University offered “reeducational help” to him and expelled him from the Party Committee because his behavior overstepped the limit of social morality. This suggests that what is needed is to promote active behavioral intervention programs in China.123 It should be noted that the public’s confidence in openly forbidding prostitution has been greatly weakened. According to a survey on prostitution conducted in cities, the inactive attitude towards illegal sexual affairs has weakened. Only 9.7 percent of the respondents believe all the underground prostitutes could be discovered. Also, only 3.75 percent believe almost all the clients could be discovered. In contrast, 42.8 percent believe the underground prostitutes are seldom or never discovered; 63.1 percent believe that the clients are seldom or never discovered. Moreover, as the public is not willing to become involved in the detection and reporting of prostitution, the numbers of prostitutes and their clients increase due to low risk factors.124 Fifth, since the revival of Chinese prostitution is one of the main causes of STDs, it is important to control the growth of STDs. Two interrelated issues—preventing transmission of STDs into the general population and treatment of infected people—are both important. From a sociological perspective, in order to effectively control the rampant growth of STDs, it is more important to prevent STDs rather than to treat them. The main task is to prevent the disease from being transmitted to the general public from high-risk people such as prostitutes and clients, the transient population, and long-distance truck drivers.125 China is at significant risk from STDs which are currently spreading from relatively localized high-risk groups into the mainstream population. Unquestionably, the first high-risk group that is spreading STDs is prostitutes.126 In addition to prostitutes, transient people are a high-risk group serving as a gateway for contracting STDs and spreading them into large cities. Research suggests that most of these affected people are migrants or prostitutes.127 Due to the fact that most male transient workers are single but have money, prostitutes target them as clients. Condoms are rarely used during


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sexual interaction, causing the disease to spread. According to a survey carried out in 2003 among the 986 sexually active migrants, the prevalence of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis was 3.5 percent, 0.5 percent, and 1.0 percent, respectively.128 The prevalence of STDs was 3.2 percent for construction workers, 5.6 percent for market vendors, and 5.6 percent for factory workers. A massive educational program is one of the important tools to prevent STDs. Recently, the Chinese government has been considering making HIV transmission a criminal act.129 It announced new regulations that include punishing HIV-infected individuals who intentionally infect others. However, the most important key to controlling STDs is promotion of mass educational programs and training of health care workers and common citizens. Open discussion of STDs helps attract the attention of the general public.130 When people learn how the disease is contracted and how to prevent it, they are able to defend themselves.131 However, the Chinese government has neglected the development of sex education for a long time and the current sex educational programs are still limited to the necessity of using contraception to limit population growth.132 Many Chinese scientists continue to complain that China lacks a national public education program.133 Schools in most provinces do not teach sexual education, leaving many young people unaware of potential risks. Many prostitutes know very little about how STDs are transmitted. A recent survey shows that large numbers of prostitutes do not use condoms when having sex with both commercial and non-commercial sexual partners, and many are unaware of the risks.134 Incomplete statistics indicate that only about 30 percent used condoms during sex before the doctors’ intervention.135 This study implies that it is necessary to promote awareness of STD infection and stress the value of condoms.136 Some Chinese cities are launching a campaign to set up automatic condom selling machines in public places, including college and university campuses, entertainment venues such as hotels, nightclubs, beauty salons and karaoke bars, and construction sites where migrant workers are often employed, but the majority of Chinese cities have not yet set up these machines.137 The Chinese government must guarantee freedom of the press, in order for the Chinese society and international organizations to monitor the development of STDs in China. Under the censorship system, Chinese authorities are very strict on what is publicized about some sensitive issues, including corruption and HIV. The Chinese government is hesitant to admit that HIV is becoming a dangerous problem and make a case about how corruption contributes to the growth of prostitution and STDs. The most widely known AIDS campaigner, Wan Yanhai, was arrested for openly criticizing the Chinese government and publicly revealing the actual size of the epidemic. Although it promised reform, the censorship will not be changed

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until implementing fundamental political reform. Therefore, it can be believed that STDs and prostitution will continue to spread along with government corruption until such time that the necessary precautions are taken to protect the public. While making efforts to prevent STDs, the treatment of STDs cannot be ignored. In order to treat STDs, the compulsory treatment of STDs is necessary, as some Western countries did during World War II, including Australia, France, and Britain, but it is not fundamental to ending their spread.138 To do so, the Chinese government should improve the Chinese health care system. In China, the National Program of STD Control is directed by the Ministry of Health and assisted by two affiliated centers: The National Center for AIDS Prevention and Control, and The National Center for STD and Leprosy Control. Although there has been a National System of STD Surveillance to monitor the STD epidemic at the national level since 1987, most hospitals and clinics do not have special STD departments or doctors. 139 Treatment for STDs is extremely scarce because the Chinese health care system has a lack of human resources. This may be due partly to the fact that Chinese prostitution “did not exist as a serious object of governmental and intellectual concern in China for a period of nearly three decades.”140 Chinese doctors had no medical experience in the treatment of STDs before the reform movement. According to Haterm, Chinese doctors who were under the age of forty-five or fifty had never seen a case of active syphilis or gonorrhea because China proclaimed that it had eradicated prostitution and venereal disease in the 1960s.141 Some clinic centers have trained doctors in recent years, but it is far from enough.142 It is even difficult to find a doctor who can test to determine if someone is infected with HIV. According to the Ministry of Health, there are about 100 doctors in China qualified to diagnose and treat HIV. Moreover, Chinese primary care physicians have limited knowledge of STDs. Obviously, this is “a barrier to the appropriate diagnosis and treatment of STDs.”143 China’s medical system is undergoing transformation towards privatization with the result that Chinese hospitals and clinics are focussing on profits instead of caring for patients.144 Some STD clinics are run by commercial organizations or individuals, often leading to a lack of quality control and lax supervision. Illegal roving clinics still exist in great numbers. Even in many legal medical units, most patients are given poor service and charged unreasonably high prices. Both illegal roving STD doctors and many stateowned hospitals and clinics charge patients too much and provide poor service. Patients are usually too shy, due to the nature of their disease, to file complaints to supervisory bodies.145 According to Zhang Junyan from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, if the public has no access to timely and effective treatment for sexual diseases, “the situation will soon be out of control.”146 The Chinese government should take any neces-


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sary measures to establish clinics, crack down on illegal clinics, and find effective ways to check the spread of the venereal disease.147 The Chinese government should provide more financial support and develop better supervision of laboratories and health care equipment.148 The basic health care equipment in Chinese hospitals and clinics, especially in poor rural areas, is outdated.149 In January 2003, a delegation consisting of various scientific and administrative professionals, led by U.S. Senator Bill Frist, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies went to China to examine its approach to HIV/AIDS. The delegation found that “China remains ill equipped to preempt a generalized HIV/AIDS epidemic.”150

Conclusion Because China lacks a serious political reform, China remains a nondemocratic government which directly contributes to the rampant growth of corruption. Prostitution, the twin of China’s corruption, is booming in the post-Mao era. China’s sex market boom is not caused by sex workers but by the demands of the market, especially by those people who hold power and money. The more corrupt officials there are, the more prostitutes there are. The increasing numbers of prostitutes reflects that the Chinese government is becoming more corrupt. The systematic corruption along with the rampant spread of prostitution has undermined the government’s legitimacy, contributed to China’s social instability, poisoned social moral order and spiritual life, damaged people’s health. Thus, the Chinese government must take effective measures to control the growth of prostitution. However, it is the top priority for the Chinese government to fundamentally reform its political system and minimize government corruption in order to win the battle of controlling the growth of prostitution.

Notes â•‡â•‡ 1.â•‡ David Rennie, “Call To Make ‘Sex Bribery’ A Crime,” Telegraph.co.uk, 16 December 2000. â•‡â•‡ 2.â•‡ Chilla Bulbeck, Re-Orienting Western Feminisms: Women’s Diversity in a Postcolonial World (Cambridge: University Press, 2003), 180. â•‡â•‡ 3.â•‡ Nanette J. Davis, Prostitution: An International Handbook on Trends, Problems, and Policies (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993), 88. â•‡â•‡ 4.â•‡ See G. L. Simons, The Illustrated Book of Sexual Records (New York: Random House Value Publishing, 1987), 8. â•‡â•‡ 5.â•‡ Davis, Prostitution, 88. â•‡â•‡ 6.â•‡ Fernando Henriques, Prostitution and Society (New York: Citadel Press, 1962), 250.

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â•‡â•‡ 7.â•‡ Donald Sutton, “Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China,” Journal of Social History 35 (Sept. 2002): 712. â•‡â•‡ 8.â•‡ Teemu Ruskola, “Law, Sexual Morality, and Gender Equality in the Qing and Communist China,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 103, no. 8 (June 1994): 2531. â•‡â•‡ 9.â•‡ Gail Hershatter, “The Hierarchy of Shanghai Prostitution, 1870–1949,” Modern China 15, no. 4 (Oct. 1989): 463. â•‡ 10.â•‡ Christian Henriot, “From a Throne of Glory to a Seat of Ignominy: Shanghai Prostitution Revisited (1849–1949),” Modern China 22, no. 2 (Apr. 1996): 155. â•‡ 11.â•‡ Ibid., 152. â•‡ 12.â•‡ Hershatter, “The Hierarchy of Shanghai Prostitution,” 465. â•‡ 13.â•‡ Harriet Evans, Women and Sexuality in China: Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949 (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1997), 175. â•‡ 14.â•‡ Christian Henriot, “La Femeture: The Abolition of Prostitution in Shanghai, 1949–58,” China Quarterly 142 (June 1995): 474. â•‡ 15.â•‡ Evans, Women and Sexuality in China, 174. â•‡ 16.â•‡ Sandra Teresa Hyde, “Selling Sex and Sidestepping the State: Prostitutes, Condoms, and HIV/AIDS Prevention in Southwest China,” International Quarterly 18 (Winter 2000): 112. â•‡ 17.â•‡ Evans, Women and Sexuality in China, 175. â•‡ 18.â•‡ Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 128. â•‡ 19.â•‡ Evans, Women and Sexuality in China, 175. â•‡ 20.â•‡ Quoted in Herbert K. Abrams, “Resurgence of Sexually transmitted Disease in China,” Journal of Public Health Policy (2001): 1. â•‡ 21.â•‡ George Haterm, “With Mao Tse-tung’s Thought as the Compass for Action in the Control of Venereal Diseases in China,” China Medicine (Oct. 1966): 60. â•‡ 22.â•‡ Davis, Prostitution, 94. â•‡ 23.â•‡ Vincent. E. Gil, Marco S. Wang, Allen F. Anderson, Guo Mathew Lin and Zongjian Oliver Wu, “Prostitutes, Prostitution, and STD/HIV Transmission in Mainland China,” Social Science and Medicine, 42, no. 1 (Jan. 1996): 141. â•‡ 24.â•‡ Quoted in Peter Goodman, “Sex Trade Thrives in China: Localities Exploiting A Growing Business,” Washington Post, 4 January 2003. â•‡ 25.â•‡ Peter Fryer, Prostitution (New York: Praeger, 1968), 29. â•‡ 26.â•‡ Xin Ren, Prostitution and Employment Opportunities for Women under China’s Economic Reform (Johannesburg, South Africa: Lola Press, 2004), 1. â•‡ 27.â•‡ Evans, Women and Sexuality in China, 185. â•‡ 28.â•‡ Ibid., 185. â•‡ 29.â•‡ Elaine Jeffreys, “Feminist Prostitution Debates: Are There any Sex Workers in China?” in Chinese Women—Living and Working, ed. Anne E. McLaren (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 83. â•‡ 30.â•‡ Yueyan Lin, “Sex Trade Dominates Debate on Chinese Women,” Radio Free Asia, Washington, D.C., 2005. â•‡ 31.â•‡ Pan Suiming, Three Red Light Districts in China (Beijing: Qunyan Publishing House, 1999), 16. â•‡ 32.â•‡ Zhong Wei, “A Close Look at China’s Sex Industry,” Lianhe Weekly, 2 Oct. 2000.


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â•‡ 33.â•‡ Li Yuguo, “Over 10 Million Sex Workers Estimated in China,” Epoch Times, 20 October 2006. â•‡ 34.â•‡ John Pomfret, “Wild Weekend’s Hangover; Outrage Follows Japanese Tourists’ Orgy with Chinese Prostitutes,” Washington Post, 3 October 2003. â•‡ 35.â•‡ Zhang Zhiping, “Does China Need a Red-Light District?,” Beijing Review, 12 June 2000. â•‡ 36.â•‡ Ren, Prostitution and Employment Opportunities, 3. â•‡ 37.â•‡ Pan Suiming, Three Red Light Districts in China, 7. â•‡ 38.â•‡ Rachel DeWosking, “Wife Sentence,” wwww.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and _style/article604618.ece (5 May 2006). â•‡ 39.â•‡ Gail Hershatter, “Modernizing Sex, Sexing Modernity: Prostitution in Early Twentieth-century Shanghai,” in Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State, eds. Christina K. Gilmartin, Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel and Tyrene White (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 147. â•‡ 40.â•‡ Ibid., 164. â•‡ 41.â•‡ Evans, Women and Sexuality in China, 175. â•‡ 42.â•‡ Sarah Schafer, “Not Just another Pretty Face,” Newsweek, 13 Oct. 2003. â•‡ 43.â•‡ Leslie Lau, “Social Problems Grow amid Surge in Number of Chinese Women Working as Prostitutes,” Singapore Times, 4 Dec. 2005. â•‡ 44.â•‡ Henriot, “La Femeture,” 424. â•‡ 45.â•‡ Elaine Jeffreys, China, Sex and Prostitution: Telling Tale (New York: Routledge, 2004), 96. â•‡ 46.â•‡ David J. Lynch, “Today’s Chinese Revolution is Sexual,” USA Today, 16 September 2003. â•‡ 47.â•‡ Hyde, “Selling Sex and Sidestepping the State: Prostitutes, Condoms, and HIV/AIDS Prevention in Southwest China,” 111. â•‡ 48.â•‡ Davis, Prostitution, 105. â•‡ 49.â•‡ Lynch, “Today’s Chinese Revolution is Sexual.” â•‡ 50.â•‡ Elaine Jeffreys, “A Matter of Choice: Feminist Prostitution Debates and the Example of China,” web.mit.edu/chinapolicy/www/conference1/jeffreys.pdf (12 Feb. 2006). â•‡ 51.â•‡ Evans, Women and Sexuality in China, 181. â•‡ 52.â•‡ Bulbeck, Re-Orienting Western Feminisms, 180. â•‡ 53.â•‡ Sue Gronewald, Beautiful Merchandise: Prostitution in China: 1860–1936 (New York, Haworth Press, 1982), 128. â•‡ 54.â•‡ Tim J. Filfoyle “Prostitute in History: From Parables of Pornography to Metaphors of Modernity,” American Historical Review 104, no. 1 (Feb. 1999): 118. â•‡ 55.â•‡ See Jessica Fulton, “Holding up Half the Heavens: The Effect Communist Rule on China’s Women,” Indiana University South Bend, www.iusb.edu/~journal/2000/ fulton.html (7 Apr. 2006). â•‡ 56.â•‡ Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power (New York: Random House, 1994), 214–16. â•‡ 57.â•‡ Gail Hershatter, “A Regulating Sex in Shanghai: The Reform of Prostitution in 1920 and 1951,” in Shanghai Sojourners, eds. Frederic, Wakeman, Jr., and Wenhsin Yeh (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, 1992), 172. â•‡ 58.â•‡ Evelyn Iritani, “As Textile Curbs Fall, Many Feel Hardship,” Los Angeles Times, 21 April 2005.

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â•‡ 59.â•‡ Lin Lean Lim, The Sex Sector: The Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia (Washington, D.C.: International Labor Office, 1998), 9. â•‡ 60.â•‡ Zi Teng, “Commercial Sex in Present-day China,” Newspaper Digest, 22 Oct. 1990. â•‡ 61.â•‡ Lin, The Sex Sector, 209. â•‡ 62.â•‡ Cheng Li, Rediscovering China: Dynamics and Dilemmas of Reform (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1997), 130. â•‡ 63.â•‡ “China’s Floating Population Tops 140 Million,” People’s Daily, 27 July 2005. â•‡ 64.â•‡ Bulbeck, Re-Orienting Western Feminisms, 181. â•‡ 65.â•‡ “China trusts prostitutes more,” BBC News, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific /8183502.stm (16 August 2009). â•‡ 66.â•‡ “Waitress Deng Yujiao Who Stabbed To Death Communist Official Walks Free,” Times, 17 June 2009. â•‡ 67.â•‡ Tiantian Zheng, Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 3. â•‡ 68.â•‡ Ibid, 22. â•‡ 69.â•‡ “Zhang Er Jiang’s Trial,” www.people.com.cn/GB/shehui/44/20020726 /784923.html (2 June 2006). â•‡ 70.â•‡ Tan Weiping, “95 Percent of Corrupted Chinese Officials Have Second Wives,” Chinese Youth Daily, 9 January 2001. â•‡ 71.â•‡ “The Chief Director of Police Bureau of Lo Hu District Is under Investigation,” People’s Daily, www.people.com.cn/BIG5/14576/14840/3034521.html (1 October 2009). â•‡ 72.â•‡ “China Procurator Suggests Including Sex Services as Bribery,” China.org .com.cn, sientechina.china.com.cn/english/government/186569.htm (20 August 2009). â•‡ 73.â•‡ Li Fangchao, “Legal Interpretation Targets Bribery,” China Daily, 9 July 2007. â•‡ 74.â•‡ “Chinese Corruption Law Targets Lovers And Families Of Officials,” Guardian, 26 August 2008. â•‡ 75.â•‡ “Poverty, Disease, Environmental Decline Are True ‘Axis of Evil,” World Watch Institutes Website, www.worldwatch.org/press/news/2005/01/12/ (20 Feb. 2006). â•‡ 76.â•‡ Hershatter, “Modernizing Sex, Sexing Modernity: Prostitution in Early Twentieth-century Shanghai,” 147. â•‡ 77.â•‡ Evans, Women and Sexuality in China, 174. â•‡ 78.â•‡ Vincent. E. Gil, Marco S. Wang, Allen F. Anderson, Guo Mathew Lin and Zongjian Oliver Wu, “Prostitutes, Prostitution, and STD/HIV Transmission in Mainland China,” Social Science and Medicine, 42, no. 1 (Jan. 1996): 141. â•‡ 79.â•‡ Michael Sturma, “Public Health and Sexual Morality: Venereal Disease in World War II Australia,” Signs 13, no. 4 (Summer 1988): 728. â•‡ 80.â•‡ Zhang, “Does China Need a Red-Light District?,” 31. â•‡ 81.â•‡ Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group, 2000. â•‡ 82.â•‡ Edmund Settle, “AIDS in China: An Annotated Chronology (1985–2003), 7, www.casy.org/chron/AIDSchron_111603.pdf (12 Feb. 2006).


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â•‡ 83.â•‡ “Anti-AIDS Campaign Spotlights Sex Workers,” People’s Daily, 4 May 2005. â•‡ 84.â•‡ “AIDS Experts Worry about ‘Mobile Men with Money’,” People’s Daily, 2 August 2005. â•‡ 85.â•‡ “China Could Have 10 Million HIV Cases by 2010,” Public Policy International News, www.hivdent.org/publicp/inter/ppinCCHM1005.htm (12 Feb. 2006). â•‡ 86.â•‡ Drew Thompson, “Pre-empting an HIV/AIDS Disaster in China,” Seton Hall Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations IV, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2003): 30. â•‡ 87.â•‡ Donald G. McNell, “H.I.V. Spreads in China, Affecting New Populations,” New York Times, 6 October 2008. â•‡ 88.â•‡ Drucilla Dyess, “HIV/AIDS Deaths in China Soaring,” HealthNews.com, 20 February 2009, www.healthnews.com/disease-illness/hivaids-deaths-china-soaring -2658.html (19 August 2009). â•‡ 89.â•‡ “Nation to Limit HIV Cases to 1.5m by 2010,” Xinhua Net, news.xinhuanet .com/english/2005-10/23/content_3671711.htm (12 Feb. 2006). â•‡ 90.â•‡ “10 Million People in China May Be Infected With HIV by 2010: WHO,” www.14wfie.com/Global/story.asp?S=4180612 (25 September 2009). â•‡ 91.â•‡ Thompson, “Pre-empting an HIV/AIDS Disaster in China,” 30. â•‡ 92.â•‡ “60 percent HIV Carriers Infected through Drug Use: Expert,” People’s Daily, 27 November 2003. â•‡ 93.â•‡ “Anti-AIDS Campaign Spotlights Sex Workers.” â•‡ 94.â•‡ “Current Overview of HIV/AIDS in China,” China AIDS Survey, www.casy .org/overview.htm (12 Feb. 2006). â•‡ 95.â•‡ Hongmei Yang, Xiaoming Li, Bonita Stanton, Hongjie Liu, Hui Liu, Ning Wang, Xiaoyi Fang, Danhua Lin and Xinguang Chen, “Heterosexual Transmission of HIV in China: A Systematic Review of Behavioral Studies in the Past Two Decades,” Sexually Transmitted Diseases 32, no. 5 (May 2005): 270–80. â•‡ 96.â•‡ Sun Xiaohua, “Day Highlights Rising HIV in Women,” China Daily, 11 July 2004. â•‡ 97.â•‡ Julie Chao, “Prostitution Boom in China Poses Growing Threat to Public Health,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution 26 (Sept. 2000): A1. â•‡ 98.â•‡ Shunzhang Ye, Xiaohong Su, Qianqiu Wang, Yueping Yin, Xiuqin Dai and Houhua Sun, “Surveillance of Antibiotic Resistance of Neisseria gonorrhea Isolates in China, 1993–1998,” Journal of the American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association, www.stdjournal.com/pt/re/std/abstract.00007435-200204000-00010.htm (12 Feb. 2006). â•‡ 99.â•‡ X. S. Chen, X. D. Gong, G. J. Liang, and G. C. Zhang, “Epidemiologic Trends of Sexually Transmitted Diseases in China,” The Service of National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/ query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10726645&dopt=Abstract (12 Feb. 2006). 100.â•‡ Ibid. 101.â•‡ X. Gong, G. Zhang and S. Ye, “Epidemiological Analysis of Syphilis in China Through 1985 to 2000,” Chinese Journal of Sexually Transmitted Infection, 1 no. 1 (2001): 1–6. 102.â•‡ “Resurgence And Spread Of Syphilis In China Is A Rapidly Increasing Epidemic,” Science Daily, 12 January 2007.

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103.â•‡ Nan He, Roger Detels, Jingde Zhu, Qingwu Jiang, Zheng Chen, Yn Fang, Xiaohang Zhang, Min Wu and Qi Zhao, “Characteristics and Sexually Transmitted Diseases of Male Rural Migrants in a Metropolitan Area of Eastern China,” Sexually Transmitted Diseases 32, no. 5 (May 2005): 286–92. 104.â•‡ Ibid. 105.â•‡ Ibid. 106.â•‡ Zheng Caixiong, “Guangdong Sees Quick Rise in STD Patients,” China Daily, 4 April 2005. 107.â•‡ Edmund Settle, “AIDS in China: An Annotated Chronology (1985–2003),” 4. 108.â•‡ “China Venereal Disease Rates Rising 18 Percent Annually,” AIDS Weekly Plus, 19 Aug. 1996. 109.â•‡ “China Deals with Increasing Venereal Diseases,” People’s Daily, 11 March 2000. 110.â•‡ “Experts Predict High STD Incidence in 3 to 5 Years,” People’s Daily, 13 January 2004. 111.â•‡ Lin, “Sex Trade Dominates Debate on Chinese Women.” 112.â•‡ Xiao Hua, “Should Sex Bribery Be Punished Without Legal Approval?” Beijing Review, 28 December 2007. 113.â•‡ Lynch, “Today’s Chinese Revolution is Sexual,” 15. 114.â•‡ Zhong Wei, “A Close Look at China’s Sex Industry,” Lianhe zaobao, 2 Oct. 2000. 115.â•‡ Zhang, “Does China Need a Red-Light District?,” 31. 116.â•‡ Wendy Larson, “Never This Wild: Sexing the Cultural Revolution,” Modern China 25, no. 4 (Oct. 1999): 423. 117.â•‡ Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century Shanghai (London: University of California P, 1997), 391. 118.â•‡ Henriot, “La Fermeture,” 467. 119.â•‡ “Anti-AIDS Campaign Spotlights Sex Workers.” 120.â•‡ Garry Bennet and Roberta Perkins, Being a Prostitute: Prostitute Women and Men (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1985), 280. 121.â•‡ Elaine Jeffreys, “Feminist Prostitution Debates: Are There Any Sex Workers in China?” in Chinese Women-Living and Working, ed. Anne E. McLaren (New York: Routledge Curzon), 83. 122.â•‡ Jeffreys, “Feminist Prostitution Debates,” 96. 123.â•‡ X. S, Chen, X. D. Gong G. J. Liang and G. C. Zhang, “Epidemiologic Trends of Sexually Transmitted Diseases in China.” 124.â•‡ See Pan Suiming, Cun Zai Yu Huang Miu—Zhong Guo di Xia Xing Chan Ye Kao Cha (The Underground Sex Industry in China) (Beijing: Qunyan Publishing House, 1999). 125.â•‡ Edmund Settle, “AIDS in China: An Annotated Chronology (1985–2003),” 5–8. 126.â•‡ Rosenthal, “Scientists Warn of Inaction as AIDS Spreads in China.” 127.â•‡ “AIDS Experts Worry about ‘Mobile Men with Money’.” 128.â•‡ He et al., “Characteristics and Sexually Transmitted Diseases,” 286–92. 129.â•‡ Evans, Women and Sexuality in China, 177. 130.â•‡ Harvey J. Locke, “Changing Attitudes Toward Venereal Diseases,” American Sociological Review 4, no. 6 (Dec. 1939): 842.


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131.â•‡ Haterm, “With Mao Tse-tung’s Thought as the Compass for Action in the Control of Venereal Diseases in China,” 60. 132.â•‡ Fang-fu Ruan, “China,” in The International Encyclopedia of Sexuality, ed. Robert T. Francoeur (Continuum Publishing Company, 2001). 133.â•‡ Rosenthal, “Scientists Warn of Inaction as AIDS Spreads in China.” 134.â•‡ Yang et al., “ Heterosexual Transmission of HIV in China: A Systematic Review of Behavioral Studies in the Past Two Decades,” 270. 135.â•‡ “Anti-AIDS Campaign Spotlights Sex Workers.” 136.â•‡ Leslie H. Lang, “Hidden Chlamydia Epidemic Found In China,” Carolina 154, 11 Mar. 2003. 137.â•‡ “Beijing Sets Up Condom Selling Machines,” People’s Daily, 24 Oct. 2004. 138.â•‡ Sturma, “Public Health and Sexual Morality,” 731. 139.â•‡ Zhong Wei, “A Close Look at China’s Sex Industry.” 140.â•‡ Jeffreys, China, Sex and Prostitution, 96. 141.â•‡ Haterm, “With Mao Tse-tung’s Thought as the Compass for Action in the Control of Venereal Diseases in China,” 60. 142.â•‡ “State Alert as STDs on the Rise,” China Daily, 6 Nov. 2000. 143.â•‡ Harold C. Wiesenfeld, Keisha Dennard-Hall, Robert Cook, Michael Ashton, Tracy Zamborsky, and Marijane Krohn, “Knowledge About Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Women Among Primary Care Physicians,” Sexually Transmitted Diseases 32, no. 11 (Nov. 2005): 650. 144.â•‡ Kyung-Hee Choi, et al. “Treatment Delay and Reliance of Private Physicians among Patents with STDs in China,” International Journal of STD and AIDS 110 (1999): 310. 145.â•‡ “State Alert as STDs on the Rise,” China Daily, 6 Nov. 2000. 146.â•‡ Quoted in “Experts Predict High STD Incidence in 3 to 5 Years,” People’s Daily, 13 Jan. 2004. 147.â•‡ “China Deals with Increasing Venereal Diseases,” People’s Daily, 11 March 2000. 148.â•‡ D. T. Fleming and J. N. Wasserheit, “From Epidemiologic Synergy to Public Health Policy and Practice: Contribution of Other Sexually Transmitted Diseases to Sexual Transmission of HIV Infection,” Sexually Transmitted Infections 75, no. 1 (1999): 3-7. 149.â•‡ S. He, “Reforms and Development of Rural Preventive Care Network in Hubei Province,” China Rural Health Administration 21, no. 4 (2001): 5. 150.â•‡ Lous Sulliavan, J. Stapleton Roy, and J. Stephen Morrison, and Gill Bates, Averting a Full-blown HIV/AIDS Epidemic in China: A Report of the CSIS HIV/AIDS Delegation to China, Jan. 13–17, 2003 (Washington, D.C.: CSIS Press, 2003), 6.

5 Freedom of Media: The Fourth Power of Modern Democracy

The previous chapters attempt to argue that a democratically strong China would not be a threat to the United States but a chaotic China would be a great potential danger to the global peace. If the CPC continues to resist fundamental political reform, it will further deepen its current social conflict. Democratizing China is the key to guaranteeing China’s peaceful rise in a global context. Under the internal and external pressures, the CPC has begun talking about China’s democracy. On December 2006, the CPC’s organ newspaper Beijing Daily published an article entitled “Democracy is Good” (minzhu shi ge hao dongxi) written by Yu Keping, who is member of Hu Jintao’s think tank. In this article Yu recognized that democracy is the best political system in the world and sketched the blueprint of Hu Jintao’s political reform. Hu Jintao mentioned “democracy” more than sixty times in his Political Report at the Seventeenth National Congress of the CPC on 15 October 200, vowing to expand the people’s democracy and ensure that they are masters of the country.1 However, the CPC has emphasized inner party democracy. At a meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee in July of 2009, Hu pointed out that “the CPC must pay greater attention to inner party democracy and actively promote it, because this will help the CPC perform its duty as the ruling party.”2 By contrast, modern democracy is a form of government in which the ultimate power of control lies with the people. The basic characteristic of a democratic system is to carry out competitive elections and the rule of law. If China fully implemented democratic principles, it would mean that the CPC would lose its position as the ruling party. There is little doubt that the CPC will not surrender its power any time soon, continuing to carry out the one-party system. While China is in transition, 101

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it is naïve to expect that the CPC will voluntarily establish the democratic system. Then, what if China does not democratize?3 What if China manages to continue on its current economic path, yet its political system does not change in any fundamental way?4 In other words, what is a workable solution for the Chinese people to steadily promote China’s democratization within the framework of the current political system? This chapter argues that the CPC is still in power and China needs to use the CPC to support its modernization and liberalization during the transition. Any attempt to dissolve the one-party system in present-day China will have poor prospects. China must take two steps to go through the transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic form of government. The first step is to promote freedom of the media, citizen participation, and religious rights. President Barack Obama told Chinese students in the town hall meeting in November 2009 that freedoms of expression and worship, of access to information and political participation are universal rights. They should be available to all people, whether they are in the United States, China or any nation.5 This chapter will emphasize freedom of the media. The freedom of the media is an invisible and unauthoritative power, but it is a great way for the Chinese people to check the unlimited power of the CPC, control the epidemic corruption, and increase the consciousness of citizen participation in order to promote a real people’s China. Thus, the freedom of the media is the beginning of a long journey toward China’s democratization.

Not One but Two Steps toward China’s Democratization Modern democracy is the best political system in the world because it creates social stability, guarantees individual rights, moderates conflicts, regulates political competition, makes government more legitimate, improves the quality of government, and recruits political leaders from a large pool.6 Francis Fukuyama points out that the democratic system may constitute the final form of human government and will continue to “spread to more and more countries around the world.”7 It took hundred years to go through the transition from a monarchial system to a democratic one in Europe because the special interest groups under monarchial system did not want to lose their sole authority. The process of democratization is always full of confrontation between the majority of people and the small interest groups. China has more than 2,000 years of written history after the first unified Qin dynasty established in 221 BC. The mainstream of the patriarchal system is deeply embedded in Chinese culture and society. The Chinese democratic movement has unavoidably confronted the patriarchal tradition from differ-

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ent interest groups of China since the May Fourth Movement in which modern democracy for the first time was introduced into China. Usually, a multiparty system, civil society, and diverse culture are the precondition for a society to breed democratization. Beginning in 1949, the CPC has become the ruling party of China and the largest communist party on the earth. The CPC, with 74 million members and fifty-nine years governing experience, is the only party which has constitutional power to maintain the social order and support political liberalization in China. Based on the Chinese official ideology of Marxism and the Constitution of the CPC, the CPC has strictly carried out the one-party system. Although the CPC has taken relatively liberal policies toward democratic movement, it has closely watched independent political movements and cracked down on any opposition whenever and wherever it felt necessary. Some small opposition parties do exist, but they are either overseas or underground. The influence of an overseas democratic movement does not attract an audience in China because the radical nature and unrealistic approach of the overseas democratic movement neither meets the needs of the Chinese people nor fits in the Chinese context. The main voice demanding democracy from intellectuals in China is within the Constitution of China. No one single opposition party is acknowledged by the CPC and therefore can replace the CPC. Thus, it is premature to carry out multiparty and competitive elections to reach the goal of democracy. Some scholars suggest that the CPC will be dead very soon. Shaohua Hu predicts that China “will become democratic by 2011,” and that the oneparty system will be history by that time.8 Isabel Hilton has observed that increasing numbers of the Chinese people are speaking up against local tyrannies and corruption, so “China’s one-party monopoly of power is coming to an end.”9 Their opinions are overly optimistic. First of all, the top leaders of the CPC have realized the illness of the party and have tried to save it. As the former president of China, Jiang Zemin, pointed out, at a meeting celebrating the eightieth anniversary of the founding of the CPC in 2001, that the party will strengthen its power further in the future and insisted that the CPC should represent the development trends of advanced productive forces, the orientations of an advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people. The new leader of the CPC, Hu Jintao has warned that that the CPC could not survive into the twenty-first century if it could not serve the Chinese people well. However, he continues to hold the viewpoint that China would turn into chaos without the leadership of the CPC. That is why the CPC has tried to ease tensions between the governments and the Chinese people through various campaigns. Second, the Chinese government is not as weak as outsiders think and is still resilient in face of change.10 The CPC still has some breathing space and is able to hold on to its power in the years to come.11 The majority of the

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Chinese people have significantly benefited from China’s rapid economic growth for more than two decades. China has made conspicuous economic achievements in agriculture, industry, railways, highways, energy, the automotive industry, telecommunications, advertising, education, and foreign trade. China’s GNP grew about 9.7 percent from 1979 through 1998, eight percent in 2000, 10.2 percent in 2005, 10.5 percent in 2006, 8 percent in 2009. It is expected that the Chinese economy between 2010 and 2012 will continue to grow about 8.5 percent annually. Undisputedly, China has achieved the world’s highest growth rate since it began its economic reform in 1978.12 China may reach the level of a developed country by 2025. High economic growth with the improvement of the living standard produced high support from governments in Western societies in the post-war era and in Asian countries in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea. This can explain why the Chinese people continue to support the party/state.13 According to public surveys, more than 90 percent of respondents were very supportive of the Chinese government because the Chinese people are basically satisfied with government achievements in the development of economy. The overall satisfaction level among the respondents was about 88 percent to 89 percent. These satisfaction rates are even higher than democratic countries and regions, such as Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.14 Obviously, the Chinese people hold very positive views of their national economy and are confident about the direction their country is heading, despite soaring inflation and unemployment rates. The Tibet Incident of 2008, the Xinjiang Incident of 2009, and the Sichuan earthquake not only greatly generated Chinese patriotism, but also consolidated the ruling party position of the CPC. Third, although China has been departing from the typical communist system, the democratic movement in China is largely limited to the circle of intellectuals, college students, and the middle class. After the Tiananmen Square Incident of 1989, the majority of the Chinese people have taken a more realistic attitude towards politics, making efforts to improve their financial situation. The Chinese government also uses this “financial psyche” to prevent the Chinese people from raising their own voices in public. The majority of the Chinese people believe that the top priority of China is economic development and social stability rather than democracy. However, it is impossible for any authoritarian regimes to get along with a market economy and diverse society for a long time. The democratic movement has become a global trend since the third democratic wave in the 1970s, and sooner or later, China’s democratization will inevitably become a massive movement. Under these circumstances the CPC has begun to cautiously endorse the experiment of political liberalization.15 Indeed, it is a difficult task to reach this goal within the current political system because the ultimate goal of democratization essentially contradicts


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that of the central principle of the CPC—the one-party system. Promoting Chinese democracy is eventually an effort to put an end to the one-party system and any achievement of the government in developing democracy is one step closer to dissolving the CPC. Samuel Huntington points out that “The legitimacy of an authoritarian regime was also undermined if it did deliver on its promises. By achieving its purpose, it lost its purpose.”16 To avoid chaos after the authoritarian regime collapses, it is necessary to create a well-developed civil society before carrying out the multiparty and free election systems. Freedom of the media is a distinguished hallmark of civil society that produces the development of a public sphere and diverse culture through public dialogues and expressions. The world democratic movement indicates that the media plays critical roles in the breakdown of authoritarianism as in Spain, Chile, Hungary, and Russia. Thus, freedom of the media is the first step towards democratization within the current political system of the CPC. Whether the CPC is willing to meet the growing Chinese demand for freedom of the media is a mirror to see if the CPC is willing to make an initial step towards China’s democratization.

Roles of Media in the Process of Democratization The term “media” refers to the aggregate of the public mass distributors of news and entertainment and other information, including three forms of media: print media, such as newspapers, journals, and books; electronic media, such as radio broadcasting and television; and recently information technologies, such as Internet, podcasting, blogging, and etc. Regarding the relationship between the media and democracy, some scholars do not suggest that media helps democracy, (e.g., post-communist media did not produce democratic political cultures in the transition of Eastern European countries).17 Guy Merger also claimed that the role of media in the development of democratic governance in Africa is comparatively small.18 However, most scholars and commentators agree that the media has contributed to the emancipation of oppressed peoples by playing a watchdog role to check on government’s power, increasing the credibility of the government, weakening the centralization of the major political parties, serves as transmission belt between society and its government, and acting as a participant in the policy making process.19 The General Roles of the Media for Democracy The media is not only a mirror reflecting society, but also actively reshapes the people’s way of life and the structure of society.20 According to Fred S. Siebert, media can play six roles in society, “(1) give service to the political

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system by providing information, discussion and debate; (2) help to enlighten the general public so that it might self-govern; (3) act as a defender of civil rights by assuming a role as government watchdog; (4) act as a conduit through which the economic sector might be served by bringing together buyers and sellers through advertisements; (5) provide entertainment; and (6) maintain financial independence so that reporting will not be influenced by special interests.”21 The media can serve the transition from a nondemocratic society to a democratic one. Democracy comes with eight distinguished characteristics, including freedom to form and join organizations, freedom of expression, right to vote, eligibility for public office, right of political leaders to compete for support, alternative sources of information, free and fair elections, and institutions for making government policies depend on votes and other expressions of preference.22 In order to achieve these goals, it is required to have reliable information. The emergence of the Internet has further contributed the process of democratization. Many Western scholars and politicians predicated that the arrival of the Internet would ultimately topple the one-party system and inevitably and swiftly set China free. Unfortunately, this has not happened. China is still run by the CPC.23 Although freedom of media does not guarantee a democratic system, it is one of the preconditions for establishing a democratic society.24 Freedom of media is vital to a healthy democratic system and very helpful in altering the political landscape. First, democracy is a sort of government that guarantees all citizens have rights to participate in the democratic process. It is impossible for citizens to join informed participation without having free access to information about government and society. Although mass media in contemporary society makes it possible to provide a variety of information, only freedom of media ensures supplying citizens with the most important and relevant information for preparation of their participation. Sufficient information can help citizens make responsible decisions rather than acting out of ignorance or misinformation. Richard Sandbrook has observed that freedom of media also empowers citizens to make them “aware of their civil and political rights, and why and how these rights should be exercised.”25 Second, public political opinion relies on media. Early media was politically driven, providing all citizens with political information and holding the government’s transparency and leadership accountable.26 In the past, the newspaper was the major source of information. As early as in the nineteenth century, “democrats regarded newspapers as a panacea for the defects of democracy.”27 Broadcasting has a social, cultural and educational vocation and remains “a key instrument of democracy today in making public policy.”28 In contemporary society, the people rely on television more than any other medium to get public information. In the United States, about 66 percent of the people use television as their main source of public news.


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About 85 percent of them feel the public media is generally believable,29 even more believable than the president.30 However, this does not suggest that newspapers have been abandoned by the American people. On the contrary, about 77 percent of Americans still read a daily local paper,31 because they reflect local and national political affairs.32 China is still a developing country. Because television provides easy access and is affordable in comparison to print media and the Internet, it is a more convenient medium for the majority of the Chinese people, and it has the most far reaching influence and the largest audience base.33 Third, governments also depend on the media. All government affairs are directly or indirectly related to the media. In democratic societies, the communication between governments and the people is a two-way communication via the media. Thus, the media can be viewed as a policymaker and a voice of public opinion. The media can be also used by politics for campaigning, organizing, and propagandizing.34 In the United States, the presidential campaign is nothing but basically dealing with the media. The American president is actually brought to the American people by public media.35 Media freedom is especially important to government in making right policy that represents the interests of the majority people. On the one hand, the media itself is a virtual public sphere and civil society that enables all citizens to express their views directly and equally and help the majority people to reach rational consensus. On the other hand, it is necessary for democratic government to justify each decision. A healthy democratic government must accommodate and absorb dissenting opinions because different opinions always inspire free deliberation and perfect an immature plan. Obviously, freedom of media provides citizens with opportunities to influence the political process and makes political leaders “be aware of the mood of society so that they can respond appropriately.”36 Fourth, media can function as watchdogs over the political establishment. Freedom of media is the most important measure to prevent government officials from abusing their power, because freedom of media empowers all citizens to check the government authority and publicize the unlawful behaviors of government officials. Media freedom can serve a checking function “by ensuring that elected representatives uphold their oaths of office and carry out the wishes of those who elected them.”37 If government officials know that their activities are watched by the public, “they refrain from abusing power.”38 However, it does not necessarily mean that the media can always play democratic cultural roles within any political system. Media is a rapier which could be a positive force for democracy and could also be an antidemocratic tool when an antiparty/government manipulates it. Ronald Berkman and Laura Kitch point out that “the media actually had a negative effect on citizens’ trust in the government, i.e., the more a citizen follows government-produced news, and the less he/she

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trusts the government.”39 The media can be a great potential power in promoting the process of democratization, but it can also be manipulated and even undermine the democratic process. The Role of Internet Technology The invention of the Internet is a major component of the information revolution. Only about 2,000 Chinese had access to the Internet in early 1994, but the Internet industry began booming after China’s Internet entered into the commercial sector that year. By 2005, however, 100 million Chinese people regularly connected to the Internet and more than 330 million people owned cell phones.40 According to the China Internet Network Information Center, the number of Chinese Internet users already reached 134 million at the end of June in 2006,41 298 million in 2008, and more than 300 million in 2009, equal to the total population of the United States.42 China has become the world’s biggest Internet market.43 China also has the largest number of cell phone subscriptions in the world and is the world’s second largest PC Market.44 By adopting a multi-interactionist perspective, Guobin Yang found that Chinese netizens have been increasingly gaining power in developing a diverse culture, civil society, transnationalism, finance and business, and democracy through Internet activities.45 The Internet has played an increasingly important role in China public affairs. For example, in 2008, after a young Chinese man was sentenced to life imprisonment for stealing money from a bank by taking advantage of a malfunctioning ATM machine, Chinese netizens posted massive comments asserting that the verdict was ridiculously too heavy. A court in Guangzhou, provincial capital of Guangdong, dramatically reduced the previous verdict of life imprisonment to a five-year jail term. Obviously, this change of verdict in such a case was made under pressure of public opinion.46 After Zhao Lianhai’s three-year-old son was poisoned by contaminated milk, he was scared and needed advice, so he was frightened by a website for parents of children hurt or killed by contaminated milk. Unexpectedly, more than 4,000 families signed up in several days and soon the discussion evolved into many topics. In trying to cover up the contaminated milk scandal, the government quickly shut down the website and cracked down on his group, but more groups fought back. As a result, the government had no choice but to acknowledge the scandal.47 The Internet is a kind of catalyst for freedom, justice, and democracy. In a traditional civil society, a participant is called citizen. In the eighteenth century, European people equally met people in coffee shops and the English pubs to chat about social events and produce public opinions. In the information society, a participant is called a netizen. Coffee shops and pubs along with today’s Internet are part of civil society.48 The recent technology


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of the Internet has expanded the role of the media in people’s social, cultural, and political life. The Internet, along with mobile phones, has contributed to the development of better economy, education and health care,49 direct relations to freedom of the assembly, freedom of the expression, and alternative sources of information, help to cultivate civil society, and enhance government accountability through online discussions and the spread of information.50 The Internet has made it possible for the Chinese people to launch a peaceful revolution. If Chinese people expressed their voices against corruption and pursued democracy through radical means in 1989 (more than a million people took to the streets, triggering the Tiananmen Square Incident), twenty years later China has become more open economically so that Chinese netizens can easily connect with the rest of the world. The Internet has provided Chinese citizens with an unprecedented capacity to express their voices, expose corrupt Chinese officials, and call for social justice, despite heavy government censorship.51 Under these circumstances the Chinese people are disinclined to take their grievances to the streets but prefer to roar dissent online expressing their voices. In the Internet age, most opposition and subversive ideas can be found in Chinese cyberspace, which forms “a sharp contrast to the official newspapers and television channels.”52 Therefore, “online activism is emblematic of a long revolution unfolding in China today, a revolution intertwining cultural, social, and political transformations.”53 The Internet is now the main propaganda channel for the CPC, but it is also used by common citizens to engage in political activities. The more than 300 million Chinese netizens obviously are China’s new rebels. About eighty-four high level Chinese officials have stepped down from their posts after their misconduct was published online.54 The majority of netizens believe the Internet is “a forum to express their political opinions and a source for political information.”55 The Internet allows anonymous communication without distance limitation. Citizens can post critical messages with less fear, organize gatherings and protests in response to social events, and offer the perfect tool for increasingly sophisticated political discourse. When a breaking news story emerges, thousands of follow-up posts spring up within minutes in cyberspace.56 In addition, “the Internet has played a role in bringing international attention to China.”57 Although China has between 30,000 and 50,000 Internet monitors, Chinese Internet users always find it still possible to discover ways to get news past the censors. Sometimes, Chinese netizens use humor and political satire in the blogosphere to promote freedom of speech. Some netizens are willing to risk a jail sentence in order to obtain information blocked by the Chinese government. The Internet technology has made it more difficult for the government to unify traditional ideological propaganda. The Deputy Director of

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the State Council Information Agency, Wang Guoqing publicly acknowledged that it is a dead end road for the Chinese government to block government information. Based on this consensus, in 2008 the Chinese government adopted Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on Open Government Information. This regulation is China’s first nationwide information disclosure system, and applies not only to central government agencies but also extend disclosure to local governments from the provinces to the lowest level of governments. Theoretically, this regulation guarantees Chinese citizens have the right to know, to participate and to supervise in order to make the government more transparent and accountable.58 As time goes by, the Internet will eventually become a popular medium serving as a democratization tool in China and the CPC will ultimately lose its battle of controlling the Internet, because CPC’s harsh control over it can slow down the process of democracy but cannot stop it. However, the role of the Internet in the process of China’s democratization cannot be over estimated. The role of the Internet in promoting democratization is largely determined by two preconditions: politicallyminded users and free access environment. The Internet will only produce little political consequence without these two preconditions. In China, first of all, “the majority of Internet users in China use the Internet for entertainment purposes.”59 Although some people use the Internet for organizing, criticizing, and protesting, the majority of the netizens use it for socializing, debating, gathering information about educational service, health, entertainment, making friends, playing games, shopping, posting humorous and clever messages, and having fun. According to a survey conducted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 71.8 percent of netizens use the Internet for checking email, 57.3 percent for reading news, 52.3 percent for hobbies, 50.6 percent for chatting, 45.2 percent for listening to music, 32.6 percent for playing games, 31.4 percent for searching the information of knowledge, 29.8 percent for searching the information of entertainment, 19.1 percent for subscribing to electronic journals, 12 percent for studying, trading in the stock market, searching for jobs, shopping, and advertisement, and about 8 percent for office work. Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Kate Merkel-Hess argue that a lot of what happens on the Chinese Internet is not political. They point out that Chinese Internet usage reflects the broad range of online activities happening in the United States, Europe, Japan, and other wired countries. Most Chinese Internet cafes are packed with students playing online video games, chatting, and trading stock.60 Second, due to the fact that it is necessary to have certain knowledge of literacy and computer skills, the Chinese middle class makes up the most important group of the netizens. About 91 percent of all netizens are between eighteen and thirty years old, although there are a number netizens under age eighteen. High school students are the fastest growing segment of


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new users.61 The vast majority of Internet users are young male urban citizens with more than average education. More than 75 percent of them have a senior high school degree or higher and are from the new urban middle class families. Their parents have more than the average income.62 Their families have benefited from the economic reform in the post Mao era. Obviously, the majority of the Internet users are not highly politicized and critical. Surfing the Internet is part of their consumption and lifestyle.63 They go online basically for fun instead of checking out political websites.64 Third, unlike the democratic societies, the Internet is not developed within an independent academic sphere in China but by government agencies.65 The hardware and infrastructure remain very centralized. This makes it easy for the government to implement their censorship policy from the national level to the bottom of society. The Chinese government spent a tremendous amount of money to create a new system to control political activities on the Internet. According to Xiao Qiang, “About 10 percent of all sites in Chinese cyberspace are directly set up and run by the government. Over 150 main news sites are established by the central and local government directly.”66 Although many netizens are still very interested in using the Internet for political purposes, the political consequences are minimal.67 Thus, there is little reason to believe that the Internet could trigger significant social and political changes within the communist regime.68

The Market Economy and Freedom of Media Although it is almost impossible to establish an opposition press under the communist censorship, it is possible to fight for more rights for media independence. Making a relatively autonomous media is pivotal to freedom of the media in the Chinese context. The First Step towards the Freedom of the Media The development of the economy is relevant to media freedom. Under the Mao regime, the Chinese media was part of a planned economy and was fully subsidized by the government, so Chinese media had no choice but to rely on the government. In 1978, the Chinese government began implementing their market economy. The media reform in China began in the print media but it triggered an overall reform of Chinese media. Consequently, many media organizations carried out internal financial responsibility systems and signed financial responsibility contracts with subordinate units and individuals. Newspaper vendors returned to city streets, numbers of non-party newspapers merged, advertisements became very important financial revenue for Chinese media, and paid information services entered

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into regular media business. In present day China, about one-third of Chinese newspapers have become semi-independent in terms of their financial resources. The market economy is an irresistible force and inevitably pushes the media to accept the market mechanism to fit in the macro-context of China’s reform. Market media helps the media survive financially, enhances media technology and media infrastructure, expands media services to meet market demands, and improves media staff’s economic situation, so that they can be more responsive to the people and society. The development of the market media results in media commercialization which has greatly altered the media landscape69 and has created more opportunities for freedom of expression that helps the process of China’s democratization.70 For example, the wide use of telephone participation provides audiences with good opportunities to participate in public affairs. Live radio and television formats and call-in programs have made censorship more difficult for the party.71 When commercialized media becomes more independent, the media better understands the interests of the people and creates cultural diversity. Market media has rearranged the power relationship between the CPC and media and market, shifting power from the centralized CPC’s power to the market and audience; and the media has challenged the authority of the official ideology while gaining power. The CPC is largely concerned about the regime’s authority and wants to keep media commercialization within an official trajectory, but ordinary people care about the quality of the media service and want media to speak the truth. The media, as a mediator, has to meet both of the interests of the government and the ordinary people and, at the same time, has to make profits in order to continue running its media business. Under market economy, the CPC can no longer have sole control over the media, although it remains the dominant force. The CPC has no choice but to negotiate with the market force and listen to the voice of the ordinary people. Market media has weakened the CPC’s propaganda machine. Market media is a buyer’s market. Once the media market opened, the government had no way to control the people’s selection for consumption. Under the Mao regime, the media was monopolized by the government, so the Chinese people did not have a choice but to accept the government propaganda. Market media provides the Chinese people with many choices, including TV, cable network, the Internet, radio, movies, theaters, and various newspapers, etc. Some local TV stations disregarded the government’s order and replaced many CCTV programs with its own advertising, video shows, and Hong Kong and Taiwan video tapes.72 The development of local television programs has significantly reduced audiences exposed to centralized propaganda. The circulation of major party organ


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newspapers has dropped significantly. The People’s Daily was the unquestioned top national paper before 1990, but it dropped below the twentieth slot in 1997. Market Media Alone Cannot Guarantee Freedom of Media The media market and commercialized media is the necessary step towards the freedom of the media, but it will not automatically lead to freedom of the press. A lack of financial resources could impose barriers to the development of the media sector. Market media has improved media financial situation and helped media organizations to gain bargaining power, but financial independence is not the full precondition of the media freedom. When media commercialization takes place within the current political structures, the media does not have institutional insurance to guarantee its accountability to the needs of the people. Instead, media programs could even more easily depart from the interests of majority of the people to please the interests of some special groups. In addition, while, market media promoting China’s democratization, it inevitably produces some negative consequences, which could defer the process of China’s democratization. First of all, media market could reduce the quality of media programming and pay less attention to democratic political culture. Driven in the pursuit of maximum profits, some newspapers, especially popular ones, concentrate on some so-called hot stories of crime cases and stars, including movie stars, singers, sports stars, etc. The rigid censorship policy under the Mao regime led to a thousand papers with one voice, but the market media has driven the Chinese newspaper industry to another extreme “called a thousand papers with one star—a movie star, a pop music star, or whoever is hot in popular culture.”73 Second, the market media could worship money and damage the principle of equality in freedom of expression. Theoretically, the media should objectively reflect public opinions. Practically, it is impossible for the media to be an absolute independent agent. The media always represents ideological orientations because the media are always under pressures of organization and audience. Audience is the major financial source for media; generally speaking, “losses in audience usually mean loss of advertising revenue, prestige, and even the ability to stay in business.”74 Although the market indirectly influences the media orientation, media organizations can feel the pressures from advertising, sponsors, and some friendly companies. Under this circumstance, sometimes money can buy media programs that highly reflect a group’s cultural values and political inclinations. Some observers believe that television could mislead the public opinion, especially for those people who depend on television in understanding politics by making them more confused in their attitudes concerning poli-

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tics.75 Some scholars suggest that the media is the primary cause of the decline of democracy, even the poison pills for democracy. Democratic societies face a paradox: rich media but poor democracy.76 Third, market media could undermine journalist confidence in reporting social problems and promoting democracy. Due to the fact that news reports can boost business and improve the images of the companies, journalists have often been invited to write some special news report to expand the influence of organizations and products. The host organizations pay all expenses of the news agency doing the reporting and, usually provide journalists with gifts, advertising contracts, and sponsorship. Many journalists have accepted bribes. As a result, journalists lost interest in advocating political reform and reporting the dark side of society and the government. Sometimes, media organizations and clients work together to create false news and overexaggerate the achievements of the government and provides false advertisements of business. In July 2007, the Chinese government restressed that editors are not allowed to publish or broadcast any stories that are false or that cannot be verified. The government has required the media to “ensure the truthfulness of sources and facts and control the manner of news editing.”77 It would severely punish journalists and news media if they publish fake stories. Although the Chinese government has established regulations, such as the Provisional Regulations for advertising Management, and tries to stop journalism corruption, the government regulations simply do not work. False news and advertising have stopped during the reform era. Corruption in China has become institutionalized and systematic. As a matter of fact, the social and political environment in China does not allow you to be an honest official. If you want to maintain your dignity, you are out of the game.

The Relationship between the CPC and Media The core of media freedom is the relationship between the party/state and media. The relationship of the media with government can gauge the degree of a government’s confidence, tolerance, transparency, and accountability. Generally speaking, cooperative relationships between media and governments are good for the process of democratization because the confrontational relationship could cause governments to introduce extra measures to limit media freedom but, “an antagonistic relationship between media and government represents a vital and healthy element of fully functioning democracies.”78 Under the Guomingtang regime, the CPC controlled all the media operation in the liberation areas but encouraged intellectuals to raise their voices in opposition to the nationalist government. Under the Mao regime, the CPC treated the media as an integral party work


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and the media became an important arm of the CPC for forbidding any opposition voice. In the post-Mao era, China’s media has been developing political liberation and cultural pluralism, which more or less facilitates the process of China’s democracy, but the leaders of the CPC “remain afraid of their own citizens and the healthy diversity of news and views which defines modern society.”79 Physical Force and Mental Persuasion Every government adopts two strategies for mental persuasion: using ideological propaganda and convincing citizens by providing material benefits for citizens.80 In the information society, it is impossible for governments to successfully persuade their citizens without carefully utilizing information.81 The prevalent opinion is that the Internet threatens the one-party state and provides netizens with alternative tools to overthrow the authoritarian state; in turn, one-party states will ban it or completely control online political activities.82 As a matter of fact, it is “a reciprocal relationship behind the transformation of the Internet and society.”83 The Internet can be used for the people to accelerate democracy, and also for the CPC to maintain ideological control. This is the reason why not all one-party states maximize their power in controlling the Internet. In North Korea, Internet access is illegal. In Burma, whoever accesses the Internet without special government authorization will be put in jail. By contrast, Malaysia has actively promoted Internet access and allowed its citizens to access the Internet and placed few restrictions on online political content.84 The Chinese government has adopted compromise strategies that encourage Chinese netizens to use the Internet for nonpolitical activities, but restricts the citizens from accessing the Internet for advocating democracy. The media has increasingly become one of the most important tools for the CPC to continue to exercise its power. During the reform era, the CPC has tried to balance the role of the Internet between ideological control and economic growth and adopted new strategy of ideology coordinating with economic growth as the cornerstone of the party’s legitimacy,85 and has used the media to assist national economic development through actively supporting the commercial media.86 During the period between 2001 and 2006, while the Chinese government invested $120 billion in building a telecom infrastructure and promoting the Internet, it has worked on reducing prices for online access to attract more netizens and Internet investors. China is one of a few of countries that “want to use the Internet to speed up economic development while limiting exposure to political news deemed subversive by the government.”87 Consequently, the Internet sector helps China build its national economy and attract valuable foreign capital and technology. This indicates that it is not the best solution for the CPC to

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absolutely restrict citizens in accessing the Internet, because it can be used for both ideological persuasion and economic growth. If the one-party government continues to promote the Internet industry, it is not very likely to fail. Nina Hachigian points out that “If Beijing had less restrictive and complicated Internet policies, commercial benefits from networking might be even greater.”88 China has made impressive progress in the economic area, but the achievement of its economy is not automatically translated into democratization. Although the top leaders of the CPC have realized that it is necessary to give Chinese citizens some limited freedom in nonpolitical areas, they have clearly understood that the top priority is social stability rather than political diversity.89 On the one hand, the CPC has tried to retain its power by adjusting its media policy: the central committee increased the strength of its fight against corruption which has been reflected in Chinese media. On the other hand, the CPC has kept exercising the basic principle of censorship policy and controlling public opinion through censoring the printing media, electronic media and the Internet. In October 2006, Hu Jintao and other party leaders, including the head of the Propaganda Department of the CPC Li Changchun, met with 450 media chiefs at the Great Hall to reinforce the message that journalists must go with the government line and “should tightly grasp the direction of the correct public opinion [and] continuously raise its capability to lead public opinion.”90 The Major Obstacle to Freedom of Media States and market media should work together to create the public sphere to meet the cultural and political needs of the people. In democratic societies, theoretically, the goal of media and the state is essentially the same because the leaders of the government are elected by the people. In reality, the relationship between the media and the government is not always cooperation. One scholar notes that democracy cannot be healthy unless the media is able to constantly confront the government and expose its abuses and errors. The freedom of media is not just an outcry of the Chinese people, but it is essential for the Chinese people to launch a wave towards democratization. If the interaction between the government and the people through the media is positive, the tension between the government and the people can be minimized. In China, the one-party system allows the CPC to more effectively control the media in comparison with democratic societies, so the relationship between the two forces in China is subordinate. Although there has been evidence that suggest that the CPC has been losing control of the media since market media emerged, the one-party system still easily manipulates power in censoring the media. The numbers of the typical news reports


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about ideological propaganda have been reduced, but they are still on the front page. The CPC and the Chinese government continue to use their power to influence the media and promote party propaganda. The communication between the government and the people is basically one-way propaganda through the media. The lack of the common citizens’ voice is the main problem of the media communication in China. How does the CPC censor the media? First of all, the CPC controls the media through organizations. The CPC uses strict codes to guide central and provincial government leaders on their communication duties by following handbooks written by the Department of Propaganda. They are even scrutinized for the number of annual press conferences.91 At the national level, the propaganda department of the CPC is the highest media authority, the headquarters of the CPC’s censorship system, and the most powerful monitoring body. The department is responsible for making policy and monitoring the process of implementation. Under the Propaganda Department of the CPC several government bodies are involved in implementing the party censorship policy. The State Administration of Press and Publication (SAPP) regulates the print media. The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) regulates electronic media. The Administration of Information Industry (MII) regulates the new media, the Internet. The People’s Daily is the organ of the Party Central Committee. Local newspapers must propagandize in the same voice as the People’s Daily does. The Central People’s Radio Station (CPRS) and the China Central Television (CCTV) are the models respectively for the local radios and TV stations. The CPRS’ morning news and CCTV’s evening news are transmitted nationwide on a daily basis.92 Xinhua News Agency is the largest state monopoly news agency with 7,000 employees and three major departments, domestic department, international department, and translation department. The main function of Xinhua is to make the significant policies and decisions of the CPC and the government, issue important news on important meetings of the CPC, report the important activities of government leaders, and remark on domestic and international events. Second, the CPC controls all sources of information. A journalist cannot do his/her job unless a news source tells him/her what happened. The majority of ordinary people cannot participate in public affairs without accurate and timely news resources. The media should objectively report the news wherever and whenever it happens. However, The Chinese government does not allow media journalists to freely interview, write, and publish articles. According to Article 186 of Chinese Criminal Law, the person who leaks state secrets should take criminal responsibility. The Chinese government tried to establish a new law in June 2006, restricting news reports on “sudden events,” including mass outbreaks of disease, riots, strikes, and accidents. If a media outlet reports a sudden event without the government au-

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thorization, the media outlet will be fined ranging from $6,200 to $12,500 for each occurrence. This law gives government officials a green light to restrict reporting sudden events that they might want to keep secret.93 Whoever reveals sensitive issues, such as those regarding AIDS, SARS, corruption, health, and environmental crises, could be charged with leaking state secrets. This emergency law has generated a strong backlash in China. The legislation was criticized both within the country and abroad. Some Chinese scholars and lawmakers argued that information transparency is crucial during the period of emergency situations, so media reports should be encouraged. When the Chinese Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress reviewed the draft law in June 2007, the Committee decided to amend it in order to avoid any misunderstanding.94 Under the new version, whoever violates the law will be warned and, if their “fake news” leads to serious consequences, their business licenses will be revoked.95 Third, the CPC control foreign news. The government places strict limitations on foreign news media. In September 2006, the China News Agency announced revisions to ten-year-old regulations governing foreign news agencies in China. Under the new rules, Xinhua has become a monopolized news agency for distribution of all news, information and data from foreign news agencies in China.96 Xinhua has the right to decide what news and information will be released in China and can delete anything it deems inappropriate.97 In order to block foreign news from directly reaching the Chinese people, the Chinese government tries to jam the reception of international radio services, such as Voice of America, BBC, and Radio Free Asia (RFA), and block their Internet sites.98 Chinese institutions are not allowed to subscribe to international journals without government approval, and even prestigious Chinese universities have very few international newspapers and magazines. In addition, the Chinese government makes it difficult for foreign journalists to enter into China to conduct interviews.99 According to the “Regulations Concerning Foreign Journalists and Permanent Offices of Foreign News Agencies,” foreign journalists must have special permission from the Foreign Affairs Office at the provincial level of government in order to conduct interviews in China. The Chinese government has kept a close watch on foreign journalist’s activities in China. Sunny Lee described his personal experience in China, saying that somebody opened his mail before receiving it. His home telephone and cell phone had been bugged and his computer was hacked. Faxing is not safe either. He points out that “Perhaps it is time for Beijing to put an end to one of its old habits: tapping foreign journalists’ phones and reading their e-mails as well as rummaging through their mail.”100 In August 2007, the Chinese government launched another political campaign cracking down on so-called illegal foreign satellite television broadcasts, which were basically limited to upscale hotels and residential com-


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pounds. Surprisingly, Hong Kong’s Phoenix Satellite news channel, a favorite television channel for the Chinese middle class, was listed as an illegal television channel, and became the biggest victim of all the overseas channels. According to the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), the aim of the campaign was to “maintain government information controls, and block the intellectual and cultural infiltration of enemy forces.”101 The Chinese government further tightened media controls in the eve of the Seventeenth National Conference of the CPC in October of 2007 and ordered its media to ban negative reporting and to report only positive news.102 The Chinese government made some adjustment to the existing media regulation during the Beijing Olympic Games 2008. Foreign reporters were temporarily allowed to travel anywhere without the permission of local authorities. Some Western observers were optimistic about the government’s decision and point out that it might have far-reaching implications for China’s political reform.103 In fact, this regulation was only applied to 2008 Olympic-related matters. In March 2007, a British camera crew went to the town of Zhushan, trying to film and broadcast the aftermath of a prior violent protest. Ironically, all the people of the camera crew were interrogated by Chinese police and driven out from the area of Zhushan. The camera crew was clearly told that the Chinese government regulation was only for Olympic-related stories.104 Moreover, local government’s officials strongly resisted this new regulation, because many of the local officials “do not like to be grilled by the media as they fear their abuse of power will be exposed.”105 When the Chinese government prepared for the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of funding the People’s Republic of China, the CPC control over the media and public opinion was tighter than it was ten years previously.106 One week after China celebrated sixty years of founding the PRC, China hosted the World Media Summit in October 2009. More than 300 representatives and 170 overseas media groups took this opportunity to attend the summit, urging China to further push media reforms, because “China remains one of the few countries in the world that still has extremely limited freedom of speech—particularly when it comes to reporting on news and political events.”107 During the summit Li Changchun, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, pledged to “strengthen cooperation between Chinese and foreign media.”108 President Hu Jintao also delivered a speech, promising that China will “safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of foreign news organizations and reporters and facilitate foreign media coverage of China in accordance with China’s laws and regulations.”109 However, in reality, the CPC continues to treat Chinese media in an unfriendly manner in order to retain its power. When President Barack Obama gave a speech at a town hall meeting with

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university students in Shanghai on 15 November 2009, it was not allowed to be broadcast live even though the United State requested it. However, when Bill Clinton spoke at Beijing University in 1998, and George W. Bush met with students at Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2002, the Chinese government allowed American leaders to be shown live in CCTV.110 Fourth, the CPC controls the Internet. The Chinese government’s implementation of censorship over the Internet is geared towards four separate groups—Internet users, Internet cafes, Internet Service Providers (ISP), and Internet Content Providers (ICP).111 China’s Internet censorship measures include proactive and reactive measures. The blocking of websites is an obvious case of proactive censorship.112 According to the Chinese government, some Western hostile powers have been exploiting their technology to use the Internet for political infiltration. China has suffered massive losses of state secrets through the Internet.113 The Chinese government has established a sophisticated technological system to control the flow of internationally sensitive information about politics and security. Any foreign website information has to pass through an international gateway, which is maintained by China Telecom, so the Chinese government is able to monitor content and filter out websites based on a blacklist by using Golden Shield Firewall and other technologies.114 The firewall has also blocked all banned words and phrase. Since 2000, the Chinese government has established Internet departments in more than 700 cities and employed an estimated 30,000 web polices to monitor websites and netizens’ activities, e-mail communication, web searches, and chat sites.115 Under these circumstances, it is difficult for blacklisted information to cross the Chinese border, and for Chinese netizens to access some foreign websites.116 By 2005, the government blocked at least 50,000 sites and more than 250,000 foreign websites cannot be accessed. In the first quarter of 2009, the government closed down more than 3,000 websites on the ground.117 Meanwhile, the Chinese government encourages web users to report illegal sites, including religious activities and other sensitive subjects.118 In 2006 more than sixty-eight citizens were rewarded for reporting illegal online activities.119 Some observed that China is more successful than any other country in censoring the Internet.120 A study conducted by Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society suggests that China remains “at the top of a list of countries blocking Internet.”121 The good news is that the U.S. government is covertly testing technology in China that, hopefully, will allow citizens to bypass Internet censorship set up by their governments.122 On August 6, 2009, Chinese News, the Chinese government’s official website, posted an article from People’s Liberation Army Daily entitled “Internet Subversion: A Great Security Threat” in which it is pointed out that in the information age Western countries have used the Internet for political and cultural permeation to attack China; and therefore, the


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Internet has negatively affected China’s national security—considering that Western governments (especially the United States’) have the right to control Internet providers. According to the article, government Internet control has become a necessary protection of China’s interests, and the Chinese government must speed up the process of fortifying China’s Internet system to enhance China’s ability to repel internet attacks. In order to keep strict control over Chinese netizens’ political activities on the Internet, in June 2009, the Chinese government planned to require all computer users to install green dam Internet filtering software in the name of blocking pornographic and violent content. In fact, the software can also be used for monitoring politically sensitive content and curbing access to information and tracking users. Facing strong resistance at home and abroad, by the end of June, the Chinese government decided to delay enforcement of a new rule requiring manufacturers to install Internet filtering software on all new computers. Finally, the government dropped the plan in August to install the controversial software on all country’s computers after an outcry over censorship, however, all public computers in schools and Internet cafes are still required to install the software.123 Fifth, the CPC controls the media through regulations. All governments need to regulate the media, but the purpose of media regulation proposed by different governments is fundamentally different. The Chinese government aims to block the process of China’s democratization. The Chinese government has made special efforts toward electronic media by passing more laws to regulate electronic media, including radio and television. At least sixty sets of regulations were issued aimed at controlling Internet content between 1995 and 2001.124 The numbers of laws affecting electronic media increased from 15.4 percent in 2002 to 52 percent for 2004.125 Whoever violates the government regulations are subject to punishments, according to the seriousness of the violation. Beijing University professor Jiao Guobiao was dismissed from his teaching position because he published an open letter entitled, Declaration of the Campaign against the Central Propaganda Department, to criticize the CPC’s censorship.126 Due to the vague wording of the Chinese law, the Chinese government can sentence Chinese dissidents to jail by using civil and criminal lawsuits as the government wants. In 2005, China imprisoned thirty-two journalists, making the country the biggest jailor of reporters. At least sixty political prisoners are in jails because they revealed “state secrets.”127 Hu Jia, a prominent human rights activist and blogger, was arrested during the Christmas holiday season and sentenced to three and a half years for online commentaries in which he criticized the CPC. As of 2009, at least twenty-two journalists remained in jail.128 Sufficient evidence suggests that Chinese official censorship “only affects ‘sensitive’ political issues and only targets political activists.”129

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Only Political Reform Can Guarantee Freedom of the Media China is still run by a communist party that takes harsh measures against organizations that threaten its hold on power.130 As long as Chinese media is required to serve the CPC as its mouthpiece, it will be impossible for the Chinese media to play an independent role in checking the party and the government. The Propaganda Department is a powerful department of the CPC and represents the CPC in managing all China’s official media outlets. However, in recent years the department has been challenged from time to time. Jiao Guobiao, formerly a professor of journalism at Beijing University, broke the silence in March 2004 and posted a long article on the Internet entitled “Fight against the Party’s Propaganda Department.” Jiao condemned the Propaganda Department and its entire propaganda system as “the main blockage in the development of Chinese civilization” and “the protector of the evil and the corrupt.” He argued that the department should be dissolved. As a result, Jiao was dismissed by Beijing University. China major public media, including TV, Radio, and newspapers are directly instructed by the Propaganda Department. In January 2009, Chan Lanzhou, a Chinese prestigious journalist, wrote a public letter, “Boycott CCTV and Reject Brainwashing.” Three days later he posted another public letter, “Goodbye, Propaganda and Lies,” pointing out that although the Internet offered a space for the Chinese people to communicate, the Chinese people remain in a steel building and they are also not allowed to speak out. On 9 February 2009, China Central Television’s new building suddenly caught fire. This was a tragic incident and the citizens of China should be very sad, because it burned Chinese citizens’ tax dollars. However, a significant number of Chinese netizens flocked to the scene, snapped pictures and videos, as if they were enjoying a fireworks show. The reason Chinese netizens took such an attitude toward the incident is that most Chinese people distrust the Chinese official media and dislike the CCTV for being the official mouthpiece, thereby cheating the audience. One such netizen Han Han wrote comments in his blog that CCTV has little journalistic ethics, distorts facts, suppresses culture, covers up government scandals, and paints a false picture of peace and prosperity. According to Han, CCTV, People’s Daly, Guanming Daily and Xinhua are the tool of the party’s propaganda and have no credibility whatsoever.131 Chinese netizens urged people to stay offline on 1 July 2009, the day of the anniversary of the founding of the CPC, for one day to protest against the CPC’s tight controls on freedom of expression.132 This was a very wise call because normally Chinese people have no right to go to the streets to protest, but the government cannot force you to touch a computer. It is not true that the Chinese government has granted more freedom to the Chinese people after the Olympic Games of 2008. The Chinese govern-


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ment in the post-Olympic period still requires that the media closely work with the government and keep the same direction as the government. In order to maintain the dominant control of media, the government frequently rejects Chinese journalists to report some important events especially some political or sudden events. Xiao Qiang, Director of the Berkeley China Internet Project, observed that in 2009 the Chinese government restricted access to more social networking sites but many sites are inaccessible or are not working properly including Fanfou, Digu, Zuosa, and Jiwai.133 Meanwhile, the Chinese government took more actions to block all unchecked flow of media and exchange through the Internet including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and various Google communication services.134 All evidence suggests that “Internet control has grown more expansive and hegemonic and that an entire apparatus of institutions and practices have appeared for the control of the Internet.”135 The Chinese will not fully exercise freedom of the media until there are fundamental changes of the Chinese communist politics. True freedom of the media comes only when the media depends neither on the power of the CPC nor the influence of money. Political reform is the key for media organizations to become relative autonomous agents and to exercise freedom of the press. When the people exercise their rights of free speech, they develop a participatory democratic system. The level of media freedom largely determines the roles of media in the transition of China’s democratization, so it is necessary to push the CPC to launch a media policy reform as the first step of China’s democratization. Under the growing internal and external demands for media freedom, it is not impossible for the CPC to make a concession in media freedom in order to remake the image of the Chinese government. It is worth noting that the CPC has demonstrated its tolerance for domestic and international media reporting during the events of the Sichuan earthquake and the Xinjiang Incident, but there is still a long way to go to fulfill the goal of media freedom. First, the lack of political reform is the main obstacle to freedom of the media.136 Democratic press legislation should be the top priority of the political reform agenda in order to promote media freedom. The Chinese government should establish laws to guarantee journalist’s rights. On the one hand, journalists should have the right to protect the sources of news. Unfortunately, there is no provision on protecting the source of news in present day China. On the other hand, the problem with press freedom in China is not the fact that there is a constitution that allows Chinese citizens to exercise the right of media freedom, there is an absence of laws that guarantees freedom of media and an overriding personal will of government leaders to use the government to try to prohibit citizens from exercising their right to media freedom. Although the Chinese citizens are entitled to freedom of the press under the Constitution of China, the constitution is

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actually not enforced because the CPC’s policy is always above the Constitution. The CPC should obey the laws and stop all forms of official censorship, allow publishers to print what they wish within the Constitution, and encourage independent coverage on reporting the policy making process in the inner circle of the CPC through debating on important polices, and revealing serious social problems. Second, an independent media system is a necessary prerequisite for democracy and multiparty politics.137 The independent media organization should be based on a model of private ownership without direct government interference. It is up to the market, instead of the authority of the government, to determine the fate of a media organization, and it is media professionals rather than political leaders who should control the media product.138 Thus, the private media is one of the best vehicles for criticizing authoritarian rule, promoting democratic process,139 and presenting and debating on matters of public policy. The Chinese government should allow everyone to invest in the media. All private and foreign investment in media infrastructure should be encouraged.140 Media investors are the bosses of the media so that media professionals can play more active roles in making decisions on what messages will be transmitted through the media. It should be noted that private media is not necessarily truly an independent organization and does not always represent an objective standpoint.141 Many private media organizations are dominated by more powerful private partners who are biased by narrow ethnics or political trappings. By contrast, state-owned media usually serve the interest of those in power. The leaders of Chinese media are appointed by the government based on political rather than professional merit. Thus, changing media ownership system from a state owner system to a private enterprise system is a decisive step for Chinese media to become an independent agent, enabling the media organization to fully exercise the right to freedom of the press. In present-day China, Chinese media, including major newspapers and television and radio stations, is basically all state-owned.142 Although some privately funded print publications have emerged during the reform movement, most of them are street newspapers, which have little influence on political culture. Privately owned television, radio stations, and Internet portals are prohibited in China. Third, media freedom should coordinate with the international legal norms promulgated by the United Nations. Chinese media has moved aggressively into the international society. China has become part of the global village. China’s Central Television is available via satellite in the United States. China Radio International broadcasts to the United States are accessible in many countries. In democratic societies, everyone can access China’s websites without interference. When China’s media enters into the international societies, China is undergoing globalization. Globalization


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has great relevance to freedom of the media. Two aspects of efforts are important to promoting China’s freedom of the media in a global context. The first aspect is about China’s domestic policy. In the information society, the media issues are increasingly becoming transnational and media liberalization in China is part of the international strategy to achieve other political objectives.143 The Chinese government should comply with international laws accordingly. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”144 The right to communication is pivotal to China’s democratization, but the Chinese government is reluctant to fully follow the international laws and fully open its media market to the rest of the world.145 China’s high-ranking officials have insisted that foreign political news may not enter China, and that foreign capital may not be invested in state-owned newspapers, periodicals, and broadcast television stations, or even state-owned web sites.146 The second aspect is related to international pressures on the Chinese government. External political pressure is necessary for challenging the Chinese media system. The news media of Hong Kong and Taiwan are increasingly influential in mainland China. Western media, including shortwave radio, satellite televisions, and the Internet, have played roles in nurturing the democratic consciousness of the Chinese people. Although the International Telecommunication Union has urged China to stop jamming overseas shortwave radio signals, some American companies continue to sell their software to anyone as long as they have received the full payment for the software. Cisco has earned roughly $1 billion from helping China build its Internet backbone. Google has created a Chinese version of its search engine, which can be used for filtering out Websites that Beijing finds politically offensive. Yahoo! has agreed to turn over information to the Chinese police. Gudrun Wacke points out that “it is Western firms that are supplying the technological means which enable China to carry out surveillance.”147 Therefore, Western democratic governments should prohibit Western based companies from selling technologies to the Chinese government for its censorship.

Conclusion At the present time, the CPC is the sole legitimate party in China and does not allow any opposition party and press to stand. According to Press Freedom Index 2009, China is the eighth worst country for press freedom among 175 countries.148 Under these circumstances, it is necessary to take two steps

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to reach the ultimate goal of China’s democratization. Realistically, the first step is to promote freedom of the media within the constitution of China to check and balance the power between the CPC and the people through the media. The roles of the media are double-edged swords which can serve democracy and yet undermine democracy as well. Under the Mao regime, the CPC solely controlled the media. In the post-Mao era, the market media has begun to challenge the party censorship, but the CPC remains the dominant force and continues to carry out its censorship policy to resist China’s democratization. Marketized media is one important step towards the freedom of the media, but is not the full precondition for China’s democratization. The Chinese people will not fully exercise freedom of the media until the current Chinese political system is fundamentally changed. Although the goal of media freedom ultimately contradicts with the basic principles of the CPC, relative media freedom can be fulfilled as the development of market media and globalization along with the changes of government policy.

Notes â•‡â•‡ 1.â•‡ Hu Jintao, “Hold High the Great Banner of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and Strive for New Victories in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in all Respects,” China Daily, 16 October 2007. â•‡â•‡ 2.â•‡ “CPC chief Hu Jintao Stresses Inner-party Democracy,” China Daily, 1 July, 2009. â•‡â•‡ 3.â•‡ Andrew J. Nathan, “Preface,” in What If China Does Not Democratize? Implications for War and Peace, eds. Edward Friedman and Barrett L. McCormick (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), 4. â•‡â•‡ 4.â•‡ James Mann, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression (Viking Adult, 2007), 11. â•‡â•‡ 5.â•‡ Jennifer Loven, “Obama prods China to accept ‘universal rights’,” San Francisco Chronicle, 16 November 2009. â•‡â•‡ 6.â•‡ Andrew J. Nathan, Chinese Democracy (New York: Knopf. 1985), 225. â•‡â•‡ 7.â•‡ Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992), 34. â•‡â•‡ 8.â•‡ Shaohua Hu, Explaining Chinese Democratization (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2000), 160. â•‡â•‡ 9.â•‡ Isabel Hilton, “China’s one-party monopoly of power is coming to an end,” Guardian, 12 July 2007. â•‡ 10.â•‡ Jim Yardley, “China’s Leaders Are Resilient in Face of Change,” New York Times, 7 August 2008. â•‡ 11.â•‡ Zhengxu Wang, “Explaining Regime Strength in China,” China: An International Journal 4, no. 2 (2006): 217. Lianjiang Li, “Political Trust in Rural China,” Modern China 30, no. 2 (2004): 32. â•‡ 12.â•‡ See Jinghao Zhou, Remaking China’s Public Philosophy for the Twenty-first Century (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003).


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â•‡ 13.â•‡ See Jinghao Zhou, “Anticorruption and Building a Harmonious Society,” Journal of Comparative Asian Development 5, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 1–25. â•‡ 14.â•‡ Zhengxu Wang, “Explaining Regime Strength in China,” China: An International Journal 4, no. 2 (2006): 226. â•‡ 15.â•‡ “Party to Focus on Social Harmony,” China Daily, 9 October 2006. â•‡ 16.â•‡ Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 63. â•‡ 17.â•‡ Peter Gross, Entangled Evolutions: Media and Democratization in Eastern Europe (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). â•‡ 18.â•‡ Guy Berger, “Media and Democracy in Southern Africa,” Review of African Political Economy 78 (1998): 600. â•‡ 19.â•‡ See Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1983), 32. â•‡ 20.â•‡ Richard Davis, The Press and American Politics (New York: Longman Publishing, 1992), 27. â•‡ 21.â•‡ Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm, Four Theories of the Press (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1956), 74. â•‡ 22.â•‡ Quoted in Marsh, Christopher and Laura Whalen. “The Internet, Electronic Social Capital, and the Democratization Movement in Contemporary China,” American Journal of Chinese Studies 7, no. 1 (April 2000): 65. â•‡ 23.â•‡ Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Kate Merkel-Hess, “Digital China: Ten Things Worth Knowing about the Chinese Internet,” Huffington Post, 7 July 2008. â•‡ 24.â•‡ Ronald Berkman and Laura Kitch, Politics in the Media Age (New York: McGraw-Hill Book), 311. â•‡ 25.â•‡ Richard Sandbrook, “Transitions Without Consolidation: Democracy in Six African Cases,” Third World Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1996): 74. â•‡ 26.â•‡ Ibid., 15. â•‡ 27.â•‡ Ibid., 312. â•‡ 28.â•‡ Marc Raboy, “Media and Democratization in the Information Society,” in Communicating in the Information Society, eds. Sean O. Siochru and Bruce Girard (Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 2003), 104. â•‡ 29.â•‡ Davis, The Press and American Politics, 4. â•‡ 30.â•‡ Anthony Smith “The Newspaper of the Later Twentieth century: The U.S., Model,” in Newspaper and Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), 17. â•‡ 31.â•‡ Ted J. Smith, III, S. Robert Lichter, and Louis Harris, What the People Want from the Press (Washington, D.C.: Center for Media and Public Affairs, 1997), 16. â•‡ 32.â•‡ Quoted in Jim A. Kuypers, Press Bias and Politics: How the Media Frame Controversial Issues (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002), 2. â•‡ 33.â•‡ Xi Chen, “Dynamics of News Media Regulations in China: Explanations and Implications,” Journal of Comparative Asian Development 5, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 210. â•‡ 34.â•‡ Berkman and Kitch, Politics in the Media Age, 12. â•‡ 35.â•‡ Quoted in Davis, The Press and American Politics, 5–6. â•‡ 36.â•‡ Wisdom J. Tettey, “The Media and Democratization in Africa: Contributions, Constraints and Concerns of the Private Press,” Media, Culture and Society 23, no. 1 (2001): 8. â•‡ 37.â•‡ Center for Democracy and Governance, “The Role of Media in Democracy: A Strategic Approach,” U.S. Agency for International Development, www.usaid.gov/

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our_work/democracy_and_governance/publications/pdfs/pnace630.pdf (12 June 2008). â•‡ 38.â•‡ Yves Schemeil, “Democracy before Democracy,” International Political Science Review 21, no. 2 (2000): 109. â•‡ 39.â•‡ Wang, “Explaining Regime Strength in China,” 224. â•‡ 40.â•‡ Jehangir Pocha, “China’s Press Crackdown: The Broadening of Economic Reforms in China has been met with Greater Restrictions on Journalists,” In These Times, 12 September 2005. â•‡ 41.â•‡ Summer Lemon, “China’s Internet population hits 123 million,” IDG News Service,Â€19 July 2006. â•‡ 42.â•‡ Andrew Jacobs, “Internet Usage Rises in China,” New York Times, 14 January 2009. â•‡ 43.â•‡ David Barboza, “China Surpasses U.S. in Number of Internet Users,” New York Times, 26 July 2008. â•‡ 44.â•‡ William Thatcher Dowell, “The Internet, Censorship, and China,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 7, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 113. â•‡ 45.â•‡ Guobin Yang. The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (New York: Columbia University, 2009), 8–12. â•‡ 46.â•‡ Wu Zhong, “Courts Withdraw Verdict on ATM Bandit,” Asia Times, 9 April 2008. â•‡ 47.â•‡ Ariana Eunjung Cha, “Grieving Parents Gain Clout in China,” Washington Post, 28 March 2009. â•‡ 48.â•‡ Guobin Yang, “Mingling Politics with Play: The Virtual Chinese Public Sphere,” International Institutes for Asian Studies News Letter 33 (March 2003), 7. â•‡ 49.â•‡ Nina Hachigian, “The Internet and Power in One-Party East Asian States,” Washington Quarterly 25, no. 3 (2002): 56. â•‡ 50.â•‡ Greg Sinclair, “The Internet in China Information Revolution or Authoritarian Solution?”

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