The liberal views inequality in China

I have no end of praise for The New York Times in its recent series of articles on social inequality in China, the first such sustained attempt by mainstream Western media at covering the most pressing issues in China. But the coverage has not escaped the media's characteristic concentration on individuals to the exclusion of attention to the structures that produce their plight. Thus we come away with only a vague understanding of why China's political economy is so relentlessly marginalizing and exploiting the vast majority of its citizens.

When we ignore how power is actually organized, we can offer nothing but moralizing about the problems and sloganeering about the need for democracy. Which is exactly what The Times editorial page does when looking back at these articles:

Instead of beginning to institute a workable rule of law, a freer press and a better system for allowing the underdog to be heard, Mr. Hu has busied himself consolidating his own power and trying to restore order and discipline within an unreformed Communist Party. ... Chinese farmers and factory workers routinely talk about corrupt local officials who siphon off relief money from Beijing or steal funds allocated to farmers who give up their land for other uses. ... A leadership that treats this unrest as a threat to its authority instead of a desperate cry for help threatens to negate much of the good that has come from China's economic upheaval - the opening to tourism, student exchanges and scientific cooperation; the ability for people to migrate; the creation of some independent farming; and a growing middle class whose cellphones can dial abroad.

This is the typically liberal approach to the problem of inequality. First is the appeal to authority: the attempt to use moral suasion to convince those in power to reform their ways so as serve the common good.

Any understanding of how power actually works makes such a strategy seem naive in the United States, much less in China. Hu Jintao hasn't struck at the authoritarian foundation of the state, it's true - but not because he is immoral (as implied by the "consolidating his own power" crack) or because he is confused about the meaning of protests in China. The reason he leaves the party-state unaccountable is that his own position rests on the continued existence of that state, and on the monopoly of power by bureaucrats and rising commercial interests that is given form in that state.

Let's remember Frederick Douglass's insight, "Power concedes nothing without a demand." Those who hold power only yield it when competing social groups are able to mobilize and force a change. The fact is that peasants and workers are too unconnected to each other - both organizationally and ideologically - to form an adequate social base for any but minor changes on the periphery of China's systematic corruption and inequality. Even if Hu Jintao overcame years of party indoctrination and suddenly converted to belief in a genuinely participatory society, the changes he might put in motion would be immediately diluted to nothingness by the dominant groups in society.

In this context, The Times's call for "a workable rule of law, a freer press and a better system for allowing the underdog to be heard", seems rather empty. In the USA, where all three steps were taken long ago, bureaucratic and commercial elites still dominate the society, and the majority is still highly exploited if not impoverished (that the relative wealth of the American majority has little to do with rule of law &c is an entirely different post).

The same refusal to see things structurally blinds The New York Times to more than just the nature of power in China. The writers say that if their arguments are ignored, China will lose "much of the good that has come from China's economic upheaval - the opening to tourism, student exchanges and scientific cooperation; the ability for people to migrate; the creation of some independent farming; and a growing middle class whose cellphones can dial abroad."

The first problem is that these developments are far more complicated than the obvious good The Times seems to see. As only a brief example, while the opening of links to the rest of the world has greatly expanded the vision of the Chinese, it has also often produced a national inferiority complex tending to support uncritical imitation of Western modes of industrial production, social organization, and ideology. Only one instance of this is the atrocious traffic I face every day in Beijing, the popular ignorance of what this is doing to the environment and people's health, and the dream of owning a car that Chinese are increasingly growing up with.

But an even bigger problem is the failure to understand that the "good" brought by China's economic reforms is necessarily accompanied by rising inequality, corruption, and exploitation. Over the last 25 years, China's rulers have slowly given up rigid social control, decentralized bureaucratic power, privatized much of the state, and switched to a market economy. These reforms produced greater freedom of movement and expression, but at the same time created many more opportunities for the well-connected to personally profit from liberalization, whether taking a cut from the sell-off of state properties, catering to the needs of the new rich while slashing the public services of everyone else, welcoming the labor of migrants from the countryside but providing nothing in return but the bare essentials. That liberalization increased inequality was not a misguided policy approach but the very reason for these policies. Those in power supported liberalizing policies because those policies bolstered their own position.

Mainstream Americans tend to view economic liberalization as inherently good, and cast the negatives that accompany it - unemployment, corruption, fewer social services, rising concentration of wealth, increasing poverty - as the result of flawed public policies. Seeing the process structurally allows us to understand that the social groups driving liberalization, especially the upper rungs of the bureaucracy and commercial elites, benefit from both sides of the coin, and will block policies that might dilute these effects. Moralizing about the bad results while ignoring their actual source won't get us any closer to a solution.