Long Time Coming

The Prospects for Democracy in China

John L. Thornton

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2008

Summary:  Is China democratizing? The country's leaders do not think of democracy as people in the West generally do, but they are increasingly backing local elections, judicial independence, and oversight of Chinese Communist Party officials. How far China's liberalization will ultimately go and what Chinese politics will look like when it stops are open questions.

JOHN L. THORNTON is a Professor at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management and its School of Public Policy and Management, in Beijing, and Director of the university's Global Leadership Program. He is also Chair of the Board of the Brookings Institution.

The Chinese system does not lack for institutions meant to keep officials honest. The oldest of these is the traditional petition system, dating to the imperial era, which allows people to take their grievances directly to higher authorities. Each ministry in Beijing has an office that handles such complaints. But the petition is seen as a last resort, and few cases are satisfactorily resolved: the process is opaque and depends on the goodwill of the anonymous officials evaluating the appeals.

Another oversight institution, the CCP's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, staffed by eight deputies and 120 senior members and headed by a Politburo Standing Committee member, is charged with fighting corruption and other misconduct by party members. Its counterparts on the government side are the Ministry of Supervision and the Anti-Corruption Bureau of the Supreme People's Procuratorate, responsible for prosecuting errant government officials. One of the functions of the official Xinhua News Agency, finally, is to gather information on corruption nationwide and produce internal reports for the central leadership.

Yet despite these multiple mechanisms, the problem of official corruption remains serious, and leaders routinely cite moral turpitude as one of the party's main challenges. As the economy has surged for more than two decades, so have opportunities for graft. High-profile cases such as that of Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration executed this past July for taking bribes from pharmaceutical companies, feed the perception of endemic rot. According to the CCP, over 97,000 officials were disciplined in 2006, of whom 80 percent were guilty of dereliction of duty, taking bribes, or violating financial regulations. "The formal [supervision] system on the whole has failed," one government researcher told me. At lower levels, a basic structural flaw in the supervision system mirrors that of the courts: the heads of the discipline inspection commissions are appointed by local leaders, who predictably tend to select relatives, friends, protégés, or colleagues. It was only in 2006 that a rule was implemented requiring that commission heads at the provincial level be appointed by the central government.

President Hu and Premier Wen face a basic dilemma. They know that rooting out corruption, which makes citizens cynical about one-party rule, must be their top governance priority. But they must act while maintaining the loyalty of local officials, through whom the CCP governs the country. To augment the formal mechanisms of supervision, the government is increasingly turning to alternative channels. In Beijing, some districts are using public opinion polling to gauge satisfaction with individual government offices, and Beijing's Urban Planning Commission has retained a consulting firm to help it take better account of public opinion in assessing redevelopment projects.

Another promising trend is the rapid commercialization of the Chinese press. The government still exercises extensive control over the media through government ownership of outlets and censorship. The redlines that journalists cannot cross still exist. But changes are taking place. As independent Chinese publications seek readers and advertisers, they pursue stories that people want to read; like their counterparts in the West, they have discovered that investigative journalism sells. In one widely discussed case, a veteran reporter for the China Economic Times wrote an in-depth account in 2002 of the Beijing taxi-licensing system. Due to alleged collusion between company owners and the government supervisory body, drivers were being forced to work shockingly long hours for low wages. The newspaper sold out almost immediately. The Central Propaganda Bureau responded by banning other publications from reporting on the story. The city's Transportation Bureau ordered drivers not to read the article. Some of the taxi drivers quoted in the article received death threats, and the author had to be protected by bodyguards for three months. The public uproar mounted, however, as the news spread to the Internet. Eight days after the story was printed, then Vice Premier Wen Jiabao issued an official statement supporting the taxi drivers and directing that a report on the situation be prepared for then Premier Zhu Rongji.

One experiment that has caught the attention of many Chinese is the government's decision to allow foreign journalists to travel and report freely throughout China (with the exception of Tibet) from January 2007 through the 2008 Beijing Olympics. "It's clearly a test," a Chinese newspaper editor said, "to see how the foreign press uses its new freedom. Unless something goes terribly wrong, it's hard to see how the government can reimpose the old system when the Olympics are over." Not surprisingly, there have been numerous teething problems: in July, several foreign journalists covering an antigovernment demonstration held by an international human rights group were detained for several hours. Still, foreign correspondents in Beijing report that, in general, restrictions on their movements and activities have been relaxed noticeably since the new policy was announced.

In the past several years, the Internet and cell phones have started to challenge traditional media by becoming channels for the expression of citizen outrage, at times forcing the government to take action. One celebrated instance was the "nail house" incident in the sprawling metropolis of Chongqing, in central China. For three years, a middle-class couple stubbornly refused to sell their house to property developers who, with the municipal government's permission, planned to raze the entire area and turn it into a commercial district. The neighbors had long ago moved away. The developer tried to intimidate the couple by digging a three-story canyon around their lone house, but the tactic backfired spectacularly. Photos of their home's precarious situation were posted on the Internet, sparking outrage among Chinese across the country. Within weeks, tens of thousands of messages had been posted lambasting the Chongqing government for letting such a thing happen. Reporters camped out at the site; even official newspapers took up the couple's cause. In the end, the couple settled for a new house and over $110,000 in compensation. The widely read daily Beijing News ran a commentary that would have been inconceivable in a Chinese newspaper a decade ago: "This is an inspiration for the Chinese public in the emerging age of civil rights. . . . Media coverage of this event has been rational and constructive. This is encouraging for the future of citizens defending their rights according to the law."

In another example of the marriage of new technology and citizen action, last May angry residents in the southern coastal city of Xiamen launched a campaign to force the city government to stop the construction of a large chemical plant on the outskirts of the city. Their weapon was the cell phone. In a matter of days, hundreds of thousands of text messages opposing the plant were forwarded, spreading like a virus throughout the country. Xiamen authorities, who had ignored popular opposition to the plant before, suddenly announced that construction would be suspended until an environmental impact study could be completed. Dissatisfied with this half measure, citizens again used message networking to organize a march of some 7,000 people to demand a permanent halt to the construction. Although local party newspapers blasted the protest as illegal, it was allowed to proceed without incident, marking one of the largest peaceful demonstrations in China in recent years.

DEMOCRACY IN CHINA