We have been very fortunate to have a Chinese student with us for a couple of weeks as a short term intern. Robert Woo comes from Nanjing, a historic city in eastern China, and is studying economics and political science as a sophomore at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. He wanted a warmer place for the winter break and contacted us to volunteer here. He has some initial experience with China’s social activism, and has written on Global Voices, an excellent website for listening in on conversations around the world. We asked him to write something about China today. The rest of this is all his.

Half-Leaps Forward

By Robert Woo

Every time I think about my own country, China, I think of Dickens’s quotation: “This was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” China has come a long way to realizing truly modernized society but has not got there, yet. So when you think about anything bad you might read or remember about China, you have to take some history into account. And by that I mean looking at the progress that has been made.

China has become more or less a better place than it was, say, a hundred years ago. We have surely become a stronger nation and have obtained greater wealth. And more importantly, the seeds of rights and citizenship have been sown; more and more people have come to realize that they, in Mao’s words, are actually “the masters of this country.” This trend has been slow, but undeniable.

So, it is the best of the times.

What does this mean? The bulldozer on fire.

But there are many moments when you simply have to scratch your head and ask, what does this mean? What is this monstrous and absurd thing called “China” all about? In this blog post I’ll try to give you some insider’s glimpses of both this country’s absurdity and what the movement for social change is like there.

The emperor and the child

Want to hear about a real-life version of Up or Avatar? A Shanghai couple, after getting only 10 percent of the money that they should have received in compensation for the demolition of their house, turned violent against a horde of evictors and law enforcers. The man armed himself with a bow and arrow, and the woman burned down the bulldozer with a homemade Molotov cocktail. The firefighters arrived, and after putting out the fire, they conveniently suppressed the couple with the fire hose. Both of them were then taken into custody, faced trial, and were sent to jail for several months. Within a day, their house disappeared.

How about fiscal transparency? In any sane society, taxpayers should at least be able to know how their government taxes them and spends the tax. Chinese taxpayers have no knowledge whatsoever on this issue. Even the disclosure of a public official’s personal assets has become a politically sensitive issue. In October 2009, the municipal government of Guangzhou put its budget, a 4 GB bundle of files, on its website. This is the first time ever that such a thing has happened in China and is generally hailed as a milestone on the road to transparency and accountability. But note the irony here. In China, “milestone” often means change that can be seen as trivial and commonplace by the rest of the world.

You may have noticed that up to now, I have not used big words like “democracy” to explain what I’m talking about. I deliberately avoid using this term when I don’t have to. Sometimes being too ideological shrouds people from looking at the details and facts. Let’s just ask some basic questions: Should law-abiding taxpayers know how their government spends their money? Should the eviction of law-abiding citizens without proper compensation and explicit consent ever be allowed?

Whenever there is an emperor with no clothes walking on the street, there will be a child asking questions.

Today’s China, like yesterday and the day before yesterday, does not lack this kind of “child.” The aforementioned Guangzhou government’s decision to disclose its budget was directly attributed to a team of citizen volunteers who have been bugging the government ever since a historic executive order was made which for the first time stated on paper that citizens have the right to know and the government has the obligation to disclose important public information.

Another good example of contemporary activism in China is the work done by Mr. Xu Zhiyong and the organization he co-founded, the Open Constitution Initiative (OCI). In recent years the OCI organized a group of socially conscious lawyers to provide legal assistance to vulnerable people. For example, a Pro Bono Legal Aid Team was organized to conduct litigation on behalf of people affected by the politically sensitive tainted milk scandals. In July 2009, the organization was shut down on account of tax evasion (OCI was registered as a company, although it should be a tax-exempt NGO; it won’t be granted tax-exempt status due to the kind of work it does.) The government quickly seized the opportunity to fine the OCI with the maximum possible amount and subsequently to detain Xu.

Whether Xu would be put on trial and end up in jail was crucial, because, as the veteran Chinese observer Evan Osnos of The New Yorker pointed out, Xu has always operated within the scope of the current legal framework:

It is easy to look at China’s list of high-profile detentions and rationalize them: that guy was a cowboy, or, things in China are improving, and we have to keep it in context. Sorry. Not this time. Xu is no cowboy. As a Time magazine reporter wrote, in 2007, “Xu is probably the person most committed to public service that I’ve met in China, and possibly in my whole life.” Moreover, his work is as intimately connected to the broader context of China’s economic and political future as you can get. When the U.S. and China wrapped up a round of strategic and economic talks this week, they issued a joint press release that affirmed “the importance of the rule of law to our two countries.” Hu Jintao is quoted every chance he gets — “the rule of law should let the people be the masters of the country.”

Grand narrative and daily life

The interesting part of the story was, within a month, Xu was indeed released. As opposed to a real “cowboy,” Mr. Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced to eleven years on Christmas for penning the 08 Charter, a document calling for a multi-party democracy.

The story of Liu Xiaobo may be categorized by professor Yang Guobin of Barnard College as a demonstration of the so-called “grand narrative” — literally speaking, pushing for BIG change in a BIG way. That is what students did in 1989. The grand narrative is often the most exciting. But the problem with it is it can sometimes be detached from what is on the ground. Take the students in 1989 as an example: they demanded democracy. But what is democracy? How will democracy look? Can a bunch of students be qualified to represent the whole nation to demand this thing called democracy? The history does not provide convincing evidence that these students actually have the answer.

In his book The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online, Yang argued that in China’s long history of activism and civic contention, “grand narrative” was almost gone for good after its final show in 1989. What took its place was a new type of contention that was much more mundane, but also much broader and more pervasive.

So instead of demanding “democracy” and “freedom,” people are now making smaller, more concrete demands: evicted landowners are demanding their land back, duped consumers are demanding consumer rights protections, public school teachers are demanding better pay, asset managers are demanding government transparency (as in Guangzhou’s example), lawyers are demanding fair play concerning the sensitive cases (OCI), and angry residents took to the streets blocking the construction of a nearby trash incinerator.

These are issues that many socially conscious Chinese people are concerned about. The government permits many of these issues to be discussed publicly. Work on some of them even contributes to policy change.

In a documentary rethinking the legacy of 1989 Tiananmen Square made by Hong Kong’s TVB Jade, activist Guo Yushan commented:

Looking back at all the history, it’s all about “Enlightenment,” “Revolution,” “Movement” — all sorts of experimental fads. But I always think, do the common people actually care about these topics? What they care about is still what they eat and how they live their own lives. If you go to ask them, hey, do you know anything about June 4, 1989? Do you know what one-party dictatorship is? Firstly, they will feel that this kind of topic is very sensitive and very dangerous. Secondly, what is the use of talking about it anyway? If you think you want to make this world a better place, you have to stick with this. Looking from this perspective, undeniably you have to study how people actually live (and how politics relate their lives).

Guo co-founded the Transition Institute, an independent think-tank (registered as a company) that focuses on issues that are closely tied to people’s lives, such as taxi regulation, taxation, and health care. It has also become increasingly famous for the Taxpayer’s Rights Handbook it publishes annually.

When I interviewed one of Guo’s partners last summer, he said:

Our organization is always making a half-step forward. We are concerned about making a full step. If you do that you may get screwed, and then you can’t make any difference whatsoever. But you also have to move forward. So you make a half-step. After so many half-steps over the years, you will end up making a really long stride.

Call it pragmatism, call it realism. But this is what is going on in China, and here my job is to tell the facts. Secretly, I also hope this is the best option, at least for now. The “Guangzhou milestone” is a good example, but there are numerous more such little successes. On a fundamental level it is a re-statement of a simple idea: how can you bring about a deep and broad social change without doing it in a broad and deep way with a broad and deep sense of patience?