China's New Left

The views of a group of Chinese intellectuals are striking a chord with the millions disillusioned by market reforms.

Jehangir S. Pocha, 01.29.05

With its soaring glass towers and giant neon signs, Beijing looks like the new Mecca of global capitalism. But behind the glitz, there's a growing disillusionment fuelling the rise of China's 'New Left'.

This is a country "caught between the two extremes of misguided socialism and crony capitalism, and suffering from the worst of both systems," says Wang Hui, a professor of literature at Beijing's Tsinghua University, whose passionate denouncements of China's market reforms are partly credited with energising China's New Left intellectuals. "We have to find an alternate way. This is the great mission of our generation."

That's a sentiment being increasingly voiced across China, sometimes with elegant words in Du Shu, a magazine Wang edits, sometimes in the frenzied cries of protesters battling police in cities and villages across China. The reason is a growing sense of anger that the dismantling of China's iron rice bowl has helped far less people than it has hurt, according to Chen Xin, a professor of sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing and a self-proclaimed 'New Lefter'.

"We have no voice (and the government) doesn't care for us anymore," says Lu She Zhong, 55, a village leader in central Henan province, who's been battling local authorities for six years over unpaid compensation after his entire village was resettled to make way for the giant Xiao Langdi dam across the Yellow River. "I know such projects are important (for the country), but why were we cheated in the bargain?"

Questions like this have led to more than 50,000 protests rocking China in the past year, for causes as diverse as cuts in social services, unpaid pensions, and illegal demolitions.

Emboldened by such tumult, Wang and other Chinese intellectuals in the New Left have stepped up their criticism of China's market reforms. Their message is simple: China's failed 20th century experiment with communism cannot be undone in the 21st century by embracing 19th century capitalism.

Some are calling for a return to Mao's bizarre 'Communism with Chinese characteristics'. However, the majority are moderates who accept that Mao's tactics lie discredited, but say there's nothing amiss about the fundamental notion of creating a workers' and peasants' society.

While Mao Zedong's reign, from 1949 to 1976, tore apart China's traditions and social structures and ran its economy to the ground, it also created universal access to housing, education and healthcare, and significantly increased literacy and longevity. "Even if the quality of these was not so good, this created the idea of what a good workers' and peasants' society provides," says Cui Zhi Yuan, a professor at Tsinghua University's School of Public Policy and Management in Beijing. "Reforms should be aimed at rescuing this idea with new policy," he asserts.

Instead, it was cast aside in the era of economic reforms that started in 1979. Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping exhorted the country "to get rich", and his successor Jiang Zemin committed China to his awkwardly named 'Three Represents' theory, a Reaganesque version of trickle-down economics that focused on empowering "the advanced forces of society" in the hope that it would end up improving life for the common man.

That's no surprise, Wang says, because when the first Chinese intellectuals went abroad, the world they encountered was being shaped by arch-capitalists such as former US President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister of Britain, Margaret Thatcher. The result was a fervent embrace of the market ideology by Chinese leaders and people alike, which took on an almost messianic fervour as China's GDP growth spurted year after year.

The real problem was that when the downside to the economic reforms started showing through by 1989, the political situation had spiralled out of control, resulting in the Tiananmen Square massacre. With the Soviet Union also crumbling, there was a real fear that China could go the same way. It was in this environment that Deng chose the then Shanghai mayor Jiang Zemin to be his successor. Once in power, Jiang stepped on the gas as far as economic reforms were concerned but put the brakes on political freedom. The result was a unique form of state-controlled capitalism that existed within what Wang calls "a very repressive political climate", so that no one could challenge it.

Now, in a country where everyone was once equally poor and saved for months to buy a Flying Pigeon bicycle, the roads are now jammed with gleaming Audis and Buicks. But between them, the unlucky ones who've missed the opportunities of reform still peddle their now-rusty Flying Pigeons. Free access to education and healthcare has been drastically cut, especially in rural areas, and property that was once taken from the rich and redistributed to the poor is being seized from farmers and given to developers. The argument that these changes were forced by "the discipline of the market" has angered many Chinese, who clamour for a return to the old days when jobs were secure, and society - while less wealthy - was also less polarised.

"This is (now) an unjust society... where people have nothing to believe in," says village leader Lu. The group of villagers gathered around him nod sadly in agreement. "If I'm still wearing (a Mao suit), it's because I cannot afford new clothes."

The echo of this disillusionment within intellectual circles has become the rallying cry of the New Left, which has been explaining the macroeconomic causes of the frustration people on the streets feel through a series of well-publicised articles.

"(This is a government) more focused on helping export manufacturers than agriculture and rural welfare," which affect far more people, says Cui Zhi Yuan of Tsinghua University. "The largest expenditure item in (China's) budget is not education or healthcare or even the military, but tax rebates to exporters. So essentially, the government is returning money to (domestic and multinational) exporters while cutting welfare programmes."

Such incentives have swelled China's exports to 30 per cent of its GDP, as opposed to about 15 per cent in the US and Japan. With many domestic manufacturers essentially being suppliers to exporters, some economists estimate that exports account for almost 60 per cent of China's GDP. That has brought wealth to about 300 million of China's 1.2 billion people, but it has also meant the Chinese government is less concerned with raising domestic consumption and domestic wages of the other 900 million, Cui says.

Wang says it's time for the political leadership to acknowledge that the country is essentially renting out its workers to foreign capital and that most of them survive in 'terrible' conditions. "It's too easy to say the farmers leaving their farms to work for starvation wages (in factories) are doing this out of free will," he says. "The truth is they're forced to do this because of bad macroeconomic policies and bad governance."

In response, the New Left has been focusing on what they call the San Nong (or Three Nongs): issues concerning the plight of the Nong Min (peasants), Nong Ye (agriculture) and Nong Cun (rural communities). Such pressure, along with increasingly violent protests in villages, has led the government to scale back heavy taxes levied on farmers. Since that's allowed farmers to make a decent living off the land, fewer now migrate to cities, shrinking China's pool of cheap labour. This upsets factory owners, but championing such causes and arguing in favour of development that is "less GDP-focused and more people-focused" is how the New Left sees its immediate role, says Cui.

With businesspeople now allowed to join the Communist Party, New Left intellectuals are also challenging the growing "nexus between corrupt politicians, bankers and businessmen who in the name of reform are looting China", says Cui. Thousands of China's State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) have been bought at fire-sale prices by politically connected persons who, in collusion with corrupt banks, have often stripped the enterprises of assets and employees without any accountability.

This has saddled China's banking system with about $500 billion in bad debt, "but more importantly, it has created a might-is-right culture across the country," says Cui. "I know a company in Chongqing (in western Sichuan province) that was sold to its managers for 20 million RMB ($3.5 million), when the workers had offered to pay 40 million RMB ($7 million) for it with funds they'd begged and borrowed from relatives and friends."

Though both Wang and Cui say there is no doubt that Chinese SOEs, which generally lose vast amounts of money every year, need change, they are calling for a process of 'institutional renovation' that would allow SOEs to restructure without surrendering ownership, or abdicating responsibilities to workers. Part of this would mean "recognising that property is not a single right but a bundle of rights, (and a company's) implicit debt owed to workers, such as pensions, must be as fully paid out as its debts to investors," Cui says.

Meanwhile, the reality is that many Chinese workers, particularly migrant construction labourers in big cities, don't get paid at all. "They have nothing else they can do, so they just work in the hope of some future payment, which of course never comes," says Cui.

Forced labour, known as 'laogai', is also common in prisons where prisoners are paid sub-market wages and "quotas are tied to beatings, leniency, favours, food or sleep," says David Welker, a Washington DC-based executive with the Food and Allied Service Trade Department of the AFL-CIO.

Even some workers employed by US and other foreign companies don't enjoy basic rights, often working seven days a week. Efforts to address such issues receive resistance instead of support from the Chinese government. Just last month, a conference in Beijing aimed at getting multinational companies to follow international standards and guarantee Chinese workers' rights was cancelled at the last minute by Chinese authorities.

What seems clear is that "China is replacing its worker-oriented Stalinist-style control economy with a one-party dictatorship led by a politically-connected managerial class. That's fascism," says Welker. "With the New Left rising, you have the classic divide between Right and Left, except in this case the right is pretending to be the left".

But dissent is a delicate business in China, and New Left thinker Chen Xin is quick to point out that: "Our concern is not politics but social welfare. We're only amplifying what we see happening around us... hopefully, that will aid and guide the government."

With the government here congenitally opposed to any sort of organisation within its society, Wang also emphasises that "we're not a group with a leader or anything, just a loose affiliation of people with (similar) beliefs."

"Even the term 'New Left' is not ours," he says. "It was first used (by pro-reform groups) to discredit us and to portray us as the old socialists at a time when the country was enamoured with capitalism. But I don't really mind. When something new is happening, it's normal for people to try and define it in old terms."

If Wang's benevolence towards his would-be labellers seems magnanimous, it is also partly driven by the fact that the 'Left' label has begun to work in favour of the intellectuals. "I've been reading some (New Left) articles, and they make me feel very warm because they remind me of the values my parents used to talk to me about," says Maria Zhang, 24, a student at the Beijing Forestry University. "I feel like China has lost its bearing by bending too much towards Western ways.... We're out of touch with our past (and) core values."

President Hu Jintao's accent to power over the last year has also brought a different and dynamic attitude to decision-making in Beijing, says Chen. "He's not from the Shanghai clique. Both he and (Premier) Wen Jiaobao worked in the grassroots and know the real problems of Chinese people." Indeed, the Hu government's rhetoric confluences with that of the New Left on many issues, leading some to believe that Hu is promoting and using the New Left to discredit Jiang and his Three Represents theory.

Chen says Hu wants to correct the ills of the Jiang years because while a democracy can balance between extremes by throwing a party or president who's gone too far out of power, "in a one-party system, the party must have its own self-correcting mechanisms. Or else, it will lose touch with the people."

As proof, Chen points to recent changes in China's constitution that enshrined the 'Three Represents' as doctrine, but also introduced the words 'human rights' and emphasised people's 'property rights' for the first time.

While some such as Lu She Zhong, the village leader in Henan, dismiss this as "only words" to mollify restive groups, Chen says rhetoric is always the first step toward change in China. "That sets the national mood. Then, there are some broad changes in policy and then, over many years, detailed changes in governance and implementation of laws. Right now, I think we are already at the second stage," Chen says.

With China not used to such debate over domestic issues and leaders fearing for stability, both the government and New Left have been stoking the country's sense of nationalism to unite the nation and win support for themselves. That's raising the suspicions of many Chinese towards the US.

"The 4 June (Tiananmen Square) movement was rooted in American notions, (but today) few believe America has moral leadership, the right to rule the world," says Chen. "They feel cautious of America, even the younger generation that never knew Mao. They see America as powerful and selfish... and bent on keeping China down."

Politically, this is leading China to forge closer ties with Paris, Berlin, Moscow, New Delhi and even Teheran at the expense of Washington D.C. While that pleases Cui - who says those countries' long-term goals and social democratic systems are more in line with how he thinks China should reorient itself - it doesn't entirely satisfy him. "The truth is that even the Western Left's policies (like progressive taxes) are only reactive, and aimed at correcting imbalances caused by a capitalistic system," he says. "Our ultimate goal should be to develop a new theory of poverty and an independent society where such massive imbalances do not occur in the first place."

Ironically, Cui, whose school is jointly funded and run by Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, admits most of the essential principles for accomplishing this have come from the West: Principles like full cost pricing (which pass on the costs of environmental and health damage caused by products to their manufacturers), full financial disclosure (which reign in potentially destabilising financial tools such as hedge funds), dismantling of tax havens (in countries such as Switzerland), and new definitions of patents, copyrights and royalties (which emphasise their productive use rather than restricting ownership), and new salary schemes (which emphasise wages plus a share in profits).

Cui explains this away with a smile. "We're not against the US," he says. "We're for a certain kind of society."