Discussion on Chinese politics with Dr Jianli (Transcript) Organized by Tibet Policy Institute 05 July, 2012

Please note that this is an unedited, rushed transcription of the talk

Excellences, Friends, Brothers And Sisters, Tashi Delek. I’m sorry, my Tibetan is little more than this, but I rely on my son to wash away this shame. He is doing volunteer work at TCV where he is trying to learn the Tibetan language. Hopefully he can do a good job. It is a great honor for me to speak at the Central Tibetan Administration, to my dear Tibetan brothers and sisters, for whom I have much admiration and great respect and deep love. Sitting here, I cannot but have a fix of four feelings: shameful, encouraged, proud, and really committed. Shameful, because our Tibetan brothers and sisters’ unparalleled sufferings have been at the hands of the regime, consisting predominantly of the Han Chinese, of which I am a member. Encouraged because given such a stark fact as such, His Holiness and the Tibetan people are still so generously kind to open their arms, to embrace us, and to call us brothers. And proud because I, myself, have chosen to stand on the righteous side, regardless of my own ethnicity, and I have been fighting side-by-side with my Tibetan brothers and sisters for more than two decades for a free Tibet. And really committed today, given the situation in Tibet, given the spate of self-immolations that shock the whole world. I feel more determined than ever to continue to fight this good fight together with you. Today I’m supposed to talk about Chinese politics. Before entering [discussing] the topic, I propose to have a moment of silence for the 42 martyrs [who] briefly sacrificed their lives in the most painful way, to speak out the voice of Tibetans. Let’s have a moment of silence. [Silence] End of silence. Please be seated. It is 1:30, almost 1:30am in US, so forgive me if I forget something. I speak slowly. [Laughs] It is really sleep time for me. Chinese politics takes hundreds of PhD dissertations to research and maybe another hundreds of books to talk about. If you lay them end-to-end, you cannot reach a sure conclusion. It is a really complicated, difficult topic. And it is also a topic about which everybody can have an opinion. So today, just let me offer my two cents. The year 1989 has become a reference point for one to look at the recent history of China. We all know the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement. The Chinese people courageously stood up against government corruption and they stood up for democracy and freedom. The

1 image of a lone man standing in the string of tanks shocked the whole world and the entire [all of] humanity. And our fallen brothers’ spirit has been one of the greatest sources of inspiration for continued struggle for this growth in China. But we all know the movement ended in bloodshed. The Tiananmen massacre created a very strong sense of fear of political engagement among ordinary people, with fear, indifference, and cynicism soon [becoming] fashionable in China. And the hopes of a public system of checks and balances against government abuse were swept away by the bloodletting of June 4, 1989. But 1989 also created fear and crisis within the Communist Party, within the Communist regime. Life was no longer the same for the rulers. The rulers had to develop new tactics to meet the overwhelming need to preserve stability. The Soviet Union disintegrated and the Eastern European block opened up. This cast an even heavier cloud over the heads of the Chinese Communist officials. Everybody was asking, how long could the Communists stay in power? But shortly after Deng Xiao Ping’s famous southern inspection in 1992, Communist officials at all levels realized the three realities. The first reality was the CCP – the . The CCP’s hold on power had nothing to do with Communist principles, so the Communist Party became Communist without Communism. Second, continued economic growth was the last best hope to keep the ship afloat. They have to use every way possible to beef up economic growth – whatever way possible. The third reality was the elite must be spoilt to retain their loyalty. The government had to exchange the loyalty from officials, from intellectuals, from elite by spoiling them, by giving them [the] opportunity for corruption. Now, corruption was accepted, endorsed, and even demanded. These are the three realities that the party officials understood not long after the Tiananmen Massacre. Understanding these three realities over the past twenty years, the CCP regime established which [what] I call “two China structures”, two China structure. I’m not talking about mainland China and Taiwan – I’m talking about mainland China. One of the two Chinas, I call “China Incorporated.” China Inc, it’s a big company. China Inc is formed through the following ways. Number one, the so-called “red capitalists.” I think everybody has heard this term “red capitalists”. The Communist officials turned into capitalists because they were the people who [were] closed to resources. Embezzlement helped them become overnight capitalists. Number two, China Inc was formed through the marriage of power and capital. Power and capital combined closely, taking advantage of the following: low human rights standards, low environmental protection, low wages, and banning collective bargaining power. If you’re a capitalist, you know very well this is the best place to do [make] investments, where you don’t have to worry about people’s wellbeing. You don’t have to worry about

2 whether the workers will stand up against bad working conditions or low wages. You don’t have to worry. All you have to worry [about] is [having a] good relationship with the government. So the marriage of power and money become the major factor for the formation of China Inc. And in [the] late 1990s, after a long debate [about] whether China was still socialist or capitalist, the leaders of China understood they had to open up the shares of China Inc to capitalists. At the 16th National Party’s Congress – Party’s National Congress – they passed a charter to open the membership to capitalists, which is the irony because communists are supposed to be vanguards of [the] proletariat. [If] you studied the Soviet Union, you know this slogan. But capitalists can be Communist Party members, so that’s the irony. But leaders become so pragmatic that they open up the membership to capitalists, so I describe it as China Inc opening its shares to capitalists. And also, the Chinese leadership understood not long after the massacre they had to buy silence. Buy silence. They cannot suppress. Coercion cannot [doesn’t] work as well as buying off. So before the massacre, the opposition came mainly from intellectuals, so soon after the massacre, they came up with a policy to co-opt the officials – I mean, the intellectuals. So I describe it as in China Inc’s share – free to intellectuals. And I don’t want to go through many, many members but the reality is in today’s China, power, the officials, capital, the elite, and the intellectual –the intellectual elite – are bound together with [an] adhesive of corruption. China Inc is now dazzling the entire world with its wealth, might, and glory. If you travel to the United States, for example, you can easily run into a group of Chinese who become major purchasing power in the US [and] Europe. They buy all the high-quality, expensive goods. So this is the face of China Inc, which is dazzling the whole world, the entire world. And China Inc dominates the public discourse so that the outside world, outside observers, believes that China Inc represents the whole of China. You can run into foreigners who will tell you, ‘Oh, China is so wonderful. It’s rising up. People are so wealthy.’ But the truth is, there is another society in China, which is also called “China” – the society of over a billion Chinese. A billion Chinese, who are virtually slave laborers working for China Inc. This is the China the Chinese government does not want [the] outside world to see. Remember in 2008, when they had a big show –Olympics – they projected China to the whole world, you know, China’s so powerful, so wealthy, and so civilized. And at the same time, they applied martial law in China and drove all the so-called migrant workers out of China. You know, that China is that China the Chinese government does not want people to see. Okay, here you are. One side of the coin is elite, corporate China, which I just talked about. The other side is what I call – listen carefully – I call it “China of shit-izens”, not cit-izens. This is a really bad word, which I coined, the term I coined. “China of shitizens.” I’m not proud that I coined this term, to tell you the truth, but this term is based on a true story, true Chinese story. On October 29, 2008, 8pm, a government official, Party Secretary Lin, violently harassed an 11-year-old girl in front of her parents on the busy street in Shenzhen. When the girl’s parents tried to stop him and passersby protested against him, he shouted, ‘How dare are you get in my way! Do you guys know who I am? I’m a representative from Central

3

Ministry of Transportation in Beijing. I’m ranked as high as your mayor in this government! You guys are just as dispensable and worthless as a piece of shit in front of me!’ The incident and Secretary Lin’s language quickly circulated on the internet, and ever since then, numerous people have sarcastically begun calling themselves “Chinese shitizens” to show their discontent and despair. To preserve my respect for elderly people in China, I will minimize [my] use [of] the term that I coined. So I will call [the] other China the “Under China.” Here is how these two Chinas diverged. These two Chinas [have] separated so much. Number one, wealth gap between the two. You’ve heard stories about that. I just give you one number.0.4 per cent of families in China own 70 per cent of national wealth. See how serious the gap, how big the gap is? Number two, shitizens are not citizens. The citizens of “Under China" are unable to enjoy [the] basic benefits of economic growth – fast economic growth, or constitutionally afforded civil rights. Number three, the Chinese elite’s monopoly over power, capital, [and] information makes mobility from one China to another China nearly impossible. Social mobility is stagnant. And number four, the two Chinas no longer speak a common political language. If you get – some of you understand Chinese – if you get online, you will find that ordinary people speak one language and officials speak another. And ordinary people create a lot of the terms they use to describe the political situation and events, and the officials use different language, another system. So, [the] two Chinas no longer speak the common political language. Okay, number five, the two Chinas has almost no common political life. I just mentioned the Olympics in 2008 – the Olympics took place under martial law. That means this is a party only for us, not for you, right? No common political life. If you get online, you can find more and more Chinese citizens [resent] national festival days and government activities. More and more resentment. And number six, the two societies have grown more and more distrustful of each other, very distrustful of each other. Okay, I [will] just very sketchily, very briefly tell you the structure. I have a lot of statistics to support what I’m saying, but I don’t want to go to that [much] detail. And the next question is: how does the CCP regime maintain the two China structures? How does the government maintain it? We all understand, all autocratic rulers use violence and lie to maintain their rule. But on top of traditional lies and the violence, which every autocratic ruler uses, the CCP in the past twenty years has developed new tactics. It is composed in the shape of a dragon – China and the Chinese people like to call themselves a dragon, [that’s why] I say it’s composed in the shape of a dragon, their strategies.

4

The body is sustaining economic growth at all costs to maintain the regime’s ruling legitimacy. If the economy slows down, the regime has problem. So the regime has one source of legitimacy – that is the fast economic growth, which is called performance- related, performance-based legitimacy. ‘You may not like me, but when I rule, [the] economy expands and your living standard raised up [rises]. So I don’t expect you love me, but I have to continue ruling.’ That’s their philosophy in recent years. So that’s the body: economic growth. And two wings. One is appeasing the elite, spoiling the elite with corruption, and suppressing the powerless with police. You may have heard a lot of stories [about] the police, how they suppress, how repressive the regime against ordinary people, even the vendors on the street, [is]. And two claws. I have never seen a dragon. I don’t know how many claws a dragon has. But anyway, one is purging citizen advocates – I call those people who try to integrate to China based on justice and universal human rights values, I call them citizen advocates. But those people have been purged, like . So two claws: one is purging citizen advocate, like Liu Xiaobo, and the other, [is] blocking public opinion, blocking information, censoring internet. This is the so-called stability-preserving system that the Chinese regime has taken pains to establish over the past twenty years. This system siphons more public resources than national defense and it becomes the final defense line for the regime. And people often talk about, who are reformists in the regime? Who are conservatives? I tell you this, there is only one faction in China – I mean, in China’s leadership. That is the faction of stability- preservers. So everybody agreed they must have such a system, that’s their strongest consensus. Okay, now the question is where the breakthrough will take place, where the hope is. If you examine China closely, you will find that in recent years, direct political persecution has become increasingly less. Direct political persecution [has] become less and less, the reason being that China’s regime is on the defense [defensive] in the field of politics. The concepts of democracy and human rights have prevailed in the mind of the Chinese people, including the elite. The Chinese leaders understand very well [that] democracy is a good thing, how democracy works, but people differ on when and how to go from here to democracy. Now China runs into a vicious cycle. I was just talking about the stability-preserving system, which every leader agrees to have. Now they run into a vicious cycle. They have to keep stability. To keep stability, they have to strengthen government power. The officials use the power to exploit people economically, which in turn, causes more unrest from ordinary people, more protest, which is considered to be [an] instable [unstable] element. For that, the government has to increase their power to keep stability. That strength...again, the officials. Officials use the power to exploit again, so they actually go in a vicious cycle. That is why you see – everyday, you turn on the TV, open the paper, and you see protests here, protests there. In China, each year 180, 000 protests by more than 100 people take place each year. That means every three minutes there’s another one. And so far, China’s

5 government has been very successful in dividing them, preventing them from becoming a big one. That is their first defense line. And a lot of people want to know the moment of opening for the democratic transition. Nobody can predict with precision, but we can analyze it. I think the moment of opening for democratic transition is most likely to arrive when the following five elements come together. Five elements: Number one: a robust plurality of disaffected and discontented citizens. Put simply, cross border opposition, discontent, dissatisfaction with the government. Number two: a crisis. So it takes crisis. What is crisis? Any event, any catalytic event that sends a signal to scatter social forces that the time has come to rise up. So that’s crisis. And third: a viable opposition. What does that mean? We see so many protests, but we don’t see viable opposition. So protests are either suppressed, or bought off. So we have so far not been able to transform these scattered protests into a long-lasting movement demanding overall change. So we need that, we need viable opposition. Number four: a split in the leadership. Specialized event can be considered a split in the leadership, but what the government does right after that is to try to make it an individual, isolated event and prevent any trouble from coming to the top leadership, to anyone of the nine on the top. Five. [The fifth] element is an international consensus to press for the opening up or support of a democratic transition. So far, [the] international community has no such consensus, no such consensus as [to] when [or] where to press China to open up. So the five elements above I just described should come together for the moment of opening up to arrive. To look at these five elements, we need to look at another five variables. How [do] we make the five elements present at the same time? The number one factor is citizen power. Citizen power. Without citizen power, nobody wants to change. If you were in power, without pressure, you would not change. So we need viable opposition from the citizen, we really need citizen power. But citizen power not only for the Chinese democracy movement. When I talk about citizen power, if we talk about [what] currently exists under the PRC – the People’s Republic of China, we should also include Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians, because these ethnic groups have so far created the most powerful pressure on the Chinese government. So that’s part of citizen power. We need to combine this power together. And in the past two decades, I, myself, and many colleagues work together with Tibetans and the Uyghurs and Mongolians trying to bring those forces together, to engage [in] real discussion, real exchange, and work for a common future – in the sense that without democratizing China, none of us will have a future. So when I say citizen power, I’m talking about across [the] broad citizen power. That’s the first factor we have to look at. The second factor is party politics. The most important development in recent [the past] three decades in Chinese Communist Party politics is the introduction of term limit and succession. With that in place, the top leaders’ authority is diminishing, one after another.

6

You understand politics – when the number one guy’s authority diminishes, the other faction will become more pronounced. Their protest, their discontent, will [become] more and more open. So this process is continued. The recent incident is a very good example. The significance about this event is just this: a lot of people misunderstood [it], thinking that the struggle was about ideas. No, not at all. It is not about ideas, it’s not about party lines - it is about power. It’s a power struggle. What is different about the previous power struggle is that this power struggle has become more transparent. Why has it become so transparent? Because the authority of the top leader diminished to that point. Everybody can say no, nobody can control another. So we will see this split tendency continue. With the first effect I was just talking about, seizing power, the pressure from the people, and this power struggle and pressure...we want to see this process continue. Okay, another factor we have to look at is ethnic politics– by which I mean the relationship between the Chinese with [and] Tibetans, Uyghurs and Mongolians. Tibetans, for example, have [had] the most systematic movement for many decades and have the most international attention, which in turn, applies tremendous pressure on the Chinese government. So to me, I think it’s a very significant part of people’s power, [to] apply pressure from within. But one thing we should be very careful [of] is the Chinese government has been trying to seize every opportunity possible to use the Tibetan cause, Uyghur cause, or Mongolian cause to scare the Han Chinese, deter them from pursuing democracy. This will present a picture to them [that] if the control of the Communist Party loosens up, this group will split up and China will become divided. The majority of Chinese would think that is a serious problem. That’s the reality. I’m just talking about reality. The Chinese government will not spare any opportunity like that, so we should be very, very careful. I, as an individual, respect Tibetans as a people, who have every right to determine your own future. But as for real politics in China, I think His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s Middle Way approach is still the best approach – at least for the time being. We should be very, very alert and sensitive to this. And another factor we have to look at is the small Chinas: Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau. They have some kind of separation – a separation to a degree with [from] China. Each of them actually has put pressure on the Chinese government, on China, and each has its own unique influence on China. Each will play a very important role in China. So that’s the factor we have to look at. Just look at what happened a few days ago in Hong Kong – 400, 000 people took to the streets protesting against ’s visit, which is a phenomenon. So that shows us Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau are our allies, friends for democracy in mainland China. So that factor we should not overlook. The last but not least, the fifth one, is international relations. So far, Tibetans – I’m talking about the democracy forces in PRC, People’s Republic of China – so far Tibetans have the best international relations. International relations is very subtle. Nowadays, no government will come to your rescue and say, “Our support of Tibetans, you know, at all costs, and self-immolation...we will stand very strongly with you against the government’s continued persecution and repressive policy in Tibet.” They won’t do that. They won’t do that for obvious reasons, which are a shame, but we have to admit this is reality about which we can do little or nothing. But that does not mean these relationships with various countries,

7 with international groups, is not important. They are very important, because the first step has to be taken by ourselves. We have to take the first step to make the whole thing into a situation where the international community is willing to do something. When they are willing to do something, these relations we established in the past will become very effective, very important. Because nobody wants to be out of the picture when comes, especially the US, European countries, the world powers...they all want to have some influence. So nowadays, what we do will not be in vain. So that fifth factor is international relations. Now, I’m talking about so many things. I want to summarize briefly. Number one task for all of us is [to] build up people power. Without that, nothing can be accomplished. Number two – China’s politics is very interesting because the top leader’s authority is in the process of diminishing. It will continue diminishing, especially with the growth of the people’s power. When there’s [a] big scale demonstration, the spilt will take place for sure. One faction or another will have no choice but to seek support from the people. They have to seek support from people, not for others – just for the power struggle. So, that’s when the opportunity comes. Okay, when a big demonstration takes place, when [this] big moment comes, we need a group of leaders from [among] the people who have the four functions. Number one – trusted by the people. Number two – can act as the true voice of the people. Number three – able to disrupt political order and engage [in] negotiations with the state. Number four – able to mobilize international attention and support. We need such a group. In Tiananmen Square we didn’t have such a group, that’s why we felt we need such a group. So through the work we do today, such a group will emerge. That’s very important, and for China’s future. I always talk about revolution – democratic revolution. We have one force: that’s the people’s power. Another force is state. We cannot overlook the state for the transition because they’re in power. And point five, from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, and point five, from the international community. So this is the democratic revolution 3.0. And that’s what I want to offer you, and I will stay for questions and answers. I think I talked too much already.

8