Discussion on Chinese politics with Dr Yang 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 Chinese Communist Party. 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.