Writing in the Journal of Democracy (July 2017) Professor Kevin J. O’Brien from the University of California, Berkley notes that China’s development model is tired and, for different reasons, some former supporters are now somewhat brassed-off.
He looks in more detail at three such groups: frustrated cops, former military officers and bullied cadres, teachers, hospital workers and SOE employees.
The cops are fed up because being a policeman isn’t what it used to be. Professor O’Brien hints that this means they’re more accountable? Young cops learn quickly that far from authority figures with a sharp uniform they’re often regarded as irrelevant by the citizenry or only good for rounding up missing cows. The old guard remember when criminals lived in fear of their summary justice and struggle with new policing methods that involve skills many can’t or refuse to acquire.
Old military cadres have different beefs. To remind, China’s military between 1985 and 2012 was reduced from 4.1m to less than 2.4m. Many officers with cadre status, and all that went with it, were moved on to middling factory positions where they found themselves answerable to managers not respectful of their former rank. To add injury to insult in the 90’s and 00’s many of these factories were privatized or allowed to go bust hitting these poorly qualified managers especially hard. Lauded in official propaganda as hero’s they find their actual situation starkly at odds with the myth and frustration has boiled over into street protests, petitions and the filing of mock law suits designed to shame the establishment to take their plight more seriously.
The bullied cadres, teachers, hospital workers and SOE employees are used by the state to ‘demobilize’ family members and co-workers straying into areas of protest or behavior deemed a nuisance. To encourage this ‘relational suppression’ demobilizer’s careers are often threatened. Persuade your sister to move out of her house to make way for the new highway or continue to mark third grader’s math tests for the rest of your academic career; no pressure. If that doesn’t work threaten the work group with collective punishment. Persuade your sister or we’ll all get it in the neck! Fail, your all-caring state dumps on you; succeed and the dumping comes courtesy of your now no longer nearest and dearest. Either way you lose and you’d be forgiven for thinking, as many now do, the system sucks; because for them, well, it really does.
The paper concludes these disaffected groups pose no immediate challenge to the stability of the CCP or the body of the state. The trend is worth noting though as so often the threat to social cohesion in China is framed in terms of high-level political power games, increasing financial inequality or some other top-down disruptor. Professor O’Brien signs off with a question of perhaps much more serious longer term significance; ‘What happens when some of the Party’s most reliable cheerleaders stop cheering?’ What would happen, say, if China’s today merely brassed-off were to become tomorrow’s seriously fed-up?
What indeed.
Happy Sunday.
[You can access the work in full via the following link Disaffected Insiders]