Almost daily, stories of some government official or other taking backhanders in a property development, giving his son or daughter a job they’re woefully underqualfied to do, endless tales of sexual abuse, impropriety and an assortment of other scandals could wear down even the sunniest of optimists.
The brazen twofacedness of Chinese politicians could break the spirit of Lei Feng himself, the passive aggressiveness of Chinese foreign policy apparently does more to contribute to Chinese development that global development and does nothing to secure China as a the world power that it pretends it is.
China is a country with problems, it's very true, and the Party has done much to make sure that the idea that the Communist Party and only the Communist Party can solve these problems (given enough time) has become firmly ingrained in the psyche of the average Zhou.
Thus the message of the leadership is that Chinese people should be optimistic about their future, and the future of their country, because the Chinese Communist Party is doing everything it can to improve the country, raise the people out of poverty, and put them on the right path to a socialist Shangri-La. And it’s the mindless optimism is exactly what China's problem is.
During The Cultural Revolution, everyone was paid a set amount of money regardless of the work that they did, and farmers dutifully went out into the fields and did absolutely no work, leaving the crops to fail and being paid for the privilege. These days the Chinese have more food than they can stomach, but it’s a famine of innovation that is plaguing the country. Copyright laws are flaunted, and opportunistic snake oilers copy Western ideas and products, knocking them out under substandard quality control, selling them for half the price of their western counterparts, and running off with the cash.
Confident that things will improve by themselves, the optimist contributes little, relies on the status-quo, and retires, happy that a days work has meant a days pay, and that the family has been provided for. The cynic recognizes the problems, the delays and the obstacles and work hard to overcome them, confident that at the end of it, there’ll be a bigger pay off that the optimist could ever dream of.
Writing in The Guardian, Julian Bagnini espoused the virtues of the cynical,
Perhaps the greatest slur against cynicism is that it nurtures a fatalistic pessimism, a belief that nothing can ever be improved. There are lazy forms of cynicism of which this is certainly true. But at its best, cynicism is a greater force for progress than optimism. The optimist underestimates how difficult it is to achieve real change, believing that anything is possible and it's possible now. Only by confronting head-on the reality that all progress is going to be obstructed by vested interests and corrupted by human venality can we create realistic programmes that actually have a chance of success. Progress is more of a challenge for the cynic but also more important and urgent, since for the optimist things aren't that bad and are bound to get better anyway.
China watchers have gotten a bad press during the trial of Bo Xi Lai, dismissing the whole thing as a scripted show trial that nothing good will come off. It's easy to take the side of cynic with this one. After writing a few self-criticisms and saying that they were really quite sorry for what happened, many of them have been let off the hook. A few token sackings have been issued to keep the junior officials on their toes, but, by and large, the scandal has been limited to a few key players, with nothing of the reform that many believed would take place under Xi Jin Ping's governance.
One of the key factors in this almost universal dismissal is that the trial really isn't aimed at Chinese people. To a certain degree, the whole thing is a PR event, you would be something of an optimist to believe that anyone is getting a fair trial in China, one just has to look at the ongoing debacle surrounding Li Tianyi's rape case to see that.
Bo's trial serves the Party in two ways. In the first, it is intended to show-off the transparent nature of the usually opaque Chinese legal system to the outside world. News coverage has been to tightly controlled to allow anything beyond the terse courtroom transcripts being published in the Chinese media. Even though the proceedings were being tweeted via the Jinan court's Weibo account, no discussion was allowed, and comments on the news feed have been disabled. Rule of law has been notoriously difficult to come by in China, and foreign companies love complaining about how difficult it is to do business.
By showing that not even high level officials like Bo are above the law (although when news broke of Wen Jia Bao's wealth in the New York Times, the newspapers website was promptly blocked in the mainland) the Chinese government seeks to placate investors wary of ploughing money into something that might get spirited away in some dodgy pyramid scheme involving property in Monaco. Venture capitalists take risks for a living, but in a place that seems to offer no legal protection, not a penny will be spent on expanding a western brand into China.
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Secondly, the trial is intended to send the message to party cadres that corruption is a problem, and if you're in the wrong place at the right time, then you could end up in the dock.
Editorials from state-run media in China have been suggesting that eradicating graft entirely isn't possible, promoting the idea that the "level of corruption" should be brought down to a level acceptable to the public. The Global Times editorial that drew most fire from China watchers was called (after a couple of revision by QQ.com to sex it up a little) The Public Should Understand that China Must Permit Moderate Corruption:
There is no way in any country to “root out” corruption. Most critical is containing it to a level acceptable to the public. And to do this is, for China, especially difficult.… The public must also understand … the objective fact and reality that China has no way of entirely suppressing corruption without sending the whole country into pain and confusion. Fighting corruption is a difficult task in China’s social development. But its victory relies at the same time on the elimination of other obstructions in other areas of battle. China can’t conceivably be in a situation where it is a country behind in all other areas, but where its officials are really clean. Even if that were possible, it would not be sustainable.
Threatening the general public with the idea that graft is the lifeblood of China, and without it a return to the bad old days of civil war, famine and rule by warlords didn't win any popularity competitions with the Chinese people on Weibo either. Some users wryly noted that after moderate corruption receives the stamp of approval from the Politburo, moderate murder will be next.
Shanghai based journalist Adam Minter ended his analysis of the furor that followed the publication of the editorial by pointing out that no one had actually defined what "moderate corruption" was, leaving plenty of wiggle room for any politicians unfortunate enough to have people like Wang Li Jun as friends.
That the trial has apparently drawn so much in the way of cynical coverage is a testament to the international misfires of the Chinese government when it comes to promoting itself overseas. While they've had plenty of practice selling the idea of Communist leadership pretty successfully to the Chinese, by their nature, western journalists are cynical.
Given enough prodding, some politicians will end up in front of a judge, there are a myriad other failings that the Chinese government is yet to even admit to. Getting a politician like Bo Xi Lai to admit to taking backhanders while parents in Sichaun and still trying to get a straight answer out of officials who sanctioned the tofu building that so quickly collapsed with a massive earthquake hit the province in 2008 is quite simply too little, too late. The failures of leadership and and the repeated lack of accountability by the CCP, accompanied by Soviet-era references to Marxism, Maoism and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics has done little to engender trust between foreign journalists and Chinese officials, and even less to bolster the image of the Chinese abroad.
The Chinese are past masters as manipulating fears and propagating their own noble crusades against unseen enemies that, according to them, seek to destroy the core values that every patriotic Chinese person holds dear.
Previously, the CCP has sought legitimacy by reminding people that things are much better these days than they were before. Exploiting the bitter memories many have of the invasion by the Japanese and other foreign powers, while at the same time, making sure that everyone knows who it was that lifted the Chinese people out of abject poverty to become the world's second largest economy. Embracing propaganda campaigns that are more borrowed from George Bush and his neoconservatives than from Mao, represent a more cynical move forward than the pessimistic step backward that many of Bo Xi Lai's supporters would've approved of.
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