This course offers a conceptual framework for understanding China that highlights the intersection of politics and economics. It shows that rather than develop into a full blown market economy, state and party officials at all levels of the political system maintain significant influence in economic development. Such a “political” economy has had both positive and negative outcomes, which we will assess in detail. We also look at the origins, views, backgrounds and relations among leaders, and how those leaders make decisions about public policy and try to get those decisions implemented down through the system. China has few formal institutions through which citizens can participate in politics, but we will study the strategies Chinese people use to try to influence their leaders’ decisions. Finally, we assess China’s future and whether rapid economic development and the emergence of a vibrant middle class will push China towards greater democracy or whether the single party system is likely to survive into the future. The course is a quite useful background for Chinese Politics Part 2 – China and the World. Course Overview video: https://youtu.be/7FpNL67EbE4
4.3: Political Culture in Rural China
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From the course by The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Chinese Politics Part 1 – China and Political Science
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The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
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From the lesson
Module 4: Understanding Societal Engagement in Politics in China
Meet the Instructors
David ZweigChair Professor of the Division of Social Science and Director of Center on China’s Transnational Relations
[MUSIC]
Now let's talk about political culture in rural China.
And one of the overall themes that I want to stress here, is that there is this
assumption in urban China, I remember traveling once in a train,
talking to an urbanite who thought that we were talking about village elections, and
his view was that peasants just had no democratic values.
And therefore,
the assumption would be that village elections would not be very successful.
But from that conversation, I drew the idea that in fact that maybe the urbanites
themselves, people in the cities who are afraid that if they had elections
nationwide in China, that the pheasants would elect people who would try and
introduce policy that would end the pro-urban bias within China.
Now in 1999, I was lucky enough to be able to do a survey
of 2400 villagers in 120 villages.
So that 20 people in each village.
In four counties, in two different provinces in China.
The Heilongjiang and Anhui.
Both of whom are not wealthy, both of which are not very wealthy,
particularly wealthy areas.
And the survey showed that peasants really have a sense of democracy.
And so what I did was created a series of questions,
six of them of which I use five here.
And as you can read from these questions.
But actually not questions, but they're statements and
then we ask people to strongly agree, agree,
disagree, or strongly disagree with these statements.
Here you can see the scores.
And that if they strongly agreed or strongly supported, they got two points.
If they only somewhat agreed they got one.
Disagreed, -1.
Strongly disagreed, -2.
Now each of these questions has a direction, all right?
So only people with specialized knowledge and
ability have the right to speak during periods of decision making.
This question, itself, would be seen as an undemocratic statement, right?
If you believe this, then you only think that a small group of people should have
the right to speak out during a meeting.
If you disagree with that statement or strongly disagree,
you are demonstrating a more democratic view.
Right, so this is rather than saying asking people,
do you believe in democracy?
Which, not a good way to ask because they may not, their view of democracy and
our view of democracy may differ.
So we have very specific questions, right, about speaking out.
About petitioning, all right?
Again, who has the right to speak out?
Here is the one place where we use the term democracy.
But in general, so there's six statements.
The maximum score that they could get would be twelve.
The minimum score, of course, would be minus 12, if they were negative,
strongly disagreed with all of these democratic norms, or values.
But the outcome, and sort of here's a distribution of the outcome,
and the distribution of what I call the Democratic Idea.
And the distribution of the outcome shows that the majority
of peasants, tend to be towards the democratic side.
All right.
The highest point is zero, but
beyond that most of the people are on a more democratic side.
And over here, if you think that getting a score of seven,
which would mean that you are positive on five and on the sixth
you're even two points positive that's how you would get to seven.
So seven onward these would all people who I would characterize as pretty democratic.
And I think this should be surprising to most people outside of China,
and even to people inside China, that in fact, back in 1999,
peasants had a fairly democratic viewpoint.
Now, the survey also shows that wealth can affect
the attitudes towards politics and democracy.
Right?
And that what we see is that in rural China people with a middle and
upper middle level income of wealth are the most democratic.
And the wealthiest oppose democracy.
While the poor are just too busy trying to make a living.
All right.
So here is again we measured people, we gave,
given their position on that scale that you saw before of the democratic idea.
We could, their position we could categorize them as not democratic,
a bit democratic, democratic, and very democratic.
So as I said, from seven on will probably be very democratic.
And then we ask them to tell us how rich they thought they were.
We couldn't ask them for how much money do you make a year?
Because sometimes people will hide that kind of money, that information.
So what we do, we ask them to describe their own economic situation
relative to other people near by.
Relative to other people in the community.
And what we find is a very strong association between
the level of wealth and the democratic values.
And it's in fact these two cohorts,
the people who per se, sort of, I see myself as sort of the middle range and,
people who see themselves as the upper middle, who are most democratic, right.
Democratic and very democratic.
All right, so here upper middle, 13% of the upper middle people
described themselves, or
would fall into the category of very democratic while only 6% of
the wealthiest group would fall into the very democratic group.
Right?
And so this in fact is the key group and here,
if we look at sort if just a bit democratic, what we see is that the poor
are more likely to fall into those categories.
Right?
And the rich.
Not being very democratic.
And that the middle level, middle and
upper middle are the people who are more likely
to answer, fall into the democratic or very democratic category.
Now just another table that I got many years ago from someone
presented at a conference.
Was also trying to show that even within China, within urban China,
we can find that strategies of business men, business men and
women in terms of how to deal with the government vary.
So again, we don't find this uniform sense of
one kind of political culture in urban China and that it varies by cities.
And the two cities that are interesting to compare are Guangzhou, right?
Guangzhou, which is a coastal open more liberal city.
And the city of Xian, which is the northwest, more conservative.
Probably less likely to be democratic, or people having more democratic values.
And so what we find, here, again, is that people
in Guangzhou, on the question of, to what extent do they try and
form associations, business associations?
And to what extent do they try and use those business associations to
press their case against the government.
That when they have a conflict with the government what's their strategy?
So, what we see very clearly is that people in Guangzhou
tend to rely much more so, twice as much,
on their business associations than the people in Xian do.
And since associations are seen to be an important measure of democratization,
we'll talk more about later the whole question of group activism and
group action.
This would suggest that the people in Guangzhou are much more democratic.
And here are ways to protect themselves when particular government policies
are hurting their interests.
Again, we see that the Guangzhou people are much more likely to try and
use their associations than the people in Xian.
Another measure that we used to try and assess whether or
not peasants were passive or active was to actually ask them a very simple question.
And the question was, did you
try to solve a problem that your village,
or you within your village, faced over the last ten years?
And we have 2,600 because we have 2,400 peasants and
about 240 officials, so the officials were also included in this.
And what we found was that 16.7% of all of the villagers
in our survey had tried to solve a problem.
And probably if you go around to Hong Kong, or
many other communities and you said to people what percentage of the people who
have problems have actually gone and tried to do something about it,
you would find that this number of 16.7 is pretty strong.
Right?
So let me go back to a couple of the questions or
the statements that we had had.
And show you I think some important results
that I think demonstrate very clearly that Chinese people,
Chinese peasants have a pretty strong democratic value, democratic ethos.
So, here's a statement, if the village economy experiences stable development,
we do not need to raise the level of democracy.
What does it mean, raise the level of democracy?
People may have different interpretations, but the idea is still that somehow,
we will have more elections, more open democratic process, something about that.
And what you find is that 65% of the people disagree with that statement.
That they believe that even if the economy is doing okay and
growing, they want to improve the level of democracy.
And, what we find very often among wealthy, and
we see this particularly in our community here in Hong Kong,
that the very wealthy tend to have an anti-democratic value.
All right.
That they don't care very much about democracy.
They only want to get wealthy and keep that.
But what this does show is that the average
villager in China in 1999, he cared.
It was good to have growth and stability, economic growth, stable development.
But that didn't stop them from hoping for more democracy.
Another good statement, is if villagers disagree with local policy,
they have the right to petition to upper levels.
Now this is an important question because petitioning, sending up a message,
writing a report, and trying to take it to a higher level government official
is a traditionally acceptable form of protest and
political activism against mistreatment by local officials.
There's been movies about this.
This has been acceptable culturally.
But we have seen over the last, I'd say 12, 10, 12 years,
less support for petitioning by the top party leadership.
Nevertheless, villagers clearly believe that they have the right to petition.
81.4% of villagers disagree with the statement that they don't have a right.
They agree that if they disagree with local policy,
they believe that they have the right to petition to higher level officials.
And that says that the villagers have this strong value and the strong ethos.
The next statement was one about good governance and
that's a theme that the communist party has tried to generate support for
the idea that even if we can't, we're not going to have democratic elections
if what we really need is to have very meritocratic,
very effective, very efficient people running the government.
If we can do that in China, that's good enough.
And probably the view would be that if we can do that, then peasants
would feel satisfied that they don't need democracy.
But here again, so if current cadres are capable and trusted, there is no need for
democratic elections.
55% disagree with that statement.
So they would argue that even if there is capable leaders,
trusted, that there is good governance, 55% of the people say that's not enough.
We still want to have more democracy.
The last slide that I'll look at in this clip is a question for
how would you respond to, hypothetical response, how would you respond
to the news that cadres, officials are going to do something that's not fair.
All right. What would you do about it?
And I've circled this one because, in fact, it shows that 37.6% of
the people would not do anything, they don't believe that they should
bother to do anything, it's no use, or they don't want to participate.
So, there is a strong cohort here of people who say,
we can't do anything, right, we're not going to respond.
Nevertheless you can see that 31% would go and talk to the officials, right?
They'd express their views to the officials.
19% would contact the village assembly, which represents all the members
of the village or some of top members of the village are in that assembly.
So, here you do have 50% of the people who would,
52% there, another 15%, 52, 57,
67% of the people would go and do something.
So, it's very hard to say that these people are passive.
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