China Off Center

2. How Much of China Is Ruled by Beijing?

In this brief chapter, originally posted on the Internet, Liu Binyan asks a question frequently posed throughout this book: How much of China is ruled by Beijing? His query is political and administrative; ours extends to the cultural and psychological domains. But he recounts instance after instance in which local thugs, local governments, and individuals acting in their own interest flout demands made by the center. Some of this interest is criminal—people committing acts of violence and rapacity that cannot be contained by lawenforcement personnel. Some of this interest is material selfishness—people refusing to hand over the taxes demanded by their local or provincial authorities . Some of this interest is defensive—individuals coming together to form virtual armies to protect themselves from roving bands of organized strongmen . For readers familiar with the past century of China’s history, this lawless contemporary chaos will immediately call to mind the warlord period of the 1920s and 1930s, when large areas of China were under the control of local authorities, some of whom went so far as to issue their own currency and passports . The predatory reality that Liu Binyan describes is strongly at odds with the common Western perception of the Chinese government as all-powerful and of its economy as “under control.” Liu does not speculate here about likely trajectories for such a fragmented China, but he makes quite clear that, at the present time at least, China’s leaders lack moral and practical authority and that public contempt for them has been increasing step by step with China’s economic growth and modernization. Moreover, his impressionistic portrait of violence and excess does much to convey why corruption is the nation’s number one problem. Liu Binyan is one of China’s best-known journalists, famous for his unblinkered accounts of official corruption. His muckraking has come at a cost, beginning in April 1956 with the publication of his pathbreaking piece of reportage literature “At the Bridge Construction Site” (Liu [1956] 1980), which chronicled such local outrages of political corruption as incompetence and misallocation of funds that, when perpetrated under the guise of strict adherence to Party doctrine, were applauded by the central government. Labeled a 25 LIU BINYAN 2 How Much of China Is Ruled by Beijing? “Rightist” and sentenced to internal exile and hard labor in 1957, he lived as a political prisoner for more than two decades. Rehabilitated in 1979, Liu resumed his journalistic career, becoming the chief investigative reporter for the Renmin ribao (People’s daily) and publishing his most celebrated piece of reportage literature, “People or Monsters?” (Liu [1979] 1983)—a horrifying account of widespread corruption in a model commune in northeastern China. In 1987, when student protests broke out in Hefei, he was again denounced as a public enemy and expelled from the Communist Party, this time for his “bourgeois liberalization.” Now living in the United States, Liu Binyan has continued to write about Chinese affairs with insight and frankness , editing the journal China Focus, which monitors the daily political excesses of the government.—Eds. The separatist warlord regimes that dominated China during the first half of this century have not yet reappeared. And, for the foreseeable future, the danger of nationwide civil war seems slim. However, other forms of disintegration —felt by many as only a “social security” problem—are really various social forces slowly undermining the control of the central government. This process began only in the mid-1980s, but it has already made the Beijing regime more anxious and terrified than ever. On 14 October of last year, the China News Agency reported that, because thirty thousand peasants had poured into a remote mountain region in Qinghai province to prospect for gold, the government decided, as of 1 January 1998, to close down the two gold mines in the Kekexili mountain range of western Qinghai province. But whether the local government is capable of forcing these peasants to leave the area is quite doubtful. About the same time that the above news was reported, another report about Linglong, China’s largest gold mine (in Zhaoyuan, Shanxi province), stated that, when law-enforcement personnel tried to ban illegal gold miners from entering the mine, the miners threatened the police with violence. During another conflict there two months earlier, fifty thugs armed with handguns and rods had encircled the local cadres and mine workers, and a confrontation ensued that lasted four hours. The armed clashes between the two sides—state mines and...