Empire of Lies

by Guy Sorman

  And then Jiren throws a wrench into the works. He gets up, takes the floor without permission, says that he is delighted with the freedom given to the Chala yak breeders, thanks the Communist Party of which he is a member, and announces that he is running for the post of village chief. He speaks simply and in Tibetan. As soon as he finishes, he sits down again and his gorgeous wife flashes a golden smile at him. The shepherds seem to like it, though it is hard to read the impassive faces that have weathered fifty years of Chinese oppression.

  The Party secretary is embarrassed; he withdraws into the white-tiled building to confer with the district authorities. An hour later, all of them come back out. An announcement is made that the Chinese government respects democracy and that the voters may add the dissident Jiren’s name to their pink voting slips. Few of the shepherds and even fewer of the women can write. “Those who can write must help those who can’t,” orders the visibly annoyed secretary. The proceedings, rehearsed for many months in advance, go awry; the official television crew stops filming the chaos. The cooks wonder what will become of the banquet of roast yak and butter tea that they have prepared for the foreign observers.

  The voting begins. The slips are counted and recounted carefully in full public view so that there can no accusation of cheating. The Tibetans know the drill well; the official candidate wins with a thumping two-thirds majority. The rash Jiren manages to get a seat on the village committee. He is not disappointed: “That’s democracy,” he says. Order is restored.

  A black limousine with tinted windows, a Buick made in China, hurtles onto the field, and a senior “cadre” descends from the car. A dark suit, white shirt, red tie, and, above all, thick black hair are the yardsticks by which status is measured in China. No Communist dignitary, irrespective of his age, is graying or bald. The cadre does not introduce himself or give his name; he is rumored to be a “director” from Xining, the provincial capital. He grabs the microphone and intones Party jargon in a martial tone, congratulating the people of China for the progress that they have made on the road to democracy in pursuance of the directives of the 16th Congress of the Communist Party. This election, he says, is one more step toward the development of China; it is a clear demonstration of the perfect harmony that exists among all its ethnic groups. He announces an exceptional grant of 3,000 yuan—a pittance, even by Qinghai standards—to be managed entirely by the village’s elected committee under the local Party secretary’s vigilant eye. Before driving off, he consents to perform an old Tibetan custom: dipping his finger into a glass of fruit brandy with a layer of salt butter around its rim, he flicks three drops on the ground to bless the earth, the sky, and the family before drinking the rest. In these high altitudes, the brandy offers protection against both frost and dizziness.

  The sun begins to set behind the mountains, and a snowstorm looms. Butter tea, yak roast, and giblets stuffed with herbs are all gulped down in a few seconds. The shepherds disperse in no time; entire families seat themselves on one horse or one motorcycle. Chala, one of the 650,000 Chinese villages in which the Party intends to install “democracy,” returns to silence in the fading twilight.

  What will become of Jiren the rebel? He will not be harmed, for he is a lightweight; the disciplinary commission of his Party will simply give him a lesson in Communist morality, and he will never get a loan from the bank to buy a deep freezer.

  On the way back from Chala to Xining, our hosts from the provincial government suggest that we stop at Bird Island; located on the largest lake in China, it is a meeting point for thousands of migratory birds. Our cavalcade comes to a halt, and we take the customary photographs. The next day, we read in the international press that the dead birds on the island are carriers of bird flu, an epidemic threat to China as serious as atypical pneumonia and AIDS. The entire zone has been cordoned off, and travelers coming from there have to be quarantined. The rules are bent in our case, however, so we escape the quarantine. This is not the Party’s way of getting rid of us; it is only displaying its ignorance of health hazards and its strange sense of priorities. An election planned and prepared months in advance has to take place at all costs; the honor of the Party is at stake. Not holding the elections would mean a loss of face for the Party in front of the Tibetans and, worse still, in front of the foreigners. The epidemic can wait. The Chinese press spoke of the dead birds four months after they had died.

  No, the Party is not moving toward democracy

  What is an election worth in a one-party country that bans opposition, passes off propaganda as information, orchestrates debates, and censures criticism? What has prompted the unelected Chinese government and the self-nominated Communist Party to hold local elections now, long after the law providing for elections in all of China’s villages was enacted in 1980? And if the Party deems it proper that village chiefs and local assemblies be elected, why does it not extend local democracy to cities, where toothless neighborhood committees are nominated in utmost secrecy? Rural elections have become a top priority for the Chinese government. Even in China, people are hard put to understand why, and offer a host of interpretations, from cynical to optimistic.

  Analysis becomes all the more daunting when one considers the scope of the subject: 650,000 very different villages. The director of the World and China Institute in Beijing—Li Fan, thought to be an independent observer—says that the Chinese countryside covers the entire political spectrum, from genuine pluralism to manipulation of the most sordid kind. The only possible generalization is that in the north, villagers vote on the basis of clans, divided as they are into opposing families, whereas in the south, money grants power and thus the ability to buy votes determines the outcome. Corrupt practices become more prevalent as the economic stakes rise. Elections are a low-key affair in Tibetan villages where resources are scanty; in the more prosperous provinces, however, where villages have their own enterprises, the village chief has a key role to play, as he runs these firms.

  Who makes the decisions: the duly elected village chief, or the local Communist Party secretary nominated by the Party hierarchy? Here again, there is no hard-and-fast rule: everything depends on power equations, influence, and money. There are also villages—one-third of them, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs in Beijing—where the Party secretary is also the elected village chief. Does the Party favor the principle of two posts for one man? Does it want its representatives to win legitimacy through universal suffrage? Perhaps it is a way to legitimize the Communist Party in the countryside; perhaps the Party wants to purge its cadres by eliminating apparatchiks hated by the peasants and replacing them with others who have a little more credibility. Such a policy does seem rational. But the discourse changes from one province to the next, and the views expressed are contradictory, to say the least. At times, the Party encourages its local secretary to stand for elections so that it can win democratic legitimacy and lower local administrative costs (since the village chief and Party secretary are both paid by taxing the villagers). In other provinces, the Party discourse is totally different: the distinction between the Party and the village chief makes for less oppression and more consultation, I am told, thus leading to a genuine democratic separation of powers. There are quite a few provinces where the Party has decided not to hold elections at all, or to hold elections in some villages and not in others, according to a schedule that the Party alone knows.

  The infinite variations on the ground tell us that the central government is not as strong as it seems. Though the state lays down general policy guidelines, it is the local representatives of the Party who implement these guidelines. They go about their business with an eye to personal gain, depending on how much influence they wield and the power equations in each village. Centralization in China amounts to a permanent negotiation between the authorities in Beijing and the local Communist Party potentates.

  Let us assume that this sudden passion for local elections, however primitive the exercise, is because the Party has
woken up to the growing discontent of 800 million peasants. It is they who sustain the army of apparatchiks camping in their villages; on average, there is one Party apparatchik for twenty rural inhabitants, a proportion growing by the day. These “cadres” arbitrarily impose taxes, fines, and duties on the peasants. The peasantry is up in arms: mutinies, sometimes well publicized by the press, at other times kept under wraps forever, testify to a real hatred for the Party. Perhaps village elections are not the foundations of democracy but rather the Party’s way of telling the peasants: “Now we are ready to listen to you.”

  From what we have seen, the message is not getting through, for dialogue is not part of the Party culture, and the clumsily stage-managed elections are perceived as being inflicted on the peasantry. It seems unlikely that a Tibetan shepherd from Chala, after voting, returns with the impression that his vote counts, or feels more attracted to the Party and likely to rally around it. He probably feels, instead, that he is again being compelled to take part in one of the many rituals that the Chinese have been inflicting on him from time to time since 1949. Local elections are no different from the other campaigns—the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, economic reforms—that have marked recent Chinese history. The elections in Tibet are reminiscent of pilot villages, model factories, and other such exemplary institutions of previous eras. Since the Sixties, only the slogans have changed; style has always prevailed over substance, music over words. The people have no choice but to submit, flexibility being the only way to survive.

  This, I must admit, is a pessimistic reading of village elections. The Party has another, more promising, interpretation, known as the “process theory,” a point of view shared by some China watchers, generally Western. The Communist Party has never formally ruled out democracy: the very first elections held in China—in 1954, at the time of Mao Zedong—were pluralistic. Under the influence of Stalinism and its totalitarian logic, however, Maoism was quick to abandon all pretense of pluralistic democracy and went on to proclaim a unanimous democracy. Ever since, on the rare occasions that voting takes place, it is unanimous.

  After succeeding Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping did not exclude the possibility of China’s returning to pluralistic democracy in the future—fifty years, he declared in 1981. Why such a long wait? Apart from the real fear of losing power, Deng Xiaoping put forth two arguments that form the basis of the Party doctrine. First, premature pluralism will lead to the breaking up of China, even to civil war. The result of the free elections held following the 1911 republican revolution is proof enough: country squires and local militia leaders became war-lords who were responsible for ruining China and plunging it into war. Were free elections held today, would the same scenario be replicated? It seems unlikely: China is far more homogeneous than in 1913, indeed more so than ever before in its history. The provinces are well linked, thanks to the massive migrations; the various populations have intermingled; a unified economy is in place. Labor and consumer markets, television, and schools spread the national language and similar habits. Furthermore—and this is something that all champions of democracy underline—a democratic China structured along the lines of a loose confederation will be able to withstand pluralism far better than a centralized form of governance imposed regardless of the consequences.

  The Party’s second argument in defense of its gradualist, start-at-the-grassroots approach is that the Chinese are still not responsible citizens. This attitude of condescension is the reason for the elaborate planning and zealous rhetoric that usually accompany village elections. The Chinese were capable of voting in 1913 and 1954, so why do they need the Party to instruct them in 2005? Indians and Brazilians, in a similar situation, were not made to wait fifty years before casting their votes, nor did they require a party to tell them how to vote. It is the Chinese Communist Party and its cadres, not the people, who need a lesson in democracy and independent thinking. They also need to learn to accept electoral defeat, if such a thing ever happens.

  Other observers, neither Communist nor Chinese—especially those from the Ford Foundation and Carter Center, both very active in China—feel that local elections have set an irreversible process in motion. The Communist Party will eventually lose its grip and, in the long run, be absorbed by the democratic process. For this reason, both foundations favor village elections in China; they provide logistical support and organizational know-how to the local authorities that hold the elections. This was the case in Chala, where Party cadres beamed as they told me that Tibetans were a free people. Additionally, the foundation headed by the former American president Jimmy Carter provided computers to the local government. The Chinese government is not short of computers, so who is being taken in: a naïve Carter, or Chinese communists caught up in the electoral system?

  Without trying to generalize, the manner in which village elections are conducted suggests that the Party is in no mood to go any further down the road to democracy. In any case, what legitimacy can democracy have when one does not have access to information or the freedom to organize oneself?

  Drops in the ocean

  The landscape changes as we move away from the Tibetan plateau and travel some 1,200 miles south to Guizhou Province. Yet the farmers’ poverty remains the same. The inhabitants of Chala just about make ends meet by breeding yaks and selling butter; in Maguan, families eke out a living growing rice on tiny irrigated terraces. Those dazzled by the Chinese economic miracle would do well to visit Guizhou, which has a per-capita income of one dollar a day. There is no electricity, schools are few, dispensaries nonexistent, and mechanization unheard of. Certainly the province has much to delight those in quest of the eternal China: peasants driving their buffalo, women raising small mud dikes under the watchful eyes of their ancestors, and funeral steles scattered all over the rocky mountains towering in the background. China is an immense accumulation of eras and cultures; uniformity comes from the Communist Party.

  After Chala, I was made to witness another great step toward local democracy in Maguan. This time, it was a meeting of the village committee. There is one elected delegate for every thirty-five families in a total population of 30,000. So it was a mammoth assembly, somewhat like a Swiss canton, that gathered in the open public square facing the Party headquarters. As in Chala and everywhere else, this was a white-tiled building, in keeping with the bland modernity of dreary apparatchiks.

  The local news is written in chalk on a blackboard: the lead items are the number of women pregnant, their names, and their states of pregnancy. This is not out of concern for the mothers of Guizhou but a means of ensuring compliance with the one-child norm; if it fails, there are informants and fines. Some of the villagers try to pass themselves off as Tibetans or Yis, ethnic minorities not bound by the single-child norm. They are wasting their time: the police know this ploy.

  The “cadre” presiding over the Maguan assembly is a replica of his colleague from Chala: the same black hair, the same thundering tones, the same rhetoric, and the same triumphalism. Like almost all Party cadres, Zheng is city-born and city-educated. The Party does not reflect Chinese society in any way: only 5 percent of its 60 million members are peasants, whereas peasants constitute 80 percent of the total population; there are very few workers in the Party, and their numbers are going down; only 10 percent of the Party’s members are women, and no woman holds any post of real responsibility, whether at the local or national level.

  Like Cairang, Zheng is happy that the assembly will “increase Maguan’s democratic awareness, take it forward on the road to progress, and eliminate poverty.” The delegates look pensive, smoke, and say nothing. Zheng moves on to the special meeting’s agenda. (Normally, the assembly meets only once a year, as is the norm for most “elected” bodies; in China, the purpose of an assembly is not to deliberate but to publicly endorse decisions taken by the Party in camera.)

  At the entrance of the village is a pond reminiscent of the mountain landscapes depicted in old Chinese painting
s. This collective property, however, has slowly become a rubbish dump. All the fish have died, duckweed covers the pond, and small plastic beer bottles float on the surface. Zheng says that the pond is an eyesore that has hurt progress and brought disrepute to Maguan; the assembly must decide its future. The Party secretary proposes that it be filled and transformed into a public garden “for the elders who deserve it.” Five or six speakers raise their hands to take the floor; they praise the wisdom of the secretary; everything is going according to plan.

  Then, as in Chala, a discordant note is struck. An old villager, dressed in a blue jacket of the Mao era, takes the floor without having been invited. He pulls from his pocket a poem he has written specially for the occasion. The poem is an ode to the pond that used to be the pride of the village. All that has to be done is some digging and cleaning, he says; the fish will return, and so will Maguan’s former glory. Zheng is furious. His bosses, who have come especially from Guiyang, the capital, huddle together in a conclave. Zheng announces that since there are two opposing proposals, there will be a vote to decide whether the pond should be filled or restored. A secret ballot is held, but no one takes any interest in the counting. Zheng declares the result: those who want the pond filled have won. Progress has triumphed, leaving the poet in the blue jacket by the wayside. This old man can hardly be called a rebel; he is only idealizing a lost China—one that goes back to the Celestial Emperors, or to Mao Zedong, who knows? His protest is a drop in the ocean of the Party’s authoritarianism. There are many like him in China; sometimes they manage to come together, causing a ripple, a brief revolt against the tyranny of the Party.

  There is another unforeseen incident. Instead of the national anthem, the sound technician plays the Communist International. It is an old recording, probably from the Seventies, replete with chorus, bringing back memories of the Mao years. Delegates and villagers alike are nonplussed: should they stand up or not? Standing up for the national anthem is obligatory, but the protocol for the International is unclear, since it hasn’t been played for the last twenty years. The delegates decide without much hesitation to leave the public square. The words of the International are drowned out in the cries of the traders returning to their stalls. It is market day at Maguan; the air is filled with the smell of pork, tripe, salted vegetables, and fresh straw. The next assembly will meet in a year.