Is the present political regime in China legitimate or not?

Introduction

The legitimacy crises are not caused by the people of China’s awareness of the pillage and totalitarianism of the socialist system. Rather the disaster comes with the fact that the behaviors of the Chinese government and officials have broken the ideological myth on which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had heavily depended for maintaining its regime.

The Communist Party of China

The Communist Party of China (CPC) is also known as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It is the current and the founding ruling political party of China and also the world’s largest political party. It is at the paramount position as the highest political authority in China, while not being a governing body recognized by the Constitution of China. CCP is realized as the supreme power through control of all state machinery and of the lawmaking process. The CCP was founded in the year 1921 and came to rule all of mainland China after defeating its competitor the Kuomintang (KMT) in the Chinese Civil War. CCP’s 70 million members constitute 5.5% of the total inhabitants of China.

Evolution of CCP

The CCP’s ideologies have considerably evolved since its beginning. Mao’s revolution that founded the PRC was supposedly based on Marxism – Leninism with a rural focus based on China’s social state of affairs at the time. During the 1960s and 1970s, the CCP experienced a significant ideological collapse with the Communist Party of the USSR under Nikita Khrushchev and their allies. Since then Mao’s peasant revolutionary vision and so-called continued revolution under the autocracy of the proletariat predetermined that class enemies continued to exist even though the socialist revolution appeared to be complete, giving way to Cultural Revolution. This fusion of ideas became recognized officially as “Mao Zedong Thought”, or Maoism outside of China. It represented as a powerful branch of communism that existed in opposition to the USSR’s Marxist revisionism.

After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the CCP under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping moved towards Socialism with Chinese individuality and instituted Chinese economic reforms. In reversing some of Mao’s extreme – leftist policies, Deng argued that a socialist nation and the market economy model were not equally exclusive. While declaring the political power of the Party itself, the change in policy generated momentous economic growth.

The ideology came into conflict on both sides of the spectrum with Maoists as well as progressive liberals, concluding with other social factors to cause 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests. Deng’s vision for economic and financial success and a new socialist market model became well-established in the Party constitution in 1997 as Deng Xiaoping Theory.

The third generation of leadership under Zhu Rongji, Jiang Zemin and associates largely continued Deng’s progressive economic vision while overseeing the comeback of Chinese nationalism in the 1990s. Nationalist emotion has also evolved to become informally the part of the Party’s guiding principle. As part of Jiang’s nominal legacy, the CCP ratified the Three Represents into the 2003 revision of the Party Constitution as a guiding ideology, encouraging the CCP to represent advanced productive forces, the progressive course of China’s culture, and the fundamental interests of the people.

The degree of power CCP had on the state has steadily decreased as economic liberalizations progressed. The evolution of CCP ideology has gone through a number of defining modifications that it no longer bears much resemblance to its founding principles. Some believe that the big amount of economic liberalization starting from the late 1970s to date indicates that the CCP has transitioned to endorse economic neo-liberalism. The CCP’s current policies are fiercely rejected as capitalist by most communists, especially by anti revisionists, and by supporters of the Chinese New Left from within the PRC.

Single Party Dominance in China

The CCP comprises a single-party state form of government. There are parties other than the CCP within China, which report to the United Front Department of CCP and do not act as opposition or independent parties. Since the 1980s, as CCP’s commitment to Marxist ideology has appeared to fade, the party has begun to increasingly appeal to Chinese nationalism as a legitimizing principle as contrasting to the socialist construction for which the party was originally formed. The transformation from socialism to nationalism has pleased the CCP’s former enemy, the Kuomintang (KMT), which has warmed its relations with the CCP since 2003.

Opinion of People concerning CCP

There are a variety of opinions about CCP and opinions often create unanticipated political alliances and divisions. Trotskyists argue that CCP was doomed to its present character, that of petty – bourgeois nationalism because of the near obliteration of the worker’s movement in the KMT betrayal of 1927 which was made doable by Stalin’s order that the Communists disarm and capitulate. This massacre forced the tiny surviving Party to switch from a worker’s union to peasant guerrilla based organization, and seek aid of the most unorthodox sources, from patriotic capitalists to the dreaded KMT itself, with which it openly sought an alliance government even into early 1949.

Trotskyists from Chen Duxiu onward have called for a political revolution against what they see as an opportunist and capitalist leadership of the CCP. Opinions about the CCP also create very strong divisions among groups usually ideologically united such as conservatives in the USA. Many of the unanticipated opinions about the CCP result from its rare combination of attributes as a party formally based on Marxism which has overseen a vibrant market economy, yet maintains an authoritarian political system.

Cohorts of the International Tibet Independence Movement, Falun Gong, a religious group, Taiwan independence, East Turkestan Independence Movement, neo-conservatives in the USA and Japan, proponents of civil liberties, international human rights groups, and freedom of expression, advocates of democracy, anarchists, along with many autonomous and anti-authoritarian left wing forces in those same countries, are among the groups which have opposed the CCP government because it is said to be a repressive single-party state regime.

Some of the rivals of the Party within the Chinese democracy movement have tended not to disagree that a strong Chinese state is essentially bad, but rather that the Communist leadership is corrupt. The Chinese New Left is a current within China that seeks to revert China to the socialist road i.e., to return China to the days after Mao Zedong but prior to the reforms of Deng Xiaoping and his successors.

Another school of thought vows that the worst of the mistreatments took place decades ago, and that the current leadership is not only unrelated with them, but were actually victims of that period. They have also argued that while the modern CCP may be flawed but still it is comparatively better than previous regimes, with respect to improving the general standard of livelihood, than any other government that has governed the People’s Republic of China in the past century and can be put in more favorable light against most regimes of the developing nations. However, farmers and other rural people have been marginalized, and national pressure have been greatly reduced, as a result, the CCP has recently taken sweeping measures to recuperate support from the countryside, to limited success.

In addition, some scholars contend that the People’s Republic of China has never operated under a de-centralized democratic government in its several thousand years of history, and therefore it can be argued that the configuration present, albeit not up to western moral standards, is the best possible option when matched up to to its alternatives. A sudden transition to democracy, they contend, would result in the political and economic upheaval that occurred in the USSR in the 1990s and that by focusing on economic growth, the People’s Republic of China is setting the stage for a more gradual and more sustainable transition to a more liberal system. This group sees China as being similar to Spain in the 1960s, and South Korea and Taiwan during the 1970s.

Many observers from both within and outside of the People’s Republic of China have argued that the CCP has taken gradual steps towards democracy and transparency, hence arguing that it is most excellent to give it time and room to evolve into a better government rather than forcing a sudden change. However, other observers question whether these steps are genuine efforts towards democratic improvement or disingenous measures by the CCP to retain power.

Many current party officials are the daughters and sons of prominent Chinese Communist Party officials. These young, powerful individuals are referred to as the Crown Prince Party, or Princelings and their rise to power have been strongly criticized as a form of nepotism or cronyism.

The Real Face of Chinese Government

The recent cases of Gao Zhisheng and Chen Guangcheng have once again authenticated the concern developed in the past few years that the political change is characterized by gangland behavior of the Chinese government i.e. privatization of public power, frequency and exposure of political violence. This process can be generalized as the political ruling methods turning illegal.

The fundamental reasons for the dramatic changes to China’s political scenery can be traced back to the 1990s, during which China’s economic revolution had disintegrated into excuses for groups of ruling elites to ransack public wealth. The extremely unfair distribution of wealth leads in turn to a social configuration dominated chiefly by injustice. The Chinese government has thus confronted a crisis in the legitimacy of its rule.

The key tone of the ideological saga is that in a socialist state, people are the masters of the state and also the masters of the state’s fortunes. In other words, the Chinese communist administration is the government for the people and all it does is for serving the people.

The Chinese government now faces escalating protest from the masses after losing support of the ideological myth. To enrich itself by looting the public, the Chinese government, with its firmness on maintaining its socialism has no other choice but to follow the disparaging path of using illegal methods to repress all opposing powers. Illegitimacy of rule by these methods is most appropriately illustrated by the fact that the regime has relied more and more on violent behavior for its routine administration. In the past few years, the aggression of the Chinese government has drawn intense attention of all.

Political Hostility in China

Political hostility in China is demonstrated in several aspects:

1.      The first characteristic is the violence against the underprivileged by the departments of the police, commerce, taxation, township officials and family planning during their law enforcement. This kind of brutality is directed against the individuals who are over and over again forced to accept or tolerate it in silence.

Even though some of the individuals protest, it is mostly restricted to individual actions. This kind of insecurely organized protest will not alert the Chinese government to the crisis of its rule. The Chinese government is also aware of the illegality of the law enforcement agents, but attributes the result to lawlessness of law enforcement agents.

2.      The second aspect is that the Chinese government in conspiracy with gangland groups, resorts to bloodshed. Sometimes, government agencies directly use criminal world methods to comprehensively despoil the resources the masses rely upon for living, like farmer’s arable land and the homes of city residents. The governing authority overlooks this kind of violence, which in turn satisfies the desires of the local governments and elite groups for furthering their own interests.

In addition, the violent actions are usually based on administrative law announced by the local governments. Disguised in a thin veil of state authorized legality, hostility is wrongly employed by the powerful governors against the governed. The brutality of this kind of violence is far beyond the business related violence committed by law enforcement agencies in the process of law enforcement. It is a typical example of state sanctioned illegal behavior.

3.      The third aspect is using spies to rule and make stronger state control over the society. Starting from the late 1990’s, the espionage department of the National Security Bureau of China had already widely penetrated many social domains and used very contemporary techniques to track and monitor all those considered protesters.

The National Security Bureau of China’s abuse of power is even more deceitful than other government departments and it repetitively seeks to frame human rights defenders. Besides abusing the use of charges such as jeopardizing national security, conspiring to subvert the government and leaking state secrets, many charges against defendants are complete artificial.

For instance, in August 2006, Beijing attorney Xu Zhiyong went to Shandong State to defend Chen Guangcheng, but was apprehended by local authorities under a fake charge of robbery. Attorney Guo Feixiong was detained under a false blame of using fake tickets on the train to Beijing. Even more serious is that in order to get away from its administrative responsibilities, the government of China instigated many gangsters (mobs with unknown identities) to physically terrorize and persecute dissidents and rights defenders. In universities, they implement a system of information management officers to train part time spies amongst the students and monitor teacher’s speech in class.

Reasons for Political Hostility

The reason for Chinese regime’s ruling methods turning illegal are the government’s fear about the legitimacy of its command. The ruling gang knows deep down that the current unfair social structure has already made the Chinese government’s future very abrupt. Democratization is likely to bring the plunderers to account. Hence their resolve to reject democratization is far greater than in the 1980s. Political ruling methods turning illegal largely rely on reigning through blatant violence.

This is not only a new political disparity of Mao Zedong’s slogan of political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, but its essence shares similarities with the criminal underworld relying on violent behavior to establish itself. A result of allowing violence to run out of control is that the buffering room between China’s nongovernmental society and the government has steadily narrowed, causing greater difficulties in advancing human rights in China. The illegality of this kind of rule is ingrained in China’s political system.

Conclusion:

It is a foreseeable, logical result of the operation of today’s power system in China. It is definitely is not caused by some government officials being of low-quality with little regard to the law. Hence punishing a few officials alone cannot stop the trend of the illegality of the local governments’ ruling methods. In other words, only by changing the current unfair social structure in China is it possible to stop the decline of the rule into underworld gangsters. Moreover, in order to change the current unfair social structures, one must also change the political system that shaped this kind of unjust social structure.

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