Yasheng Huang: belief

Transcript context

…The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] and the governments — the local governments — they are quite responsive to citizens on some, but not all, issues, right? There’s an embedded civil society where a message is sent. You don’t need to do all the organizing. You get a fair amount of response, and it’s a kind of shadow civil society. Yes, but that’s a different framing. This is about a government. Even though it is autocratic, it is still reasonably responsive to the demands of the citizens. And therefore, the argument is that you don’t really need organized civil society to press their demands, to press their policy preferences. I think in some sense, that’s correct. If you look at what the CCP has been doing, it is actually quite clever. It’s not the case that they don’t take input from the society. They create portals, they create websites, and they create phone numbers for the citizens to call in. They also do surveys. What they want to do is, they want to solicit opinions and information from the citizens without creating conditions for the citizens to get organized. If you think about all these opinions expressed to the government through the government control portals, you are doing it as an individual. You’re not doing it as a member of a larger group. The CCP has no problem with that, and sometimes those opinions can be quite negative. The CCP has no problem with that. The beauty of the system is that once you express those opinions, convey that information, as a CCP official, I have a number of choices. I can act on them to alleviate your concerns, and I also make sure that you don’t find it necessary to organize protests and demonstrations. That’s only true on traffic, pollution, things like that. The big difference between Zero-COVID and these other issues, such as traffic and pollution, is that so many people are affected by the policies simultaneously and to a similar extent. Therefore, they can relate with each other much, much more than in the previous situation, when you think about your own treatment mostly as an isolated, individual situation rather than something that you can generalize. That, I believe, is the main reason why you see this level of demonstrations and protests. Yes, China has had a lot of protests, but those protests tend to happen in rural areas, in less urban settings, in isolated situations, and on single issues. Usually, in the 1990s, it was about the land that the government took away. And then it was about the salary, that employers were late in paying my salary, so there were protests about that — very single-issue, very focused. This time around, you’re talking about people demanding the CCP to step down, demanding Xi Jinping to step down. That’s just something entirely different from what we saw before. Now, in your book, you write of what you call Tullock’s curse— Gordon Tullock having been my former colleague — namely, embedded succession conflict in an autocracy. Why has Chinese succession been so stable up to now? And will we see Tullock’s curse whenever Xi steps down, passes on, whatever happens there?…

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