China's Charter 08

The New York Review of Books has published an English translation of an important emerging document calling for political and legal reform in China. The document is called Charter 08 (in analogy with Czechoslovakia's Charter 77 in 1977). It is a citizen-based appeal for the creation of a secure system of laws and rights in China, and has been signed by several thousand Chinese citizens. The Chinese state has belatedly taken note of the Charter, and a number of lead proponents for the document have been detained by the police, including Liu Xiaobo, Zhang Zuhua, Gao Yu, and Liu Di. Perry Link provided the translation.

The central principles articulated in the Charter include:

• Freedom
• Human rights
• Equality
• Republicanism
• Democracy
• Constitutional rule

The specific points included in the Charter include:

1. A New Constitution
2. Separation of Powers
3. Legislative Democracy
4. An Independent Judiciary
5. Public Control of Public Servants
6. Guarantee of Human Rights
7. Election of Public Officials
8. Rural-Urban Equality
9. Freedom to Form Groups
10. Freedom to Assemble
11. Freedom of Expression
12. Freedom of Religion
13. Civic Education
14. Protection of Private Property
15. Financial and Tax Reform
16. Social Security
17. Protection of the Environment
18. A Federated Republic
19. Truth in Reconciliation

Perry Link makes the point that this is not a "dissident" document, but rather a public-spirited attempt to articulate a future for China's polity.

The Chinese government should recognize that these are precisely the reforms that China needs for the twenty-first century. China needs to find its way to a genuinely law-based society; this is the point of items 1-7 and 14. China needs to rebuild a spirit of legitimacy joining government and the governed. And China needs to end the environment in which corruption, both private and public, is the most visible manifestation of unjust power that is visible to virtually all Chinese people.

Here is a very interesting audio interview with Perry Link on the NYRB website about the context of Charter 08. Also of interest is a piece that Daniel Drezner has posted on Charter 08 on the ForeignPolicy blog. Drezner's view is that the goals of the Charter can only be realized through confrontation with a mass movement, not through consultation and negotiation. But there are other pathways through which a governing party has come to rethink the conditions of its grip on power in the past twenty years. Let's hope the Chinese government has the wisdom to recognize the suitability of these principles for China's future.

January 22: see this very extensive and illuminating analysis of the Charter by Rebecca MacKinnon at Rconversation.

Authoritarian "democracy" in Russia

Is authoritarianism gaining a new lease on life?

Clifford Levy's coverage of Russia's politics in the New York Times makes the situation crystal-clear: Vladimir Putin and his party, United Russia, are determined to govern without opposition, and are fully prepared to use all the forms of intimidation and coercion that are necessary in order to succeed (article). The use of bogus charges and show trials against potential rivals is familiar from the example of Mikhail Khodorkovskii, former boss of the Yukos gas monopoly. (See the Amnesty International dossier on this case; dossier.) The arrest of Gary Kasparov prior to the recent elections is another example.

What Levy's coverage this week adds to this highly publicized willingness to use the power of the state and judiciary against rivals, is a similar heavy-handedness on the ground. Levy documents the party machine's use of its power to compel supporting votes from auto workers through threats made by the foremen; the machine's use of school children to coerce the votes of their parents and to monitor their political choices; and the use of intimidation and harassment to silence the activities of one of Russia's few opposition parties, the Union of Right Forces. Quoting Levy from this article, "Over the past eight years, in the name of reviving Russia after the tumult of the 1990s, Mr. Putin has waged an unforgiving campaign to clamp down on democracy and extend control over the government and large swaths of the economy. He has suppressed the independent news media, nationalized important industries, smothered the political opposition and readily deployed the security services to carry out the Kremlin’s wishes."

Why is this a problem?

First, it is a huge problem for the political rights of ordinary Russian citizens. Citizens cannot freely decide what candidate or party to support -- both because their own behavior as voters is supervised, and because they can't gain access to organized voices advocating for alternative policies. This silencing of opposition parties means a limitation of the agenda of discourse to the issues and candidates favored by the ruling party. And this means that the ability of ordinary citizens to have a meaningful voice in the large policy choices that the Russian government inevitably will make is reduced to a blade of grass.

But Putin's willingness to use authoritarian power to control democratic activities also means that Russian citizens are much less able to advocate for very simple local issues and needs -- environmental change, better transportation, better education. This is because every effort to organize in support of a local priority or need becomes, potentially, a sign of potential dissidence. And as such, it needs to be repressed. So activism around common local issues -- environment, transportation, education -- is also silenced.

A third harm that is created by this authoritarian rule, is the fact that it shelters the ability of powerful interests to continue their exploitation of the Russian economy. One of the social mechanisms through which corruption and criminal behavior by large companies are detected and deterred is the operation of investigative journalism and a free press. But Putin's rough treatment of the media and the press is well known; so investigating public or private corruption is a dangerous activity. (How dangerous it is, we know, when we consider the string of killings of investigative journalists on Putin's watch; see the article in Business Week on this subject.)

Some conservative observers in Russia say that the Russian people want a strong, effective government, and this requires strong measures. But this is untenable on its face. If people genuinely wanted the government and policies of Putin's party, then open and free elections would be easily won. So the behavior of the state actually expresses a deep lack of confidence in the democratic acceptability of the policies of the party.

Finally, it is hard to see how Russia can develop into the modern European state that it wants to be, without genuinely subordinating itself to meaningful democratic institutions and individual rights. Russia will be a stronger society and, in the long run, a more innovative and creative society, when it recognizes the ultimate responsibility of a state: to preserve the rights and liberties of its citizens and to respect their will through fair and free democratic processes.

We may have thought that the book has been written on authoritarian government in the twentieth century. But Vladimir Putin is writing new chapters, and they add up to a tragedy for the Russian people.

(See this link for a more theoretical blog entry on the authoritarian state.)

Rights and violence in China

There is a pretty vibrant conversation going on internationally and in China about the role that individual rights should play in Chinese society. (There was an interesting conference on this subject at the University of Michigan early in February.) Some theorists object to the idea of formulating China's issues of state-society relations in terms of individual rights. They object that the theory of individual rights is an expression of liberal or neo-liberal morality, and that this theory doesn't give enough expression for the value of the society as a whole.

Other social scientists document the fact that there are a variety of increasingly visible groups in China who are formulating their claims in terms of rights: peasants in terms of their rights of land use, workers in terms of their labor rights, urban homeowners in terms of incursions against their homes by land developers, and city dwellers in terms of their rights against environmental harms. In each case the groups consist of people who have a deep and shared interest in something -- access to land, working conditions that are safe and compensated, immunity from environmental toxins, security of their homes; these interests are threatened by powerful interests in Chinese society; and people in these groups want to have the freedom to struggle for their rights, and they want the state to have a system of law that protects them against violence when they do so. (Kevin O'Brien documents some of these social movements in Rightful Resistance in Rural China.)

So what is involved in advocating for "legality" and "individual rights" for China's future? Most basically, rights have to do with protection against repression and violence. The core rights that Western political theorists such as John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, or John Locke articulate are rights like these: freedom of association, freedom of action, freedom of expression, freedom of thought, and the right to security of property. Karl Marx criticized these rights as "bourgeois rights", and some post-modern theorists today denigrate these rights as a vestige of liberalism.

But I want to assert that these rights are actually fundamental to a decent society -- and that this is true for China's future as well. Moreover, I want to assert that each of these rights is a reply to the threat of violence and coercion. Take the rights of expression and association: when a group of people share an interest -- let's say, an interest in struggling against a company that is dumping toxic chemicals into a nearby river -- they can only actualize their collective interests if they are able to express their views and to call upon others to come together in voluntary associations to work against this environmental behavior. The situation in China today is harshly contrary to this ideal: citizens have to be extremely cautious about public expression of protest, and they are vulnerable to violent attack if they organize to pressure companies or local government to change their behavior.

The use of private security companies on behalf companies, land developers, and other powerful interests in China is well documented -- as it was in the labor struggles of major industries in the United States from the 1880s to the 1930s. And these companies are pretty much unconstrained by legal institutions in their use of violence and gangs of thugs to intimidate and attack farmers, workers, or city dwellers. It's worth visiting some of the web sites that document some of this violence -- for example, this report about thugs attacking homeowners in Chaoyang. Similar reports can be unearthed in the context of rural conflicts over land development and conflicts between factory owners and migrant workers.

So this brings us to "legality." What is the most important feature of the rule of law? It is to preserve the simple, fundamental rights of citizens: rights of personal security, rights of property, rights of expression. Why, in the photos included in the web site above involving an organized attack by security thugs against innocent Chaoyang residents -- why are there no police in the scene making arrests of these thugs? And what does it say to other people with grievances? What it says is simple -- the state will tolerate the use of force against you by powerful agents in society. And what this expresses is repression.

It is also true that the state itself is often the author of repression against its own citizens for actions that would be entirely legitimate within almost any definition of core individual right: blogging, speaking, attempting to organize migrant poor people. When the state uses its power to arrest and imprison people who speak, write, and organize -- it is profoundly contradicting the core rights that every citizen needs to have.

It should also be said that these legal rights cannot be separated from the idea of democracy. Democracy most fundamentally requires that people be able to advocate for the social policies that they prefer. Social outcomes should be the result of a process that permits all citizens to organize and express their interests and preferences -- that is the basic axiom of democracy. What this democratic value makes impossible is the idea that the state has a superior game plan -- one that cannot brook interference by the citizens -- and that it is legitimate for the state to repress and intimidate the citizens in their efforts to influence the state's choices. A legally, constitutionally entrenched set of individual civil and political rights takes the final authority of deciding the future direction of society out of the hands of the state.

Give Chinese people democratic rights and they can make some real progress on China's social ills -- unsafe working conditions, abuse of peasants, confiscation of homeowners' property, the creation of new environmental disasters. Deprive them of democratic rights, and the power of the state and powerful private interests can create continuing social horrors -- famine, permanent exploitation of workers, environmental catastrophes, development projects that displace millions of people, and so on. The authoritarian state and the the thugocracy of powerful private interests combine to repress the people.

So let's not fall for the post-modern jargon, the equation of liberal democratic values with neo-conservative politics or worse, and let's advocate strongly for a Chinese society that incorporates strong legal protections for individual rights and liberties.