Internews, the NGO I work with in Beijing, held a conference on media ethics at the Chinese Youth University for Politics this weekend. I was surprised to see panel discussions turn into the kind of lively debates that took place at the last month’s China Bloggers Conference (see a roundup and liveblog). Audience members - mostly journalists, editors and students from Shandong and Beijing - spoke about the right to broadcast information, freedom of speech and the like. They had firm opinions, they asked what was in their society’s present and future interest, and they seemed to take the government’s rhetoric and laws seriously.
Maybe we should do the same. Too often foreign observers get misled or turned off by official rhetoric and stuck in dual thinking (authoritarianism vs. democracy), concluding that there’s nothing to be said - or done - because there’s no evidence of change in China’s government. Take Jasper Becker: in a talk just before the 17th Party Congress last month, he made the usual remarks about how decisions are made in advance in closed smoke-filled rooms in some island resort; said of an optimistic op-ed that foreigners can write whatever they like, since no Party member will come out and say they’re wrong; and laughed politely with the audience when a young Chinese man educated in the US asked which year China would become a democracy. Of course Party Congresses are scripted and staged, and of course foreigners and Chinese people alike can be naïve. But journalists at our training this weekend and bloggers at last month’s conference are thinking as seriously about China’s governance and eventual political liberalization as I am sure Chinese leaders have. Many of them have taken action too, e.g. by suing governments or Internet service providers, sometimes successfully. The rest of us could be more perceptive and reassess a bit more thoroughly different political scenarios for China’s future.
An exception among foreign observers is Professor Scalapino, founder and first chairman of the American National Committee on US-China relations, who was interviewed last week on CCTV9 (China’s international state TV channel). He blinked neither at his interviewer’s repeated prefaces about “the cynical Western media” nor at a request for a one-word prediction on eventual confrontation between Washington and Beijing. Instead he explained that President Hu wants to preserve political stability while opening up to public interventions in governance - which of course doesn’t mean democracy (Hu used the word 60 times, but my understanding is that he referred mainly to inner-Party democracy). But it confirms what Scalapino wrote in 1998:
“communication at the nonofficial level of conferences, educational exchanges, and business meetings is more open than ever. In these forums, Chinese citizens and foreigners sometimes frankly exchange views on a wide range of subjects.”
I think China’s leaders and intellectuals are ambivalent about democratization and want to test public opinion. Because a functioning civil society - interested not just in political representation but in public policies - is no more likely to emerge spontaneously than markets were when capitalism replaced communism in many parts of the world, there is lots of work to do at the bottom to prepare for opening up from the top. Luckily, that work is well under way at least among some of China’s grassroots and professional media.
