thinking informs the behavior of the generation that came of age during the Cultural Revolution even to this day.
An enduring legacy of Mao’s Cultural Revolution was the disappearance of virtually all of the more stylized forms of etiquette that had distinguished the Chinese for millennia. This was compounded by the new market-orientated society, where survival and achievement became more important than ritualized etiquette. It was to be several decades before the importance of good manners was to become a matter of national concern.
Opting for the Capitalist Road!
The Red Guard reign of terror and destruction in China did not end until Mao died in 1976. Mao was followed in power by Deng Xiaoping, an old revolutionary cohort who had been removed from his position in the government and exiled to the countryside after making known his disillusionment with Mao’s ideas and methods.
Recalled to Beijing by other members of the politburo who had also become disillusioned, Deng was soon to become famous by declaring, “To get rich is glorious!” It is said that an independent-minded daughter of a high-level general made this comment first; Deng apparently just adopted it.
Deng’s epochal new capitalistic ideal was also the result of outside inspiration. He adopted it after a visit to the coastal city of Shenzhen (Shen-jen), where Deng saw that entrepreneurs from nearby Hong Kong had transformed the area into a dynamic manufacturing and shopping center far beyond anything else in China. Beginning in 1978 Deng initiated reforms that were to set the country on the road to capitalistic wealth and power.
The initial benefactors of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms were agricultural workers, because the farmers could now bring their crops directly to the market and keep the money they had earned. Another group which benefitted greatly from the reforms were party cadres. With the decentralization of government control over the economy, they had plenty of opportunities to become wealthy by lining their own pockets through corruption and graft. However, reforms occurred much more slowly in the commercial and industrial sectors, to the detriment of city-dwellers and people with university degrees. At the same time, even though society was becoming more open and people had many more opportunities and choices than ever before, the government itself was not keeping pace with social and economic reforms.
This all reached a breaking point, resulting in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. While the student protestors wanted to end government corruption and to speed up government reforms, one key factor underlying their discontent was a lack of economic opportunities for themselves.
After the protests were put down in June, 1989, the Chinese government gradually shifted its policies from agricultural reform to privatization, with many government factories and businesses being spun off into private companies which were completely responsible for their own bottom line, even though they were partly or wholly government owned. These state owned enterprises (SOEs) were not bound by the old rules, and could hire or fire whomever they wanted.
With the growth of SOEs, many Chinese people began to groan that “the iron rice bowl was now broken”—that the promise of full employment and a government salary until the day they died was no longer going to be kept. This was only partly true, as the government made great efforts to insure that these SOEs stayed afloat through easy bank loans and favorable treatment. However, with privatization and the loosening of economic restrictions, the private sector experienced rapid growth. This growth intensified after China was admitted into the WTO in 2001.
With this economic growth, people flooded into the big cities looking for high-paying jobs, something the national government has encouraged. In the year 2000, only 36% of the people of China lived in cities, but by 2014 this figure was 53.7%, and the Chinese government plans on raising it to 60% by 2020. Thus, within less than a generation, China has turned from being a largely rural, agrarian society to an urban, industrialized nation, with white-collar wages approaching those found in developed countries. Indeed, in 2011, China surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy.
Not everyone has shared in this prosperity, however. Rural areas have become an economic backwater as farming income has declined, and in many cities—especially Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Beijing—new arrivals have often found themselves relegated to low-paying jobs, and barred from receiving public benefits because they cannot get a residence certificate, a hukou (hoo-koh).
With economic reforms there has come in increased interest in the rule of law and greater fairness and openness in how the law was applied. This has been especially true in cities such as Shanghai, which effectively have become laboratories to test out policy initiatives before they are rolled out nationwide. While there are sometimes unexpected anomalies in the way the law and various government rules and regulations are understood and enforced in a city like Shanghai, in daily life the legal system there is in many ways just as transparent and above board as in many developed countries. This is certainly not true throughout China, however, and there is still a great disparity between how the law is administered in the big metropolises, and how it is administered in rural villages and small cities.
This emphasis on rule of law has not extended to the decision-making apparatuses of the central and local governments. If anything, the government is less open, less transparent, and more restrictive of press and individual freedom now than at any time since 1989.
The pressing problem for the Communist Party has been how to maintain control over the country in the face of economic reform and openness. The answer was to take steps to strengthen its control over the government and over the Chinese culture and media, and to increase party membership. In 1989, the party had 47 million members. However, by 2015, the party membership had risen to 87.8 million members—an 86% increase, even though the population had only grown by 21%. Now, instead of complaining about corruption, many of the educated elite could take part in it and share the wealth.
Things came to a head in 2012, with the Bo Xilai incident. Bo Xilai was the party secretary for Chongqing in southwestern China, but he had aspirations to become leader of the country. As noted by Carl Minzner of Fordham Law School,
Breaking with long-accepted political norms that emphasized low-key public personas for up-and-coming cadres, [Bo Xilai] aggressively cultivated a charismatic populist image during his tenure from 2007 to 2012. His signature tactics included mass rallies, a revival of Maoist “red” culture, and an intense campaign against “organized crime” that swept up criminal suspects, legitimate businessfolk, and their lawyers alike.
However, the world came apart for Bo when his chief of police fled to the US consulate in Chengdu to escape retribution for investigating Bo’s wife regarding the murder of a British businessman. The chief of police carried with him an extensive dossier on Bo’s activities, and both the chief of police and the dossier fell into the hands of the central government in Beijing. While things become murky at this point, if the stories are to be believed, Bo conspired with the head of state security, Zhou Yongkang, to wiretap the top leaders in the central government in view of gaining leverage to become elevated to the top spot in the government, and possibly even mounting a coup d’état.
Now with Bo’s wife, the chief of police, Bo Xilai, and Zhou Yongkang safely in prison, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has effectively adopted many of the same tactics that Bo Xilai used in Chongqing, but on a national scale. Xi Jinping has amassed more personal power within the Chinese government than any man since Deng Xiaoping, and he is now building a personality cult around himself. Further, the government is promoting Maoism on a scale that has not been seen in a generation, as Xi Jinping seeks to center all of Chinese society around the Communist Party. In this regard, there is a government push to insist that all private companies within China should have Communist Party cells operating within them (as this is not yet a law, it appears that foreign companies may be exempt).
Oddly, Confucianism is now being emphasized by the government, as it
