Chinese origin: 对中国最大的威胁不是社会动荡而是社会溃败
English edition: The biggest threat to China is not social clash but social collapse - part 1
Translated by: Yee
1. Are we worrying about the wrong problems? Nowadays people are all concerning about social conflicts, social clash and group events. The rationale behind those concerns is the worry that social unrest is going to happen. But in fact, the most serious threat to China society may not be social unrest, but social collapse.
2. Social unrest means serious social conflicts will threat the basic framework of a regime and political system, while social collapse means the putrescence of a society's cell and disability of its function. Take human body for instance, 'unrest' is like a healthy body being wounded, while 'collapse' is the body or the cell got serious problems. The concepts of Mr. Fei Xiaotong's "social erosion" and Huntington's "Political decay" could improve our understanding on this phenomenon, though these two concepts are not exactly the same as "social collapse", but the latter will be closer.
3. The opposite side of social clash is social stability, the opposite of social collapse. These two are commonly connected, but need to be distinguished. Now the problem is the misjudgment of the former usually becomes the barriers for curing the latter. It is like a cancer patient who need a surgery, but the doctor misjudged he has serious heart disease that is not able to do a surgery. But actually this person may not have heart disease, even have but very slight. However, the misjudgment of the former absolutely will alter the action to the latter. In real world, some necessary reformations against social collapse are suspended due to the worry that they may threat the stability of the society, which make things worse.
4. In the recent articles I have emphasized again and again that currently there are many social conflicts, some may even be intensified, but the possibility of large scale social unrest in China is low. About this saying, I already wrote related articles 10 years ago. There are also two interviews on the newspaper South Weekend in the beginning of last year where i emphasized this point of view. In the past decades, because the unstable factors and the possibility of occurrence of crisis are overestimated, we formed a thinking orientation that stability is the top priority. Under this thinking orientation, stability seems to be an ultimate negative factor, everything should make way for stability. It results in that many things that should be done cannot be done. In reality, in a year of 356 days, there will always be situations any time; disasters (big or small) are unavoidable to a nation with 1.3 billion people. If they purposely look for unstable factors, of course they will get some. Besides, the runaway powers will continually create "group events". The key is how they look at those problems. How many countries are purposely looking for unstable factors like us? Handful. But only we have the organization that can make everything "stable".
5. In recent years, the sign of social collapse has been appearing. The most vital one is the runaway of powers. In the process of 30 years reform, though the base framework of market economics has been built up, the (political) powers are still the center of our society. Hence, the social collapse will firstly appear in the runaway powers, corruption is just the outside appearance. The runaway power here means the powers are unable to be controlled neither by outsiders or insiders (central government?). In the past, thought there is a lacking of limitation from outside, but it's relatively effective from inside; the base of authority is being weakened, as far as few years ago there was saying that government orders can't pass through Zhong'nan'hai. The regional powers an departmental powers is becoming something that have no restricts from senior or supervision from citizens, in the mean time there are no other powers to balance with them, this indicates the fragment of national powers; Government officers are not to work responsibly, but will satisfy the political system's interest for a rise. Under this background, corruption is uncontrollable and ungovernable.
6. The collapse of society has extended to every area of society life: "the hidden rules" are popular in the society, and even become the basic attitude of dealing with affairs. Mr. Wu Si has a good analysis on this: the bottom line of a society is lost, moral bankrupt; the strongly interest groups already become unbridled, the Sicilian lifestyle trend comes out; the unbridled interest groups has make serious erode the justice of society, the losing of professional ethics is a widely existing phenomena; the whole society’s information system is highly distorted, the falsification of statistic data represents a systematically distortion on information. There is a vivid saying,”Village lies to country, country lies to county, so on an so forth until they lies to the state council.” which may be a more reliable fact compare to the official statistic data.
7. Social recognition and social centripetal force are fading rapidly. The fire accident happened to CCTV in January caused a loss of billions of RMB. However, netizens are gloating over the fire. No sadness, no heart broken feeling. What the gloat reveals is an unspeakable happiness. Somebody says, this indicates how cold people are; somebody says, there is no hope left for our nation; somebody asks, who don’t those gloating people think that a part of the burnt billion RMB belongs to them(after all CCTV is a state-owned asset)? But somebody argue that even if the money was well kept, it will be eaten by the officers in the end. The truth behind this discussion is, a mental estrangement, that is, those “things” are “theirs”, not “ours”. The mental estrangement is reflection of structure estrangement.
8. The society is losing the ability to think for the long run. The interest group formed under Crony capitalism only focus on the short run benefits, they don’t have the responsibility that ancient emperors are to their coming generations, nor the transcendent spirit that noble has. In our society, there is a trend, which is exaggeration on short term problems together with numbness on long term. On the resources and environment problem they behaved like a lousy gambler, trying their best not to amend the systematic problems as long as it’s beneficial to them. For government officers, the powers they owned and allocation of interest means everything to them, so they don’t have much time to really do “things”.
(to be continued)
