Is a civil society possible? – the WTO-column

(Later in Chinabiz)

In one of the online discussions I’m having in an internet project called Connecting China I had a revealing discussion about China’s developing civil society. “What are you talking about?” asked one of the participants, Amy Gu who recently moved from Shenzhen to study journalism at the Hong Kong University. She has no clue what I was talking about.
It was a fair question. When you have grown up in a society where there is a clear distinction between government and civil society, there is a lot to be seen here in China. But when you have always been in a society where the government has been dominant, from defense to telling the media what citizens should read, it might be hard to imagine what a civil society actually is, and certainly you would have your doubt whether it would work.

At a central level we see a rather strong commitment of the government to change China into a civil society. The government is trying to withdraw from actually running companies and businesses. The planned economy is making way for a market economy. The economy lobby groups are running into the thousands and for the first time in China post-1949 history NGO’s are sometimes really what their name says. Media control has been reduced to some key subjects and the culture of needing permission for any stone that should be moved, is on its return. At least: when we can believe what the central authorities are telling us through their former propaganda tools.
I do believe that the government is – at least verbally – committed in getting this civil society in place. But when you ask it citizens, they tend to be rather doubtful whether it is actually going to work. The culture, the traditions, the resistance of government officials on a lower level that might see their reason to exist and their livelihood under siege. There are very legitimate reasons to believe it might almost be impossible to get a civil society in place very fast.

Even on a central level, the temptations to fall back into the old habits are huge, for example when we recently saw that the banking authorities ordered their banks to issue loans to students. It might be for all the right reasons, but it smelled certainly like the old policies that have cause so many bad loans in the first place. Giving up power does not go easy.
Although I see all those problems, I’m still optimistic about the emergence of a real civil society in the long run. Why? Because there is no alternative. China has been working very hard to abolish remains of the planned economy, but has been less than active in encouraging alternatives to come up. In the past government departments would decide on wages, now it is left to the discretion of the employer, the market conditions or a combination of both. In the end also China needs a system of collective bargaining that represents also the interest of the employees in a fair way.
Lobby groups representing different economic interests are the first very real signs of a civil society emerging, although some still function under the umbrella of some kind of government departments. The situation is not unlike the existence of the so-called ‘collective’ enterprises in the 1990s. While the ownerships structures were often unclear, many of those enterprises smelled and acted like private companies. At the end of the 1990s they were ordered to re-register and suddenly the collective enterprises were gone, while the private enterprises emerged in the statistics as a new economic force.
Behind the scenes a similar change is being prepared, waiting for the official announcement that civil society – with some limitations – will be in place: then only labels have to be changed.

Fons Tuinstra