China‘s new Internet restrictions requiring that Internet users provide their real names to register has triggered “heated discussion” amongst the country’s netizens, according to reports.

“Since the party congress, we’ve seen increased measures, not lessened,” Stanford University’s Duncan Clark told VOA China. “So the big question … is, when we get to the spring of next year, when the new leadership takes up the formal positions in the new government, is this the new normal?”

The regime’s tightening of internet controls and mandating real name registration threaten the security and privacy of internet users, Human Rights Watch said today:

On December 28, 2012, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s legislative body, passed the “Decision to Strengthen the Protection of Online Information.” …This decision follows a series of high-profile corruption exposés that were widely discussed online, despite government efforts to control media coverage, as well as increased use of social media to mobilize citizen action. For example, weibo users and bloggers became important watchdogs in revealing corruption and governmental cover-up attempts in the wake of the July 2011 Wenzhou high-speed train crash. In addition, companies that provide virtual private networks (VPNs) that circumvent China’s “Great Firewall” have also reported expanded interference with the use of their services. VPNs can allow users to secure their communications over an internet connection. Businesses, journalists, and ordinary users rely on VPNs to encrypt internet traffic and evade China’s filtering system.

“These new mandates send a chilling message to China’s netizens,” said Cynthia Wong, the group’s senior researcher on the internet and human rights. “The government’s decision is an effort to silence critics and curb anonymity online by further conscripting internet companies to monitor and censor users.”

China Digital Times cites reports that the website of Yanhuang Chunqiu magazine, a liberal publication that published a pro-reform New Year greeting, was shut down on Friday morning:

The magazine’s official account on Sina Weibo, a Twitter style Chinese social media platform, posted at 10.08am, said the site was “suddenly cancelled” around 9am. It said they received text messages and emails from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on December 31, telling them the site had been cancelled….After clicking the site’s URL on Friday, internet users see a notice saying: “the website you are visiting has been shut down for not registering”.

“Several influential Chinese bloggers, activists and even a popular cartoonist had their online microblogging accounts shut down in recent days, belying the hopes of many here that the country’s new Communist Party leaders might begin to relax strict controls over the Internet and free expression,” the Washington Post’s Keith Richburg reports:

Another microblogger who uses satire to tackle sensitive topics is the cartoonist Kuang Biao, who said he publishes most of his work online. …

“I guess my political cartoons (above) made them unhappy,” Kuang said. “I just can’t figure out why they are even afraid of cartoons. They lack confidence and don’t have any sense of humor.” Kuang said his cartoons mainly satirized official policy pronouncements and the well-documented misbehavior of some Communist Party officials.

In light of China’s media crackdown, the U.S. State Department should both address the treatment of American reporters in China and assess its current approach to Chinese reporters in the US, argues The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos:

Why is this happening now? At bottom, it’s a curious confluence of skill, corruption, and record-keeping. Twenty years ago, most foreign correspondents made their bones on exotic front lines, and rarely ventured into the wilds of business reporting until they came home. But these days the ranks of the foreign press include a number of people who came up reading 10-Ks and bond prospectuses and have the instinct to deploy those skills abroad. At the same time, the increasing sophistication of China’s economy has forced the bureaucracy to create a body of records that, if deciphered correctly, can provide a roadmap of relationships that no human source could easily match. And finally, the scale of corruption in China has grown right along with the economy, creating a target-rich environment.

The crackdown also follows a hike in Chinese netizens’ willingness to speak out on Tibetan self-immolations, says Human Rights in China.

China’s efforts to tighten the reigns on the Internet “could chill some of the vibrant discourse on the country’s Twitter-like microblogs,” says one observer.

The crackdown comes shortly after Rendezvous Asia Blogger Mark McDonald reported on the Communist authorities’ efforts to fortify the Great Firewall, “blocking some of the leading services that allow people on the mainland to access forbidden sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.”

See the discussion that ensued, much of it, from China residents who use virtual private networks or VPNs to access the wider Web.

“Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili are better known to history by the pseudonyms under which they led the Bolshevik Revolution—pen names that served them well as agitators under the czars. No wonder the ostensibly communist party still ruling in Beijing is so acutely attuned to the dangers of anonymous scribbling,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s Joseph Sternberg. “Call it Zuckerberg’s Revenge.”

The clampdown has dampened expectations that the new leadership “might be more tolerant of weibo’s burgeoning free speech forum, as they try to cultivate a more popular image for a party buffeted by corruption scandals and tales of power abuses at the highest levels,” says the Post’s Richburg:

“The hope for that kind of openness was less based on any kind of evidence and more based on hope,” said Bill Bishop, a longtime China resident who publishes the Sinocism online newsletter on current political, economic and social news.

Despite the new leaders’ recent remarks about economic reform, Bishop said, “there’s nothing in there about loosening their restrictions on the Internet.”

“I do think you’re going to see some pretty aggressive measures on economic reform,” Bishop said. “You’ve got a party that believes in pursuing economic reform without comparable political reform.”

“Social media has become an incredible tool for public accountability in China, but these new controls certainly undermine that potential,” Wong said. “If the government is serious about fighting rampant corruption, it shouldn’t silence whistleblowers and ordinary citizens, or enlist companies to do it on their behalf. Instead, it should allow people to speak out and to protect their identities online.”

China Digital Times and Human Rights in China are grantees of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.

China’s hardline chief of domestic security has been forced to relinquish control of the country’s police, courts and espionage networks in the wake of the Bo Xilai affair.

The demotion of Zhou Yongkang (right) is “a symptom of the ideological struggle” within the ruling party, say observers:

Senior party members and political analysts, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter, said it was highly unusual for a top leader to hand over their portfolio before the end of their term, especially in the midst of a major power struggle.

One of these people characterised the current political strife and the purge of Mr Bo as “a symptom of the ideological struggle caused by disagreement over which direction the country should go in”.

Some officials within the party, including premier Wen Jiabao, are trying to push through political reforms that would move China towards western-style democracy while hardliners, including Mr Zhou, are opposed to such a move.

While international media has understandably focused on the cases of Wang Lijun, Bo Xilai and Chen Guangcheng, Chinese media are also covering the country’s growing labor militancy, and media attention is “helping to drive the movement,” says China Labour Bulletin:

A glance at CLB’s new interactive strike map shows how strikes have increased over the last six months, and how disputes have expanded across different sectors to encompass a broadening range of issues. In March, for example, a sudden increase in the price of fuel led to an upsurge in strikes by bus and taxi drivers. The following month, the manufacturing sector once again took centre stage as workers protested low pay and plans by their employer to relocate, merge or downsize.

The growing number of labor disputes is also leading analysts to ask: Does rule of law matter in China?

“A cursory look at the two crises that have hit the Chinese government in recent weeks — one at the very top, with the purge of Bo Xilai, and one at the grassroots, with the escape from unlawful house arrest of the blind activist Chen Guangcheng — suggests not,” writes Nicholas Bequelin:                                                                                                            

Both cases are widely seen as emblematic. Bo’s embodies the corruption of an unchecked political elite: Communist Party members are investigated by the party’s own disciplinary committee, and not by the courts. Chen’s case is rife with the predatory behavior of local officials whose conduct is more reminiscent of China’s feudal past than of the “new socialist countryside” Beijing leaders claim to be building.

“Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that the law doesn’t matter in China,” says Bequelin, a senior researcher on Asia at Human Rights Watch:

First, while Chen’s case entails the catalogue of unlawful measures that are used against government critics, it also embodies the rising assertiveness of a citizenry that is increasingly ready to defend its legal rights against official arbitrariness, corruption and injustice.

Land-rights activists, factory workers, forcibly evicted residents, arbitrarily censored netizens, ordinary consumers and environmental activists — citizens in China are increasingly committed to defending their rights. To overcome the control of local courts by local authorities, Chinese citizens are taking their grievances public, making full use of new media. They are increasingly ready to take their demands to the streets, as witnessed by the rapid growth in the number of social protests over environmental issues, labor disputes, land seizures, abuses of power and corruption.

“As a result, the authorities back down more often than people may suspect,” Bequelin notes, as in the cases of Wukan, where local citizens ousted leaders involved in illegal land transactions; the July 2011 Wenzhou train-crash; the Dalian protests in August 2011 over a petrochemical factory’s environmental and safety violations and it is the case “in countless labor disputes when workers sue for compensation or violation of labor laws.”

“Admittedly, such victories come hard,” he concedes, with rights activists suffering police harassment and suppression,.

“But the fact is that the rule of law has become a central demand of the Chinese citizenry, and grievances are increasingly framed in the language of rights. The law matters.”

RTWT

Growing rights awareness and new communications technologies are proving a potent combination for mobilizing, China Labour Bulletin notes:                       

Last week on 8 May, around 1,000 shoe factory workers in Dongguan walked out in protest at management plans to cut their monthly bonus from the usual 500 yuan to just 100 yuan. Management refused to talk so one worker posted their grievances on his micro-blog.

China Labour Bulletin contacted the worker and posted an account of the strike on our microblog. This story was then retweeted more than 50 times within the hour and soon five reporters had gathered outside the factory gate demanding to know what was going on. They were refused entry but the very next day the management, under pressure from local government officials to make the story go away, agreed to increase the workers’ bonus to 300 yuan and the strikers returned to work.

To put these recent developments in perspective, CLB published in late March a research report that shows how demographic shifts combined with economic growth and social change over the last decade have given China’s workers more bargaining power, and how a younger, better educated, more aspirational workforce that is more aware of its legal rights has learnt to use that bargaining power to its advantage. Workers are not only more confident in their ability to organize strikes and protests, they are increasingly willing to sit down with their employer and negotiate a settlement on behalf of their co-workers. Indeed, in some factories, workers have already established an embryonic system of collective bargaining.

A Decade of Change: The Workers’ Movement in China 2000-2010 is available as a downloadable PDF.

China Labour Bulletin is supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.

China’s ruling Communist party faces a strategic dilemma: the regime needs economic reform to maintain the growth that sustains its performance-based legitimacy. But party leaders recognize that changes won’t materialize without political reforms that could ultimately undermine its monopoly on power.

In any event, the status quo is unsustainable.

“The sense of fragility in China right now is almost palpable,” says a leading analyst. “There’s the sense that it has been defying gravity for a long time.”

But old habits die hard.

The country’s Justice Ministry today ordered lawyers to take a loyalty oath to the Communist Party, in an unprecedented move that appears to be aimed at human rights advocates, but which will also undermine prospects for consolidating the rule of law needed to underpin economic reform.

To maintain current growth trends, China must “revive economic reform and start political change,” says Minxin Pei, an analyst at Claremont McKenna College. But the party lacks a consensus on reform strategy, as the inner-party divisions evident in the recent ouster of neo-Maoist Bo Xilai demonstrates.

“The rift is over power, not necessarily over ideology,” Pei tells the Council on Foreign Relations. “From the party’s point of view, they want unity.”

China’s current economic system is not sustainable, according to a recent World Bank report, in the latest indication that the luster of the China model is fading.

“The case for reform is compelling,” the bank’s president, Robert Zoellick, said recently. “China has reached a turning point in its development path.”

But the country’s wealthy elite is not convinced that the ruling party is able to implement the required reforms, judging by recent surveys that large numbers of the rich want to emigrate to the decadent West.

“Right now, there is a feeling of an exhaustion of hope,” said Andrew Nathan, a China specialist at Columbia University.

The ruling party is confronting both top-down and bottom-up challenges that pose a threat to the post-Mao consensus, notes one analyst.

“Post-Mao, China has instead built a meritocratic collective leadership that rules by consensus…. There is even a place, up to a point, for public opinion,” notes the FT’s David Pilling:

The Communist party leadership is highly sensitive to criticism, these days voiced mainly in cyberspace, whether it be related to corruption, pollution, incompetence or inequality. Sometimes it chooses to crush dissent, certainly when it challenges the legitimacy of the party itself. But in other instances – for example, anger over a petrochemical plant in Dalian or a train crash in Wenzhou – it can be surprisingly receptive to public outrage.

But the party is also being challenged by an increasingly vocal and rights-conscious middle class prepared to expose and protest against endemic regime corruption, as in Wukan.

“These are just some of the pressures that the party faces as it tries to negotiate a once-in-a-decade political transition and a once-in-a-generation economic elision from an investment-led to a consumption-led model,” Pilling notes. “Bo’s great crime was to expose the illusion of party unity in the face of such momentous challenges.”

Today’s decision to require lawyers to take a loyalty oath to the ruling party reflects an attempt by the regime to reinforce its authority, but also betrays its realization that it does not command the authority that emanates automatically from moral or political legitimacy.

The oath demands that lawyers “pledge to faithfully fulfill the sacred mission of a legal worker under the socialist system with Chinese characteristics” and to “be loyal to the motherland, loyal to the people, uphold the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist system.”

“It is ridiculous for such a thing to occur in modern society,” said Jiang Tianyong, a rights lawyer detained by state security last year. “It’s unimaginable that any other country would like to ask lawyers to pledge allegiance to a party. Lawyers should respect laws and uphold the rights of their clients,” said Jiang, who advocates for AIDS activists and freedom of worship.

A newly revised Criminal Procedure Law may be “a significant step forward” in extending rule of law “if its provisions are implemented in practice,” writes Stanley Lubman, a specialist on Chinese law and is author of “Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China After Mao,” (Stanford University Press, 1999).

But the law remains subject to politically-driven interference and arbitrariness, he notes, citing human rights researcher Nicholas Bequelin’s observation that government officials use vaguely defined offenses like “endangering state security” or “terrorism” in order “to crackdown on dissidents, human-rights lawyers, civil-society activists and Tibetan and Uighur separatists.”

The new oath requirement is designed to undermine the growing network of activist lawyers, but it also threatens to undermine rule of law.

“I don’t see the legal basis for adding these procedures. On what basis is the ministry of justice doing this?” said Pu Zhiqiang, a Beijing-based lawyer and rights advocate. “If I don’t take the oath, are you not going to give me a license?”

“In my opinion, the biggest destroyer of the rule of law in China is the Communist party,” he said.

The oath demand also suggests a regime unsure of its own legitimacy and the much-vaunted China’s model’s longevity, analysts suggest.

 “The elite, who almost by definition are politically connected, are uneasy and have questions about the system’s sustainability,” says Thomas Fingar, a China specialist at Stanford University who formerly served as chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

China’s imminent implosion? Heard it all before, says China watcher Gideon Rachman:

In 2003, I purchased a much-acclaimed book, Gordon Chang’s, The Coming Collapse of China – which predicted that the Chinese miracle had five years to run, at most. So now, when I read that China’s banks are near collapse, that the countryside is in a ferment of unrest, that the cities are on the brink of environmental disaster and that the middle-classes are in revolt, I am tempted to yawn and turn the page.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao last week urged the party to take the path of political reform, but his leadership colleagues appear paralyzed by the prospect of a scenario recently raised by Tsinghua University sociologist Sun Liping: “During the process of social transition, how can we avoid the emergence of serious social disorder?”

Bo Xilai’s dismissal “has clarified the strategic choices facing the party,” writes Minxin Pei. “One is to stay the course, maintaining one-party rule and trying to sustain economic growth under the state-capitalist model. The other is to revive reform, not just economic reform but also democratization:”

The first path seems increasingly untenable. One reason Bo’s leftist populism had so much appeal was not that ordinary Chinese people were yearning for a return to the dark Maoist era, but that they were fed up with the status quo…… If the party’s new leadership doesn’t alter the country’s present course, such frustrations will continue to grow and create opportunities for ambitious politicians like Bo to exploit in seeking power. The difference is, of course, when such opportunities occur in the future, people like Bo could be leading a radicalized opposition with mass popular followings – a nightmarish scenario the Communist Party should do everything to avoid.

The regime may be facing profound challenges, but not necessarily a terminal crisis.

“I agree that China is a cauldron of turmoil and dissatisfaction,” says Nathan, a National Endowment for Democracy board member. “And I don’t see the current system as forever. But I also don’t see an imminent collapse.”

On the other hand, China’s rise as a growing global power is threatened by its failure to reform, says Pei:

Because if China doesn’t do anything, if it simply coasts along, as the World Bank report has warned, China’s growth is not sustainable. That means the current political system will not be sustainable. There will be no social stability in China either. For China, reviving reform, not just economic, but also political, is its most urgent task.

“China has very difficult political and economic transitions ahead,” notes Rachman, author of Zero-Sum World. But while Beijing can learn from the “encouraging precedents” of South Korea and Taiwan, which “both moved from fairly brutal one-party states to functioning democracies – and from low-cost manufacturing to high-tech consumerism,” it faces distinctive challenges of its own;

The sheer scale of China – and its uniquely traumatic history – will make the country’s political and economic transformation that much harder. In particular, if China were to move towards free elections, it would almost certainly see the rise of separatist movements in Tibet and Xinjiang. Given the depth of Chinese nationalism, it is unlikely that these would be treated with subtlety or sensitivity. As well as struggling to preserve the country’s territorial integrity, a more democratic China would find itself coping with all sorts of barely-suppressed social tensions.

RTWT

Never mind the Arab Spring.

Prospects for democratization are likely to take a cue from the Obama administration and pivot towards Asia, a leading analyst believes.

“If there is going to be a big new lift to global democratic prospects in this decade, the region from which it will emanate is most likely to be East Asia,” Stanford University’s Larry Diamond writes in the new issue of the Journal of Democracy.

And the world’s leading authoritarian power will not remain immune from the democratic contagion, observers suggest.

“The momentum for democratization in China will accelerate in the not-too-distant future,” two leading analysts contend, disputing the consensus that the ruling Communist party confidently presides over a resilient authoritarian regime.

“Behind the political stagnation on the surface, signs abound that a fundamental political transformation is taking place in China,” with recent economic trends “creating a reservoir of forces available for political mobilization,” say Yu Liu, a political scientist at Qinghua University, and Dingding Chen, an assistant professor of government at the University of Macau, writing in the latest issue of The Washington Quarterly.

Over the last year, China has witnessed “an unusually large group of independent citizens” contesting seats in local assemblies; an unprecedented ‘‘netizens’’ campaign in support of ‘barefoot lawyer’ Chen Guangcheng (right); and a wave of vocal anti-government criticism following the July 2011 train crash near Wenzhou.

“Although these are just three pieces of evidence, they represent a rising independent civil society and illustrate that China’s political regime is increasingly being challenged,” they write. Pressure for democratization is also being driven by “four interlinked mega-trends: economic development, cultural change, political leadership trends, and the global environment.”

To sum up, we do not argue that most ordinary Chinese are actively seeking democracy, but do suggest that recent economic trends are politically neutralizing important social classes, creating a reservoir of forces available for political mobilization. We believe that further economic growth in China is a force of democratization, and see rising inequality in China as facilitating rather than obstructing democratization.

The ruling Communist party’s “performance legitimacy” is inherently unstable, they argue, rejecting claims that the regime has successfully co-opted China’s entrepreneurial and aspiring middle classes through a docility-for-stability social compact.

Such a contention “not only underestimates the vulnerability of such a coalition, but also ignores another side of the story: over three decades of reform in China, the CCP has systematically discriminated against local private entrepreneurs in favor of large state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and foreign corporations.”

China’s people are “increasingly dissatisfied with the ‘growth first’ model and are demanding more social justice and equality.”

The pro-democracy stance of leading celebrities and many intellectuals refutes claims of “Chinese exceptionalism,” or inherent cultural obstacles to democratization:

In recent years, a group of liberal opinion leaders has emerged in China, shifting the political views of more and more young and educated people. Han Han, a young writer as well as race-car driver, is the unofficial representative of these opinion leaders. He uses his blog to criticize political censorship and injustice in China, and he is so popular that the blog, with more than 500 million hits by the summer of 2011, enjoys the largest readership in China. Many mainstream celebrities are also becoming increasingly outspoken. This is worrying for the CCP because political liberalism is increasingly associated with glamorous figures, rather than marginalized political exiles or Falun Gong practitioners.

“Of course, cultural change takes time, but more and more netizens are detaching themselves from the authoritarian regime,” the analysts contend.

The emergence of a palpable “democracy discourse” within the ruling Communist party and in the wider civil society is a telling demonstration of the regime’s ideological bankruptcy.

Premier Wen Jiabao is perhaps the most prominent figure to articulate the case for rule of law, social equality, judicial independence, civil rights, and anti-corruption initiatives, but other voices are demanding “faster and deeper” reform, including Yu Keping, deputy director of the Central Committee’s Compilation and Translation Bureau and author of the hugely influential article , ‘‘Democracy is a good thing,” who advocates ‘‘incremental democracy’’ through growing citizen participation in politics.

“Despite such positive trends, one might wonder if all the talk about democracy has any real impact on political development in China,” Yu and Dingding concede. “We say it does, for several reasons:

First, even if the democratic discourse is just speechifying, it can provide a weapon for civil society to mobilize and hold the Party accountable….. Second, there is good reason to believe that some Party members are genuinely interested in promoting democracy in China. This is because they understand that the Party’s legitimacy cannot stem from economic performance alone but must be based upon multiple sources, including political legitimacy. Moreover, they probably understand that the Party will be able to hold on to power or protect its interests if it initiates the political reform and shapes the constitutional design rather than if it is driven out of power by others in a time of crisis.

“What’s equally important, if not more important, than the rhetorical incorporation of democracy into the Party’s discourse is, ironically, the CCP’s inability to come up with a coherent theoretical alternative to liberal democracy,” they note.

The party’s flirtation with Confucianism [and Daoism] and the warmed-up Maoist nostalgia of Chongqing leader Bo Xilai demonstrate the absence of a coherent ideology.

“The current ideological disarray might force some political elites to gradually turn to liberal democracy at some point,” they suggest:

Last but not least, we want to emphasize that the pressure coming from the emerging civil society, which we discussed in the first two sections, will have its impact on elites. The CCP does not live in a vacuum. The rise of a contentious society will increase the cost of repression for China’s authoritarian rulers, and when the cost of repression is too high, as MIT Professor Daron Acemoglu has argued, democratic reform probably becomes a rational choice for the elites to avoid a revolution.

“Although the mega-trends identified in our assessment point to a clear outcome – the democratization of China – we believe that the process is neither linear nor deterministic. Our forecast is only probabilistic, though the probability is high,” they conclude:

The form of democracy which China will ultimately take is uncertain. There is good reason to believe that the U.S. model of democracy will not be accepted by Chinese people for historical, cultural, and social reasons. Policymakers in Washington should be careful not to impose their own values and views on the Chinese, as doing so is likely to cause a domestic backlash within China and could ultimately delay or derail the democratization process. In general, a democratizing China will be gentler, kinder, and more confident and peaceful in domestic and international affairs. This is good news for China and the rest of the world, as a large body of empirical evidence suggests that democratic states rarely, if ever, go to war with one another. It is in the mutual interests of the world and China, therefore, to see China entering the journey of democratization in the next two decades.

RTWT

The Journal of Democracy is an initiative of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.

China’s ruling Communist Party has demanded greater honesty and transparency from public officials in the wake of a train crash in Wenzhou that prompted unprecedented public criticism of government incompetence and censorship. But the government directive itself provoked ridicule and criticism for not even mentioning the July 23 crash on the prestigious high-speed rail network that killed at least 40 people.

“Central government issues directive on greater openness — do you believe it? Do they believe it? I don’t!”, wrote one user of Sina.com’s Weibo site, China’s most popular social media network.

The Beijing consensus may have crashed along with the train, writes the Financial Times’ David Pilling, who observes that outrage has been most pronounced within “the urban middle class that the Communist party is supposed to have co-opted into its modernizing project.”

Many analysts have suggested that China’s model of non-democratic development provides a feasible alternative route to modernity, albeit one based on a precarious performance-based legitimacy. What Francis Fukuyama has plausibly described as “high quality” authoritarianism rests on a social compact in which the growing middle class ceded political and civil liberties in exchange for guaranteed economic progress and security. But that contract has been frayed by growing inflation, rampant official corruption and the latest episode of ruling class mendacity.

“Perhaps not since Tiananmen Square more than 20 years ago has the Communist party looked so naked in the face of public contempt,” writes Pilling:

A middle class revolt is particularly dangerous for the Chinese leadership. It undermines a recent truism of Chinese analysis, sometimes referred to as the Beijing consensus. This contends, among other things, that people don’t worry too much about democracy, freedom of expression and free markets so long as they have a technocratic leadership capable of delivering economic progress.

The Wenzhou crash “sparked a blogging and micro-blogging frenzy amongst Chinese citizens who are angered at the way the accident has been handled by the party,” China Digital Times reports. The disaster demonstrates that China’s authoritarian model must change, CDT notes, citing an opinion piece in The Guardian:

A knowledge economy operating at the frontiers of technology is incompatible with a one-party state.

‘If nobody can be safe, do we want this speed? Can we live in apartments that do not fall down? Can the roads we drive on in our cities not collapse? Can we travel in safe trains? And if there is a major accident can we not be in a hurry to bury the trains? Can we afford the people a basic sense of security?”

When a news anchor on China’s state TV feels he can say that on a broadcaster which has become the world gold standard for censorship and propaganda, you know that something profound is afoot.

The Communist party’s ability to contain simmering social unrest is also being tested in Hangzhou, where a taxi drivers’ strike has prompted “the kind of violence seldom seen in China, outside the ethnically tense regions of Tibet or Xinjang.”

The strikers reportedly returned to work today, official sources claimed, after the authorities agreed to adjust fares. But the dispute raises serious questions about the sustainability of a closed political system which provides no institutional outlet for the articulation and resolution of citizens’ grievances.

“Taxi drivers can’t participate in the drafting of polices relating to them, and can’t protect their rights through the courts or labour unions, which means they have no choice but to go on strike,” says Guo Yushan, a researcher at the Transition Institute, a privately-funded think tank. “China has had 60 taxi strikes since 2004. If the system doesn’t change, the strikes will continue in different cities.”

Some China watchers had predicted a “hot summer” of social unrest fueled by discontent over rising inflation. The taxi drivers’ strike is the latest in a series of disputes that are worrying the ruling Communist authorities who are especially wary of workers taking industrial action independently of the officially-sanctioned All China Federation of Trade Unions.

“We have seen these kinds of disturbance on a regular basis in China for several years now. I think you can possibly say there has been a bit of an upsurge,” according to Geoffrey Crothall of the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin. “There is a lot of pent up anger and frustration among ordinary people – not just migrant workers,” he said.

China Digital Times and the China Labour Bulletin are grantees of the National Endowment for Democracy. Francis Fukuyama is a NED board member.