In late September, two trains on Line 10 collided. The crash left at least than 271 people injured, about 20 critically. Fortunately, as yet, no one is reported as having died. I’ve long since stopped using Line 10 at all, since having moved to a different district of the city, and yet the implications – and tacit fear – hit me all the same. I could well have been riding that train… and further, who’s to say the trains I do ride might not be at risk of a similar or worse accident? More than anything, though, I simply shake my head and sigh as this latest near-tragic chapter of China’s breakneck modernization unfolds. And many Chinese, much like me, see this as a horrifying – but unsurprising – development… the cost of growth, perhaps.
This is hardly, after all, a singular occurrence. In some ways – too many ways - it rings of “déjà vu all over again.” Just two months ago – in an incident that again hit far too close to home for my comfort – a two high-speed trains on the Shanghai-Wenzhou railway collided amid a thunderstorm, injuring hundreds and killing an official “40” people (though there is widespread belief that the real fatality count will never be released). This occurred less than a week before my wife and child were planning to take that very train line down to her hometown, with me following a few days later. They ended up taking a plane, while I gulped and boarded the train by myself… a thankfully completely uneventful trip to and from.
Still, that’s pretty small comfort. I arrived in China in the immediate aftermath of the infamous melamine-milk scandal of 2008, read about the near-completed apartment complex which collapsed on a man due to shoddy construction materials, watched on the news about another apartment complex going up in flames due to – you guessed it – shoddy, unlicensed renovations, read about bridges and half-finished freeways collapsing because of… well, you get the picture. Most recently (save for the Line 10 accident) I read the sickening reports of a “crackdown” on so-called “gutter oil.” This is used cooking oil fished from gutters, sewers, drains, et al, illegally “processed” to “clean” it, and then sold to restaurants at rock-bottom prices (gee, wonder why). It’s estimated that perhaps one in ten businesses have used or are using gutter oil in some capacity. Yum.
My point is that cutting corners in ways that can lead to tragedy, sickness, and death is not just some one-off for China – it’s business as usual; a product of both corrupt business practices, and a corrupt bureaucracy of governance… but more than anything widespread societal acceptance that “this is normal.” It is simply understood that these sorts of things are the cost of advancement, of modernization. Of course, there is public backlash whenever anything goes wrong. The guilty (or perceived guilty) parties are paraded forth to deliver Jerry Falwell-esque “I have sinned” repentance speeches, and then “justice” is doled out. Be it merely losing their job or prison, or execution at a speed that would make even a Texan’s head spin, the case is closed and everyone else keeps right on fishing for gutter oil.
Why is this? Why is there no discernable shift in attitudes when these things crop up? I’ve already mentioned the cultural shrug-off of it being “the cost of progress,” but I think it’s more than that. In part, I’d say it has to do with the opaque implacability of the CCP – at virtually every level. Be it the local police force, or the People’s Congress, there is no Chinese C-SPAN (or Daily Show to help parse it) monitoring and recording what happens (or doesn’t happen) in those glorious and harmonious halls. The populace at large simply does not know, and has no way of knowing what their government is doing… and consequentially has long ago given up caring. This is completely by design.
The government of the PRC seems to have found a winning combination – the holy grail of a techno-auto-bureaucratic regime. The recipe for one-party success has deceptively few steps, but appears to be surprisingly difficult to actually balance (see: Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, et al).
Step 1) Grow the economy, always. People without jobs are people planning insurrection. As long as most of the people feel their lives are better this year than last year, and their children are doing better than their parents, they will not want to rock that boat. Under no circumstances should the economy be allowed to contract. In the event of a global financial meltdown, which would shutter huge swaths of your export and manufacturing-driven economy, force the banks to give huge loans to keep those industries afloat. Oh, that leads me to…
Step 2) Control the finances. The banks are state-owned, or at the very least a joint-venture with the govt. When Beijing says start shelling out the bucks, they don’t demure and whine about profit margins… they salute and say “How much, sir?” This works even better if…
Step 2.5) Don’t block the media, be the media. At first glance – and to many Chinese, their only view ever – China doesn’t censor. They’ve got news, they report bad things that happen, conduct interviews, and there are multiple news channels and internet outlets with different reports. There are newspapers that report more conservatively than others, and some that report things at the borders of tolerability. They’ve even got a Facebook clone (Renren) and a Twitter clone (Weibo). And they’re all owned, operated, and policed by – you guessed it – the gub’ment.
Step 3) What You Can’t Control, Remove. – The title of the previous step is misleading… China censors… big time. There is an entire massive industry surrounding the manipulation and denial of information. From the vast and seemingly-random swaths of the internet blockaded by the Great Firewall, to web forum/blog “Harmonizers” empowered to moderate, change, or straight up delete posts deemed “unharmonious” (read: potentially anti-Beijing/Party), to the semi-infamous “Fifty-Cent Party” which has nothing to do with promoting the thug life of Curtis James Jackson III, and everything to do with acting as a paid army of commentators who’s job it is to steer online discussion into government-friendly territory, and are paid by the post. You can even find their usually ham-fisted attempts to do the same in English any time an article relating to China appears on Time or CNN. Fortunately they’re pretty easy to spot as their arguments consist overwhelmingly of misspelled hyper-patriotic Chinglish to the tune of “y u westrenrs no like harmonious China? Leave glorious PRC alone evil white guizi!”
Back when the so-called Arab Spring was just gaining steam in Tunisia and Egypt, and when Ghadaffi was still sporting ridiculous floral print dresses in Libya, some Chinese netizens started calling for a similar protest movement in China, dubbing it a “Jasmine Revolution.” They called for large-scale gatherings in cities all over the country, in public places a la Tahrir Square. Naturally the CPC took a measured, appropriate response of A) deleting all mention of the protests, B) arresting anyone who showed up to the designated protest area… even though it was a KFC (and Chinese people love KFC), and C) completely blocking the term “jasmine” from the internet. That’s right – in a country where jasmine is a popular tea, a pretty flower, and the English name of every fifth girl – they eradicated the word based on the postings of about a half-dozen dissidents.
And finally, Step 4) Turn official corruption into a game of Russian roulette – Official corruption is a redundancy in the PRC. Forget what you think you know about Rod Blagojevich or Bernie Madoff… they’re small fries, amateurs. The entire Chinese economic machine is oiled with the grease of back-room dealings, black market trade, mafia money, and cutting every conceivable corner while paying the official in charge of oversight to take a 4-month bathroom break. As I mentioned before, it’s long past the point of a running joke… it’s just too blasé to be funny or interesting to most people anymore. It is the “take my wife…please!” of China. So in a system powered entirely by the unholy combination of Ayn Rand’s wet dream and The Godfather Pts. 1 & 2 (seriously, screw part 3), how can the government maintain the façade of accountability and, y’know, not being essentially a national-scale Triad organization… without grinding their economy to a screeching halt (remember Step 1, after all)?
Simple! Just turn the act of being a government official, tycoon, or wealthy person in general into a big lottery: everyone gets to make as much free black-market money as they can, become as corrupt and unaccountable as possible… and when something goes wrong, the guy who pulls the short straw gets shot and his family stripped of everything it every owned. In this instance, “pulling the short straw” means not having enough connections and strings to pull to buck the blame onto someone else, or crossing someone more important than you. And instead of being fitted for a pair of concrete shoes, or a “leave the gun, take the cannoli” drive out to the countryside, the poor Luca Brasi in question is paraded through the legal system as an embodiment of “justice” and “anticorruption” before being taken behind a chemical shed and shot. Oh, and then his family is sent a bill for the bullet. Seriously.
A good friend of mine and I recently got together at one of the only places in Shanghai that brews anything other that Budweiser-clone pilsner, somewhere between the second and fourth pitcher of Imperial Stout our conversation turned to this very topic. He’s Chinese and studied law in college in hopes of becoming a policeman, and worked in a government office for a while before deciding that wasn’t his thing. His girlfriend is an intern at a large Shanghai legal firm. Suffice it to say, what he has to say on the topic is something worth taking with more than a grain of salt. I’m paraphrasing, but in essence he said the majority of legal work, deals, and trials have almost nothing to do with case law, precedent, or evidence… but on who you know, and your (the lawyer/firm’s) relationship with the judge presiding. Though he and his girlfriend have enough firsthand knowledge to make a pretty convincing case by themselves, he went further and told me this wasn’t just the de facto situation, but what he was actually taught in school. I have to imagine the curriculum looked something like:
Chinese Law 101: It Isn’t What You Know, It’s Who You Know
Legal Ethics 215: LOL… C’mon, Seriously Now…
Trial Law 347: How Schmoozing the Judge Can Get You Acquittals/Convictions
Trial Law 401: Evidence Suppression and You
Now this is the part where I’m supposed to have some sort of grandiose solution to this list of issues: A Grand Unified Theory of Fixology. Well, I don’t… no one does. That is also by design. I’m an outsider looking in, simply blinking rapidly and marveling at the sheer enormity of the system in place and – for better and for worse – its own complex system for self-preservation. It’s a fascinating organism, the PRC: a society and government body based on the bones of a Confucian/Imperial mix of meritocracy and patronage, the organs of a Soviet/Maoist-style autocracy, and the muscles of Den Xiaoping’s “socialist market economy,” and all that under the thin, transparent skin of a “Republic.” While the rest of the Soviet bloc have long since crumbled to dust, the PRC keeps chugging along, using its own peculiar ability to adapt with the times to remain relevant and in power. And me? I’m just, for the time being, along for the ride, enjoying the benefits of being somewhere between a panda and a space alien in terms of coolness, and making sure to only buy my kid formula that’s been imported from the West. No melamine in my son’s diet, thanks.
(CS) TAW Out.
