The Guardian, 19 March 201

Politics

People are getting more and more conscious of their political and social rights. Fifteen years ago, the air quality in Beijing was probably even worse than today, and cases of chengguan [low level law enforcement officers] beating people were probably more serious, but they did not become issues until recent years. Nobody saw good air quality as an entitlement; now people’s ideology has changed.

If you think about recent social conflicts – land disputes and environmental issues – the government tries to use old ways to deal with these: they try to deal with it in an isolated way, to buy off people’s dissent. But if the government doesn’t allow some kind of institutional participation, then no matter how much they compensate those who are losing land, people will feel there are problems behind the scenes.

Whether people can participate in the whole decision-making process – instead of having bargaining power when it comes to implementation – will be the biggest challenge. Ten or even five years ago people at the grassroots cared more about material benefits or short-run issues. But if you look at what’s happening in Wukan [where locals staged a rebellion against officials they accused of stealing their farmland] you see that even peasants are thinking the real solution is to have their own organisations and have genuine village elections. Even grassroots people realise we now need institutional solutions. That’s probably more the case among intellectuals and the middle class. If you watch [the microblogging website] Weibo, you can see so many Chinese people caring about what’s happening in the Taiwanese elections, the Middle East and Russia. It is the issue of democratisation rather than those particular countries or regions that people really care about. The government’s response to such challenges is not as fast as many people hope.

Last year there were county-level People’s Congress elections; on one hand, we saw an unusually large group of people declared themselves “independent participants”, which means they joined the competition without backing from the party and the government, but they were harassed in many ways.

More and more people realise that if there’s economic development it’s not given by the government; it’s their own labour and entrepreneurship. It is not the government that is creating wealth. It’s society. The logic of this “deal” – the assumption behind it – is wearing thin.

The momentum for more freedom of speech is building. It is much harder to kill a dog than a puppy, and civil society is not a puppy any more. The government is playing a very delicate balance between maintaining power and retaining legitimacy. If some kind of change takes place, how things go probably will not be in the government’s control. Look at what happened in the Soviet Union – when you start to engage in reform, even if you are the Communist party, it can get out of your hands. Even if the government has the intention to control change little by little, I don’t think it will be a planned change.

Dr Liu Yu, political scientist at Tsinghua University
Environment

In the past, the Chinese public, government and businesses focused more on the economy and neglected the environment. Because China developed too fast after opening up, problems have accumulated over the past 20 years and more will appear more in the coming years despite the implementation of protection measures.

In the coming decade, environmental problems will affect ordinary people and they deserve our attention: issues such as poor air quality causing lung cancer and heavy-metal pollution resulting in birth deformities.

From Since 2008-2009, incidents of heavy-metal pollution have been frequent. In January, cadmium threatened the drinking-water safety of 1.4 million people in Guangxi province. The minister of environmental protection said earlier this year that China had seen more than 30 major incidents of heavy-metal pollution since 2009.

Supervision should be enhanced; reporting and emergency measures are needed. When accidents happen, enforcement and strict punishment should be implemented.

China has the right attitude to environmental problems, but to solve them it also has to rely on civil society and on introducing mature international practices.

Global warming poses a big challenge and is pushing the country to adopt a model which can ensure development but decrease energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. China is one of the few countries using coal as its primary form of energy. That will not fundamentally change for a fairly long time.

China needs to keep developing to solve the problem of poverty and this will result in increased energy consumption and carbon emissions.

The effects of global warming have been increasing. In the past 50 years, glaciers in north-west China shrank by 21%. By 2050, glaciers in western China are estimated to shrink by about 27%. Some lakes relying on meltwater from glaciers are shrinking, and water shortages in Gansu, Ningxia and other north-western areas are becoming fiercer.

Extreme weather has been widely observed: continuous droughts in the north and frequent floods in the south. China’s agriculture has been affected and its food security threatened. In the coming decade or for even longer, China’s environment will be in a difficult process of recovery.

Jin Jiaman, executive director, Global Environmental Institute
Society

This is the key 10 years. It will be 10 years of changes, but whether the change is little by little or all of a sudden is hard to say. China’s development seems to have proved the point that in a country under a dictatorship the economy seems to develop faster, but the problems that develop along the way seem to be greater.

For example, the wealth gap has not got smaller as the economy develops: it’s grown. Society has not become any more just and equal, but worse. Corruption is more severe. It’s not just the ecological environment that is being polluted but the political environment.When a tycoon is detained, someone will come to the detention house, saying, “If you are willing to sell your 3bn yuan assets for 300m, I can get you out of here.” This is a corruption industry created in the process of fighting corruption.

People are looking at the case of Wang Lijun [the Chongqing police chief suspected of seeking to defect to the US]. It sends the signal that in their bones our senior officials do not loathe western democracy as they say. Deep in their hearts, they don’t trust the government they are working for. The children of high officials get fortunes from their power and migrate to democratic countries, not dictatorships.

As social conflict becomes sharper, maintaining stability becomes more important. The official figures say the cost of public security is more than 600bn yuan – even more than what is spent on the military, according to western media.

At least right now on the mainland, there hasn’t been any political power strong enough to challenge the party. We can see small-scale protests all over China, but all of them have one thing in common: they only fight local officials, not the central level.

As these small protests become more and more numerous, there will be more problems. The only solution is democracy, to make officials careful about what they say and what they do. If there is not a revolution, the party has to make itself democratic to ensure its own survival.

Yu Hua, novelist and author of China in Ten Words
Economy

While some claim that China’s economy will collapse soon, I do not think we will see dramatic changes. As a result of the economic crisis [in 2008], there has been a certain shift from the coastal areas, which rely on the global economy and have seen a lot of social conflict in their centralised urban areas, to central and north-western China. Due to its vast size, China’s ability to resist a crisis is evident, and this shift can also help with the imbalance in regional and overall development. But as industries move, crises concerning land, urbanisation, the environment and resources are being repeated in inland areas.

I do not believe these crises will decline while China’s development model is unchanged. From cases such as the dispute over land at Wukan, and workers’ struggles at Foxconn and Honda, we can see conflict will not weaken because the economy is growing, but will rather intensify in some places as the shift happens.

There were an estimated 180,000 mass protest incidents last year and more than 60% had to do with land disputes, so exploring a flexible land system which can protect farmers’ interests is essential. Chengdu and Chongqing are launching land experiments which give more benefits to farmers.

Meanwhile, the question of whether migrant workers have the right to speak out also needs to be stressed. China’s reform is promoted by the state, that is to say the Communist party … but in political practice the voice of ordinary workers is not included. The question is whether people have their own representative in the public sphere of politics, whether decision-makers go to the grassroots to learn about the needs of the people at the bottom, and whether ordinary people gain access to participation.

Conditions beneficial to private-owned economy should be encouraged and cultivated. The operation of state-owned companies should provide more social dividends, but this does not equate to large-scale privatisation of state-owned enterprises. Some state-owned enterprises have monopoly problems, but most gain growth through market competitiveness rather than monopoly. Monopoly exists in various forms of ownership.

What needs to be considered are the principles of fair competition, market mechanisms, supervision and control, and encouragement of other ownership, to make SOEs more democratic, transparent and standardised.

Wang Hui, professor at Tsinghua University and author of The End of the Revolution

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/18/china-challenges-next-generation?newsfeed=true