Fukuyama on China's Localized Human Rights Abuses

I've been busy lately working on linguistics projects and puttering about in my Sprachbundesgarten between bouts of Wikipediatrics, but I did want to blog Francis Fukuyama's latest opinion piece about where most of China's human rights abuses originate: at the local level, out of sight and mostly out of mind of the central government until everything blows up. It's subtitle is Beijing's reach isn't big enough to stop local governments from abusing the rights of ordinary citizens.

Many people assume the problem is that China remains a communist dictatorship and that abuses occur because a strong, centralized state ignores the rights of its citizens. With regard to Tibet and the suppression of the religious movement Falun Gong, this may be right. But the larger problem in today's China arises out of the fact that the central Chinese state is in certain ways too weak to defend the rights of its people.

The vast majority of abuses against the rights of ordinary Chinese citizens -- peasants who have their land taken away without just compensation, workers forced to labor under sweatshop conditions or villagers poisoned by illegal dumping of pollutants -- occur at a level far below that of the government in Beijing.

China's peculiar road toward modernization after 1978 was powered by "township and village enterprises" -- local government bodies given the freedom to establish businesses and enter into the emerging market economy. These entities were enormously successful, and many have become extraordinarily rich and powerful. In cahoots with private developers and companies, it is they that are producing conditions resembling the satanic mills of early industrial England.

The central government, by all accounts, would like to crack down on these local government bodies but is unable to do so. It both lacks the capacity to do this and depends on local governments and the private sector to produce jobs and revenue.

The Chinese Communist Party understands that it is riding a tiger. Each year, there are several thousand violent incidents of social protest, each one contained and suppressed by state authorities, who nevertheless cannot seem to get at the underlying source of the unrest.

The rest of the essay is actually more interesting, inasmuch as it compares similar tensions between central and local authorities in various Western governments at crucial historical transition points.

via A&L Daily