Period 3, 3/10/09

What’s the number one direct agent of socialization? China’s gonna be ((?)). The Communist party is a socializer, the family, the education system. Over history the communist party will kind of try to instill a highly moralistic centralized culture, but in recent years, as we’ve noted, corruption seems to have over taken the system on many levels. Back in ancient China the family, not the individual, is the basic unit of Chinese society. And since about 1949 family policy could be divided into three phases. Early 1950s freedom of marriage, freedom of divorce and the equality of the sexes was recognized. While the local power of the old families over local affairs was being replaced by authority in the communist party, so this is soon after the revolution. From the mid 50s into the 1980s family power declined and since 1980 the family has gained much of its former status. At the same time, since 1980 a new marriage law has furthered liberalized divorce, although obtaining a divorce remains difficult. The one child per family population growth control policy has effected families also. Under the current one child per family policy, city residents are limited to one child while rural residents may have two. In addition, parents who themselves are only children and members of that same minority are granted exceptions. There’s a section on minorities in your textbook. They have a lot of vigorous (something).
Interesting to China watchers, Chinese government announced in January 2007 that fines for violating this one child per family policy may actually be reduced. And it seemed to show some government concern over public opinion and the growing gap between rich and poor. And then in January 2008 it was announced the 500 people in one province had been expelled from the communist party for violating the policy, which I think tells us that the Chinese leadership isn’t quite clear on what the policy should be and how it should function. One of the other things that is happening in China is that more Communist party members, more celebrities, more well off people, are violating the policy, which then undermines social equality and embarrasses the communist purists. They have some problems enforcing the program.
By in large the education policy in China had been a tremendous success. In the post-Mao period, education policy emphasized qualitative improvement rather than simply expansion of education opportunities. And the shift in the academic environment was a result of the communist party’s emphasis on modernization. They recognized, and they said before that these are pretty pragmatic people, that in order for China to make progress in science and technology, their universities have to be expanded. And experts had to be encouraged and restructured. The Chinese didn’t hesitate to send students overseas to foreign universities while their own universities were improving.
In their communications, the mass media in China is controlled by the Communist Party. The People’s Daily is the newspaper of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and has an authoritative voice. There is heavy editorial oversight of the media content by the party and there is no private mass media in China. There is private local media, but with smaller audiences. Criticism of negative phenomenon and even of leadership failings is allowed in the government press, but there cannot be general criticism of the leadership and their really can’t be opposition to the current party. So the language of the Chinese read often slogan-bound. And you’ve seen a lot of slogans, often ideological and sometimes kinda obscure and hard to understand. The media is designed to persuade the people to carry out communist party policy.
And finally we get some indirect socialization through individual experiences and that can become a major socialization factor in a country undergoing as much rapid social change as China is(did?). We look at the political culture and the People’s Republic of China rose from it’s revolutionary era dominated by three themes.
One was nationalism. One was a national unification under a national authority, and if you remember at the revolution, part of the revolution warlords had been local strongman and the central government was not very strong, and so a communist theme. And the third theme was social and economic reform. We would call China and authoritarian political system. The regimes legitimacy has been threatened by events like the cultural revolution, Tiananmen square massacre, challenged by the Fao Lu Gong, but it seems to have survived. China has a mixed economic system. Part government owned businesses. In China government over the past decade or so has become less intrusive, still no such thing as a loyal opposition political party, however China does have an ethnic cleavage. China’s ethnic population is primarily Hahn((??)). Hahn Chinese form China’s basic identity they were the majority. Minority groups compose only about 8% of china’s population, but as we saw in Russia, the minorities live in China in autonomous areas (like Tibet) and the autonomous areas were told by the minority percent of populations, have 60% of China’s territory and have a long history of resistance to the Chinese government. There are 55 officially recognized minority groups. Generally the central government’s policy has been to encourage economics development and to suppress expression of dissent in these minority groups. There is also a growing urban-rural cleavage that reflects economic difference as well as social lifestyle differences and the many episodes of rural unrest makes this cleavage pretty obvious.
If we look at how average citizens participate. Chinese Communist party decides what people should do and tries to turn them out to meet the party’s goals. It used to be that the government could mobilize political participation, get huge crowds to turn out, fill stadiums with people, more difficult for them to do that these days, but there are still basically three ways for the average citizen to participate.
1. Vote in local elections. That is, elections the village, distract, or county level communist party congresses and turnout in local elections usually exceeds 90%.
2. Get involved in the government’s occasional mass campaigns, which do get people involved, to and extent, in policy implementation, and allows influence on local decisions or local decision makers.
3. Person to become actively involved in local affairs, below the level of local government, in being a local activist and being recognized.
We look at the elites. When China was very tightly communist, top to bottom, left to right, we spoke of three political roles, one of those being an activist, a cadre, and a party member. Those three layers or levels had dominated the staffing of the Chinese political system, historically. And in 2001 a fourth role for the elites was added when communist party membership opened up to capitalists, the businessmen and business owners. Activists by definition as average citizens, they do not hold full time, official positions in government. They, on their own, acquire interests in gov’t take some initiative and may even gain some responsibility in public affairs. So being an activist is the first step to becoming a political elite and most people that go on to become cadres or party members are drawn from the activists. Cadres are those who hold a leadership position in a government organization and it would generally be their full-time job. State cadres, that is, full time employees who staff state, party, and mass organization hierarchy, above the primaries above the local levels and who receive their salaries from the government. State cadres, appointed from within the bureaucracy through the personnel section of the government and the communist party. There is a tension in the Chinese government at this cadre level between people who are mostly politicians moving up and those who have professional or technical skills and aren’t overwhelmingly interest in politics, you have a clash there. Admission to the communist party is the decisive act to becoming a political elite in China. Party membership provides entrance into the political careers with opportunities for advancement, for power, for privileges. Higher level govt’ units and some types of profession s have mostly party members. A difficult task for Chinese Communist Party has been to identify and advance or promote technically qualified people who can lead China’s modernization, but who are also politically reliable. And the communist party in china to it’s discomfort has had to place less emphasis on political conformity in order to place more emphasis on productivity and this is particularly true during Deng’s time, to post-Mao period. Today, technically competent, politically reliable people are still needed to run the government owned businesses as well as to advice the communist party and the government leadership, But as the number of private businesses in creases and as a private sector becomes a larger and larger part of the economy business men are less likely to be interested in government positions and to be more interested in making money. To keep from becoming increasingly disconnected from the business elites Chinese Communist membership has made a ((something, 21:00)) in 2001. If we look at getting as far on the political agenda and this is normally where we would take up interest groups we go back to Mao’s day, Mao at least theoretically got things placed on the political agenda in accordance with his idea of the mass line. That is, taking the ideas of the people and concentrating them, and giving them back to the people and explaining the idea until the masses agree and accept the idea as their own/. The mass line then, was a principle that party leadership depends on constant contact with the party and the public. ((Discussion on the AP and if it will discuss the mass line. He doesn’t think so, but wants you to know in case. Pay attention to the test and give him feedback.)) Today organized interest groups while there, are not permitted to influence the political process unless they are under the Communist Party state authority. The Communist Party State tries to preempt the formation of groups by forming mass organizations in which people may express their opinions within fairly strict limits. These mass organizations \often form around occupations or social categories for example, most factory workers belong to the All China Federation of Trade Unions which is an official state organization and it alone has the power to collectively bargain for wages and benefits. So in China, workers are not allowed to form independent unions. Women’s interest are represented in the All China Women’s Federation. And concerns of young people are supposedly represented in the Communist Youth League. In urban areas the communist party tries to maintain social control through what are called tanwei. These are social units from the party, usually based on a person’s place of work. And people come to depend on their tanwai for jobs, for income, for promotion, as well as for medical care and housing, day care centers, recreational facilities. Still in the last 15 years, China has gone from having virtually no interest groups of any kind to more thasn 300,000 non-government organizations. But in China their impact on policy making is weak. These organizations, these non-government organizations, the tanwei, and the state’s relationships reflect state corporatism. Most organizations are created are at least approved by the state and many have government officials as their leaders. The state only allows one organization for any one profession or activity making it easier for the government to monitor and control them. In authoritarian society, like China individual contacts and patron-client networks take on a (something) China recruits it’s leaders through the nomenclature system. However Chinese leaders communicate with one another through a patron-client network that they call a guanzi. These linkages that are similar to the good-old-boy networks that we pointed out in the UK have the underscored importance of career ties between individuals as they rise through the political system.
Events like the student protest in Tiananmen Square, the demonstrations by the Fao Lu Gong, and recent protests against the governments one-dog policy of November 2006. We have talked about the one dog policy. November 2006 government decided that there were too many stray dogs running the streets and families could only have one dog. And actually they sent out the army into the street and clubbed stray dogs to death. And not only strays. People walking their dogs had them taken and clubbed to death right in front of them. ((Noise)) The protest at Tiananmen square, the Fao Lu Gong, protests against this one=dog policy and the way the government went about implementing it are another way of getting interests on the political agenda. Only thing is, they’re not particularly well received by the government. The internet also frustrates govt control. While the government often tries to maintain a blackout on bad news barring almost all newspapers and broadcasters from reporting and ordering major internet sites to censor the news the proliferation of small websites keeps the news alive even as the government tries to close them down, if the government notices a lot of traffic going to a specific site. The govt has laws banning use from internet cafes, and has implemented control programs that kick teens off network games, have to file out in addition china has internet addiction clinics, which teens are sent if they become addicted to the internet. These are becoming effective and combining the use of cell phones and the internet. Watch the frustration of the authority. In the summer of 2007 environmental activists had hundreds of thousands of text messages ricocheting around cell phones in a particular cite, warning of government plans to build a giant chemical factory which they claim would cause leukemia deform babies. Messages generated a lot of public anger and forced a halt in construction pending further environmental impact studies by the government th9is delay in 2007 marked a rare instance in China of public opinion rising from the streets and actually prompting a policy change in the communist party. During the 2 days of street demonstrations that were in response to the text messages citizen journalists carry cell phones sent text messages to bloggers in several other cities who then posted real time reports to the entire country. Bloggers stayed a step ahead of government security forces that tried to cut down sites carrying the reports. And who’s going to win? Is there any way for the government to take control of cell phones and the internet?