TLDR: Middle class Chinese and China Watchers have a flawed understanding of modern China.
“But in your country, at least you get to choose your leader.” my coworker told me over drinks once. Jaded and privileged first world communist that I am, I just kind of shrugged. “Well, it doesn’t really mean anything.” I said. “You just choose from this guy or that guy and they’re both the same in the end.” But she, middle-class Chinese from a fairly well-off but not wealthy family, not of the spoiled rotten second-generation rich or in any other noticeable way, said: “But at least you get to choose.”
“You see,” someone else once told me, a young man in his twenties who worked at one of Guangzhou’s indeterminable finance firms, the hamster wheels in which tens of thousands of university-educated Chinese endlessly turn, “China is a completely capitalist country.” And then in a weary, amused tone: “But to get anything done, sometimes you have to put the socialist hat on for a little while.”
Another, a student at the South China University of Technology, one of Guangzhou’s more prestigious universities: “Well, I’m going to join the Party. But I don’t really care about any of that. It’s just for my career. That’s what everyone says.”
A fourth, a Guangzhou-based businesswoman who grew up in Taiwan: “Do you know how many people they killed? We came here a few years ago to find my grandfather, who had died in the Cultural Revolution. There was no grave. We had to go deep into the countryside to find him. And in the end we weren’t sure if we had. I hate them.”
And from another, making lots of money in Guangzhou’s flourishing real-estate business, more money than a foreigner like me, working in Zhujiang New Town, the city’s premier Central Business District, which a decade ago had been – people liked to tell you – only rice fields and old houses: “Other countries are just more civilized than China.”
Over the years I’ve met many people like this. Guangzhou is one of the most prosperous, wealthy and developed cities in China, and its middle class, made both of old-fashioned Cantonese locals and those from outside who smell the money, is proportionally prominent. On the surface it’s a city of shopping malls, fancy restaurants and office complexes, of kindergartens for busy parents and nightclubs and bars for exhausted office drones, a city made rich off of reform and opening up, where Deng Xiaoping is always ranked above Mao Zedong as the best modern Chinese leader. The provincial capital of Guangdong, cradle of the Xinhai Revolution, the powerhouse of the reform era and close relative to capitalist Hong Kong, Guangzhou is a city where usually before now it was always very easy to assume China had become ‘normal’. Beijing cabbies talk politics – Guangzhou cabbies look out at the hundreds of flags hung up each year for National Day and shake their heads and say “too many red flags” and keep driving. Until the last few years the propaganda was quiet and the presence of the Party a background event if you weren’t paying attention. And it was very easy to hear opinions that were officially heterodox like those above. Guangzhou’s traditional, rebellious culture helped. But another part of this – what I’m talking about today – was class.
The people outlined above did not grow up – and had not become – rich. But when I met them they were all rich enough to be living in the wealthier parts of Guangzhou, the gated communities of the city centres, and to be studying or have studied at good universities. They all had travelled; they all wore foreign brands and had decent enough smartphones. Many of them might have enjoyed a good drink sometimes but did not chug beer at streetside dapaidang every night but spent most of their free time going to the gym and playing games and taking selfies with friends. They ate at upmarket chain restaurants in the shopping malls, and did not go to dirty neon-lit KTV places but family-friendly chain ones. They worked in shirts and suit trousers or skirts, white-collar uniforms, with lanyards to show their identity as staff at this or that company during quick convenience store lunchbreaks before back to a gruelling work schedule sat at a computer all day. Some of them, on the other hand, owned small businesses, and were always keenly watching the outside world for the shifting winds of capitalism. If they had children they were also committed to learning English or playing the piano or learning to code of a weekend or a school night. The non-stop commitment to self-improvement, living your best life and never letting the cracks show was everywhere.
In WeChat Moments posts the contrast always seemed stark – pretty-faced or handsome people in clean western clothes with their skin slightly photoshopped – ‘PS’, in slang – and a determined-to-be-happy smile, next to family elders with the hard dark skin of the old peasantry stooped over by their side, their expressions happy or tired or whatever but without the outwardly-conscious energy of the social media generation. These people were inwardly a little ground down by urban life, by the relentless weight of ‘involution’, the societal pressure to outperform your peers for diminishing returns endemic in modern China, by the brave new world of capitalism. Nevertheless they had ambition, and somehow in their daily lives summoned up boundless energy to match it.
Although frustrated by the inefficiencies, quirks and occasional cruelties of life under the party-state, rarely were they super-political; but they knew, just as they themselves were going to make it, to get enough money to save themselves from the spectre of hunger and poverty their haunted parents had taught them about, that China was going to make it too, that one day things would become better. And better, to people whose whole lives had been defined by the status of western brands, western objects, and western people, meant more western. Which might – if you talked privately, candidly, over a beer or in someone’s home – have one day meant western-style politics too.
These people told people like me the story we wanted to hear, or the story many of us wanted to hear, since to me “China will become a liberal democracy” is a little like “China will cut off its own legs for no good reason”. The idea that the middle class would eventually create a Chinese democracy was one still with some life to it in China Watcher circles when I arrived in Guangzhou a decade ago – regardless of which of Prince Charles’ ‘appalling communist waxworks’ was in charge, it was assumed that the spiral of expectations would, with material poverty now so majorly reduced, lead to a demand for the supposed spiritual poverty of the party-state to go too. And uh, yeah. Look at how that went.
Turns out there was another China story – another China – going on at the same time. It was spelt out not in high-rises and shiny buildings and the white-skinned happy-family consumers of every advertisement and billboard but between these things – in the narrow alleyways of the migrant worker neighbourhoods where people from the barren countryside without urban household registration dwelt working for survival wages, in the local villages where residents were facing encroaching gentrification by all of the malls, hotels and offices rising up around them, in the altars to old gods, Guan Yu, Confucius, Buddha and Mao which survived in the unregistered temples and the homes of poor families, and even amongst that same middle class itself where the exhaustion and pointlessness of it all was mounting, leading to not an embrace of the western ways embodied in the Zhujiang New Town office towers but a rejection of them.
This story has been picked up on by now. How could it not be? Xi Jinping’s time in office has seen a renaissance for anti-western, anti-democratic, patriotic and leftist ideas in Chinese society, the return of the Party to prominence even in relatively apolitical Guangzhou, and a resurgence of interest in that aforementioned barren countryside in both high politics and pop culture (witness the phenomenal success of rural lifestyle vlogger/tea saleswoman Li Ziqi). All this has changed China so much that many of our least favourite experts are proclaiming a ‘regression’, a ‘step back in time’, or even ‘Cultural Revolution 2’ (lmao). In fact the two things this period shares with the Cultural Revolution are that firstly it is a response to the errors of a previous era (the Cultural Revolution was fuelled by grassroots dissatisfaction with the bloated, unfair and corrupt party-state of the 1950s) and secondly that in western eyes it perfectly suits us to remove entirely the ‘grassroots’ part of the event and focus only on the elite. This is Xi’s China, after all, and everything within it was made by he and his chums. The focus of western analysis as to why the liberal segment of the middle-class not only failed to win power but now is stifled, and why in general China is not turning out to be on the road to liberal democracy, is upon Xi and his crackdowns and his new rules and his changes to education, politics and law. And it would be naïve not to talk about those factors. A key difference between the Cultural Revolution and now – I mean there’s so many of them – is that today’s politics are still top-down, to be implemented by the cadres based on their local understanding of the central government’s orders, rather than participatory. But we shouldn’t reduce them only to this stuff.
Continued in comments
What else then is behind the shift? A growing nationalism and a growing pride in the country’s achievements as it develops, sure- but this is mingled with an awareness of just how much went wrong in those last few decades; and since those last few decades were the decades of catching up with the west, aping the west, and learning from the west, this does not only create discontent with the prevailing socio-economic order, with its massive alienation, work burnout and cruel stratification, but against the place associated most with how these things, hitherto unknown in the pre-market era, came to China’s shores – and of course, that would be the west.
It was assumed by us that these things would all be blamed on the party-state and that to deal with them the party-state would have to begin abolishing itself, just as we didn’t really understand what was happening when Russian capitalism was birthed in the traumatic nineties and that the Russian people might blame us for their plight and not only the oligarchs. A world of hope glimpsed in the aspirational middle class of China, so similar to our own, was mirrored by a world of despair that bubbled along beneath it that it seemed the Party was incapable of recognizing or responding to. And now it is trying to do so. But not how we wanted. Angry nationalism and anger at socioeconomic injustice mingle and the party-state attempts to respond. Normally clumsy and blundering it is surprisingly nimble when it has to be, and it does its best to stoke these feelings where it needs to, and suppress them when it doesn’t, and aims to in the end come out balanced precariously still on top of the world despite everything.
Is it currently succeeding? Yes and no. The Xi-era Party faces a crucial contradiction of not really being able to push back against the most important parts of western influence – capitalism, markets, inequality – as much as the loudest of those who wholeheartedly support it want it to. It wants the stock markets, the nice buildings, the impressive-looking numbers, the tasty foreign investment and (in certain grimy quarters) the money it got by being intertwined with big business. “The market must play the decisive role in resource allocation”, Xi says. “Reform and opening up will never end.” is another of his lines, and it’s one that I sometimes read as a bit of a concession to his liberal number two Li Keqiang and other pro-market forces within the Party but also as an indication of the limit of his ambition.
Despite handwringing from western observers today’s Chinese government is not returning to the command economy; rather it wants to follow the market for the most part and retain the power (long forsaken by western governments) to discipline it when it’s bad, to be socialist in the streets and capitalist in the sheets. This is the same thing it has wanted ever since Deng’s successors pushed down hard on the reform button and launched themselves into the stratosphere, holding on for dear life: to reassert control. But let’s be fair to it; for all the areas it falls short in the government seems to be attempting to strive for this rebalancing of society properly rather than just honouring it in the breach. Rural revitalisation and environmental restoration, neither ideas to set the stock market on fire, are the key tentpoles of the new era, not madcap growth – the megacities are less the focus than the left-behinds who built the megacities, whose impoverished, polluted and corrupt hometowns create the push to leave that has created the floating migrant class and hollowed out much of the countryside.
The household registration system that exacerbates this is easing up, and the ruinous real estate bubble is being gingerly prodded and local fiefdoms of corrupt officials are being purged and rectified. Infrastructure is built up where before no budding cadre would bother to do so and public housing is made available for those who can’t afford it. Grassroots politics and the spirit of volunteerism, long neglected, are in the process of attempts at revival. Poverty, the government proclaimed last year, has been eliminated, and although this is a nebulous thing to declare eliminated there can be no doubt that, whatever we say about its addiction to capitalism, the party-state is currently acting to try to cut down a little bit on its annual intake. Because Xi Jinping doesn’t like it, because of this or that – and also because the organisation as a whole is part of a society that is increasingly seeing the damage the capitalist decades have done, even if the Wall Street Journal isn’t.
And this meets with the nationalism of both middle and working classes. The 1996 essay collection “China Can Say No” was the bestseller of the nineties that argued for a new Chinese nationalism, and neocon non-communist Chinese patriotism has been a thing since after 1989, but for a while these were bourgeois pursuits only. Nowadays though this new nationalism, whether the youthful “little pink” online warriors who report their politically-incorrect teachers and troll people on Weibo, or the vibe of that old guy who stopped me in the park to point to his Mao Zedong badge and tell me “China Number One!” or the kids who play communists vs Japanese soldiers with their friends, or the guy I knew who had “Add Oil, Huawei!” stuck to his car during that whole thing, to two girls I saw who started crying during Battle At Lake Changjin – it has spread all the way down to the street. It might sometimes be absurd, it might sometimes be cloying, it might in some cases (as nationalism does) override common sense – but it is not only a product of Party indoctrination, and rests on that long vein of Chinese patriotism that powered the 1949 revolution in the first place, that has its roots all the way back in the ‘century of humiliation’ prior.
That this energy was to some extent exhausted during the early decades of reform by the tendency towards overcorrection – from the grandiose, arrogant autarky and isolation of the Cultural Revolution and its trauma to China as weakling, needing foreign help to ‘civilize’ itself – didn’t mean it went away. Its return has been bolstered by, to speak frankly, the alienation and loss of social cohesion that reform itself created. People are lonely – the motherland is always there, the perfect motherland of the heart, where none of the things that make you miserable – office jobs, busy subway stations, difficult social relationships between alienated capitalist subjects, having to talk to girls – exist. And as well as that is the very real sense of foreign threat born from trade wars, international condemnation over Hong Kong, Xinjiang and so on, and the US moving to ‘contain’ China when from a layman’s perspective China hasn’t really done anything wrong, or at least anything the US didn’t already do first. Does the Party use these things, exploit them, fan them when convenient? Duh. Does that mean they exist just as the result of machinations in Beijing, because of what Xi wants? Not at all.
Simply put, it was expected by us that the contradictions of the reform era would lead to an identification of its failings solely with the party-state, and of the successes with the market and the freedom of people – of its weaknesses with backwards nationalism, and its strengths with the friendship with the US and other countries. In fact it hasn’t been this simple. While we can of course say that Chinese attitudes towards their government and leaders aren’t black and white, and that there are many – probably the majority – who are indifferent or resigned about their government more than anything (capitalism does that), I’d say that today people are more politicised than before, and that this is partially because the government’s attention is now on not the winners of the democracy-seeking middle classes in China but those outside of that winners’ bracket, the working class both migrant workers and otherwise, the remains of the peasantry, and those of the middle class who have fallen beneath involution’s grindstone. It is these people, the discontented, who are becoming the Party’s primary concern, and whether or not it has the ability to truly help them or not it seems set on trying. The wealthy and outward-facing classes of China can sit tight for a few years or decades, goes the message. “Let some people get rich first” was Deng’s big phrase, and now some people have gotten rich first. Now ostensibly it’s time for the rest. It’s time for common prosperity. “China is turning inward”, some pundits say; well, might be the rebuttal, given what kind of crazy shit has gone on ‘inward’ maybe that’s probably something it needs to do.
Again, my criticism of this is that it doesn’t do enough, that Xi is going to have to hurt the economy and its capitalists a lot more if he wants to even scratch the surface of these enormous problems, and China is so entrenched in capitalism and the Party so made up of number-chasers – Xi himself being one of them – that I don’t know if his government can or wants to. But I’m an internet communist, and my criticism is not the most common mooted in English. That would be the aforementioned ‘Cultural Revolution 2’ sort of language – -that this is a reversion to Maoism, the rubbishing of all of the sensible work Deng and his successors did. Man, I wish it was. What it is – and why we’re so hyperbolic about it – is the moving of focus from one China to another. Our China, my China, the China of all of the middle-class friends us foreigners make, was once supposed to be the future. Jiang Zemin’s ‘Three Represents’ allowed ‘patriotic entrepreneurs’ into the Party and experiments with open elections were happening at certain local levels of government, and the internet was making officials accountable and everyone was professing to us ‘foreign friends’ off the record that they didn’t believe in any of that red nonsense.
There was a belief that at all levels things would be moving more in that direction, that China was a ‘pragmatic’ authoritarian country, which to us meant it would move on from authoritarianism as soon as it needed to. Well it’s moved on, or is trying to – just not in the direction we assumed. Because to us the migrant workers and the farmers and the people so far away from our nice comfortable coastal cities, living in towns without electricity or roads or running water, were existent, sure, as a source of tragedy and pathos in op-eds about the real cost of breakneck development, as evidence yet again of the cruelty of communist dictatorship, eternal victims of Party rule – but they did not exist politically.
By politically I don’t mean that these losers of reform and opening up are somehow the masters of modern China, that they run things and this really is a true dictatorship of the proletariat. No – in the end the Party is the boss and no one else. But I mean that they, these people who make up the majority of the population, whose labour powers the vast gleaming first-tier cities where the middle class lives, are currently in the process of seeming to matter again rather than the ‘patriotic entrepreneurs’ and their offspring. It goes without saying that they were not who we thought might end up the target audience of socialism with Chinese characteristics. How could they? While we admired their hard work and found all the difficulties of being poor very touching, to us – children, from the UK to the US to everywhere else, of bourgeois revolution – the idea that these faceless tragic masses could exert any influence whether through actions or ideas on the ‘sensible’ ruling elite was unthinkable. Change came from those like us, not those unlike us.
The Party with its sham-socialism was supposed to be more scared of the educated foreign-trained middle classes than anything, and was supposed to pivot to appeasing them, seeing – surely, those pragmatists in Beijing would see it! – that marketisation, separation of Party and state, and ever-more freedom of speech could secure its legacy as another neat little developmental dictatorship that gave way to a happy bourgeois democracy. But this has not happened. The workers are not allowed to organise, to exist as a political force – there is only the Party – but the overlords hear them, and I’d wager are warier of them, of a potential Mao-fuelled leftist populism that outflanks the timid suits, the businessmen-cadres, in promising real justice for the left-behinds of reform, than of those who want to do “that democracy stuff” as Deng called it. So now this is where things are.
The eclipse of our China is baffling to us. We remain locked into a way of thinking that sort of worked to understand China ten years ago, of the vibrant, capitalist first-tier cities pulling along the corrupt, hopeless rest of it in their wake, all to be resolved at a later date when those first-tier cities revolt and introduce democracy, and we remain convinced that Xi has cheated us by attempting to shake this world up. All our hopes are for the moderates within the system to overthrow him, wherever they are, or for the middle class to finally, finally have enough and spark a kind of fuzzy rebellion. We do not factor in the Chinese poor, except to condescendingly refer to them as the (always using the Mandarin word) laobaixing, sort of noble savages whose salt of the earth charm and wit make for cute Kuaishou clips and whose continual suffering at Party hands is also our evidence for its evil.
If the educated people could organise things, start to oppose the Party from within or without, then the masses would surely join in. But as is these proles are brainwashed, only expressing opinions given to them by the propaganda chiefs; the real China, the middle class one we glimpsed before Xi, is the only one that knows the truth, the only one we really trust with the power to shape the country’s political future. The ordinary people, after all, might choose something else. We remember having to help Yeltsin rig the 1994 Russian elections to ensure those pesky people didn’t vote the Communist Party back into power again. What a hassle! So here we are waiting for the good guys instead.
It is this that makes Shanghai, currently still under inept and surreal lockdown, such a lightning rod, as Hong Kong was in 2019. Because we see ourselves there; we see the ultimate middle class city, emblem of our China, being starkly reminded that in the end it’s just as subject to the Party’s logic of numbers as everywhere else. The Shanghai lockdown is not really a paradigm shift – it’s just saying out loud what we should have always known, that there was no way it was going to turn out how we wanted it to. And so we fixate on the middle classes, the locked down foreigners and white collars, the bureaucratic absurdity and the mismanagement, and the delivery drivers and migrant workers who are actually much worse off are acknowledged only in brief glimpses, in weepy stories of individual suffering that surface for a moment before being subsumed over our outrage that this is happening in Shanghai, not in some poor other city. The misery of the laobaixing, after all, won’t change anything. Or at least not in the way we wanted.
The same can be said for our dependence on Weibo, on the ‘netizens’, to gauge public opinion and the way the political winds are blowing. Pre-Xi Weibo was a kind of civil society of sorts, a place for the online class to talk, and today every time a subversive hashtag trends or a new game of cat-and-mouse between censors and users takes off we sit up, alert. Is this it? Has the revolution begun? That this is like reading American politics through Twitter never seems to occur to us. Shanghai has seen many moments of Weibo insurgency, as did Wuhan before it – and yet after each, after the censors have laboriously scrubbed it all away, nothing ever happens. We mistake the censors’ work as evidence of the supreme danger of what they’re censoring, and eagerly await the next big shock, the next internet earthquake. This ghost of our China hovers there and we are always happy to see it, because it helps us forget that the other China, the much larger China, has dwarfed it utterly and was always going to. The political circumstances of China, its system, its history and its people in all their varied forms of struggle for and against modernity, ensured this. It was never as clear-cut as we thought.
So we wait. For what? In 1949 at the end of the civil war we lost China, the good China, to these godless communists. Now another civil war is playing out and again our China is losing, the good-hearted, well-intentioned, by-no-means wrong-headed ‘civil society’ of the 2000s having been disarmed before the battle began and knocked over quite easily. After 1949 we waited for our China until it was clearly no more. Now we wait for our China again. We wait for failure; for Xi to fumble, for the economy to collapse, for the Party to rot and all of its cadres to discover democracy or be pushed aside like it’s the Eastern Bloc in 1989, by mobs of people storming government offices led, of course, by educated students and intellectuals. We wait for the whole thing to fall inward as we always knew it would if it didn’t do as we told it to.
And we promise ourselves the good China will triumph in the end. Any deals we have to make – any interaction with have to engage in – with their China is temporary. We love the people – those precious little laobaixing – and hate the government. And the frustration we feel at how it didn’t go our way seeps out in our obsession with its tragedies, our contempt for its every idea and policy, our shameful little joy at its every misstep. It fills our books and newspapers and overflows, getting in our eyes and ears, but we like it that way. This two China policy is the only way we have of understanding things. And we might despair sometimes, faintly aware that our superficial Anglosphere understanding of history has led us here, to this cul-de-sac, but then another Weibo hashtag that signifies the anger of the people will pop up and we’ll get excited all over again. Such is what’s left of professional China-watching in 2022. If we want to know the real China – not the one we prefer, or the one we want, but the one that exists – we need to accept, however begrudgingly, that it’s here to stay. And what might change it won’t, in fact, come from the same place as us. If we do that then we can face a much more interesting world of potential futures for China – and understand much better what’s happening to it today.
We love the people – those precious little laobaixing – and hate the government.
lmao
People are lonely – the motherland is always there, the perfect motherland of the heart, where none of the things that make you miserable – office jobs, busy subway stations, difficult social relationships between alienated capitalist subjects, having to talk to girls – exist.
Take me to the motherland
It's interesting to me to see the middle class perspective. On the one hand liberalism and a "middle class" go hand in hand anywhere in the world. On the other, there are a lot of problems middle class people in China and everywhere face BECAUSE of capitalism, not in spite of it. If the middle class changes materially because of new socialist economic policies in China perhaps then we can understand what might happen to the middle classes of the world under socialism. I think the Cruz of it is the simple solution of providing a social security net and a socialist Great Society, meaning one similar to the post war economy of the U.S. but a non-imperialist one based on socialist construction of industry, not an imperialist one.
Good luck Xi and CPC cadres, I hope it works out for you :xinternet:
Edit: the Ted Cruz of it :khrushchev-fist:
two girls I saw who started crying during Battle At Lake Changjin
Y'know, I watched this film, and without a big ass nationalist attachment to China, it was entertaining and absurd, but still affecting.
I wonder what it would take for me to cry at a nationalistic war film.
Such a perfect encapsulation of the attitudes of the people the west calls "pro-democracy" lol.
I think that at the very core of my observation of China at this point (and I suspect this is the unconscious analysis of many a western marxist) is that although China has a primarily capitalist mode of production, the party could still function as an instrument of political expression of the Chinese proletariat. More importantly, I feel that China is still fighting it's revolution, and that until the western bourgeoisie is globally subdued (whatever that means, and it could be as simple as the Chinese economy getting big enough to start calling the shots across the world) it won't be finished. This might have more or less to do with the bourgeois aspirations of the world wide "middle class" as well, basically meaning that once becoming a bourgeois is no longer a realistic or even desirable goal for the global "middle class" things might actually change for the better, insofar as the pursuit of liberation from the exploitation of work is not working harder so you don't have to work later, but pursuing a social reorganization of living and labor that liberates people where they are.
I suppose that the bigger question we should be asking ourselves, is what will the global bourgeois class look like once China is the world's most powerful economy? Will the party assert control over global capital the same way it has been doing with some of its domestic capital? With a few years of bad leadership it could just end up propagating the same global 'community' that exists now, but with different rules. Hopefully this is not the case.
My apologies for rambling I am very sleepy. 💤
Lol very interesting reminds me of a lot of the Chinese liberals I talked to during Covid. Was searching up the rave piano compilation.
There was a guy in the TrueAnon Discord posting random ass videos of fires in China saying it was due to the pandemic or whatever. People were so fucked up in 2019.
