China Elections and Governance Review Issue 4

On October 1, 2009, China celebrated the 60-year anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic with a massive parade intended to showcase the country's military might, social stability, political unity and ethnic harmony.  However, manifestations of social unrest have continued to hinder Chinese leaders in their efforts to project this image of a stable and unified society. Protests and riots highlight the public's frustration with official corruption, social injustice, and economic inequality in certain sectors of society.  Massive riots in Xinjiang Autonomous Region, coming only a year after similar riots in Tibet, have diminished the image of harmonious coexistence between the Han and ethnic minority populations.  Although the government response to these "mass incidents" has typically been to focus on the manifestations rather than the causes, central and local governments have begun to identify more holistic measures geared toward crisis prevention rather than crisis management. Such endeavors have been particularly evident in the efforts of the central and local governments to promote greater governmental transparency and openness with the media and its citizens.

This is an excellent piece that brings up the real conundrum that China faces in regards to media transparency. While on the one side it looks absolutely fullproof to just release more and more information to the public, this is just inherently unrealistic in regards to maintaining what stability there is on the local level. The Chinese central government polices the local governments just as much if not more than it polices local populaces. In fact, the Chinese government has reached a point where one could easily say that they are the friends of the populace far more than the local Hamlet and Township level officials that have been instated by the intermediaries between them and Beijing. Always remember that governance in China is top down, and that the best way to seek reform of the local areas is to inform the upper echelons of why they should care about what is going on locally.

Governance through paranoia of your boss: it only works well if an information conduit exists between the people beneath the local official and the boss.

Read the full piece here.