The Chinese government’s bid to maintain stability at all costs is creating a domestic security system so expensive that experts and officials say it is sapping funds needed elsewhere to sustain the country’s economic health.
The Chinese Communist Party’s smothering of public support for Nobel Peace Prize winner and jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) is the latest example of the lengths and costs the authorities are willing to go to keep a lid on even minor events that might seem to threaten its hold on power.
China’s total spending on domestic security reached 514 billion yuan (US$76.7 billion) last year, a whisker below the military budget of 532 billion yuan, a group of social researchers from the elite Tsinghua University in Beijing estimated in a report published earlier this year.
“Threats to social stability are constantly being side-stepped and postponed, but that is making social breakdown increasingly grave,” it said. “The current model of stability has reached the point where it cannot continue.”
Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher on China for Human Rights Watch, an international watchdog group called the resources devoted to stability “absolutely humongous.”
“There’s a vicious circle that more security leads to more security,” he said by telephone.
China swaddles all its big meetings, events and sensitive dates with police and guards to scare off trouble-makers, extinguish protests and project power.
The massive security for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing has become a general template and is on show for preparations for a party leaders’ meeting in Beijing beginning today.
The show of strength works for now. However, many question how much longer it can be effective.
Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) will use the party meeting to hone a five-year economic development plan intended to cement their vows to build a “harmonious society” free of serious division and discontent.
And for the moment, China’s formula of one-party rule and economic growth can ward off serious challenges from below, as long as the public is still happy enough with economic and social gains.
It is later, especially if growth and revenues flag, that worries some Chinese experts and officials.
Firm control of discontent has been a defining policy of China’s government, especially since the pro-democracy protests of 1989 that ended in a bloody crackdown and party patriarch Deng Xiaoping’s (鄧小平) demand that “stability comes before all else.”
Adhered to by successive leaders, that slogan has created an expensive illusion of solid order for which the country may one day pay heavily, the experts and officials have said.
“This unyielding stability has already reached the point where it cannot be sustained, because it exacts a huge cost,” Yu Jianrong, a prominent expert on social unrest at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said in a recent lecture in Beijing.
“What may happen in China in the future is that there are more outbreaks of local turmoil,” he said.
Rapid economic growth over the past two decades has rekindled official worries that social flux and inequality could unsettle party control.
Hu chaired a meeting late last month that studied the social strains facing the country, state media reported at the time. He warned officials to be ready for a rough patch.
That means more spending on social welfare, healthcare and rural services in its next five-year plan starting from next year, the Xinhua news agency said on Wednesday.
Yet the government’s single-minded demand for officials to snuff out symptoms of unrest is skewing resources and attention away from social needs and into forces to monitor and detain potential protesters, officials and experts say.
A study of 10 provinces and local governments showed outlays on domestic security rose faster than for schools, hospitals and welfare, and often ate up a bigger share of budgets, the Social Sciences Weekly, a Shanghai paper, reported in May.
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