This is an unofficial English translation of an op-ed article written in French by CLB's Chinese website editor Cai Chongguo for Le Monde in 3 July 2007.
The celebration of the Chinese Communist Party's anniversary, on July 1st, has rarely been shrouded in such a gloomy atmosphere. Since the end of May, mainland websites have exposed scandals on working conditions, beginning with the story of enslaved workers employed in a brickyard, an affair even the official press and television couldn't avoid mentioning. Thirty-two children were employed at a Shanxi brickyard. A few days later, four hundred fathers of missing children issued a desperate appeal to search for them. These scandals were the talk of all the media and websites: in the brickyard, children between 8 and 13 years old reduced to slavery, subjected to daily abuse, with no pay and unable to wash for months on end.
This barbarity was uncovered in a country that today counts 150 million internet users and 50 million bloggers. The Net has opened space for discussion and commentary unlike anything witnessed since 1989. Each manifestation of dismay at the children's fate snowballed as other internet users added their impassioned reactions. The emotion turned to indignation at the involvement of the Party and local authorities in these scandals. The village's Party Secretary was a member of the family that owned the brickyard and of the local people's assembly.
Talk returned to the explosions in mines, to the trafficking of children and forced labor, which had for years been reported in the press but as unrelated events. Suddenly this accumulation of facts arrested attention and created a kind of shock wave. Confronted with the public outrage, government censorship remained paralyzed for two weeks, not knowing how to intervene. Meanwhile, internet users could freely discuss the matter, vent their anger and post their comments.
These discussions revealed the encroaching institutionalization of forced labor just about everywhere in the country and the virtual absence of government response to it. A flood of criticism and insults ensued, directed against the leaders and the Party, with such uncensored comments as "We are all slaves of those people in Zhongnanhai." and "They behave like slave-owners." This kind of language is a thousand times harsher than the words dissidents used in the 1980s and 90s.
The debate also incriminated the Party, as it operates through its grassroots organizations, which not only defend the interests of bosses mercilessly exploiting workers but are actually directly implicated. As bloggers citing Marxist conceptions of history ironically conclude, "Having reached the stage of primitive communism, we are now, according to the laws of historical materialism, approaching the period of slavery, which is henceforth our future."
All of the current leadership's work on the necessity for the Party to be close to the people and on the construction of a "harmonious society" – five years of effort – thus went up in smoke in a single month. The phrase "harmonious society" itself is a target for irony, with "harmonize" now used as a synonym for repress or censor. Instead of referring to an "arrested person" or a "censored article," the word is now "harmonized." Such discussions seriously undermine the Party's credibility and authority. They go so far as to challenge its historical role and nature at the very moment when preparations are under way to celebrate its anniversary. And the trouble does not stop there but also affects the CPC's organization.
In October 2006, a young researcher at Beijing Youth Political Institute, Chen Shengluo, submitted a research report on a field survey of how the Party was organized in State-owned enterprises, which were formerly a Party stronghold. It found that almost no grassroots organizations were left; out of a total 70 million members, 40 million were reported to be inactive or to "let things slide."
It is worth mentioning that over the past ten years of privatization and factory closures, many Party members were fired; others, peasant members of the Party, left the countryside and their original political groups to become "immigrant communists." In the city, they count not find equivalent organizations, especially in foreign companies whose owners, from Hong Kong or Taiwan, are not particularly keen on having communists in their companies.
Some even say that the CPC is a clandestine party! Sixty percent of all companies are in fact owned privately or by foreign capitalists. Naturally, many employers do not belong to the Party, although they make the decisions, which the Party cell merely rubber stamps. In other words, the capitalists in a company generally lead the Party rather than the reverse and can fire employees, whether or not they are Party members.
In this somewhat humiliating situation, many communists no longer admit they are members. They are afraid of being ridiculed or of having a harder time finding another job if they are identified as communists. Not to mention the fact that in companies, where the workday lasts twelve or fourteen hours, employees have neither the time nor a designated place to carry out Party activities.
According to official ideology, the Party is still a working-class and peasant "vanguard" leading the country to the communist society. Yet no one believes that fiction any more in today's China. First among the serious problems generated by this crisis is its effect on the incentives for membership.
Why belong to the Communist Party today? The glorious motivations of the past have vanished, and ideology pretty much ceased to exist at the end of the 1970s. Now Party membership is sought for personal advantage, a promotion or to climb the social ladder. Prospective members are thus often recruited in unscrupulous profit-seeking circles. Their routinely corrupt practices alienate them from honest and talented people anxious to keep their distance from the Party. Undeniably, this organization persists in several echelons of society including the army, the police, and the administration. Elsewhere, though, in the countryside and in factories, what is left is really little more than an empty shell.
A Party that lacks both a grassroots organization and prestige, whose members incur public contempt, can no longer attract the country's best and brightest. As the leader of an increasingly powerful and complex country, it inevitably has to take a look at its own future and that of the world. After 86 years of existence, the Party has entered into a complex crisis period and its future is very uncertain.