How Should We Understand Secular Society, and Why Is It Missing From Our Lives? | Living With the Future ④

This report is about one thing: how secular society in China grew weaker and weaker.

"Sometimes the point is not to change the world, but to explain it."

At a moment like this one, on how to explain the world and how to live with the future, we need to hear wise and independent voices.

We asked our questions of more than 20 specialists in economics, law, sociology, communication studies and other fields.

The questions are many and tangled, but they bear directly on the lives the younger generation will lead. Those we interviewed hope the world handed to that generation will work well and stay civilized and humane — and that people will stay independent and clear-headed in a world that is complicated and confusing.

Late last year, Guo Yuhua went to the 2017 annual meeting of Love Save Pneumoconiosis and noticed that the government's attitude had changed. Love Save Pneumoconiosis is a non-governmental charity founded in 2011 to provide targeted aid to China's 6 million migrant workers with pneumoconiosis, and to push for prevention and, eventually, the end of the disease. A number of well-known public figures — Yuan Li, Yao Chen, Chen Kun, Jia Zhangke, Zhao Tao, Xu Xiaoping — are important backers of the organization. Guo Yuhua is a professor in the Department of Sociology at Tsinghua University.

The change she noticed was that the government "no longer thinks they're there to make trouble." She believes the shift came mainly from a change of attitude at the "top." In January 2016, ten ministries and commissions jointly issued a document calling for stronger work to prevent and treat pneumoconiosis among migrant workers and to help those already sick — which amounted to admitting that groups like Love Save Pneumoconiosis had done a good thing.

Pneumoconiosis is an occupational disease, tied to brutal working conditions and a labor-protection system that offers little support — and migrant workers, who make up the bulk of the labor in this industry, are a group that receives care and protection both inside the state's labor-protection system and among the people who run the companies.

Guo calls this "a very good thing — it means they have in effect become a textbook case of a social organization with a fairly good, cooperative, constructive relationship with the government."

Which raises the classic question: why are cases of NGOs working smoothly with the government so rare?

In December 2017, after the fire in Daxing, Beijing, we investigated the clearing-out of people that followed. Both the groups with prior NGO experience and the volunteers who had thrown themselves together to help the newly homeless ran into the same problem: they had no way to organize an effective service. The mess lasted until the whole affair faded from view.

Looking at it from the vantage point of Love Save Pneumoconiosis, Guo Yuhua suggests one reason may be that the two sides understand a public event differently. "Official figures put the number of workers with pneumoconiosis at 600,000. The real number is ten times that — 6 million." A gap that wide may be what decides the rest: the government wants to play the problem down, while NGOs want to use its urgency to make more people pay attention.

Sometimes — perhaps often — that gap grows into hostility between the government and charitable or civic organizations.

And an ever more powerful government produces a result that follows logically enough: a society without a secular society. Or, put another way, a society with no "social component" in it.

This report will look at how China's secular society grew weaker and weaker; why a secular society cannot be tolerated; what role the government, meaning the organs of power, ought to play; how power can hold its own power in check; where the value of a secular society lies; and how to rebuild a rational society.

1. Why Is There No Intermediate Society?

China's Bureaucracy: Ancient and Modern

Hong Tao, Professor, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University

China's bureaucracy took shape very early. From the Qin and Han dynasties on, China was a centralized bureaucratic state. The Qin in particular had a very typical bureaucratic form. This was not yet the modern type of bureaucracy; in Max Weber's terms, it was patrimonial bureaucracy. The emperor treated the state as family property to be handed down generation after generation, which by itself violated the principles of bureaucracy. For him, bureaucracy was only a tool or a means of rule: he could see how efficient it was, and he could see that under it the bond between official and state was not a substantive one — which suited an emperor who wanted to hold the state as his private property. The school that contributed most to bureaucratic theory in ancient China was the Legalists, Shen Buhai among them; quite a few Western scholars of China call him China's theorist of bureaucracy.

In traditional China, though, bureaucracy was always held in check by one force, and that force came mainly from Confucianism. In the Confucian-Legalist argument that ran from the Warring States period to the Western Han, one of the important issues was precisely how to regard bureaucracy. The Confucians spoke for family feeling and personal ties; the Legalists held that the family feeling and personal ties the Confucians stressed, and the weight they gave to family and clan, could get in the way of unified government orders and their execution, since every human action was supposed to follow the command of the ruler or emperor. Historically, the argument between the two ended with each side gaining something. People later often set China's old imperial examination system alongside the modern Western civil service, but the comparison does not hold. The examination system did not produce bureaucrats in the bureaucratic sense; it produced a kind of "anti-bureaucrat." As Weber says in Confucianism and Taoism, the Confucian ideal that "the gentleman is not a vessel" stands against bureaucracy's demand that the official become a specialized technician — that is, become a vessel. The two roads run in different directions.

Modern bureaucracy has, on the whole, developed in step with modern China's state-building. For most of the 20th century, revolution and mass movements on a large scale kept modern bureaucracy from developing smoothly here. Not until the early 1970s — the late stage of the Cultural Revolution, a hinge point in modern Chinese state-building — did the building of a bureaucracy get onto the right track; that was also an era of much talk about the Legalists, and the two are no coincidence. After reform and opening, bureaucracy entered a period of fast growth, for roughly two reasons. First, it went with the founding and refining of modern economic institutions — the modern enterprise system, the corporate system — whose organizational forms are, in a sense, all forms of modern bureaucracy. Second, politics broke free to some degree from a state of high mobilization and gradually became routine, everyday. Turning political processes into procedures and political activity into institutions both call for a bureaucratic form. And at bottom, the drive and the theme of 20th-century Chinese state-building was competition with the other powers of the world, so wealth and strength were the first goal, and "modernization" became unavoidable. What is "modernization"? To a degree, it is "rationalization" in Weber's sense, and modern bureaucracy is its basic form.

So after reform and opening, especially in the early years, it became common to attack the traditional or Confucian idea of renqing — personal ties — and to attack the "society of personal ties," on the grounds that personal ties breed corruption. That shows how urgent the demand for bureaucratization was at the time. Bureaucracy by its nature demands that ties of feeling be cut and personal relations stripped away. That public opinion today is broadly against carrying the old, emotionally invested teacher-student relationship into the modern university shows a demand that the university be bureaucratized too. Beyond these economic and intellectual influences, of course, the Communist Party's own influence cannot be ignored. After 1949 it also bureaucratized quickly, in at least one respect. To some degree this may have been one cause of the Cultural Revolution, though not the only one and not the main one — because in the late stage of the Cultural Revolution things went back to the old road of bureaucratization. Once the party and the government are bureaucratized, and given the party and government's core leading position in society and their thorough penetration of social life, a bureaucratized society is not hard to understand.

Today, Where Is the Force That Can Curb Bureaucratic Power?

Hong Tao, Professor, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University

Modern states have parliaments and universal suffrage. These institutions hedge against the effects of bureaucracy. Weber wrote a good deal about this; in his later years he discussed parliamentary systems in particular, and presidential systems as well. The growth of bureaucracy is an important tendency of the modern state, but it is not the only one — there are tendencies pulling the other way. As Weber saw it, parliamentary struggle and mass political struggle can produce a kind of political practitioner unlike the bureaucrat: the politician. This is one way of overcoming rule by bureaucrats, which is why the machinery that produces politicians matters.

The two forces develop unevenly from country to country. In authoritarian states, parliament is often symbolic. Parliament may itself already be bureaucratized, or its members may be worked by the bureaucratic machine. Political leaders in authoritarian states come mainly out of bureaucratic organizations, whether the party or the government, so the line between politician and bureaucrat is blurred. As far as these two institutions go, an authoritarian state lacks any force that curbs bureaucracy; and because in an authoritarian state a bureaucratized party and government dominate society, and their power reaches into every corner of it, the society of an authoritarian state also tends to be highly bureaucratized. Take a residential community: is it a rung of the bureaucratic hierarchy, or a self-governing social organization? The answer is not hard to reach. It is a rung of the bureaucratic hierarchy — even though it is not formally a government department — because what it does is still to pass orders down and carry them out, and it has little to do with the shared life of ordinary people.

Totalitarian states look anti-bureaucratic. In fact they are so only in the first stage, the stage that forms them, the stage of the totalitarian movement. Once the high tide of the movement has gone out, what cools and hardens is still a bureaucratic machine. Soon after Hitler took power he wiped out the movement's radical forces, the SA among them. Stalin did the same: after Stalinism came a highly bureaucratized state. Totalitarianism cannot keep itself forever in a state of high mass mobilization; in the end it always cools into a bureaucratic state. Even the movement itself turns into bureaucratic routine, as Orwell described in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Max Weber was not optimistic about whether total bureaucratization could be curbed. He seems to have thought that even Western countries could not escape that fate. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four foretold the same prospect. Weber saw the link between bureaucracy and the modern spirit. Bureaucracy is not only an organizational form; it embodies modern man's attitude toward the world, which is an endless appetite for power. Total control and manipulation of nature leads of necessity to total control and manipulation of human beings — of the whole society and everyone in it, from the body to the soul. On one side the appetite for power runs loose; on the other, reason becomes the servant of desire. That is the ground on which bureaucracy stands as something reasonable in the modern age. Bureaucracy reflects the modern view of the world, the modern attitude toward the world, toward life, toward oneself and toward others. Unless that attitude is rethought and changed at the root, modern politics cannot escape the prospect of rule by bureaucrats.

In the Name of the Work Unit, the State Swallowed Society

Ren Jiantao, Professor of Political Science, Tsinghua University

The "spindle" and the "sheet of loose sand" are probably both attempts, set against the olive-shaped society, to sum up the shape of Chinese society. Chinese society is no longer a sheet of loose sand. Arguably it never was one. To this day the basic structure of control in Chinese society is still the work-unit, or danwei, system. Sociologists announced on our behalf long ago that the danwei system was over. They were wrong. From my own experience I know that danwei control in China is very strong. I have moved between universities twice, both times between "985" universities, between big cities — among Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, not even involving the state-protected universities of the northeast or northwest. The first move took ten months. The second was worse: a move inside Beijing that took two years. I arrived at Tsinghua in January two years ago and only finished the transfer paperwork this January. So the system of danwei control is in fact extremely strong. It is a society organized by work units. You can of course call a society organized by work units sand-like, but it is certainly not loose sand. Control over Chinese society works through two mechanisms, one hidden and one open. For city residents, the open mechanism is the work unit and the hidden one is the state's apparatus of political control. So you are placed inside a grid — the public security bureau has a method of urban management called "grid management." The bureau has grid chiefs; you are assigned to a grid and managed there.

So what do we usually mean when we call Chinese society loose sand? We mean that citizens' everyday order is sand-like. Once I am outside my work unit for those eight hours, the unit stops managing me. At that point we are not organized. There is no real social mobilization of me. Take interests: I might have an angling club, a chess-and-cards club, a mahjong club. Outside those eight hours you need social associations of this kind to take hold of you. Or take formal organization by place of origin — a Sichuanese association, a Hunanese association — but those do not work well either. They are all senior members amusing themselves. Their feelers, their power to mobilize, never reach into society. Occupational associations are still more purely administrative appendages. We have an education union, but the education union is basically about arranging trips and handing out a little cooking oil and rice at the holidays, to show that the union cares about us. It has in fact lost the union's real function of organizing a trade. In that sense it is fair to say Chinese society is a society of loose sand. And putting together everything we have discussed, you could say that a self-organized society of citizens needs ties of occupation, of place and of interest, overlapping and repeating, organized so that citizens really feel they belong to something 24 hours a day, not just to a work unit for eight. In that sense building a society is a complicated business: after the state swallowed society, society has to get back the space that should be its own.

2. The Absence of an Intermediate Society Brings All Kinds of Ills

Without an Autonomous Society There Are No Autonomous Citizens; Citizens Who Cannot Govern Themselves Do Nothing to Grow a Well-Ordered Society

Ren Jiantao, Professor of Political Science, Tsinghua University

What we have now is a basic contradiction that has been handled all through the 40 years of reform and opening. People have summed it up simply: "Loosen the grip and there is chaos; tighten it and everything dies." For China's civic self-governing groups and charitable groups, there was a stretch of time, when we were trying to build a harmonious society, when the grip was fairly loose. Once it loosened, we had not planned well in policy or in resources, so international NGOs poured in, and that raised worries about national security. There was another factor too: once civic self-governing groups multiplied, party and government bodies — having neither prepared themselves psychologically nor adjusted — felt they were now facing organizations of a different nature from their own, something alien, and they felt insecure inside.

So at that point the need for dual management arose. Dual management means, first, political management — but our political management often turns into political control. I loosen my grip on you, because I think we need to build a harmonious society, so society organizes itself, international NGOs come in and we welcome them too. The international NGOs have resources, the civic self-governing groups provide mutual aid, and so the government can let go and stop managing. In the early stage party and government departments were in fact glad of it, because it relieved us of a lot of responsibility. What was not foreseen was that shedding responsibility also cut down your ability to command through power. So political control then had to be tightened again. And then there is a second kind of need, which I would call order-maintaining management, and which I take to be an objective need. When a country's society is growing fast — in China, driven by market forces — it was the for-profit sector that first won a fairly high degree of autonomy. We also saw that around the 19th Party Congress, even while deeply uneasy about market organizations, the central leadership still had to draw up a party document stressing respect for entrepreneurship, because the whole order of China's economic development was at stake. If you press down too hard, the situation is now very simple: even if I cannot move money through the state banking system, I can move large sums out through underground banks. And what was the most telling crisis signal? That growth in private capital investment was visibly falling. That made the central leadership respond in earnest. Hence the cultivation of entrepreneurship, even the retrial of the Gu Chujun case, and respect for entrepreneurs' property rights — this important adjustment of policy from the center came relatively promptly. In other words, we now have to give the for-profit sector something to settle its nerves.

But while we tighten political management and order-maintaining management, the fact that tightening kills things off is genuinely hard to adjust for. It is the same as with the for-profit sector — except that the for-profit sector is tied to GDP growth, and the moment the numbers come in it is obvious. Building a self-organized society of citizens will not visibly move the economic figures. Because it does not visibly move them, party and government bodies are slower to write the corresponding policy. Unless some social contradiction or some social pressure that cannot be overcome shows itself, policy is hard to keep up. The decline in Chinese citizens' self-discipline in recent years is itself a social signal that the self-disciplined charitable sector and the self-organized society of citizens are decaying — but the policy response has not matched what happened with the for-profit sector, where a fall in private capital investment made the central leadership anxious enough to respond fast, in the courts, in policy, in central political documents. For the other side, there has so far been no such fast response.

For Chinese society, the for-profit sector, the non-profit sector and the charitable sector are generally taken to be three separate spaces, and the importance of the latter two is great and plain. The reason is that citizens' interest groups and charitable groups touch on citizens' autonomy, self-government and self-discipline in their own lives. We used to hope citizens would not govern themselves and would not be autonomous, and yet would still be self-disciplined. That was our general hope. For a country with a long history of the planned economy, this hope is not exactly a mistake; it is the judgment its habits of thought were bound to produce.

But now we have no choice but to recover a piece of modern common sense: whether it is the for-profit sector, the self-governing sector or the charitable sector, if it cannot be autonomous it develops a dependent frame of mind. The party and government poke it and it jumps. Don't poke it and it doesn't jump. Sometimes you have to poke several times before it jumps at all. So the party and government pour in enormous resources at enormous cost, and the results are unsatisfactory. Why can Chinese cities still not solve the problem of "Chinese-style jaywalking"? In the end, because there are no autonomous citizens, and so there is no self-discipline. And autonomous citizens must get there through self-government. What is self-government? It is governing one another. It is social governance, not governance by state power. Only once citizens have made a habit of governing themselves in society does the upright force we hope for appear, strong enough to hold down the bad. If three or five people cut across the road while seven or eight hundred glare at them, they become self-conscious and stop. But if only three or five obey the rule of stop-on-red, go-on-green while seven or eight hundred are crossing, those three or five get swept along. So a self-governing society is exactly a self-disciplined one. With self-discipline, citizens can tell right from wrong and good from bad. In China today that judgment is hard to make. When city residents break the traffic rules, for instance, even when they are plainly in the wrong they will get into a fight with the urban management officer or the policeman or the auxiliary officer enforcing the rules — some even slap the enforcer in the face.

Why so little self-discipline? Because people cannot tell right from wrong. Right and wrong have been muddled for so long that a person does not know he has done anything wrong. "I've ridden my motorbike the wrong way down this street before and nobody ever fined me. Now you're actually going to fine me? Have you nothing better to do, are you 50 yuan short?!" — and then the hands go up. So at this point we need to be clear about a basic piece of common sense: only an autonomous society can have the capacity for self-government; only citizens with that capacity can be self-disciplined citizens; and only self-disciplined citizens connect to a well-ordered society — and it is a well-ordered society that supports the rule-of-law state which both the 18th and 19th Party Congresses singled out. Without that healthy fit, controlling society by policy arrangement alone will not work. Social control of that kind can only be called suppression, not governance; compliance in words, not conviction. Conviction shows itself in action.

A tightly controlled society may be a society with fire running underground. Because the fire is underground, you do not know where it will erupt. Because the fire is underground, you cannot predict how bad the eruption will be. You ought to give society a pressure valve it can use at any time. How wide we open that valve, how much social anger gets let out — that we can calculate, or at least estimate. Social management run this way stays on a healthy track. Without the valve, society may be pressed down until people no longer strive to get on or to stand out, no longer even wish to step in for fairness, let alone act to defend it. You may think that makes for obedient citizens, but because of the long repression the temper inside them has been building up like fire underground, and once it erupts the situation may be past controlling. The recent case of Iran makes this plain: who would have expected that in a theocratic state, all of a sudden, millions of people would be protesting and marching in the big cities? Nobody on any side saw it coming. China must at all costs avoid a governing tragedy of the Iranian kind.

When Public Life Is Missing, Collective Life Takes Its Place — Square Dancing, for Instance

Wang Xiaoyu, Associate Professor, Department of Chinese, Tongji University

Having public space is a good thing, but a new problem may be emerging: many people already live in a virtual world and no longer feel any need to look for public life in the real one. A common scene now is friends meeting for a meal and not talking; people going to a lecture and seeming uninterested in it, each holding a phone instead, taking photos, scrolling Moments or playing games.

The younger generation still, who have had virtual space since childhood, may even feel physical space is a separate world. The gap keeps widening into what we call a parallel world. I was talking with a friend recently about danmu, the comments that scroll across a video; this friend spends a lot of time following the virtual world of people born after 2000. I watch danmu too, but only after my friend explained it did I realize how many layers it has: who can post which kind of comment, who can see which kind — many gradations. What I usually see turns out to be only the surface. Danmu is a tiny detail, but the one detail shows how far apart the generations are.

Looking at it from the human side, I think public life has to be a necessity. Whether you start with Aristotle or with the old Chinese phrase "grouping together without forming factions," human beings have a social nature. I do not fully agree with "withdrawing from the crowd to live alone"; it easily ends in plain atomization. Plutarch has an essay on the question, Is "Live Unknown" a Wise Precept? Of course I also understand a person's passive retreat under heavy pressure. I only think there is no need to describe that passive retreat as some transcendent ideal state.

A republican sort of public life ought to be treated as a necessity, but enjoying that necessity is sometimes very hard, because a rich public life presupposes rich social space and rich social organization. Square dancing by old people often becomes a topic of argument. So long as it does not disturb anyone, I have nothing against it. But why has square dancing become one of the few options old people have?

When public life is scarce, collective life is bound to take its place. Both public life and collective life have more than one participant, but there are basic differences between them. Public life is open to the outside and allows differences inside it; collective life puts more weight on uniformity and can at times shut people out. A fully atomized individual life is almost impossible, so when public life is missing, collective life rises. And if someone has no interest in collective life, he may go into the virtual world instead.

I do not mean to write off the internet; the internet has made public life more convenient. Since around 2000 it has made it possible for us to find like-minded people across geographic boundaries. Before that, any connection with other people had to have a real-world basis, usually being from the same town or the same school — but those ties were closed, communities of place rather than of interest or value. So the internet offers the chance to seek out communities of interest and value beyond the limits of geography.

Even with the internet, public life remains scarce; without the element of social organization it is still hard to form a more general public space. Besides square dancing, for instance, old people could ease the loneliness of their free time by taking part in charitable work — but that does not seem to be what is happening.

Still, the absence of public life cannot be blamed entirely on the shortage of public space. If you are used to everyone hugging a phone when friends get together, you might also ask whether the absence of public life has something to do with you.

Rule by "No One," or Anonymous Rule, Is What Marks Bureaucratic Rule

Hong Tao, Professor, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University

The important mark of bureaucratic rule, in Hannah Arendt's phrase, is "rule by nobody." The phrase is not new with her; Marx and Weber both pointed this out before. On the surface, openness is what characterizes bureaucratic politics: the authorities have public signboards, public rules and public procedures, which makes this modern form of politics look thoroughly aboveboard, and it takes pains to look that way. But unlike the frankly secret politics of traditional rule, the secret politics of bureaucratic rule lives side by side with its openness. The whole operation looks like a set of procedures, like a production line, running by the rules — but this is a machine running, which is to say that no individual inside it has any substantive connection to what it does; each of them is, in effect, irrelevant to it. Nobody is responsible for the machine's actions and their consequences; more precisely, the only thing responsible is the machine itself. Even the lowest-level operator of this machine will tell you that everything he does comes from an order issued at the top. The one thing a bureaucrat can be held to account for is breaking the machine's rules (corruption, say); as for anything wrong with the machine itself, there is no possibility of anyone being held responsible.

Its operation is therefore anonymous. If someone asks: who is doing this, who decided it? The only answer can be: no one. The secrecy of bureaucratic rule lies in the fact that nobody can get near its real source. If the public has a demand, no one will answer, no one will pay it any attention, because it has nothing to do with any particular person. This is a machine that runs on its own. It has countless rules and procedures, and those rules and procedures are an invisible wall, enough to keep anybody out.

The whole bureaucratic organization is a system heavy with intermediaries; the great majority of people inside it do nothing but pass orders down or reports up. They do not know where the commands they receive came from, or what their real intent or meaning is, and so they do not know what their own actions really mean. Yet this thoroughly blind group is society's backbone and elite.

Politics ancient and modern differ. Ancient rule was a performance: the real ruler's greatest fear was not being seen, not being recognized as the real ruler. Modern rule, especially in this bureaucratic form, is anonymous: the real ruler's greatest fear is being seen.

So the hiddenness of bureaucratic rule goes hand in hand with its open procedures and open rules. It is a magic trick performed right under our eyes. What bureaucratic rule accomplishes is a transformation: politics becomes routine business, public business becomes private business, rule becomes neutral, technical administration, and an argument over values becomes a public-order incident. The police and the security guard become the only political presence the public ever meets, and so the only political question left is the question of order. On the surface, order-ism is bureaucratic rule's one and only ideology.

To understand bureaucratic rule there is one man you cannot avoid: Kafka. The Trial, The Castle and his other novels describe bureaucratic rule to the bone. He showed not only that the source of bureaucratic rule is forever out of reach, and that rule is woven into daily and private life, but that as bureaucratic power seeps into every area of life, every part of society reproduces the spirit of bureaucracy.

In a Society Ruled by Bureaucrats, Bureaucratic Power Becomes Human Fate

Hong Tao, Professor, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University

Bureaucratic organization is a machine, and in modern society an enormous one. The man at the very top of the machine issues an order: does he know the consequences? Issuing an order is easy, because responsibility never comes into it. The people in the middle and at the bottom who receive the order may add a push of their own or work it in some other way, but either way they need not answer for it, since they merely received orders. The public, the target group, are the ones who bear it. And though they bear everything, none of it has anything to do with them. You do not want to bear it? You want to resist? You can only resist the whole machine. And if you do, the whole machine starts up against you. In ancient times it was not hard for the public to know the particular cause of their suffering; they knew whom to resist. Under bureaucratic rule the cause is made objective and general, and the public loses its object, its target. Who is exercising power, who is abusing it, who is doing the harm and the killing? The answer: no one. Ancient times had tyrants, but a tyrant could rouse the courage of resolute men. Today there are only rules, procedures and rule-following staff behind desks. What is there to do but endure? You want to lay blame — on whom? From the top of this machine to the bottom, not one person has anything to do with your accusation. You want to resist — then you are resisting the whole state, or else killing innocents at random, because there is no single person to answer for what happened to you.

A society ruled by bureaucrats develops along two opposed lines: on one side the bureaucratic machine grows stronger and stronger, and on the other the society of ordinary people turns to sand and the people themselves grow weaker. Wherever bureaucratic power reaches, it breaks up the spontaneous, self-governing life-world of the people; human relations are destroyed, and people who were once organically joined are cut loose from their social bonds and become atoms.

And so that this de-organicized society will not turn wholly to sand, bureaucratic power then puts all of it under bureaucratic machinery. Through this breaking and rebuilding, society completes its bureaucratization. The old relations in which people lived and grew together become relations of power: command and obedience. This society has only one kind of organization, the bureaucratic organization, and no social organization independent of it; every social organization is either its appendage or its offshoot.

The strength of bureaucratic power, then, lies not only in itself but in the weakening of the people, because the individual has been robbed of his social bonds. At that point, if a person does not want to enter the command-and-obedience system of power, all that is left is to become an isolated atom. So everyone works, formally or informally, to find a place inside that system. Only one's relation to this machine bears directly on one's survival. Relations with other people no longer matter; only the relation with the machine matters. People face the machine warily, watch what they say and do, and take great care never to offend it, never even to disturb it. That is how each of them preserves his temporary survival and safety. There is no better way to turn people into atoms than to bureaucratize their society.

No age has ever seen so wide a gap between the strength of the rulers and the strength of the ruled. Today's bureaucrats are professional and technical people: well educated, highly credentialed, highly capable, widely informed, good with words. They are the elite, the meritorious, high-end and polished — is it not entirely proper that they should rule? And what does the ordinary person have? At most he is credited with kindness and goodness, which is treated as an excuse for weakness and incompetence. The gap is that wide, and bureaucrats share no flesh-and-blood tie with ordinary people — bureaucracy requires shedding all personal feeling — while their power, their office, has nothing to do with ordinary people either. Why should they spare a thought for them? Set against these dull and useless creatures, what reason have they not to treat ordinary people as ants, as weeds, as trash?

They also have vast organizations, force both visible and invisible, a cloak of invisibility. And ordinary people? Under total surveillance that leaves not the smallest gap, they are entirely transparent, cut off from any substantive social relation: no clan to belong to, no neighbors, no friends who share their lives — this solitary existence, unable to form a community of its own, belonged in ancient times to slaves. Every voice they have can be shut off at any time, anywhere, with no explanation given. In what earlier age did so lopsided a balance of force ever appear? What reason is there not to let these high-end elites do as they please with the low-end population?

In those extreme cases — which are not exceptions at all — we see that when helpless, pitiable people can do nothing but pour gasoline over themselves, the men carrying out orders simply stand and watch, unmoved. Because carrying out orders is their job. Might makes right: is there a better explanation than that?

In a society under bureaucratic rule, everything develops toward the greatest possible safety for the rulers — but their safety is not the safety of ordinary people. Ordinary people are like prisoners stripped naked in front of the guards, except that they cannot even see the guard. One side has everything; the other can be stripped of everything at any moment. One is so safe and so strong; the other so weak and so helpless. In the face of all this, what more can be said? Saying it amounts to saying nothing, because what one faces is bureaucratic power.

3. The Government Cannot Treat Secular Society as an Alien Force — A Way Out

If Only One Voice Is Left, Society Will Fall Out of Balance

Guo Yuhua, Professor, Department of Sociology, Tsinghua University

Forty years into reform and opening, why is the thinking still that of the planned economy? This is a fundamental question. The government cannot do things this way. Only after the damage is done — people with nowhere to live, freezing without heat, or half their homes torn down and everyone left with no idea which way is up — only then does a document or a notice come out, saying what? That the people's heating must not be affected, that the people's homes must not be left cold and their hearts must not be chilled. Where were you before? Isn't this a bit late? These were things you should have thought of. What exactly is it that you put first?

So I think this has to be solved at the root. Even today I think it is still China's most fundamental question: government is in essence a form of power, so what exactly is the relationship among power, the market and society? And where does ruling the country by law actually show up? None of these are narrow, particular questions like the heating question, the urban-construction question, the shop-signage question. Behind all of those is a structural problem completely out of balance, a structural contradiction. What I keep saying is that in a society — not a highly developed one, just a normal one — power, market and society should stand in a relatively balanced relationship; the three should be able to cooperate, to work together, to complement one another, and also to check and balance one another. Only then can a society be called reasonably normal.

Right now it amounts to one power dominating everything, holding everything, deciding everything. Power interferes in the market and leaves society no space at all. When ordinary people have opinions and grievances, you have to give them a channel to express them, some way to speak up for their own rights and protect them. If none of that space is left, society's space is squeezed down to nothing. How, then, can society be good? How can it be harmonious? Once only one voice is left, once one power dominates alone, that society is bound to be badly out of balance, and big trouble is bound to follow. But the government has always worked on this same thinking. If we are talking about ruling the country by law, is the government under the law? Is the party under the law? That is the basic relationship.

If we are talking about ruling the country by law, the constitution and the laws have to be the highest standard. They ought to be supreme. But right now the constitution and the laws are not supreme. If they are not supreme, trouble is bound to arise. That is to say, the law governs one group of people and cannot govern another — cannot govern a very small group. It becomes a tool by which a tiny minority rules and punishes the majority. In that case, where does your legitimacy come from? So it really comes down to this fundamental question.

The reach of this control, of this power, has already grown so wide that it has no boundary. Power needs boundaries. Fundamentally speaking, why should there be a government at all? Why should there be rulers? Whether you say "put people first," or "serve the people," or, in academic language, "supply the public with public goods and public services" — that is your reason for existing. If that is not the reason, then what is?

Power, Market and Society Should Each Do Their Own Job; the Government Should Get Over Its Fear of Society

Guo Yuhua, Professor, Department of Sociology, Tsinghua University

To solve the problem at the root, the government has to step forward, the state has to act. No matter how impressive an organization is, no matter how much it does, it cannot do this on its own. So I think Love Save Pneumoconiosis has done especially well, given how hard this work is, and has pushed things along fairly successfully. But the other organizations? It is hard to find any that have got this far. They too have walked a very hard road, held down at first, as if they all had some hidden motive. But if you cover your eyes and refuse to look, do these problems stop existing? Those migrant workers are dying in extreme pain, family after family collapsing — can't you see it? Isn't this exactly what the government should be doing? Isn't it your responsibility? What are you doing?

So the logic here seems to me very simple. I have said it before: all under heaven belongs to all the people under heaven; a city belongs to the people who live in it. If there were no ordinary people, what would a government be for? If you take no care of people's livelihoods, what use is a capital city? These fundamental questions cannot be turned upside down. In China now, none of these relationships has been sorted out properly; a great many of them are badly tangled.

Power, market and society should each do their own job and keep to their own part, and then work with one another, cooperate with one another, and also check and balance one another. That is a reasonably normal relationship. The market, for instance, has its own laws of operation, and there the government must not intervene by administrative means. But the government is responsible for protecting a sound market system. It cannot be referee and player at once. You have to guarantee that the market can run fairly and justly, so that people can carry out economic exchange and economic activity. You have to guarantee that system. Right now there is no such system — they will not even admit the legitimacy of private property. That is a huge problem. It is the same with society: the government always treats society as an alien force. But look at the more developed countries; society is in fact a very positive and effective institutional arrangement that lets people live reasonably well.

A society that is spontaneous, self-organized and capable of governing itself is something every country needs. Society is a way for citizens to organize themselves. Once organized, it can win welfare for itself, protect its own rights, and give itself a space to speak. For the state, all of that is positive, all of it good. To insist instead on seeing it as a wholly alien force, and to cut it down the moment it shows its head, is simply wrong.

We have been talking about this for ten years now. We began saying it very early and have kept saying it, and the proposition we put forward then was that the government must get over its fear of society. You treat society as a negative force, an opposing force, a hostile force; you put it in that position and develop a fear of it, as if the moment people organize they are plotting to rebel against you and bring you down. That is not how it works. You need to build a constructive, two-way relationship with it.

Right now the market is not a full market economy; it is still a market economy dominated and led by power. Nor is society a spontaneous, autonomous society; it is a society restricted, controlled and squeezed. That leaves only the government dominating alone. Can such a society possibly be harmonious?

(More reporting to come, updated as it goes.)

People interviewed for this report:

Graphics: Feng Xiuxia

Banner image from Flickr; long lead image from Flickr.