Face.

Today I read an Op-Ed on the New York Times web page written by the Nobel Committee justifying it's selection for this year.  Specifically, they were responding to non-Chinese government criticism of the award, and said that something along the lines of, if we don't speak out, then governments will think it is okay to treat political speech like this.  I see where they are coming from. It falls along with my personal beliefs, and the poem about "First they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist..." and everything which stemmed from that.

However in this case, there is an argument for the other side. As my Professor Tim Lang would put it, they are "thinking like Americans" or in this case, Westerners. Too often Westerners don't seem to consider the way that the political system works in China. While the government publicly announces policy decisions and seems to have a united front, there are always at least two sides to an issue, with the stronger faction winning the decision of what to say to the outside world or how to act. This was the case during the 1989 protests. The reformer faction led by Zhao Ziyang was overpowered by Li Peng's faction when the protests lasted too long and seemed to be threatening the government. The reformers had been in power for years and had been gradually implementing change, but outside pressure shifted the balance of power and after that there was a regression of political speech.


Also, because the government is a one party system which does not allow direct elections or protest, it needs to allow civil discontent in China to be released another way, such as against foreign insults or slights. There are frequent protests here against for example Japan which can flare up when provoked by outside comments or actions. When the public is not focused on Japan, Japanese-Chinese or Chinese-Taiwanese relations can be content with the status quo, leading to much safer geopolitical stability in the region.  But when the chinese government feels like it has to save face from it's people, that's when it starts to act in aggressive and counter-intuitive ways.

Face is so incredibly important here it's hard for a westerner to wrap their head around it. Like me. Chinese people can be extraordinarily blunt, talking  about weight or asking questions like "do you have a chinese boyfriend" (which I get asked all the time) but when it comes to embarrassing someone they'd rather die.  And I've been finding that this concept extends from internal Chinese society to the political sphere as well. We're learning in our business class about how you cannot correct your boss because it will make him/her lose face. And I think some of foreign policy stems from this fear of losing face, or 丢人。

Due to the recent letter published by former heads of Party Newspaper mouthpieces and former politicians, it seems like there is a power struggle going on right now in the party. The Propoganda Department, headed by the number 5 man in the CCP (which makes the entire department immune to the orders of all but five people in the government) has been censoring more and more since 2008, when Charter '08 was first published.   Their actions don't necessarily represent the views of the entire government body, there just isn't anyone powerful enough to make them stop.  The outside critics of the Nobel acclamation are probably  thinking that without international pressure uniting the CCP to save face to the Chinese people, there would continue to be such a power struggle, in which reformers could prevail, allowing a gradual increase in the amount of information people have access to or even leading to the people having an actual say in their government.

Chinese people more than anything fear chaos. Many now elderly chinese who were repressed during the Cultural Revolution by Mao Zedong's reforms still consider him a great leader, because he was both able to united China by ending a civil war which had gone on for decades and liberate china from the unfair treaty system with imperialistic powers such as the united states. This applies today too.  The government uses the fear of "chaos from disorder" to legitimize it's rule, and the majority of the middle class is fully in accordance with this reasoning.  As such, under the current system of startling economic growth, the only way reform could happen would be from gradual change as more worldly and educated individuals fill the ranks of the CCP leadership. We as westerners must remember that Mao Zedeng was a dictator, Deng XiaoPeng was a first among equals, and Jiang Zemen and Hu Jintao are now simply leaders of a coalition.  The presidency does not have the same powers that the Presidency has in the United States (actually that position itself has no power at all, it is symbolically held by Hu because he has the position of General Party Secretary and Chair of the Central Military Commission, the real positions of power in the CCP). And it is factions within the party which have the inside influence to change the government's policy.

So the critics of the prize are probably thinking that the letter recently released would have had a much greater effect on policy towards speech if the government wasn't trying to save face from the recent Nobel disclosure.