Opinion Soul-searching in China

The official Chinese press finally confirmed last month that,indeed,many restaurants in China had been using “gutter oil” — recycled cooking oil collected in trash bins — in food preparations. Such oil could cause cancer and other health problems. But the practice is said to be widespread.

In June this year,a 20-year-old woman reportedly employed by the Chinese Red Cross was shown,in a series of pictures posted online,flaunting Gucci handbags,wearing expensive designer clothes,and driving a Maserati,an Italian-made luxury car.

All of these incidents sparked public outrage over callousness,dishonesty and corruption. They also raised profound questions about the issue of morality in a society experiencing unprecedented and disorienting socio-economic changes.

While it is tempting for many Chinese to blame the insidious influence of raw capitalism and crass commercialism in corrupting China’s public morality,much more powerful forces are at play here. Obviously,for-profit motives can drive individuals in any society to immoral,even criminal,conduct. And unrestrained pursuit of materialism can also distort a society’s values and make its members self-centred and indifferent to the needs and well-being of others.

But the task of maintaining public morality in a rapidly modernising society is further complicated by political factors. In the Chinese case,it is impossible to talk about the decline of public morality without also discussing the role of its one-party political system.

As observed in any society,public morality can be irreparably harmed by the corruption of a country’s ruling elites. Whenever these elites engage in cheating,looting and lying,their conduct inevitably sets a bad example for the rest of society. In such a case,the deterioration of public morality originates in the corruption of the ruling elites. From this perspective,we can easily see the connection between rising official corruption and declining morality in China. A good place to test this theory is the Chinese press,which,despite censorship,is full of shocking tales of greed and debauchery featuring Chinese government officials at all levels.

Public morality is also impossible if there is no public trust. In a one-party state,public trust is perpetually in short supply. It is well-known that authoritarian regimes cannot survive without suppressing truth or embellishing their accomplishments. In this respect,the Chinese government has been quite skilful,though not always successful,in controlling the flow of information. Its officials habitually conceal their failings and even public health emergencies (such as the outbreak of dangerous contagious diseases like SARS and melamine-tainted baby formula),causing the Chinese public to lose confidence in their government. Worse still,cheating and lying by officials seem to have helped them get ahead. A good example here is fake academic credentials claimed by many Chinese officials. Because the Communist Party has a policy of promoting more well-educated party members,this has encouraged countless officials to burnish their resumes with fraudulent credentials. Most popular are advanced graduate degrees received as part-time students or through correspondence programmes. As a result,many Chinese officials proudly affix PhD to their titles even though they never really earned the degree. The practice has become so widespread and blatant that it is now a running joke in China. But the damage to public trust has already been done.

Finally,authoritarian repression undermines public morality in many ways. Symbolically,the Chinese government’s rejection of human rights as a universal value and its violation of its citizens’ constitutional rights send a demoralising message to Chinese society. When intrinsic human values such as dignity,equality,rights and security are attacked as Western and inapplicable to China,public morality becomes,at least indirectly,devalued. In addition,the lack of the freedom of the press in China means that the Chinese themselves cannot carry out an honest and open debate on the causes of the decline of public morality. In the recent discussion of the collapse of public morality in China,nobody dared to criticise the authoritarian nature of the current political system as a major contributing factor. Of course,muzzling the press is not the only sin committed by a one-party state in this morality play. More reprehensible is its routine persecution of activists who champion causes of social justice. For example,the Chinese government has jailed or exiled activists who have been trying to help AIDS/ HIV patients who contracted the virus because of local government negligence and corruption. It has imprisoned,on false charges,a blind lawyer who fought for the rights of women who were forced to undergo abortions by local officials eager to meet their family planning targets. Only days ago,Chinese tax authorities demanded that Ai Weiwei,perhaps China’s most famous contemporary artist and a defiant critic of the Communist Party,pay $2.4 million in back taxes — mainly because he angered the party by calling for a thorough investigation of the collapse of hundreds of shoddy school buildings during the earthquake in Sichuan province in 2008.

So at the heart of China’s crisis of morality is a political malaise. Revitalising public morality would be impossible without fundamentally reforming China’s public institutions and how the country is governed.

The writer is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in the US,express@expressindia.com