Bao Tong: Of Kings and Bandits

Many bloggers around the region have been covering the “nail house” phenomenon which has been sweeping through Chinese cyberspace, and which the official media are now forbidden to cover, although bloggers are filling the gap. Essentially, nail houses are property holders who refuse to sell out to developers, and in the above video clip, this Chongqing homeowner tells reporters that she will not vacate her home, which now stands isolated in a vast construction site. (via CDT)

Directly related to these themes of property rights and citizen journalism is this essay, which forms the second part of Bao Tong’s commentary on the passing of the Property Law of the People’s Republic of China. It was broadcast on RFA’s Mandarin service Friday March 30, 2007. You can read the original essay in Chinese here:

The recognition of private property rights lies at the core of Roman civil law. Liu Bang, rebelling against the Qin dynasty, issued a decree specifying the three main crimes: theft, murder and causing injury. This decree explicitly forbade these three crimes, and also recognised the private rights of individual citizens. In 1946, Clause 8 of the Constitution of the [Kuomintang] Republic of China guaranteed the property rights of the people. But Mao Zedong wasn’t having any of it…

In January 1949, riding high on the back of his victory in the civil war, he sounded the death knell for this provision, with campaigns entitled “Abolish the Bogus Constitution” and “Abolish the Fake Rule of Law”. But in spite of this, Clause 3 of the “collective guiding principle”, passed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party after extensive political consultation in September the same year, still guaranteed the existence of “the right to private property of the workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie and ethnic minorities”, extending a promise of “protection”.

But this protection only lasted for three years. It was abruptly terminated in 1953, when Mao tore up the collective guiding principle of the Constitution, replacing it with a “Communist Manifesto” and his “Brief Study Course in the History of the Communist Party”. In it, he mentioned “the road through the transitional stage of socialism”, and the concepts “state-owned” and “collectively owned” were to be employed in a “bureaucratic socialism”. Too right! Mao Zedong did indeed implement a bureaucratic socialism. This drew a clear gap between the workers and peasants, and the private capitalists, and nationalized any privately held property, any individual rights, and any private point of view with one stroke of the pen. Right up until his death, Mao grumbled about “capitalist legal rights”, arguing that money should be declared a target of the revolution.

Now, the fifth plenary session of the 10th National People’s Congress has passed the Property Law, apparently once more bringing back recognition of private property rights. One move abolished private property rights: the other re-establishes them. I have already called this move “going back to the beginning”.

Even on the surface of things, it becomes clear that a very special sort of morality and a very special sense of comedy are required to continue to shout about, and even to be moved to tears by, the concepts of “A great victory for socialist reform”, or “The self-perfection of socialism” after the sacrifice of 80 million lives.

But this insight doesn’t prevent us from penetrating a little deeper into the matter. The Communist Manifesto says: “The entire theory of the Communist Party can be summarised in a single phrase: the annihilation of the private ownership of property.” This phrase is not to be taken lightly; it certainly isn’t of the same order as the other political opinions and theories which abound. We should be very clear that this principle has been the driving imperative behind the entire international communist movement for more than 100 years now; the Alpha and the Omega of “scientific socialism”. Enshrined in the founding documents of the Chinese Communist Party and the Constitution, it constitutes a guiding, fundamental principle by which all Chinese people, whether within the Party or without, must abide.

Now, the Chinese Communist Party is regretting this move. Now, no longer does it aim to abolish the private ownership of property, no longer is Marx one of the four guiding principles which must be upheld, nor, even, is socialism. And the principle of one-party rule and the dictatorship of the proletariat are not enough by themselves to grasp the broad reality in which we find ourselves. I don’t know whether the 17th Party Congress is planning to grit its teeth and hold on regardless, or whether it has a counter-measure up its sleeve.

Mao Zedong’s time-honoured maxims that “Political power must be seized by force; only war can solve the problem”, and “All political change around the whole world must come from the barrel of a gun” have been superseded. They will no longer stand. What to do? Do we carry on writing these things down in books and feeding them to our children from an early age? Or is it time they were consigned to a museum? The barrel of a gun is much like the knife or the lance, or any other weapon. Its usefulness is limited to the destruction or oppression of people, to terror. But it can’t even reform itself. How can it possibly have the capacity to reform anyone else?

If indeed it is the case that the great and glorious victory of the Chinese Communist Party was really only that it substituted the one-party rule of the Nationalist Party for the one-party rule of the Communist Party, then it certainly won’t be enough to change the system of ownership, or to change society.

Throughout the whole of Chinese history, all the characters, great and small, who believe in the superstition of the barrel of the gun–from Mao Zedong to Chiang Kai-shek, to the Northern Warlords and the Boxer Rebellion, from Yang Xiuqing and Hong Xiuquan, to Zhang Xianzhong, Li Zicheng, Zhu Yuanzhang and Huang Chao–not one of them has succeeded in changing the pattern of their forefathers. Instead, they have been condemned to repeating version after version, amid cycles of violence and bloodshed, of the same drama, enacting without change the rise and fall of kings and bandits.

Bao Tong
Beijing, March 2007

Also available: an English translation of the first part of Bao Tong’s commentary on the Property Law. 

Via China Digital Times, the law firm Lehman, Lee and Xu has done an English translation in full of the Property Law, available here (PDF).