[MUSIC] One of the ten points that I had made at the beginning about critical preconditions for the emergence of democracy, was the role of the middle class and the emergence of the middle class. But one of the things I would argue, is that in fact China's middle class won't play very much of a force for democratization. And I'll explain to you why. Originally the base of support of the Communist Party was termed as termed as the alliance of peasants and workers. But after privatization in the 1990s, Jiang Zemin decided to change the social base of the CCP, and he put forward this idea of the Three Representatives, which became his contribution to Marxist thought. All the leaders liked to do that. And what he did was, he shifted so that the primary group, the first group that the CCP represents is really the advanced social forces. Scientists, white collar workers, the urban middle class, capitalists, and managers. And the broad masses, which had the workers and soldiers and peasants, which had been the key group for the Communist Party before that. Now flips down to third place. Jiang Zemin also revised the Chinese Communist Party constitution in 2002, to allow capitalists to join the Communist Party, which is quite ironic given the fact that the role of the Communist Party is to carry out a dictatorship over the capitalists. But in fact, even though capitalists were allowed to join the party, only 22% of the capitalists in China joined the CCP. And I would argue that that's because, and as the following table will show, most of the capitalists or the new capitalists in China were already in the CCP. So, as this table will show, right? This is surveys done over four periods, 91, 97-8, 2000, and 2002. And what it does is, it asks private entrepreneurs in each of these periods, what their prior occupation was. So this will give you the background of, where did these entrepreneurs come out of? Did they come out of the working class, the countryside, from the state sector, where did they come out of? And, I really want to highlight this section right in here, where we can see that in 1997, 1998, just as the privatization of state owned enterprises, the small state owned enterprises was underway. 23.5% of the private entrepreneurs reported that their previous job had been a government or administrative official. So it's very clear that almost a quarter of the new entrepreneurs were coming out of the government sector. And by 2000, two years after the big privatization, and it was still continuing long after that in 1990 to 2000. By 2000, if you combine these two numbers right here, we get 48%. So almost half of all the private entrepreneurs in China reported that their previous job had been a manager in a state factory or a collective enterprise or a government official. Now my argument would be, these people are not very democratic necessarily. These are people who've come out of the party hierarchy, who've been party members, and who have been able to take over factories, that in fact previously have belonged to the state. Now, the CCP's social contract with these people also was very strong. We find that in the cities, people are afraid of the floating population. That the middle class is much more supportive of order. And I'll show you that in a second. The social contract between the party and the urban middle class also gives the middle class cars, apartments, as we've seen around the world, they travel abroad. But part of the deal is, you get these goodies, you get these cookies but no political reform. And you can understand that private entrepreneurs really fear organized workers and many of these middle class people, now middle class, had worked with the CCP for a very, very long time. And were engaged in what David Wank calls a kind of symbiotic clientelism, where they are closely aligned with the local party officials. And many of them were invited to join the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and the National People's Congress, and they've done that. Now, what I'm going to show you now is a series of three tables, which layout key aspects of democracy and freedom. Each of these tables makes a general statement, and we will see, for at least some of them, these statements, the response. We broke it down into, actually I didn't do it, but. He has this table, and he broke it down into two groups, the middle class, and other classes. And what this will definitely show you is that the middle class is far less democratic than the other classes. And the other classes could include workers, and peasants, and maybe students, and other people. All right, so the first statement says, In general demonstrations should not be allowed because they become disorderly and disruptive. Now, in terms of people who disagree, only 22%, 23% of the middle class disagree, but 35%, getting close to 36% of the other classes disagree. Therefore, they would say we should allow these protests, it's okay. Harmony of the community will be disrupted if people form organizations outside the government. Most of the middle class agree with this, right? Only 23.5% of them disagree, whereas 37.4% of the other classes disagree with the statement, and therefore that's a strong vote. Over one-third of the people in China believe that these organizations should be allowed, and this view shows that they support the development of what must be seen as civil society organization. Table number two that I would show you, Support for Participatory Norms. Government leaders are like the head of a family. We should all follow their decisions and don't need to participate in government decision making. In other words, we don't need to participate. Disagree, 25% of the middle class. But 33.7% of the other classes, so clearly they are more democratic. They want to participate in larger numbers than the middle class. Still, it's only 34% so there's still 66% who don't think that it's necessary to participate. But still, relative to these two groups, if we're looking at these two social classes or two groups, it's clear that the other classes are more democratic. Measures to promote political reform should be initiated by the party in government, not by ordinary people like me. I like this one a lot. And boy, a lot of the other classes don't like this statement, right? 40.1% of them disagree with this statement. In other words, they should be allowed, ordinary people like me, should be allowed to promote political reform, whereas a large percentage of the middle classes agree with this statement and only 28.1% disagree, right? because it's percent disagree. The last one is support for competitive elections. And this statement first says, Government officials at various levels should be selected by multi-candidate elections. 70% of the middle class agrees. 71.2% of the other classes. But these differences are not statistically significant. So on this question, there's really no major difference between the middle class and the other classes. But on this one, this statement, there is a big difference, right? Competition among several parties in the election of government leaders should not be allowed. Disagree with that. The middle class strongly agree with the statement that this competition should be allowed. Only a small 25% of them disagree, whereas among the other classes, 38% getting close to 39% disagree. So, that would mean that 61% of them agree with the idea that we should have multi-party elections and that that would be okay.
