Communist Party May Be Losing Its Grip : New Era of Disorder Emerges in China

When a river barge ran aground on a sand bar in Hunan province, hundreds of local villagers jumped on and stole everything they could from the cargo of clothing and medicine.

Afterward, authorities acknowledged that this was not an isolated incident. State property, they said, has been stolen “quite a few times.”

This was just one of the less-publicized events that have occurred in China in recent months. Some of the others:

-- The director of a leather factory in Henan province was stabbed to death by the husband of a woman he had fined and disciplined for poor job performance. The husband climbed over a wall into the factory director’s house and attacked the director and his wife.

-- As part of the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign to spread awareness of the rule of law, cadres in Anhui province helped to organize a series of classes on legal education--and broke the law themselves. The cadres, along with 32 local police and court officials, required people convicted of petty crimes to attend the law courses, then imposed heavy fines on those who missed class and pocketed some of the proceeds. In two townships, those who did not pay up were handcuffed, beaten and goaded with electric prods.

These are not isolated incidents. Examples of social disorder, instability and lawlessness are becoming increasingly commonplace in China these days, and this raises the question of whether the Communist Party is losing its grip.

China is gradually developing a system of government that might be called chaotic totalitarianism. It is a unique system in which the state has a hand in everything yet has the ability to control only a few things at a time.

Much of the rigid political structure set up with the help of the Soviet Union after the 1949 revolution remains intact. But old phenomena have re-emerged that call to mind the disorderly, seemingly ungovernable China of the Nationalists and of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Respect for Authority Declines

Corruption, theft and extortion are rampant. Every individual, family, work unit and government ministry looks out almost exclusively for itself. Respect for authority is minimal.

In theory, the state controls virtually everything. The government claims authority over almost every aspect of human life. It determines when its citizens will marry, when they will give birth, in what city they will live, whether and how they may travel, what housing and jobs they will be assigned.

There are party officials in every factory and neighborhood. In certain rare instances, when the government concentrates its resources, it can enforce its will with remarkable thoroughness, if not efficiency.

China is a country that still honors Josef Stalin and still views “the dictatorship of the proletariat” as a positive concept. Yet in practice the supposedly pervasive, all-knowing government finds it increasingly difficult to carry out its policies. The people regularly find ways to subvert these policies, to go over or around them. In many instances, lower-level officials either ignore or openly defy officials above them.

Inefficiency a Problem

“No matter who the leadership is in China these days, they can’t control things the way they used to,” University of Michigan Sinologist Michel S. Oksenberg has observed. “No matter what the policy is, the orders aren’t always carried out.”

Part of the problem is simply inefficiency. Government informants and spies can see everything, but only when their eyes are open. The cameras and wiretaps can record everything, but only when they are in working order.

China’s police officers are still feared, but these days they display a lack of discipline that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Not long ago, an American resident of Beijing was taking a Sunday morning walk with his wife when a member of the People’s Armed Police, standing at attention in front of an embassy building, smiled and said hello.

Surprised at the friendliness, the American stopped to talk. The uniformed policeman then put his hand in his pocket and asked, in English, the question with which foreigners in China are regularly besieged, “Change money?”

Legacy of Cultural Revolution

Another factor underlying the disorder is the continuing, lasting impact of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, which destroyed values and faith, uprooted much of the Chinese population and left an entire generation without adequate training or education.

Some of the tens of millions of Chinese who were beaten, imprisoned or sent to the countryside now do as they wish, realizing that whatever happens to them cannot be much worse than what has already happened.

To all this has been added the impact of the recent economic reforms. Curiously, the reforms put the government in an awkward political position: To the extent that the reforms succeed, they bring about a lessening of the party’s control, and to the extent that they fail, they produce frustration, disappointment and the cynical belief that nothing will ever change.

In rural areas, the reforms were successful, at least at the outset. The result has been to make peasants fervent believers in their right to be left alone. The party now complains that the peasants have returned to superstition, ancestor worship, lavish weddings, concubinage and other vices the party has long opposed.

Temples Restored

Hillsides in prosperous parts of the countryside are now dotted with white and brown graves, despite the party’s preference for cremation. Peasants pool their money to build or restore temples, and the party protests that the funds could be used in better ways.

In some instances, witches and sorcerers have returned to work in the countryside, promising magical rains, telling fortunes and exorcising demons. In one county in Sichuan province last summer, authorities estimated that 100,000 people burned joss sticks and offered sacrifices and prayed for rain.

“Pay attention to education on atheism in rural areas,” the party theoretical organ Red Flag warned rural cadres last fall. It noted that “as regards witches and other professionals in feudalistic superstition, they should be educated to reform themselves.”

Despite a law committing China to nine years of compulsory education, rural cadres have a hard time keeping young girls in school. The vice governor of Gansu province said not long ago that 157,000 children in his province were not attending school--80% of them girls.

“Rural girls over the age of 10 are the main domestic work force,” he said.

Family Planning Failing

Most seriously of all, the party is having increasing difficulty carrying out its family planning policy in the countryside. Seven years ago, the regime imposed a limit of one child per family, but it has proved easier to enforce in cities than in rural areas, where an extra child, particularly a male, means more help in the fields.

But over the past year or so enforcement in the countryside has become so lax that some provinces have recently admitted to a “partial loss of control” over family planning.

For example, Sichuan, China’s most populous province, has a population of 104 million, more than all but seven of the world’s countries, but in the early 1970s the rate of growth began to decline. In 1985, the rate was at its lowest ever, 8.2 per 1,000. Then, last year, for the first time in more than a decade, the growth rate increased, to 13.7 per 1,000. Sichuan had a bumper crop of babies, 1.86 million of them, up by a third from the previous year.

Part of the explanation was a sharp increase in women of child-bearing age. Yet that was not the only reason. According to Jiang Yi, vice chairman of the Sichuan Family Planning Commission, more than 500,000 of the new babies in Sichuan last year were born into families that already had one child, and “a few tens of thousands” were born into families with two children.

Pregnant Women Disappear

Some peasant women in Sichuan travel to remote areas in the neighboring province of Yunnan to have unauthorized children and then return home. In Zhuqiao township outside Chengdu, party secretary Li Shucheng said authorities are sometimes forced to send cars out in search of women who disappear after becoming pregnant.

In the cities, the effect of the economic reforms has been to foster a fast-buck, anything-goes climate. The already overpopulated cities are now swelling with large, floating populations of migrants--people who have come from the countryside to work temporarily in the construction industry or in the free markets. Security officials blame problems of urban crime on these transients, but they have been unable to halt the influx.

Although foreigners are rarely affected, thefts have become commonplace. In a few instances, mobs have made off with state property, like the goods on the barge in Hunan, or stolen goods from private entrepreneurs.

In June, it was reported that thieves had seriously damaged flood-prevention equipment at several places along the Yangtze and Yellow rivers. Copper and other metal was said to have been stolen from telephone lines, as well as forecasting equipment.

‘Great Watermelon Theft’

Beijing has been riveted this spring by “the great watermelon theft.” Over a 12-hour period, in broad daylight, a crowd of more than 100 street vendors stole almost 25 tons of melons from three farmers who had just arrived at the railroad station.

The farmers had brought the melons into Beijing from Guangdong province in South China. The vendors first tried to force the farmers to sell them the melons at low prices; when the farmers refused, the vendors simply took them. Authorities did nothing to stop them. Weeks later, after the incident had been reported in the press, authorities finally arrested those they said were the ringleaders.

Street fights have also become routine. It is rare these days to drive through a Chinese city without seeing at least one or two fights. Occasionally, bicyclists will square off after bumping into each other. More often, the fight is over money.

Any street fight immediately attracts a crowd, sometimes including policemen who decline to intervene. In Dalian last year, policemen stood by in a crowd of about 100 watching a bloody brawl between employees of a bread store and their customers. The fight ended, at least temporarily, when two Americans joined the spectators.

No Fights for Foreigners

“Hold it, there are foreign guests here,” one of the onlookers shouted.

The fights are not only in the streets. The party newspaper People’s Daily acknowledged last year that doctors and nurses had been beaten up at several hospitals. In some cases, the attackers were the relatives of patients who had died in the hospitals.

The sheer size of the crowds in the cities, and the inadequacy of crowd control measures, sometimes leads to disaster. Last year, 21 people were trampled to death in a town in Jiangsu province when a crowd of more than 100,000 surged forward to see the lanterns on display at a holiday festival. Two days later, 35 were killed in a similar stampede at a lantern festival in Zhejiang province.

In 1985, a fistfight broke out on an overloaded ferryboat carrying 238 people in the city of Harbin. When the crowd surged to one side of the ferry to watch the fight, the ferry capsized, and 161 people drowned.

Mental Illness Blamed

There have even been a few incidents of violence this year that the authorities have blamed on mental illness.

In March, two New Zealand tourists were sitting in a restaurant in Xian when a Chinese woman sat down next to them, reached into her handbag and pulled the pin of a hand grenade. The grenade exploded and 21 people were wounded, including the woman and the two tourists. Authorities said the woman was carrying a note saying she wanted to commit suicide because her husband was divorcing her.

In April, Liu Changshan, a male nurse at a mental hospital in Heilongjiang province, bought 13 pounds of explosive material from a quarry worker and set it off on a passenger train, killing 12 people, including himself, and injuring 47 others. Officials said he had been dismissed from his job because he attacked mental patients and had gone bankrupt when he tried to set up a private business.

To Americans living in a violence-prone society, such incidents may not sound so extraordinary. But in China, a nation with a longstanding fear of chaos, the lawlessness has greater political significance than it would in the United States.

Social Unrest Seen

Indeed, some foreign observers believe the street fights and seeming increase in violence raise the possibility that there might be an outbreak of social unrest in China. During last winter’s series of student demonstrations for democracy, authorities went to great lengths to make sure that factory workers did not join in the protests.

“Things in China may be better than they were, but people know that for the rest of their lives, they aren’t going to change very much,” one Western diplomat, a longtime China specialist, said recently.

“The Chinese leadership realizes this. They’re much more worried than we realize about this place turning into another Poland. Those student demonstrations last winter were really very minor, compared to what could be and might be in this country.”

For the time being, the likelihood of serious political unrest seems remote. In the countryside, peasants are enjoying the greatest prosperity they have had for centuries. In the cities, residents continue to splurge on new clothes and household goods, competing with one another to buy things they have coveted for decades.

Boom May Not Last

Yet many Chinese realize that this temporary boom will not go on forever. To prevent the economy from stagnating, authorities may well take unpopular measures. In the process, the party could reassert some of the power it has lost or given up.

In rural areas, the regime is already beginning to try to persuade peasants to pool their land and cultivate larger plots to increase slumping rice and wheat production. Even these modest efforts have aroused some fears among peasants of a return to the collectivist days of Mao Tse-tung’s communes.

In urban areas, authorities have been trying to reduce the levels of consumer spending and at the same time get acceptance of the need to keep on lifting price controls. Such measures present urban workers with the unhappy prospect of a new round of inflation.

Unpopular policies might be accepted more readily if the party’s prestige were as high as it was in the 1950s. But the party’s authority has eroded to the point where it is the butt of private jokes. A Shanghai school teacher remarked the other day, “Whenever a teacher works late at school, we say, ‘What are you trying to do, join the party?’ ”

Favoritism and Corruption

With its 44 million members, the party is still the largest organization holding political power in the world, but nowadays virtually every grass roots initiative the party takes seems to result in charges of favoritism and corruption.

This year, the regime began a new policy of having party cadres in the countryside sell sorely needed fertilizer and diesel fuel to peasants at low prices as a reward for growing grain. Within a matter of months, peasants began complaining that local cadres were channeling the fertilizer to their families and friends, using it to extract gifts from peasants, even selling it for profit.

In a front-page commentary in mid-June, the People’s Daily acknowledged that the fertilizer incident had raised the question “of whether or not our party still upholds the aim of wholeheartedly serving the people.”

“In some departments that directly serve the people, there is hardly anyone speaking for the peasants,” the newspaper said. “ . . . They always take the side that will protect their own departments’ interests and therefore, consciously or unconsciously, do many things that harm the peasants, to the point that they even want to get profits from the peasants.”

For a Communist Party that won its revolution because of the overwhelming support of the peasants, that was a shocking admission.