John Kampfner on Freedom

You begin with a book on China – Smoke and Mirrors by Pallavi Aiyar – which is often criticised in the West for denying liberty and human rights.

It is a matter of endless fascination for Indians and for Chinese and for others like myself to ask the great Chindia question: to what extent are these two countries similar and to what extent are they very different? Aiyar is a young Indian foreign correspondent based in Beijing. For me, it was fascinating to get a perspective on China from a non-Anglo Saxon and non-European perspective, yet from someone who is extraordinarily wedded to notions of Indian democracy and democracy in general.

There is one particular observation in this book that I found particularly appealing, and that is the different interpretations of political accountability. It goes roughly along these lines: in India political parties derive their legitimacy from victory at the ballot box and Indian elections are a boisterous and at the same time a wonderfully vivacious and refreshing exercise of democratic will. The problems, she says, then start immediately, in fact the day after. Indian governments then put their feet up, many politicians are on the make and put their hands in the till. Meanwhile, delivery of the most basic public services only continues in the most desultory way.

There is a pact between the Indian middle class and the business and political elite – the middle class pretty much opts out of everything in the public sector. Pretty much everything is only delivered to the rest of society. Whether it is your electric generator, your water supply, education, health, everything you get in the middle-class world is provided for you outside the state sector. And if anybody from the state gives you any hassle you just bribe them and they go away.

Meanwhile you leave the politicians alone and they leave you alone and the country remains in the absolutely abject state it is in in terms of public service delivery to everyone else. Aiyar compares that with the fact that at the same time notionally, and constitutionally, India is an extremely healthy democracy. There are obviously flaws – there are flaws in free expression, issues such as newspapers quite openly mixing advertorial with news, the descent of so much of Indian media into covering B and C list Bollywood and cricket celebrity. You are quite pushed to find hard news stories in the mainstream media. But yes, it is still healthy and the most populous democracy in the world – which is a cause for celebration in such a disparate country with so many different ethnicities and so much potential for combustibility.

She compares this version of legitimacy with China, where there are no elections, and the Chinese version of accountability is different. The ruling Chinese Communist Party has no democratic mandate, so it spends all its time seeking to produce the public services to keep a critical mass of the population sweet. In many ways it is the reverse of everything Indian. The Chinese pact is to keep the middle class and those that aspire to the middle class in increasing material comfort so that they don’t give the ruling party any hassle. That trade-off is at the heart of my book, and in a sense it is why the eight per cent growth target in 2009 at the height of the global financial crisis was so important. By fair means or foul, they had to make this target in order to keep the people confident that the country was continuing to grow – and all the predictions of social unrest faded away because the ruling elite managed to deliver material comfort. So hers is a very interesting analysis, and many of her points elided with my own theories about material comforts offsetting failures in democracy

So what of the infringements of liberty which we hear so much about: for example, internet censorship?

The key to controlling the message is controlling the internet: hence the Chinese being extremely exercised about what was appearing both before the Olympics and afterwards. And yet at the same time the Chinese have realised that you can’t turn the tap off completely – that’s the old ways of North Korea and Burma, it doesn’t work in a country of the size of China and it can’t work if you are seeking to ensure material comforts and to allow freedom of travel and all those sorts of things. This is the challenge of 21st century authoritarian states, which are different from 20th century totalitarian states.

It’s a constant push-pull in China: what you get away with on a Tuesday might not be what you get away with on the Wednesday. The Chinese have a real middle-class obsession with golf, and they call this out-of-bounds markers: if you hit the ball out of bounds you have to start again. But these out-of-bounds markers are quite indiscernible: how do you tell when there are markers and when there are none, and who decides whether and where they are? So (and this is the Singapore model, too) it is perfectly fine to criticise corruption in your local council: ‘Why haven’t they collected my rubbish and why are the roads in such a bad state? It must be because someone is on the take.’ But it is absolutely not fine to name somebody and it is certainly not fine to criticise the national government. There is this constant push-pull and it is kept deliberately vague so that people self-censor.

But yet it is utterly false to say that modern China is anything even resembling the Mao era. The conversations I had there were extremely candid and gossipy. People know roughly how far you can go but not clearly.

Does it not mean, though, that if people are testing boundaries all the time, that those boundaries get pushed further?

Not necessarily, the markers can be put back again. There was an assumption that when they pulled back freedoms during the build-up to the Olympics people would be happy just to draw in for patriotic purposes, not to humiliate the country for those six weeks in the expectation that afterwards the authorities would loosen up again.