THE SOCIAL PROTEST «WITH CHINESE PARTICULARITY»: THE SHIFTING VECTOR

• Main Author: V. A. Korsun
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MGIMO University Press 2015-08-01
• Series: Vestnik MGIMO-Universiteta
• Subjects: confucian state steadiness; protest patterns; permanent revolution; burocratic capital; soviet model; aesop language; reforms from above; social protest potential; rotation; jinnee index; china way of corruption; petitions and claims; ethnic separatism; new leftists; web-culture; chinese dream; xi-li versus bo; patriot-traitor; umbrella revolution.
• Online Access: https://www.vestnik.mgimo.ru/jour/article/view/2868

The article analyzes current spiritual-political and socio-economic situation in postreform China with the emphasis on newest tendencies in the social feeling and conscience. Such a gigantic socio- cultural laboratory as China, with the processes of modernization and archaization proper to it, gives much material disproving conceptions of unilinear historical progress and brining to light the Chinese particularity. The content of China elite identity and the reasons of its stability and continuity are analyzed on the basis of a profound excursus into history of the evolution of the «Confucians way of governance», that quite differs from the European model. In consequence of thousands years of selective breeding through the examination system and the stratagem mentality there was created, in the author’s opinion, not the political culture, but some type of the specific Chinese administrative behavior mode, based on «the moral consensus» between different clans of elite, this time leaded by Xi Jinping, and composed by the «shanghai» and the «komsomol» factions. Contemporary partocracy regime of PRC inherited all the negative characteristics of soviet «nomenclature» such as hierarchy career based on loyalty, bureaucracy privileges, special rations and advantages, nepotism, corruption and so on, but has created specific Chinese system of «soft» succession of power from generation to generation. At the same time, the confluence of political and business elites is taking place and the state and society interests are more and more subordinated to their corporative Ames, that provoke so called «new leftist» movement against the irrational redistribution system. The CCP new leadership exploits the «Chinese dream» rhetoric and anticorruption assault to get the national consensus and conserve its monopoly on political power. However, the social-economic structures sophistication and the new social contradictions and conflicts intensification, the now days economic crisis evidences about, draw attention to the crucial importance of democratization and creation of the new nontraditional political system for up to date diagnosis, softening and salvation of such conflicts.