Chapter 10
Assembly Required
As Chen Yulian waited for her husband at the high, wrought iron gate one summer day in 2010, she noticed six large men rounding the street corner, hulking toward her. Chen Yulian was a small, bird-like creature, so thin there seemed little insulating her sagging, aging skin from her brittle bones. At 58, she was far from feeling a need to look like the plump, well-coiffed wives of other government officials. A mere 5-feet 3-inches tall and weighing in at 82 pounds, she preferred wearing baggy pants and a simple smock when she went outdoors, especially in the searing heat of one of China’s hot-pot cities, Wuhan. She noticed all but one of the men coming toward the gate at which she stood wore black clothing—ridiculous in the heat—and dark glasses. The one in the front—she guessed he was the leader—wore a black shirt and red shorts. She thought there must have been some altercation she had just missed. Perhaps there was a brawl they were joining. Their intention was clear, even to a blind man: they were going to injure someone—anyone, it seemed. She stepped closer to the gate to let them pass. She took out her mobile phone to call her husband to tell him she was waiting for him at the gate of his office at the Public Security Bureau (PSB).
The PSB was the last channel of adjudication for those with unresolved grievances. If a judge decided a case against an aggrieved party, the party could theoretically boot the case to a higher court. That seldom happened though, as complainants understood when decisions were stacked against them from the top-down. Petitioning, however, was a means as old as China itself for plaintiffs to circumvent the court system and go directly to the top officials of a city—even of the entire country—to get a hearing and, hopefully, a decision in their favor. Twenty years ago, and before that even, most complaints were disputes between people or families—civil cases; now, the vast majority of petitions are about illegal land seizures.
The group of men surrounded Chen Yulian. Wordlessly, they began pummeling her with their fists, feet, knees, and elbows. She did not immediately crumple to the ground, as there was a disconnect between her recognition of the bizarreness of the incident and the pain she was receiving at the end of each sharp blow. She was sure they were Black Society thugs—Chinese Mafia—mistakenly beating someone whom they believed owed them money or payment of some long overdue debt. One of the assailants grabbed her arms forcefully and swept her legs from beneath her like a Sumo wrestler. She fell to the pavement heavily.1 Pain blasted through her from her hip. After some struggle, she stood to confront her attackers, but was repeatedly knocked to the ground. She could see between the legs of the men a crowd had formed around the assault. She heard someone shout, “Stop beating her! She’s the wife of a high-ranking government official!” No one, however, dared intervene.
Doctors diagnosed Chen Yulian as having a concussion, soft tissue injury, a broken left foot, and nerve trauma. She vomited frequently and her body was covered in bruises. She stayed in the hospital for more than a month after the incident. She turned the event over in her mind as clarity gradually returned and she digested the horrific encounter. She did not know, though, whether she was more upset by the beating or by the revelation of who had assaulted her.
Actually, her assailants were not part of any mafia. They were plain-clothes police. The squad’s duty was to disenchant potential petitioners from filing petitions of wrongdoing with the government. The day of the incident, the director of the PSB came to her bedside to apologize. He said, hat in hand, “When we heard about this incident we attached great importance to it. Look, I rushed over as soon as I had a moment! . . . It’s a misunderstanding, merely a misunderstanding; we didn’t know we had hit a big official’s wife.”2
Nevertheless, Chinese news articles, blogs, and forums dubbed the incident “Wrong Beating–Gate” (
). Chinese Internet users commented, “So long as it’s no one important, beating is acceptable behavior?” One netizen questioned, referring to photos of a battered Ms. Chen lying in a hospital bed, “Is this democracy? Is this rule of law? Is this justice?”3 Shanghai Daily newspaper columnist Wang Yong stated: “Instead of tossing out these bad apples [the police] one by one, it would be better to ask: Who hired them and enabled them to work against the people?”4 The newspaper deleted the digital version of the column from its website soon after the publisher had posted it. Nevertheless, Ms. Chen was the unfortunate recipient of the backhand of 4,000 years of Chinese civilization, without the “civil.”
Can’t We Be Civil?
One of the most important innovations China will need to research, develop, and incorporate into the modern society its leadership is attempting to build and integrate with the rest of the world, are civil institutions. Civil institutions accept and even promote the reality that no government can address all the needs of its people. Indeed, the discouragement and, in some countries, the outlawing of non-governmental organizations is an indication of the degree of autocracy of the leadership. Autocratic governments insulate themselves from the needs of the people and the wider world, and the quality of life its citizens lead.
Civil societies are also indicative of the degree to which citizens can freely assemble, exchange information and ideas, and innovate. The existence of civil institutions does not imply the societies in which they exist are inherently innovative. Civil societies in which government has accepted the complementary role of civil institutions are mature, vibrant societies in which discourse is encouraged. Open societies nurture the creativity required to meet the society’s spiritual and material requirements. So, though Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States all support non-governmental organizations, charities, and a plethora of non-profit organizations, few dispute the fact that the United States as a society has a far more active culture of innovation than do its European and British counterparts. China is already meeting serious resource, environmental, and demographic challenges that are calling the viability of its social structure into question.
In time, China’s government will be unable to meet the country’s growing energy requirements. Authorities will one day have to ration natural resources—especially water. The great bulge of the population will age into retirement without sufficient government benefits and family members to support them. Chinese citizens will then have to learn how to help each other through institutions that complement and supplement government services. The central government will have to accept its limitations and begin to trust the self-organizing principals that citizens in Western countries develop to enrich their societies, not destabilize them. In modern history and throughout China’s long history, however, an individual’s and family’s fealty went solely to the emperor and his representatives. To hold loyalty to other institutions—including one’s own family—in equal proportion to that of the throne would mean death.
Chinese society throughout its imperial history has been a “doughnut” society: hollow in the middle except for the epicenter, where sits the emperor. The emperor seldom left his palace and never encountered the common man. The country was essentially administered by ministers who all passed the same civil service examination, no matter where in the country they took the grueling test. Not only was the examination a test of the degree to which potential administrators could memorize and regurgitate great swathes of poetry, philosophy, and history, but the examination served to ensure homogeneity of thought, belief, and response of imperial servants to dynastic edict, no matter where in China they hailed from. The 1,500 year old system was to serve as a means to align government administrators and to harmonize the disparate societies and geographies of China. Today, it is university graduates with connections in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who sit for rigorous government examinations. The exams test their understanding and expression in their lives of Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Theory. The examinations are a continuation of a historic means of ensuring lock-step social harmonization through authoritarian rule.
Chinese citizens support each other outside government channels through concentric circles. The tightest circle is the extended family, headed by a patriarch. Beyond this innermost circle are circles of classmates and co-workers. The hometowns from which Chinese come make for the final circle on the periphery of social relationships Chinese have defined as paramount for their survival—especially when the government has let them down. At times in public spaces the circles of strangers come into contact. When the circles of strangers intersect during a moment of high tension the result is either extreme passivity or explosive aggression. Chinese seldom reach out to communicate or assist other Chinese not in one of these circles related to them personally; hence, no one dared come to Chen Yulian’s aid. With the exception of her being a local, Ms. Chen did not come across the relationship “radar” of any of the onlookers. The idea of helping one’s fellow man without commensurate payback in China—that is, guanxi—is inimical to Chinese social relations—unless the preservation of the family and the family’s “face” is at stake. Of course, such a value system is contrary to the intent of institutions meant to help complete strangers who may not contribute a direct benefit to service providers.
Highly centralized governments have their limitations, however; especially with such a large and geographically dispersed group as the Chinese in Mainland China. Population explosions during the midlife of each dynasty stretched government resources beyond practicality. Floods and famines due to unsustainable pressures placed on the environment seized up the totalitarian model of governance. All that was left was for families and villages (often the same in historic China) to fend for themselves. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, villages sometimes had to defend themselves from marauding government soldiers, themselves unpaid for months and starving in some instances. Though the rich patrons of some Chinese towns did create benevolence societies to help the less fortunate in their towns, Chinese non-governmental organizations usually developed a violent response to the disintegration occurring around them. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in the mid-1800s was a direct response to the breakdown of the administration of Manchus who ruled China at the time.
The Taiping Rebellion was started by Hong Xiuquan. After he failed the government civil service examination several times in the early 1840s, the erstwhile student suffered feverish visions of himself as the younger brother of Jesus Christ. By 1850 he had 30 million adherents who marauded their way from south China to establish the capital of their Heavenly Kingdom in Nanjing. The Kingdom was a direct response to the decay that gripped the ailing dynasty. It provided a means for cult followers to take care of their own family and friends. Ironically, the final death toll after nearly 20 years of fighting was nearly 200 million people. The Boxer Rebellion of 1900 was a similar expression of citizen discontent with government administration and Western intrusion into Chinese society. The Boxers were unique in their belief that their kung fu made them invincible against bullets. They also believed the throne itself, in the person of the Empress Dowager, would defend them during the violent uprising against Westerners in 1900. The Falun Gong movement of the late 1990s was also a declaration of discontent with government social services—health in particular. Falun Gong, was a hybrid system of Buddhist beliefs, yoga-like exercises, and group-support mechanisms. Its membership ran into the millions. It raised a clear and present danger to Communist Party rule when thousands of exercisers gathered one morning outside the headquarters of the CCP itself in 1999 without the knowledge of the security apparatus. Nowhere in the mood to replay the sort of organized, concerted protests of the Taiping, the Boxers, or more recently Tiananmen Square protestors, the CCP dismantled the Falun Gong movement swiftly and violently. Remnants of the self-help group still exist in countries throughout the world, occasionally renewing its call for the CCP to allow them to practice freely in Mainland China. Despite China’s violent history of imperial encounters with social and religious organizations, religion is thriving in China—albeit in a divided house.
“For We are Living in a Material World . . . ”
Those with a religious bent believe that the root cause for dynastic meltdowns in China lays in the country’s lack of freedom of religion. Actually, China, as a historically superstitious culture, has a plethora of religions and icons for individuals in need of supra-material orientation. In the 1980s the CCP revived Buddhism, Taoism, folk tales, Christianity, ancestor worship, Confucianism, and even Chinese civilization itself. The CCP realized it needed to provide society belief systems to replace the vacuum it left behind as it retreated from its raison d’etre as the standard bearer for communism in Asia.
Still, Brian Grim, Senior Research Fellow in Religion and World Affairs, reported in his article, “Religion in China on the Eve of the 2008 Beijing Olympics,” that fewer than 1 out of 5 Chinese adults interviewed across six cities in China said they are religiously affiliated.5 The United States, however, claimed 8 out of 10 adults as religious. However, in absolute terms the number of Chinese with religious inclinations is still enormous, with about the same number as the entire population of the United States at the time; that is, about 300 million.6
China Daily reported in 2007 that about 200 million Chinese followed in some way, shape, or form Buddhism, Taoism, or “legendary figures such as the Dragon King and God of Fortune.”7 Frankly, I believe every Chinese in China is a Buddhist at some level or other in his belief system; that is, most Chinese have no problems entering a Buddhist temple every few years, burning some incense and perhaps saying a few prayers for success in business or for the birthing of a son. The same Chinese would also have no problem negotiating with the Taoist bureaucratic hierarchy in Heaven for good luck in a business deal. Later, they may say a few Hail Mary’s in Church, if they felt it would help serve their interests. Even the outlawed Falun Gong has made room for the Buddha and Jesus Christ, to help with protection against the Fox Spirits from Chinese countryside folklore.
Indeed, the Chinese government at the national and local levels have re-opened, renovated and even built new Buddhist and Taoist temples since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. The small town of Anshan in Liaoning Province, a two hour drive south of the provincial capital of Shenyang, has outside its city limits a new Buddhist compound, the finishing touches of which were still underway when I visited in 2007. The centerpiece of the temple is a great monolith of stone, the Anshan Jade Buddha. The local government claims it is the largest Jade Buddha in the world at more than 250 tons. The Buddha image was found on the side of a mountain outside Anshan in 1960. Mao Zedong’s right-hand man Premier Zhou Enlai declared the find a state treasure. In the 1990s a column of government trucks and army tanks from the People’s Liberation Army moved the severed rock from the mountainside where it was discovered to its resting place. The government does not exert the same amount of constructive energy toward Christianity in the country.
Onward Christian Soldiers
Christianity had been flourishing in parts of Mainland China for centuries before the CCP outlawed it when the Party gained power in 1949. With a string of government policy failures from the 1950s through the 1970s, the Chinese were ripe for belief and value systems that seemed to have more durability than the flexible atheism of Party doctrine. In the 1980s Christianity became attractive in China as a value system that would help guide citizens through the vagaries of a time unlike any other in Chinese history. The ancient religion would also provide a channel through which adherents could develop their organizations for charity and altruism.
By 2006, according to the Chinese central government, about 21 million adults had claimed the Christian faith, a rise of 50 percent from 10 years before. Protestants outnumbered Catholics about three to one, with Protestantism having grown by more than 20 times since it first came to China in the early 19th century. Independent research institutions place the total number of Christians at anywhere from 50 million to 70 million associated with more than 300 house-church networks. House-church networks are small groups of family and friends who gather together in each other’s residences to study the bible and discuss the gospels in private. They do not recognize the Communist Party as above their religious order. However, there does not seem to be the same level of animosity between house churches and the central government (or, even at the local level) as between Falun Gong and the government. Falun Gong adherents boasted that at its height in China the movement had tens of millions of followers. House churches, however, have been allowed to develop, presumably as long as they do not organize into a massive, major challenge to Communist Party hegemony, as Falun Gong had in 1999. At times, the local government seems absolutely apathetic to the activities of Christian worshippers.
While I attended a dinner banquet one evening with local Chinese lawyers and local Chinese government officials in a municipality in China, one of the lawyers freely discussed his and his wife’s Christian beliefs at the table. I suppose he believed that as an American I too held the same beliefs, as he invited me that following weekend to a retreat he and fellow worshippers were having at a nearby civic center. I cut a glance at one of the government officials who sat at the large, round table, to see her reaction to the invitation. She had no response, which surprised me. Still, I declined the invitation as I never even participated in such groups back in the United States. Nevertheless, Christianity seems to supplement ancient Chinese values in an unexpected way.
Where Christianity seems fresh to Mainland Chinese is in the absolutism of its morality and its value system compared with relativistic Buddhism and Taoism. Also, the ease of access to and sharing of feelings within Christian study groups and confession booths gives Chinese a face-saving way to relieve pent up emotions. Channels of expression within the Church also mollify the riot of mixed feelings that naturally come from the frequent injustices they suffer in their crowded and capricious society. Buddhism, though, will always be part of the Chinese fabric of its world view and its perception of itself. Christianity, however, will continue to grow, albeit from a much lower base of adherents than China’s classical belief systems. In contrast to China’s other belief systems, though, Christianity in the country has provided social services sanctioned by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, which oversees the activities of charities in the country.
The Amity Foundation, for instance, is a Chinese Christian organization that received millions of dollars a year in funding from church groups around the world. The Catholic Church in China supported the Beifang Jinde, an outgrowth of a Catholic newspaper in Hebei Province. The YMCA and YWCA also re-emerged in the 1980s. The “Y’s” run neighborhood development programs that offer recreational facilities for young people, programs through which volunteers can befriend retirees, and training programs for laid-off workers.8 An unexpected benefit of China’s go-go economic development is a greater awareness at the grass-roots level that people must come together to help the less fortunate, whether or not it is sanctioned by the government.
A Charitable Streak
Grace was a young Shanghai resident who worked as a project manager for a British-based professional education company. She traveled frequently to Europe for her work. The day we met in Suzhou in an international five-star hotel she was wearing a pretty white blouse, low cut, a simple black skirt and colorful shoes made of textiles and colors one would find in a Tibetan wares shop. She had bought the shoes in Hong Kong, she told me. We drank bottled beers. She opted for a Guinness.
Grace was representative of Shanghai’s new generation of 20-somethings who were university educated, had service-sector jobs, spoke English, were paid relatively well, and traveled frequently within China and abroad. I asked her about the religious disposition of this new generation, which was providing a model for other young Chinese in other large urban centers. “I’ve been to church in Prague, but didn’t feel any pull toward joining.” She paused in thought to scan her mental record of her friends. She finally said, “I don’t know anyone who has become a Christian.” I was a bit surprised by the answer. I had approached the topic of Christianity with the presumption it had gripped young professionals in China. Perhaps, I calculated, they felt their lives had little meaning or found themselves disoriented by all the changes happening around them. Indeed, Suzhou had four of its own churches, one of which had just been completed in the university town about a half hour drive from downtown Suzhou. Two years before the neighboring city of Kunshan, near Shanghai, completed construction of a huge post-modern Church funded by Taiwanese money. And Shanghai had preserved many of its churches, and was building new ones, too. Grace, though, was telling me she was unaware of any massive trend of Chinese people—young or old, rich, middle class or poor—toward Christianity. Indeed, she looked more perplexed than any other response to my pressing the question a second time.
Her face lit up when she told me she and a lot of her friends enjoyed doing charity work. She personally had done work for the American organization Up With People, in the Filipines countryside. She had helped build houses for the poor. “I lived with a Filipino family that every Sunday went to Church. They insisted I come with them, which I did—every Sunday. But I still never felt a need to join the Church.” She and classmates had also traveled to one of the historically poorest provinces in China, Gansu, which has little agriculture, some mining and very little water. She and her classmates taught classes to some of the poorest children in China, many of whom would never make the state-mandated eight years of education for lack of teachers, school houses, materials, and tuition. “I first got involved with charity work in high school, cleaning rivers in Shanghai. I found the work so satisfying.” She admitted that the first priority for many of her peers was making money. “But they’re so busy; they don’t have time for Church, even if they were interested.”
With growing optimism in the charity sector, Grace hosted her own birthday party at a trendy gallery on Suzhou Creek in Shanghai in 2009. The email invitation said in English and Chinese that instead of receiving gifts, she would like celebrants to donate cash to her favorite charity. The party took place in the loft of the River South Art Center, on Suzhou Creek. The River South Art Center was historically a warehouse on a tributary feeding the Huangpu River. I was sure that without a lot of research I would find that little more than 100 years before, Western merchants had likely stored opium in the warehouse for transport and sale into the interior of China.
At the entrance to the loft was a sign-up counter and small wooden contribution chest for the Chinese charity, The One Egg Project. The One Egg Project involved donors making contributions that would help children in the poorest villages in China be able to afford to eat at least a single egg, daily. Apparently, such a simple unit-source of protein makes a quantum difference in the height, weight, and academic performance of children. I pitched in my 100 yuan donation. A young man in stylish eyeglasses gave me a colorful bookmark. “This is the child your donation will be supporting.” My eggs would go to a little girl name Huang Ling, an eighth-grader in Wangmin Village, Xiji County, Ningxia Province.
A crowd of about 200 was already milling about inside the gallery, all young Chinese professionals evenly split between men and women. Some were dressed in jeans with laptop computer bags slung over their shoulders, while others were stylishly dressed in evening attire that gave the event an almost chic feel. During breaks in programming, chill-out music filled the space and made everyone feel “cool.” There were very few Westerners at the party. I saw only one young businessman still cosseted in his dark suit, and a small group of French standing together, talking behind one of the charity displays.
Within the loft itself an array of other charities displayed their causes at tables, counters, and video displays: Raleigh, outdoor leadership adventures that contribute to charities; Shanghai Young Bakers, which takes teenage orphans and provides free training as bakers in Western (predominantly French) bakeries, restaurants, and hotels; Shokay, which sells wares made of yak wool from Mongolia; The Zhejiang Xinhua Compassion Education Foundation; The Xingeng Workshop, a volunteer organization that helps stricken villages get back on their feet.
Just inside the wide entrance, off to the side of a central dais, stood a large screen where some of the charities displayed videos of the results of their efforts throughout some of the poorest parts of China. A master-of-ceremonies introduced in Chinese each of the charities in attendance. Members of the charity groups took a few minutes to deliver professionally produced video- and slide-presentations of their mandates in action. At the end of the evening Grace announced that over 300 guests had contributed more than 38,000 RMB (nearly US$5,550) to The One Egg project. Grace’s admirable efforts, however, took place in a national policy gray area.
From the 1950s to the 1970s the CCP regarded charity work as “a decoration of the ruling class used to cheat the people.” The government-run China Charity Federation (CCF), the largest official charity in the country, maintained that China had more than 100 registered charities since the central government legalized the institutions in 1994. In the 20 years since then, the official charities raised about US$700 million.9 One of the reasons for the relatively low level of donations had to do with China’s tax code for donors: individuals are actually taxed for donations. Donors may pursue a labyrinthine application procedure for tax-free donation status, however. Claiming exemptions is an even more grueling procedure. In 2008, the central government amended China’s corporate tax law to provide a tax deduction of up to 13 percent of the tax bill, up from 3 percent. Still, government minders believed most Chinese companies and individuals would use any exemptions to escape paying tax. Hence, policy development is slow.10
In 2002, philanthropic giving through “un-registered,” private channels in China totaled 2.2 billion yuan (US$323 million). When private foundations could legally register in China in 2004 total receipts exceeded 100 billion yuan (US$14.6 billion) annually. By 2010 there were around 1,500 private foundations doing needed work across the country. One of the private foundations that has benefited through the liberalization of the charity policy in China is Jet Li, kung-fu movie star and founder of the Chinese charity the One Foundation. He cited his organization had over a million pledged volunteers at the time. Established in 2007, he was aiming to create a new model of “social entrepreneurship,” in which individuals with the means reached out to other individuals to help the less fortunate in China and around the world. The One Foundation since its establishment has contributed to the relief of twelve national and international disasters, including the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. The Foundation received donations from close to 1 million individuals who used their mobile telephones and the Internet to contribute to disaster relief.11 However, by and large, citizens have a great distrust of official charities.
For instance, during the summer of 2011 the Chinese Internet and Twitter-like service Weibo were alight with the photos and personal information of a 20-year-old woman who promoted herself as the Business General Manager of Red Cross Society. China’s Red Cross Society has no relation with the international organization. The young lady, named Guo Meimei, posted photos of herself leaning against an expensive sports car and living in a luxury villa. Two years before she had been a model who had undergone plastic surgery. The scandal drew in a Vice President of the Chinese Red Cross, Guo Changjiang, who was Guo Meimei’s benefactor. Chinese netizens accused Guo Changjiang of embezzling funds from the charity and doling the money out to sycophants. Some local governments and citizens, however, understand that the challenges confronting the nation will require more than nepotism and cynicism.
The Final Innovation
Through Grace I was able to meet the executive staff of the Non-Profit Incubator (NPI) in Shanghai in the summer of 2011. NPI was a social experiment with the full backing of the Shanghai government and funding from some of the largest multinational companies in the world. The intention of NPI was to help cultivate organizations with mandates to help communities become self-sufficient. The downtown site was located in a renovated factory of an extinct State-owned Enterprise. To step into the building was to feel oneself a child again, the high, vaulted ceiling uplifting one’s spirits while the walls with colorful, child-like murals animated one’s heart.
I met the deputy manager of NPI, Ms. Ding Li, in the lively cafeteria, on the ground floor opposite the main entrance. Employees with a variety of handicaps were cleaning the dining area and serving counter after lunch. One of the workers smiled at me and said “hello” loudly. The Executive Director explained to me that NPI had originally been launched in 2006 in Shanghai with the intention of addressing some of the social issues that had begun to press on the city. Some of those issues involved taking care of a demographic in Shanghai that was aging ahead of the rest of China.
I recalled a conversation I had with Richard Brubaker, a Professor at the China Europe International School (CEIBS), a few weeks before my visit to NPI. Brubaker had told me some districts of Shanghai in 2011 already had populations in which 30 percent of the residents were over the age of 60. Local governments were already beginning to feel the burden of supporting a social welfare fund into which a diminishing number of workers were contributing funds into the retirement pool. Shanghai also has a substantial portion of its population who are disabled: autistic, deaf, mute, or with limbs that have not fully functioned from birth.
The NPI facility in which I was standing was the Shanghai Social Innovation Park. The site incubated businesses to provide the special-needs demographic with opportunities to help themselves by helping others. NPI, however, was also much more than a business incubator.
NPI’s venture philanthropy provided small- and medium-sized non-profit organizations with seed funding, management, and technical support. NPI also supported what it called a Community Service Platform (CSP), which managed public facilities in communities in the Pudong district of the city. The CSP also trained social workers to better serve communities and organized various community programs. The CSP was so successful in Shanghai that NPI rolled it out to Sichuan province, to help rebuild communities destroyed during the 2008 earthquake that killed nearly 100,000 people. NPI also provided Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) consulting services to large companies such as Motorola, Novartis, Lenovo, Cannon, Nokia, Intel, and others, to help them develop community-based programs in China. NPI was also approved by the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau to create a public charity called the Shanghai United Foundation. The Foundation raised and disbursed funds for a variety of non-profit organizations and social enterprises. I marveled most, however, at the refurbished factory I was in, which housed the social business incubator.
Ding Li introduced me to Frank Wu, who actually managed the incubator. Frank was an enthusiastic man in his mid-thirties with a light frosting of white at the tips of his otherwise black hair. Otherwise an unassuming fellow, it was clear as he took me through the facility he deeply appreciated the efforts of the organization to better a society beset with huge challenges. On our way to the exposed stairway that connected the ground floor with the second floor he explained that participants in the program for the autistic had painted the colorful murals. On the second floor he introduced me to facilities where the blind were taught massage skills. When they graduated from the program they would get jobs as professional masseuses at the company that sponsored the training. Within a large, glass-encased workshop area a young Chinese woman led a group of a dozen or so chatty participants with learning disabilities through a session on how to make teddy bears. As we rounded the corner to pass down a corridor a young woman with Down’s syndrome brightly said “hello” to me—twice, in case I didn’t hear her the first time—and waved at me.
In a large office area segregated with low-walled cubicles Frank explained the space actually housed several businesses. One was Heifer International, which donated calves to poor rural families and taught them how to nurse the calves so they could pass on offspring and teach other families. Another was a graphic design business for physically handicapped professionals who had received formal training in their craft but who could not find jobs because they were disabled—not because they cannot perform their jobs. The for-profit business prepares the designers to market themselves and manage professional portfolios that leave little doubt in the minds of potential customers as to the abilities of the designers. Another section of the space was set aside for a call center business manned by staff with physical disabilities. None of the staff was there when I visited; however, Frank explained that each staff was capable of making 400 to 800 sales calls each day. The tour left me feeling optimistic about the positive, constructive possibilities in which modern Chinese society could develop—the CCP willing, of course.
Hot House Innovation
The CCP believes it can have its innovation cake and eat it too. That is, it believes it can command large swathes of its economy to become technologically innovative while maintaining iron-fisted control of the society. It bases its approach on a post-Soviet model of governance that even the Soviets eventually found wanting. Innovation with Chinese characteristics seems more about showing the world how brilliant Chinese citizens can and have always been, when foreigners are not intruding into their country, rather than about addressing the very real problems confronting its society. As the CEIBS Professor Rich Brubaker told me during one of our conversations, “Innovation is not about intelligence; it’s about incubation.”
Increasing pollution, environmental degradation, natural resource depletion, and public health issues are eroding its social gains as quickly as it modernizes. China’s leadership believes that through systematically acquiring technology from abroad, localizing it to address domestic issues, re-packaging it in cheap-labor wrapping, and then selling it on to other countries China will become a sustainable superpower.
The leadership has it wrong. Many of the social controls it places on its citizens, families, companies, and neighborhoods need to be dramatically revised. Otherwise, people and companies will not feel safe enough to take the risks “Big-I,” disruptive, world-beating innovation requires to erupt. In other words, all the technology in the world is not going to solve the country’s greatest vulnerability: a lack of civil society. Its own citizens do not feel liberated enough to reach out within their own communities to work together, to help each other, to assemble so they can exchange ideas and swap thoughts and try on different futures. Whether it’s the ubiquitous stinky public bathroom in China that no one wants to clean specifically because it is in the public domain; or the crumbling stairways and disused garden plots of apartment buildings for which no one wants to take personal responsibility, Chinese society needs to see that far more can be gained working with strangers toward a common good than not.
In the instance of the police beating up the hapless Ms. Chen, the political system saw even the most remote indication of assembly and dissent as punishable by death—or near-death, in her case. Onlookers were too afraid or too disinterested to get involved in what was clearly wrong. Even if Ms. Chen had been an accused serial killer certain rights should have been accorded her in a civil society so justice could be properly carried out. And, though Ms. Chen herself was clearly wronged, she believed that as the wife of a government official she was immune from the sort of day-to-day indignities served up to so many of the country’s citizens with lower socioeconomic status. Within the Chinese system, Ms. Chen herself likely would not have intervened if she had seen a half-dozen thugs kicking in the rib cage of a little old lady in broad daylight. And nor would anyone have thought to ring the police if Science Cop Fang Shimin had been caught by the thugs intent on breaking his bones on a public street. Yet, the very essence of scientific and technological revolution is about dissent; it is about questioning results; it is about pushing the envelope of inquiry and authority. China cannot have true in-your-face world-shaking “Capital-I” Innovation until its society and its governance structure accept and assimilate that axiom.
Innovation is dissent. It is about breaking molds and taking risks and the desire to disrupt the current workings of the society through creative destruction. Efforts like the Social Innovation Park are easy for Westerners to sneer at or to look down upon as naive, or even as a government public relations stunt. Everyone I met at the Park, however—especially the students and entrepreneurs and future teachers and skilled professionals with their disabilities and sunny dispositions—did not find the park a Potemkin initiative, all smoke-and-mirrors, no back-end substance. With locations that have sprouted like strawberries in Shenzhen, Beijing, and Chengdu, NPI has great potential to serve as a model for social, educational, and scientific communities in China.
The NPI model placed emphasis on sharing across domains of experience and ability. It implied learning through creative projects, instead of just by rote, as is the traditional Chinese way. The approach expanded one’s awareness of one’s environment through experimentation and observation instead of just through brute ideology. The work environment encouraged participants to take care of one another with the profound understanding that we’re all on this planet together: Chinese, American, European, South American, Muslim, Jew, Christian, and the rest.
As the old saying goes, “Just because the hole is on your side of the boat, doesn’t mean it’s just you who will drown.” The goal of the kinds of innovations incumbent on all our societies to foster is not to make winners of the ones who die with the most stuff. Instead, the aim should be to work together to build social and technology ecosystems through which modern society may be able to thrive in a way that is truly in harmony with Nature—in an environment in which each of us is afforded the opportunity to leave the world just a little better than when we’d come into it.
Notes
1. Elaine Chow, “If You’re Beating a Petitioner, Make Sure It’s Not an Official’s Wife,” Shanghaiist, July 21, 2010. Available online at http://shanghaiist.com/2010/07/21/if_youre_beating_a_petitioner_make.php.
2. Ibid.
3. Christopher Carothers, “Outrage as ‘Wrong-Beating Gate Scandal’ Breaks,” Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2011. Available online at http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2010/07/22/outrage-as-wrong-beating-gate-scandal-breaks/.
4. Ibid.
5. “Religion in China on the Eve of the 2008 Beijing Olympics,” Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, May 7, 2008. Available online at http://pewresearch.org/pubs/827/china-religion-olympics.
6. Ibid.
7. “Religious Believers Thrice the Estimate,” China Daily, Feb 7, 2007. Available online at www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007–02/07/content_802994.htm.
8. Nick Young, “Three ‘C’s’: Civil Society, Corporate Social Responsibility and China,” China Business Review, January–February 2002. Available online at www.chinabusinessreview.com/public/0201/young.html.
9. “Underpinning Charity Work,” Beijing Review, Nov 23 2007.
10. “Now Is the Time to Begin Charity at Home,” China Daily, Oct 31, 2007.
11. “The Celebrity, Jet Li,” Forbes Magazine, Sep 28, 2009.