Rumors corrode Beijing's political legitimacy
By He Qinglian on March 23, 2012
The perfect hotbed for rumors to thrive would be where the
politics is opaque and where power functions in a way that is
concealed from the public. China has always been full of rumors,
in particular when it is the time of chaos and confusion, or when a
dynasty nears its end. At present, the Chinese people in a time of
Web2.0 is surrounded by all sorts of rumors, as was the case when the
Qing dynasty was about to end a hundred years ago.
All these rumors could be traced back to one incident: Wang Lijun,
deputy mayor of Chongqing and former public security chief, went inside the
U.S. Consulate-general in Chengdu in February this year. In the
afternoon of March 14, 2012, Bo Xilai, one of the most powerful
persons in today's China, was relieved of his duties. From that day
onward, Bo, who in the past few years had been in the limelight of
domestic and foreign media, vanished from public vision. Even Bo's
whereabouts is now deemed as a “state secret” that the public
should know nothing about, not to mention the kind of punishment that
he may get from the authorities. As a result, all sorts of rumors
fly.
A good few varying stories can be retrieved from Chinese websites
outside China, some appear to be quite plausible, such as Bo being
put under house arrest; others are clearly incredible—a looming
coup for instance. Yet because Bo Xilai and news about him are
censored inside the country, all kinds of “argots” pop up on
Weibo and they change daily. Several argots are being used to refer
to Bo Xilai alone: “not thick” (taken from Bo's surname, which
means “thin”); “Red in the West” (Red Songs sung in the
country's Southwest); and “third young master” (Bo is the third
son).
In the beginning, major international media would still make the
effort to verify leads appeared on the Internet. For example, when
the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune
reported the CPC central committee's “Bulletin Regrading the
Initial handling of the Wang Lijun incident” on March 15, they
would respectively check with several Chinese officials who had read
it. But later on, even some of the major media joined in the guessing
game. For instance, in the afternoon of March 20, a report that Bo
Xilai repeatedly objected Wen Jiabao's calls to redress “June-fourth”
was published in the website of the Financial Times; and on
March 21, netizens in mainland China found out that all of a sudden
the ban on the country's website had been lifted and they could
retrieve some of the information about the “June-fourth incident”.
All these gave rise to even more far-fetched speculations.
After a closer look, I found that these rumors could be divided
into three categories: the first would be about the corruption issues
of Bo Xilai himself and his wife, Gu Kailai; the second would be the
issues of CPC top level disputes that Bo Xilai brought into daylight;
and the third would be the number of persons with military background
who got involved in this power struggle.
As a result of the Chinese officials' remaining silence, the
Chinese people had no way but to exercise their special skill of
deciphering the true meaning from between the lines of the news
reports. Reportedly the CCTV evening news, a program that has long
been dismissed by the young and the middle-aged, saw a great increase
in its audience recently, people would patiently watch the boring
domestic news from start to finish so as to find out who has not
shown up. In particular, Zhou Yongkang, member of the Politburo
Standing Committee and secretary of the Political and Legislative
Affairs Committee, allegedly the one who backed Bo Xilai, has become
a focus of attention.
Rumors are in fact what the people in authoritarian societies use
as a weapon to resist those in power. Looking back at the history of China, one
would see that the times when rumors abounded and played significant
roles in helping people to make of the situation were usually when
dynasties came close to an end and when the country was descending
into chaos.
From “rumors”–an
incision of any given society, we could have some insights into the
state of things in that society, what people have on their minds, the
basic situation of politics and its development trend. Since modern
times, China has gone through at least three major occasions when
political rumors were abuzz: the first took place in the late Qing
Dynasty, the second on the eve of the KMT government retreat to
Taiwan, and the third in 1976.
Take the late Qing Dynasty for example, at that time the air was
filled with rumors mainly of two categories: one being predictions
of the dynasty's collapse; and the other focused on disputes and
infighting at the top most level. When triggered the Hubei New Army
mutiny (the prelude to Wuchang uprising) in October 1911 was also a
rumor that had a direct relevance to the soldiers' lives: the Manchu
imperial government was compiling a roster of all Chinese soldiers,
and all Chinese soldiers of Hubei New Army would be arrested and
punished for being members of the revolution party. The rumor put the
soldiers in an impossible situation which obedience meant death; but if they revolted, there might be a chance that they could
survive. And so the Chu Lookout uprising on the night of October 10
broke out.
China is not a country with information transparency. Whenever a
power struggle occurs, rumors would be everywhere, and even officials
at lower levels would be happy to spread and believe in those. In the
Web2.0 era, there is no way for any government to manage all
communication channels in society, no matter how good at
information control it may be; the tighter the government
regulates, the more bizarre the generation and dissemination of
rumors would become. This state of various rumors flying around since
Wang Lijun incident in February this year provided a very valuable
research sample for Political Communication, the interdisciplinary
study of Political Science and Communication.
The relationship between a society's political system and its
communication system is a symbiotic one. The fact that rumors spread
rapidly reflects to some extent the social conflicts and chaotic
governance of a given period, and is an omen that a drastic change, a
major division and a great collapse would occur. It can be said that
these rumors are fundamentally corroding the legitimacy of the
Chinese government.With all these rumors around, the Chinese people become increasingly discontent with and contemptuous of their government.
