Chapter 84 Four new forces never seen before: the Internet, NGOs, entrepreneurs and liberal intellectuals

Under the long-term unified system, all social strata in China have their own problems, the most serious of which is the lack of four major consciousnesses: lack of awareness of local autonomy, lack of awareness of contract between the government and the people, lack of awareness of independence among intellectuals, and lack of awareness of enterprises. The family class lacks class consciousness.Whether China can make great progress in the future depends on the awakening of these four consciousnesses.No country's change follows the pace of history, and China is no exception.So, it is impossible for us to rule out any new possibility. In China in 2013, the forces of change sprouted at both ends of the government and the opposition. What is especially important is that with the emergence of some new civil forces, the lack of these four major consciousnesses shows signs of being improved.

One, the Internet.Although the Internet was born in the United States, its transformation of Chinese society is far greater than that of American society.Since entering China in the mid-1990s, China's Internet economy has almost all changed in terms of business models except for technology from the United States, and the powerful state-owned capital has done nothing in this rapidly changing field, thus creating "sunshine entrepreneurship" Generation", this group of young entrepreneurs has accumulated amazing wealth and completed the connection between Chinese companies and international capital. Almost all of the more than 100 Chinese companies listed on the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchanges are related to the Internet industry. related.In recent years, the rise of e-commerce has detonated a channel change and consumer revolution in the traditional manufacturing and service industries. As of 9:50 p.m. The transaction volume has exceeded 1 trillion yuan, accounting for 5% of the total retail sales of consumer goods in the whole society.The bigger change is that the Internet has restructured China's media and social ecology, especially the emergence of blogs and microblogs, making traditional public opinion control methods at a loss.

platform. Second, non-governmental organizations (NGOs).In China since the Ming and Qing Dynasties, two kinds of non-governmental organizations have been active among the people: one is the hundreds of thousands of grassroots clan organizations, and the other is the chamber of commerce spread over 20,000 cities and towns linked by hometown. Foundation.These two organizations were successively destroyed in the "land reform", the people's communalization movement, and the public-private joint venture movement. Since then, the Chinese people have been in a mess for a long time, and have no power to cohere.In the past ten years, various non-governmental organizations have sprung up like mushrooms, which is a symbolic event for China to enter the civil society and middle-class era.They demonstrate the power of civil autonomy in various ways in hundreds of domains.At present, no agency has announced the number of existing NGOs. A rough calculation should be more than 50,000. Most of them are outside the scope of government control. In 2008, the All-China Environmental Protection Federation announced that there were 3,539 environmental NGOs across the country, but a sample survey showed that only 23.3% of them were registered with civil affairs departments at all levels. In March 2012, the China Charity Donation Information Center of the Ministry of Civil Affairs announced that there were about 1,000 American NGOs in China, and less than 3% had legal status.These data all show the autonomous posture of non-government forces refusing to regulate.

Third, the entrepreneurial class.By the end of 2012, China had 10.8572 million private enterprises and 40.5 million individual industrial and commercial households, the total number of which exceeded the entire population of South Korea.There has never been such a large, wealthy and powerful property-owning class in Chinese history, which can be described as "a great change in the millennium".Braudel once said very succinctly: "In Chinese society, the power of the government is too great to allow wealthy non-rulers to enjoy any real security. The fear of arbitrary expropriation is always lingering." China still exists today, and the immigration phenomenon in recent years is a reflection of the wealthy class trying to escape.However, the vast majority of operators will still continue their careers, and they have the opportunity to change their own destiny and China with an independent and non-attached spirit.

Fourth, free intellectuals.After the implementation of the imperial examination system in the Sui and Tang Dynasties, China actually lost the soil for the emergence of a free intellectual class. It was the abolition of the imperial examination system in 1905 that induced the splendid New Culture Movement in the early 20th century.In the past ten years, there have been many intellectuals who are free from the system and make a living by their professional ability. The wider and wider market space has given them a chance to survive.Non-governmental think tanks that take ideological research as their mission emerge in endlessly.On blogs and Weibo, many bold "opinion leaders" have emerged.

The above-mentioned four new forces pose a challenge to the four basic systems that maintain centralization. The governance model characterized by "top-down control" is facing the most significant transformation in history, and the process of its game will run through the whole of China. The whole process of reform.No one can clearly tell us what China will look like twenty years from now.The high-profile cheers for the "rise of great powers" and the pessimistic predictions about China's collapse can hardly constitute the whole of history. In 1948, American scholar John Fairbank, who had been traveling in China for 16 years, completed the book "America and China". In the masterpiece, Fairbank wrote with unpredictability: "The road that China may choose, the channel through which various events must flow, is narrower than we can easily imagine." By 1983, "America and China" The fourth edition was revised and published, and the aged Fairbank still carefully wrote: "The revolutionary process within the People's Republic is best understood as two revolutions, one economic and the other social. The revolutions sometimes work together, sometimes they contradict each other. The struggle for economic development .

If Coase sees the rise of China as an "unintended consequence of human behavior", which is a purely Western perspective, then Fairbank, who has really walked on the land of China, prefers to believe that China is walking on an "incomprehensible" but in line with his own Logical, more "narrow" paths.Maybe, he's right.