Chapter 7 "Historical Three Gorges" and "Dunkirk Retreat"

When China's transformation will be completed, the year that is often mentioned is 2040.Tang Degang, a historian living in the United States, made this statement in the book "Seventy Years of the Late Qing Dynasty": "This second major transformation was forced, and it was extremely painful. This turbulent great transformation , the author tried to name it "Historical Three Gorges". It will take roughly two hundred years for us to pass through this terrible Three Gorges. Since 1840, we can pass through the Three Gorges in 2040 and enjoy some peace and tranquility. We are considered very lucky Yes. If there is a deviation in history and the politics and military go crazy, then this "Three Gorges of History" will continue indefinitely, and the suffering of our nation will be endless. But no matter how long the time is, the Three Gorges of History will eventually have The passing day is a historical inevitability. At that time, "the clear river will be covered with trees in Hanyang, and the fragrant grass will be luxuriant in Yingwu Island". Amidst the cheers, we can sail straight down and follow the great river to the east to enter the peaceful land of vast sea and sky. At the beginning of 2008, the book "Struggling: A Research Report on China's Political System Reform after the 17th National Congress" edited by political scientist Zhou Tianyong and others also pointed to this year - China's transition from a traditional planned economy to a modern market economy 1. It will take at least sixty years for the transition from low-level democratic legalization to higher-level political democracy starting in 1979.

In the mid-1950s, China established an economic system based on the Stalinist model.As early as 1917, when the Soviet Union just started, due to insufficient funds, it was powerless to large-scale industrialization, so the economist Preobrazhensky's "socialist primitive accumulation" theory was adopted, allowing farmers to pay for industrialization unconditionally. Huge cost.As a result of light agriculture and heavy industry, "in traditional socialist countries, agriculture is a mess" (Alvin Toffler). Apparently, the model of "the Soviet Union serves China" is also the beginning of the dual division of urban and rural areas in China.In addition, in order to industrialize as soon as possible, traditional socialist countries often depreciate service industries and white-collar jobs, vigorously praise manual labor, pay attention to production materials, and ignore consumer goods.When talking about the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Wu Jianmin once talked to me about his impressions when he passed by the Soviet Union twice: Although the Soviet Union has made progress in many aspects, the civilian industry is in a mess.

As mentioned above, China copied the Soviet Union, and in the late 1950s, under the guidance of the "theory of continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat", China pushed the Soviet system to extremes.What followed was the "Three Difficult Period" from 1960 to 1962 and the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. Poverty and chaos brought China's politics, economy and society to the brink of collapse.It was not until the hopeless peasants of Xiaogang Village pressed the bloody fingerprints of survival against adversity and objectively completed a counterattack against the old system that China's reforms finally surfaced.

The Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee held in December 1978 ended the "two whatevers", stopped using the slogans of "taking class struggle as the key link" and "continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat", and began to shift the focus of work to socialist modernization build up. In 1984, the Third Plenary Session of the Twelfth Central Committee launched a "planned commodity economy" or "socialist commodity economy". In 1987, the "Thirteenth National Congress" defined the operating mechanism of the commodity economy as "the state regulates the market and the market guides enterprises." In 1992, the "14th National Congress" formally proposed the idea of ​​establishing a "socialist market economy". The 15th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 1997 clarified the basic economic system of "public ownership as the main body and multiple ownerships developing together".Although the reform is proceeding slowly, the wave of "retreating from the country and advancing from the people" is clearly visible.Marketization has allowed Chinese people to step out of traditional production and lifestyles and gain more and more personal freedom.

There can be no real political freedom without economic freedom.With the development of society and economy, financial freedom and freedom of career choice have given Chinese people more "free capital", so they don't have to rely on the "work unit system" as in the past. In this regard, the economist Mao Yushi is not without emotion: Compared with before the reform and opening up, there was no freedom to wear clothes, no freedom to find a job, no freedom to earn money, no freedom to travel, no freedom to think, etc., the freedom of the Chinese people now Obviously significantly increased. "As long as you have money, you can buy almost anything, except land."

However, the "advancement of the people and the retreat of the country" was neither accomplished nor smooth sailing.As we all know, especially after 2000, there has been regression in some fields, and some places have even used "state-owned enterprises as the economic foundation of the party's governance" as an excuse to engage in "secondary nationalization" or "re-nationalization" of "state advancement and private retreat". change".The alliance of power and capital enjoys the benefits of the reform, but at the same time it becomes a hindrance to the continued reform, causing the society to fall into the situation of being abandoned and betrayed again.

Speaking of China's achievements in the past three decades, economist Wu Jinglian believes that the key lies in the adoption of a series of flexible systems and policies during the reform and opening up process, which untied the shackles of administrative orders in the command economy and expanded the opportunities for residents to choose jobs and start businesses. Freedom and rights enable the originally suppressed potential to be brought into play.However, after the market system is developed, further market-oriented reforms must be carried out on such transitional systems, otherwise it will bring various negative economic and social consequences.Chen Zhiwu, a professor at Yale University, even believes that "only by returning what is produced to the people can we return to the people."From the perspective of fair transactions, during the full nationalization in the 1950s, the government promised to the people: You will return your land and property to the state, this is your contribution, but your future work and life , medical care, elderly care, and children's education are all covered by the state.That's a symmetrical transaction.Today, work and life responsibilities are returned to individual citizens, and the state basically ignores them. However, private property and land that were nationalized back then have not been returned to citizens. Such transactions are obviously unfair and will leave disasters.

There is a consensus that the most important thing in China's current transformation is the transformation of power, that is, how to complete the transformation of the government from a political rule and economic construction type to a public service and social management type of government.The so-called "rights", for a society in a transitional period, are first of all "political repayment of rights" and "economic repayment of interests". Human history is also a history of property concepts and a history of social growth.Societies, like trade, are older than nations.

Some people think that society is nothing but an appendage of the state.In Hegel's words, society "must presuppose the state."Undoubtedly, for quite a long time in the past, China has been pursuing a system in which the state is higher than society and the state overwhelms society, so that the state and society are highly integrated, social life is highly politicized, ideas overwhelm entities, and politics exiles life. The strong state-weak social form has dominated Chinese history. In the traditional Chinese power system, there is no concept and theory that the society is independent from the state and obtains independent rights without state interference.When a generation of kings rule the world, the royal power will surely overwhelm the society.At the same time, in the period of omnipotence where the state controls everything, the highly isomorphic nature of the state and society is that the state annexes society, and more than that. "The people are the masters of the country" has been alienated into "the country is the masters of the people".

However, from the perspective of more ancient history, man is a social existence, not a national existence.If the state is destined to disappear one day, as Marx predicted, then the state is no more than an episode or a stopgap measure in the history of human development.In fact, the construction of the European Union today has begun to deconstruct the state. Similarly, words such as human society and international society also indicate that society and human beings have a more natural affinity. Li Hayek said that in ancient Greece, the Spartans were the most strongly opposed to the commercial revolution. "They did not recognize personal property, but allowed or even encouraged theft."And under the rule of senators deeply involved in commercial interests, Rome provided the world with a model of private law based on the absolute notion of personal property.It was only after Rome's central government increasingly abolished entrepreneurial freedom that the self-extending order of society began to weaken and eventually collapse.

This phenomenon shows that if the government does not regard the protection of citizens' private property as its primary goal, or even takes over the rights of citizens' daily life against the trend, it is unlikely to develop an advanced civilization, because under such conditions, social development Doomed to be disrupted by "mighty" governments.Today we know that all kinds of tragedies caused by "political overall design of society" in modern history are nothing but the disillusionment of omnipotent rationality after the Enlightenment.In Hayek's words, all attempts to plan the entire society, no matter what kind of noble motives, have a "fatal conceit" written behind it. So, "the more one learns about economic history, the more one finds it wrong to think that the establishment of a highly organized state constituted the pinnacle of the development of early civilization. Because of what we do with organized government Knowing that there must be far more than can be achieved by the spontaneous cooperation of individuals, history accounts for a gross exaggeration of the role of government.... Powerful governments have repeatedly wrecked spontaneous improvement and brought the evolution of culture to a halt..." Looking back at the history of our country, many Chinese, especially intellectuals, have an inexplicable nostalgia for the Spring and Autumn and Warring States.Although there were troubled times at that time, there was unprecedented prosperity in thought, so that the descendants who did nothing complained that the thoughts in this world were prematurely taken over by the ancestors.In that era of "ritual collapse and music decay", everyone parted ways between Xiaguang and Dianhuo.It's a pity that regarding these "chaotic phenomena", even the "top ten young people in the world in the Axial Age" like Confucius only saw the copulation of the times, but did not see the gestation of the times.What is even more unfortunate is that since the first emperor ruled the world, the suppression of speech has turned generations of talented scholars and beauties into ideological vegetative states. Of course, Chinese history does not always stand still, it is magnanimous, and occasionally produces a few good emperors for the Chinese directors who will sing their praises thousands of years later.For the prosperity once in history, dreamy rock singers even want to "return to the Tang Dynasty in their dreams".Indeed, China's history has not been poor and weak.It is also nearly a few hundred years behind the world civilization.In fact, when the western world was still moaning in the darkness of the Middle Ages, the Chinese Empire in the far east was already prosperous and prosperous, shining like the United States today. When it comes to the great development of Chinese society, those who are familiar with Chinese history may prefer to "go back to the Song Dynasty in their dreams".The author believes that although the Tang Dynasty was once powerful, it was just an era of boasting with poetry and achieving nothing.In comparison, the Song Dynasty really had thousands of scenes.However, the social growth of the Song Dynasty was mostly submerged in later historiography, so that many people mistakenly believed that the Song Dynasty was an orphan who was weak and sick but loved to sing the wind and enjoy the moon. No wonder that in "Chinese Social History", the French academician Xie Henai wrote: "The orthodox ethics that have permeated all the concepts of Chinese history since the twelfth century, together with its past history, are all reduced to some events that have lost any time dimension. The category of traditional historiography (they are only concerned with the survival and administration of the central government), it makes us believe from the bottom of our hearts that the social and political forms, basic institutions, economies, ideas, and technologies of the Chinese world are eternal. Some of the most profound changes and the most astonishing new things, the Chinese are blind and deaf to. Events that in European history are considered to mark the emergence of a new society are, in the traditional view of Chinese history, nothing more than a It's just a 'change of dynasty'." At this time, the Song Dynasty was undergoing a Chinese-style "Renaissance" movement.More than half of the important inventions in Chinese history appeared in the Song Dynasty, and three of the so-called "Four Great Inventions" or "Four Great Discoveries" appeared or were really used in this dynasty.In the Song Dynasty, navigation, shipbuilding, medicine, crafts, agricultural technology, etc. all reached the pinnacle, and its GDP accounted for half of the world. It was a well-deserved superpower in the world at that time.Today, many Westerners are still fighting for oil and God's business, but as early as the twelfth century, there were already ten oil wells in production on the side of the Huangpu River. Today, China has not stepped out of the agricultural society, and there are pre-modern, modern, and post-modern at the same time, which can be described as "three generations under one roof".However, as early as the Northern Song Dynasty, the industrial and commercial tax accounted for 70% (half of which came from maritime trade), while the agricultural tax accounted for only 30%.This means that the Song Dynasty once stepped out of agricultural civilization and moved towards an industrial and commercial society. The historian Needham once said that the decline of Rome did not permanently stop the evolutionary process in Europe, but similar development in Asia was prevented by strong governments.The great development of Chinese civilization and technology happened precisely at a time when government control was temporarily weakened.Obviously, an important reason why the society of the Song Dynasty achieved unprecedented prosperity was that the government did not restrain social growth at that time.The Song Dynasty was also the only dynasty in Chinese history that did not implement the "suppressing business" policy for a long time and did not have a "literary prison".Compared with Song Taizu's politics of "drinking wine to release military power", Zhu Yuanzhang and other dynasties who slaughtered the heroes of the founding of the country should feel ashamed. It's a pity that although the Song Dynasty was the first to use artillery and other hot weapons in the world, it did not have the expansionism of colonial countries or the hobby of nomads to harvest other people's crops and human heads. In the end, they were alone and devoured by barbarism like Greece.The massacre of foreign powers on the society of the Song Dynasty made Chinese society finally turn from a bull to a bear after several consecutive daily limit, and it has been consolidating to this day.However, the opening up of the Song Dynasty also allowed the peoples who were still in barbarism to see civilization, and indirectly led to the explosive growth of Western society during the Renaissance.Looking back on the contribution of this dynasty to human civilization, and the subsequent decline of Chinese history, the Chinese in that era can be described as "only caring about farming, not about harvesting". Sorting out the social prosperity that once existed in China's early history may be more helpful to our understanding of the country and society.As mentioned above, China's reform actually coincided with a process of "rediscovering society".In this sense, the reason why China has achieved world-renowned achievements since the 1980s is not so much because of what the government has done, but rather because of what the government has not done. Due to the reasons or limitations of the times, China's political system reforms today have been "dwarfed" as administrative system reforms time and time again.It should be said that the reform of the administrative system is also a detail of the reform of the political system.What people are concerned about is how to avoid the recurrence of the "political reform cycle" of "expansion-simplification-re-expansion-re-simplification...". Zhou Tianyong and other scholars mentioned in the book "Struggling": In the critical stage of dual structural transformation and economic development, the goal of political system reform should not be to adopt the model of universal suffrage, multi-party system and freedom of the press, but to adopt the model of political A mode in which the economy is properly centralized and the economy is moving towards a market economy.Therefore, the focus of political system reform in the coming period should be "those parts of the political system that hinder the coordinated operation of the economy, the orderly development of the market, and the full development of society."As for the reform of the administrative system and other reforms, it must be coordinated with the People's Congress, the judiciary, and civil society.Without the constraints of the National People's Congress, the reform of the administrative system cannot be successful. Ren Jiantao, a professor at Sun Yat-Sen University, believes that when the state administrative organ usurps itself as the state power management organ and tries to dispose of its own power spontaneously, it not only formulates rules, but also executes the rules and evaluates itself. If the legitimacy of the reform is lost from the very beginning, it is doomed to be difficult to succeed.Moreover, the more such administrative reforms are, the more social resources will be consumed. In the end, the government still cannot get out of the vicious circle of "omnipotent government". Scholar Zhang Xuezhong published "Administrative Reforms Will Not Succeed Without Political Reforms" in Singapore's "Lianhe Zaobao", pointing out that since 1982, China has carried out a massive reform of government institutions almost every five years, and the goal of each reform is are roughly the same.Every time the organization is downsized, the state has to pay a huge price and provide cash or other forms of compensation to the "downloaded", but the positions vacated by these people are quickly filled by more new recruits. In 1995, China's administrative expenditure accounted for 11% of the total fiscal expenditure, but in 2006 it reached 19% to 20%.In addition, after several institutional reforms, China's government system still does not seem to be known for being fair, transparent, clean, and efficient. "If some important principles of political science are applicable in China, it is no easier for an unaccountable government to reinvent itself than for a man to drag himself off the ground by his hair." From Political Theory Said that the state is usually divided into two types of contractual state and predatory state.There can only be a contractual state if political power is equally distributed among citizens.In such a country, the government and its members are only social managers authorized by the people. The managers are not fixed from a certain group and must constantly face the regular and irregular accountability of the people.The analysis of political dynamics shows that in a contractual state, the government system will continue to be fair, efficient, transparent and clean. High political costs are mainly manifested in administrative expansion.At the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China, there were only a few hundred cadres in large county organs, but now some township organs have as many as four to five hundred cadres.Liu Xirong, a deputy to the National People's Congress and former deputy secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, revealed at the two sessions in 2008 that some county governments in China had 17 deputy county heads.Liu Xirong thus proposed to formulate five new laws against corruption, including the National Income Distribution Law, the Budget Law, the Punishment of Collective Corruption Law, the Civil Servant Property Declaration Law, and the Administrative Organ Establishment Law—because we not only need clean civil servants, but also build clean and honest civil servants. government.Faced with the fact that China's actual fiscal revenue is much higher than the announced figures, Zhou Tianyong and other scholars also believe that "the key to promoting people's democratic politics is for the people to control the budget." Previously, Jiang Yong, director of the Economic Security Research Center of the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, wrote in "Beware of the Expansion of Departmental Interests" that in recent years, with the development of the market economy, the issue of departmental interests in central government agencies has become increasingly prominent.In the process of decision-making or performance of functions, some departments start from the interests of their own departments too much, overemphasize, maintain and seek the interests of their own departments, which affects the strategic, overall and forward-looking nature of decision-making, damages social justice and public interests, and increases national economic and political risks.In his view, although the "big department system" is the general trend, it can streamline government agencies, reduce overlapping functions and conflicts of authority between departments, simplify official procedures, improve administrative efficiency, and reduce administrative costs, which is conducive to the establishment of a unified, streamlined, and efficient government. A modern government system that meets the requirements of a market economy and democracy and the rule of law.However, the reform of the "big department system" means the reorganization of departments, which will inevitably involve the redistribution of power and interests among departments. The biggest resistance to the reform of the "big department system" is still the departmental interests that have been continuously strengthened over the years.Because the expansion of departmental interests involves not only general government departments, but because of China's special political system, many government functions extend to the ruling party and the people's congress system.Therefore, the successful reform of the "big department system" will definitely affect the reform of the political system, involving and covering power systems such as the party, government, and people's congresses.Without the promotion of political system reform, the establishment of the "Ministry System" is likely to be incoherent. Today's "big department" reform in China revolves around the separation of powers. "'Separation of three powers' has become an official term, and just from this point, the 'superiority system' has taken a big step forward." Scholar Wu Jiaxiang divided the "separation of powers" into three types: big, medium and small in his blog. The "big department system" is the separation of the three minor powers, that is, the separation of the three powers within the administrative power. It is an administrative system arrangement that divides the administrative power into "decision-making power, executive power, and supervisory power" and allows them to perform their duties; The separation of powers is the "separation of powers" in the sense of Montesquieu. It is a political system arrangement, which means that the three powers of legislative power, executive power and judicial power are set up separately and check and balance each other; It refers to the separation of the three powers of the party, the parliament, and the executive.Before the reform, China implemented a Soviet-style total power system. One of the characteristics of this system is that party power replaces executive power, and executive power replaces parliamentary power. "The advantage of this is that it is more efficient in doing good things, and the disadvantage is that it is also more efficient in doing bad things." On December 11, 2006, China ended its five-year "transition period" for joining the WTO.WTO Director-General Lamy gave China the grade of "A+" in the past five years.Although China's accession to the WTO has also brought some problems, it is obvious to all that China has actively integrated into the world and fully globalized, and has not formed a chaotic situation of "leading wolves into the house" or "feeding wolves with its body". Taking stock of the achievements made since joining the WTO, official data show that from 2001 to 2005, under the premise that prices remained basically stable, China’s per capita GDP increased from US$1,038 to US$1,700, and the number of poor people decreased from 32.09 million at the end of 2001 to 23.65 million at the end of 2005.However, for China, a country in transition, the significance of joining the WTO goes far beyond the economic level. It also has far-reaching significance for China's political and social transformation. If the "social liberation" that started in the late 1970s is called China's second liberation movement since the "national liberation" in 1949, then so far this "social liberation" also includes two stages: the first The first stage is "reform and opening up", and the second stage is the "opening up and reform" that China strives for and promotes after joining the WTO.The former is formed from top to bottom through the power of the state, while the latter is promoted from the outside to the inside and from the bottom to the top through the power of the international community and society.One up and one down, one outside and one inside, has become a coordinate system to witness China's "social liberation" in the past 30 years. As far as China's accession to the WTO is concerned, before joining the WTO, China's transformation was mainly "reform→opening up", while after joining the WTO, it was "opening→reform".The former is "promoting opening up through reform", while the latter is "promoting reform through opening up".From "reform and opening up" to "opening up and reform", the two are not clearly distinct, but have a benign interaction.Specifically, on the one hand, opening up is the result of reform; on the other hand, opening up also provides a steady stream of impetus for reform. As mentioned above, "promoting reform through opening up" is not limited to the economic level.Joining the WTO has promoted the reform of China's economic system and the strategic adjustment of the economic structure, enhanced the vitality of economic development and international competitiveness, and won a better international environment for China.At the same time, what should be noticed is that this kind of "promoting reform through opening up" is more reflected in the political level.After joining the WTO, China is also under the pressure of transforming government functions and improving the legal system, and this pressure is more of a constructive pressure, a pressure to rehabilitate for a better future.In this process of "from adaptation to recognition", the external pressure from the world will be transformed into the internal driving force for reform. As early as a hundred years ago, American missionary Ming Enpu once compared Eastern and Western civilizations in his book "The Quality of the Chinese": "Western countries are facing the dawn of the future, but China is always facing the dark night of the distant past. . ” In my opinion, facing the “night of the distant past” is a double self-closing of oneself both intellectually and spiritually.If some Westerners say that it is "too short for a thousand years" to complete China's reform without the help of external forces, Ming Enpu also believes that "if China is to be reformed without the help of external forces, it is like building a ship in sea water. And sea water won't make it happen."Because "whatever begins and ends with a machine cannot move the machine."In this sense, China's full globalization and active globalization means opening up to the world, but also means helping a country with the power of the world, and means that the world will become a "new continent" that promotes China's transformation. The openness of a country is like a person's breathing and eating. People must gain strength through communication with the outside world.A common sense of system theory is that if any living system is to be maintained, there must be countless open pathways connected to the outside world, so as to complete energy transmission and metabolism.Because of this, "connecting with the world" has become an important force to promote China's transformation. As for some people criticizing some departments for "seeking monopoly in the name of opening up", for example, China's oil price has double standards to "connect with the world", and state-owned monopoly enterprises have been restructured and listed overseas to strengthen the monopoly of related industries, etc. Obviously, all of these are problems with monopoly, not openness—just like when we reviewed China’s rural problems, we found that the root of rural problems lies in the fact that someone monopolizes the city and prevents farmers from entering, not that farmers carry bedding Walk around to find a way out.If someone insists on saying that this is an issue of openness, it means that China's current power is not open enough, and the interests of monopoly sectors are not open enough. Ding Xueliang, a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, pointed out in the article "Four Ways to Deal with Bureaucratic Corruption and Privileges" that looking at the past 20 to 30 years, regarding major social phenomena in China, there are differences between the "leftists" and "liberals" in China. Say tit for tat on everything, but amazing consensus on bureaucratic privilege and corruption.Both basically agree that bureaucratic privilege and corruption have intensified since the reform. Ding Xueliang believes that the twentieth century offers at least four possible ways to deal with bureaucratic corruption and privilege. The first method has been tried in many third world countries, and to a certain extent in China at the beginning of the 20th century, that is, military power.In Pakistan, Indonesia, Africa, and Latin America, there have been many incidents where soldiers, especially young soldiers, came to power in the name of the National Salvation Committee. The reason is often that the civilian government is corrupt and incompetent, and social contradictions are becoming increasingly prominent.But the result was just to drive out the corrupt civil servants with guns, but it did not use guns to promote long-term economic development.Most of the time Pakistan is a military dictatorship, and its consequences are nothing more than a more secretive way of turning the widespread corruption of the previous civilian government into the closed corruption of the military group. At the same time, the military will not do a good job in the economy, so this method can only It is impossible to drive out a corrupt civil service system in a very short period of time to enable the country to develop economically for a long time. The second way is mob politics.This violent means both violent and violent.The method is to storm a corrupt and privileged bureaucracy with a lawless mob movement.The result is that the bureaucratic system is of course smashed to pieces, but at the same time the society is completely destroyed, and the damage to life, property, education and culture is countless.In this regard, China has suffered a lot. The third way is the so-called enlightened autocracy.The most visited countries in China are Singapore and Hong Kong.There is no universal suffrage with fair competition among multiple parties, and corruption is strictly controlled.This kind of system is what China's top leaders want to introduce most these years, but this kind of enlightened autocracy does not seem to be suitable for China as a whole, although some partial methods can be referred to.The biggest difference is the scale. Singapore has more than 4 million people and Hong Kong has 7 million people, equal to a medium-sized city in China.How can China's society of 1.3 billion people strike a balance between denying people participation in politics and tackling corruption like they do? The fourth is to open the public to participate in politics and promote fair political competition, that is, democratization reform.The most recent case is Indonesia.Although Suharto's administration overthrew the corrupt Sukarno regime and brought some economic development, the Suharto group and his family became more and more corrupt and brought down the Indonesian economy.Indonesia was considered the most likely place for mob politics and genocide after Suharto's fall, because the country has thousands of islands and hundreds of tribes.But for more than ten years, the direction of democratization has been clear. Although the steps have been shaky, it has come step by step, and the suppression of corruption at the top has been very effective.The most basic point is that the media is open, and then the highest level allows the legal system to operate independently.The two most important tools for a society to deal with corruption are a transparent media and an independent judiciary.If these two tools are under the control of the bureaucracy, they will never be able to cut themselves off. Ding Xueliang believes that if we look at Chinese politics and comparative politics in the 20th century in a broad context, the past 20 to 30 years are the 20 to 30 years of the recovery and development of China's bureaucracy, and the beginning of the overall bureaucratization of Chinese society. Twenty or thirty years.In the process, as China's economy grows stronger and stronger, bureaucratic privileges that cannot be effectively restrained are increasingly promoting the refinement, depth, and comprehensiveness of corruption.At the same time, the just and just anti-corruption demands of the Chinese people and the system have been increasingly marginalized and unable to act as a check and balance.So the sad, Cultural Revolution-style political sentiment resurged, attracting more and more people.China in the twentieth century has tried two and a half of the above four methods of dealing with bureaucratic corruption and privileges, namely warlords, mobs, and semi-enlightened autocracy, all of which were ineffective, but the fourth method was delayed. Tocqueville answered such a question in "The Old Regime and the Great Revolution": The reign of Louis XVI was the most prosperous period of the old monarchy. Why did the prosperity accelerate the arrival of the Great Revolution? Tocqueville noticed that if people portrayed the ancien régime as it looked at the end of its existence, what would be drawn would be a portrait that was more beautiful than it really was, but less like it.France under Louis XVI: Population was increasing, wealth was growing faster, and the American War did not slow down this leap forward; the country was heavily in debt from the war, but individuals continued to get rich, they became more industrious and richer Enterprising and more creative.Public prosperity did not develop as rapidly in any period after the Revolution as in the twenty years before it. Behind the boom, however, discontent is also building.Spiritually, the nation appears more unstable and uneasy; hatred of all old rules and regulations grows.Moreover, those parts of France that later became the main source of the revolution were precisely those areas where progress was most evident.If one studies the archives left by the old treasury of the Île-de-France, it is not difficult to find that it was in the neighborhood of Paris that the ancillary regime was first and most profoundly reformed.There, the liberty and property of the peasantry have been better protected than in any other fiscal district.Nowhere, on the other hand, has the ancien regime been more completely preserved than in the valley and mouth of the Loire, the Poitou marshes, and the moors of Brittany.But it was there that the civil war was ignited and nourished, where the resistance to the Revolution was fiercest and lasted longest.So much so that some people would say that the better the situation of the French, the more intolerable they find it.The people who resisted the revolution in Hugo's novels came from the Brittany region. Tocqueville said: "Revolutions do not always occur because people's situation is getting worse and worse. Most often, people who have always endured the most intolerable laws without complaint and as if nothing happened, once the pressure of laws is relieved, they just throw it away. A regime destroyed by a revolution is almost always better than the one that preceded it, and experience tells us that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform. Only great The genius of man was able to save a prince who set out to relieve his long-oppressed subjects. Suffering was patiently endured as inevitable, but it became intolerable the moment an idea was conceived to remove it. At that time All the evils that have been removed seem more likely to make others aware of the existence of other evils, so that the people's emotions are more intense: the pain is indeed lessened, but the feeling is more acute. Feudalism is no more aroused at its height than at its end The hatred in the hearts of the French. The slightest tyrannical act of Louis XVI seemed more intolerable than the whole despotism of Louis XIV. The short imprisonment of Beaumarchais was worse than the persecution of Protestants by dragoons in Paris in the time of Louis XIV. arouse greater public sentiment.” At the same time, the drawbacks of the old system are also fully revealed.This is the financial stretch, and in 1788 France was once again facing a financial crisis.Unlike the previous two financial crises (1720 and 1763), which were quickly resolved, the French, who had awakened their sense of rights, had completely lost patience and confidence in the royal family at this time.Although Louis XVI was also reforming, his reforms did not keep up with the pace of society.Tocqueville attributed the cause of this catastrophe to a paradox: on the one hand, a nation whose desire to get rich is inflated every day; By obstructing it, igniting it and then extinguishing it, we have promoted our own destruction in two ways. The ideal state structure is that the state, society, and market are divided into three parts, and the state cannot go beyond the field of power to enter the field of market-price and citizen-society autonomy.毫无疑问，在经过三十年的改革开放之后，市场与社会正在从国家或者政府那里一点点“收复”自己的疆界。这不仅体现在市场经济中，同样体现在公民社会的建设中。细心者会发现，近年来中国媒体甚至已经开始部分地出现了有关“罢工”或者“游行”的新闻。只不过，“游行”在词语上被改头换面以“散步”等平和的方式出现。 2008年“两会”期间，经历了“厦门PX”事件洗礼的厦门市政府发布公告，承诺“公众参与和市民反映强烈的项目不批”。由此可见公民参与在塑造政府性格时究竟有着怎样重要的影响。 相较经济与社会变革而言，政治改革无疑更缓慢曲折。谁也不能否认，尽管已经取得了举世瞩目的成就，但中国改革最艰苦或最关键的一段路程尚待开拓。早在1980年，中国改革的总设计师邓小平在“八一八讲话”中谈执政党和国家领导制度的改革，着重强调要克服“党政不分、以党代政”“把一切权力集中于党委，党委的权力又集中于几个书记，特别是集中于第一书记”等弊病。如今，当中国改革船到江心，人们最为关切的仍然是，如何能够切切实实地推进政改，闯过转型时期“最后的大关”。 2008年，经济学家茅于轼在《绿叶》杂志上发表文章，指出改革开放三十年来，中国在财富、自由和对内、对外开放三个方面取得了很大的成就，这和政治方面摆脱了毛泽东时代的不自由大为相关。今天中国所谓的问题，从道德滑坡到发展道路其实都与政治相关，其求解在于能否还权于民，用法治保护每个中国人平等自由的权利。但是，在一元政治之下，经济可以取得成就，却存在一个突出的矛盾，就是政权是为了极少数人的。当这个少数人的利益跟多数国民利益不冲突的时候，那可以相安无事，而一旦发生了冲突，就只有执政者的利益。在茅于轼看来，中国当下的许多问题，诸如道德滑坡、环境恶化等同样与政治有关。总而言之，“政治好了，其他问题都不是问题”。 你不关心政治，但是政治关心你。近年来，诸如党内民主说、宪政民主说、合作主义国家模式说、咨询型法治政体说、国家制度建设说、增量民主说、协商民主说等各种政改路径设计陆续出台。然而无论哪种改革，最后给人的感觉总是“只听楼梯响，不见人下来”。中央编译局当代所所长何增科直言不讳地指出当代中国人“患上了民主恐惧症”。在何看来，回顾中国政治现代化历史，渐进与激进、改革与革命曾经屡次交替出现，但是渐进改革曾多次因贻误时机而被激进的革命所代替，中国的政治现代化也因此命运多舛。而中国今天的渐进政治改革到底能走多远主要取决于两大因素：一是改革能否适时推进并取得突破；二是现有政治制度的容纳量和领导集团的学习能力。如果领导集团缺乏改革意愿，任由矛盾和危机积累并最终总爆发，改革的机会就会悄悄流走，革命则会不期而至。改革和革命都在与时间赛跑。 乔治·布什曾经在演讲中说：“人类千万年的历史，最为珍贵的不是令人炫目的科技，不是浩瀚的大师们的经典著作，而是实现了对统治者的驯服，实现了把他们关在笼子里的梦想。”熟悉霍布斯政治学理论的人知道，政府像“利维坦”（Leviathan）一样具有双面性格：它由人组成，也由人来运作，因此也就具有了人性的那种半神半兽的品质，它在保护人的同时，又在吃人。 显然，转型国家政治改革的成败得失取决于如何将“利维坦”关进笼子。纵观人类历史，其具体路径不外乎权力主导、权力裂变、外部输入及社会反叛（革命）等几种。比较而言，权力主导无疑是社会总体代价最小的一种方式，如英国的光荣革命、日本的明治维新等等也一直为人们津津乐道。至于这种渐进式变革能否取得成功，关键在于权力对自己前途的认识，以及社会在赎买权力时究竟愿意支付多少社会成本和时间成本。从这方面来看，中国当下的改革，无论有多少挫折，有多少奋进，种种利益交换的背后，或多或少都有些“花钱买宪政”的救赎意味。 有理由相信，发生于大革命之后的中国转型从本质上说是要完成一场关于国家权力的转型。即完成权力（或者国家）之于社会领域的“敦刻尔克大撤退”——既要避免社会动荡，又要使权力能够安全归位。这是一场新的革命，其目的就是要让中国历史真正“告别革命”。 而眼下的中国，社会生机初现。一切正如罗曼·罗兰眼里当年的法国：“我明白了我的力量，明白了我的民族的力量。我们只要等洪水退下去。法兰西的质地细致的花岗石决不会因之剥落的。在洪水带来的污泥之下，我可以教你摸到它。眼前，东一处西一处，有些岩石的峰尖已经露出水面了。”