Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

The revolution evolves

What would Mao say? Now the power elite is playing the game of authoritarians everywhere: suppressing the poor and powerless and protecting the urban elite. Remind me again, which characteristics are Chinese?

Protecting the middle class

IN THE southern boomtown of Shenzhen, normally docile legislators have been complaining with unusual vigour. Their worries, aired in the local media, are about the introduction on January 28th of the country’s first home-ownership tax…

In recent months fast-rising property prices in China have put the Communist Party in a quandary. Avowedly socialist leanings mean that the party cannot easily ignore the complaints of the urban poor… But most registered urban residents… own their own property. Few want to see prices drop. For them, the main concern is avoiding a crash.

Keeping the middle class happy is also the party’s concern. Over the past decade, despite a rhetorical shift to the left, the party has tailored policies to avoid antagonising such a politically crucial group. It has been adept at isolating and containing protests by angry farmers or the urban underclass, using a mixture of intimidation and pay-offs. But it is less sure that it could deal so adroitly with grievances shared by swathes of the middle class…

Some officials have touted the new property tax as another market-dampening measure. But it is unlikely to have much impact on prices in the two cities. The tax rates are low and they affect only a small proportion of homeowners…

One aim of the property tax is to provide local governments with a steady new income that will help wean them off their dependence on one-off land deals. Jia Kang, a government researcher who helped devise the tax, says it should result in fewer evictions and protests [of poor people]. It could, he says, even help promote local democracy, since taxpayers will expect a bigger say in how their governments are run. Another reason, perhaps, for not expecting property taxes to play too big a part.

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Labels: China, cleavages, economics, ideology, politics