Earlier this month, People’s Forum magazine, which is published by the official People’s Daily, ran a story about a national survey showing that close to half of all government officials in China view themselves as being among the nation’s “vulnerable groups” (弱势群体). According to the same survey, 73.5 percent of all Internet users identify themselves as “vulnerable,” as do 57.8 percent of white collar workers and 55.4 percent of writers and academics. In short, the People’s Forum report points to epidemic levels of insecurity in China.
I had my own double-edged brush with vulnerability when I microblogged recently about a trip I made with my 82 year-old father to a hospital in Guangzhou. We had waited for several hours for an injection before I finally gathered the courage to ask the nurse why things were taking so long. “Everyone is waiting, don’t you see that?” she answered brusquely. This set me on edge, and I later decided to vent my anger through my microblog. Immediately, scores of readers accused me of “exploiting the vulnerable,” “not considering others” and even of “bullying the weak.”
In the eyes of my accusers my tale of vulnerability had placed me up top with those privileged special interests.
It was the hospital’s total insensitivity to the vulnerability of my 82 year-old father — and their lack of reasonable policies for getting patients in and out — that had angered me in the first place. But it had never occurred to me that others would regard this gruff nurse as vulnerable, and victimized by me.
Another experience that left me gloomy recently concerns my 18 year-old son. If one were to apply this concept of “vulnerable groups” to present-day Australia, where my son lives, there’s little doubt that recent immigrants, and particularly recent immigrants from mainland China, would be counted among the vulnerable. Most Chinese immigrants, save those corrupt officials who slip through the net, arrive in Australia “poor and blank,” as we say. Goaded on by a sense of vulnerability, Chinese in Australia push hard to change their stars, and fortunately the vast majority are able to establish themselves.
But the shadow of vulnerability lives on in the next generation, emerging in the overbearing hopes parents place on their children. We want them to excel, and we hope they gravitate toward the most profitable and respectable professions. I’m no exception on this count, and my hopes have been rewarded with a son who has achieved quite well and who could study whatever he wishes at his university of choice.
My son suddenly announced to me recently, however, that he wants to be a pilot.
Now you must understand that being a pilot in Australia means not only that you have little guarantee of a job, but that you have to be ready to pay the 150,000 Australian dollars (about one million yuan) it takes to go through pilot training. How many rich men in the world made their millions flying airplanes?
In any case, my son confessed to me that his passion is for flying. I wanted to say to him, “Look, can a passion feed the family? Can a passion . . . ?” And then I stopped, realizing that my son doesn’t share the same sense of vulnerability that I have.
The fact is that in Australia you won’t go hungry if you’re not a doctor, a lawyer or a businessman. You won’t find yourself underprivileged to the point of living out on the street. In a society where the basic necessities of life come with some guarantee, one can pursue one’s dreams with a freer heart . . .
Try separating Australian employees and bosses into the “strong” and the “weak” and you’ve set yourself a difficult task. Being a boss and employing workers may seem to put you in a position of strength. But Australian laws mean that you’re the one in the position of weakness in your relationship with those you employ. What about workers? They receive all sorts of guarantees that the government obliges employers to provide. On the other hand, you can’t say that bosses are in a position of weakness either. Most importantly, the law ensures that their personal assets are inviolable. When in the last few decades have you ever heard about wealthy Australians being stripped of their assets? Or of Australians having their homes raided and property confiscated? Or of Australians having their homes forcibly destroyed without compensation?
Both inside and outside China, when we talk about the sense of insecurity that prevails in our country, we dwell on such things as wealth disparity, social inequality and the pressures of life. All of these are factors, of course. But the most critical problem is the lack of institutional protections and rule of law.
In a fair and prosperous society, in a stable and harmonious society, in a society safeguarded by rule of law, everyone is equal, everyone is the boss of himself, and everyone is the boss of his nation. In such a society, the numbers of those belonging to so-called “vulnerable groups” are also substantially reduced.
In the absence of a good system, and in the absence of rule of law, the poor risk being exploited by the rich, the rich risk being swallowed by the powerful, the powerful risk being tormented and toyed with by the still more powerful, and the still more powerful are tormented in turn by waves of public opinion, fearing that a reckoning lurks around the corner.
We all become “vulnerable groups.” And we all become vulnerable to the accusation that we enjoy too much privilege.
This article was originally posted in Chinese to Yang Hengjun’s Blog on December 9.

At Southern Weekend, Tim Hathaway translates a recent piece by columnist and CMP fellow Xiao Shu (笑蜀) called “Life should not yield to development,” in which the writer reflects on the cultural and political causes of human tragedies in China.
A portion of the piece follows:

The blaze that never should have happened finally did happen at 728 Jiaozhou Road in Shanghai. No matter how hard rescuers tried, nothing could be done to lift our compatriots from the rolling flames. Another tragedy came on the heels of this one in Guizhou. 49 people employed by the Henan Zhongping Nenghua Group died because of a flooded mine. And recent reports indicate that on November 30 the Yide Mine in Xiangtan County flooded as well, trapping at least seven people.
With this backdrop People’s Daily published a commentary titled “What’s the point of development without the people?” It has served as an especially loud wake up call.
The time has come to discuss how to prioritize life and development. This is because there are far too many conflicts between economic development and the right to life which are the cause of an unending line of tragedies: mining accidents, demolitions that result in violence, fires, mud slides, gas explosions, industrial pollution. There is a new disaster almost every day which befalls our fellow citizens. It’s like an interminable Cold War. Where will it all end?

Read MORE . . .

News reporter Yan Bingguang (颜秉光) was fired by China’s official Xinhua News Agency this week after she was found to have used her own relatives as sources in a number of news reports. The scandal began, as so many scandals in China now do, on the Internet, as web users subjected Yan’s reports to scrutiny and the allegations were followed up by her employer.
Yan has now become something of a sensation on China’s internet. Web users have compiled the whole series of news reports she wrote using her own relatives as her chief news sources, and Yan has been dubbed China’s “greatest journalist,” a title obviously granted in jest.
Faking news stories is of course not altogether new, but Yan’s case is certainly an exceptional one. Her habitual use of her own family members as source material has been laid out, plain for all to see, by Internet users. The scandal, though comic in its overall effect, should really get us thinking.
As Xinhua News Agency and many web users have read this case, Yan Bingguang’s conduct stems from poor professional ethics and a lack of regard for media credibility. The work of the journalist is largely the work of conscience. Those who aren’t interested in the public’s right to know or in social justice would do best to stay clear of this profession. And yet, as it happens, our profession is full of the crooked and the shifty. It’s only that many journalists are more clever than Yan Bingguang in concealing their crimes.
Much of the anger being vented over Yan’s conduct is actually the product of festering frustration over the quality of news coverage in our country. I still remember how, in 2008, Xinhua News Agency reported in detail on the successful launch of the Shenzhou 7 rocket, which had not yet occurred. And reporters have been jailed before in China for attempting to extort money from companies or individuals.
The reports from Yan Bingguang that have come under scrutiny don’t deal with sensitive political issues. They report information about the trifling details of life — kids going on holiday, the weather changing in Harbin, family reunion dinners and the like. Why did she do this? The answer, obviously, is that she wanted to do her job in the most basic sense, by successfully filing stories.
But the more important question is how she was able to do what she did. How was her conduct able to continue without raising alarms from other editors or reporters? It is certainly an indictment of how the entire editorial system works that web users were able so easily to lay out a record of Yan Bingguang’s longstanding deception [while her employer apparently noticed nothing]. In this case, the system clearly failed the test.
In fact, not all of Yan Bingguang’s reports were fabrications. Perhaps it could even be said that the majority of them were truthful. web users were able to get a handle on what she was doing precisely because her family members appeared repeatedly in her reports under their real names. Put all together, her news reports read like a diary of family life. Web users have poked fun at her, saying that her husband has now become a nationwide media darling, thanks to her reports and the ensuing scandal], even though he’s nothing but an ordinary teacher.
This comical result comes about precisely because Yan Bingguang’s reports preserve a great deal of truth. How different would these reports be if the names had been changed to “Mr. Wang,’ “Miss Li” and “Grandma Zhao”? They wouldn’t be much different at all. The question is why these trifling records of ordinary life have been transformed again and again into news?
Of course journalists should be attuned to the mundane details of life. But if the quotidian life of an ordinary citizen becomes the routine focus of news reports outside the context of more significant and newsworthy issues, we must ask tougher questions about why this is happening.
To put a finer point on it, another key reason why these news reports on Yan Bingguang’s family life were able to escape notice and censure is precisely because they dealt with vapid and insignificant issues [and were therefore unlikely to cause trouble]. [NOTE: Chang’s implication here is that editor’s at Xinhua were so preoccupied in looking for political red flags that they were blinded to ethical and professional ones.]
What issues did Yan’s reports deal with at all? How could she file so many banal reports?
Read Yan Bingguang’s reports carefully, then think of many of the images we see on our television sets, and the reason becomes clear. The bulk of what we see is empty and superficial. When Chinese New Year rolls around, we hear about how happy the people are this year; when it snows, we hear about how this promises a fruitful year to come; or, in a dramatic departure from the focus all the rest of the year [i.e., Party and government leaders] we are treated to gestures of solicitude for the welfare of the ordinary people.
We see the same reports every year, repeated endlessly. They don’t require that journalists go and do real reporting, and there are so many journalists who turn to those near and dear to accommodate this appetite for empty news. And so long as such reports persist, it will make little difference that a single Yan Bingguang has been fired from her news post.
This editorial originally appeared in Chinese at Oriental Daily. Some points have been clarified, such as the fact that the premature report on the Shenzhou 7 mission in 2008 was by Xinhua News Agency.

Cases of students ratting out their teachers seem to be on the rise in China in recent years. Almost invariably, the teachers have done nothing wrong. Rather, they have said something wrong, something the right people believe to be politically unacceptable. It’s no longer very exceptional to see a teacher’s career impacted by accusations from their students, and nearly every university has had its cases. In less severe instances, a teacher’s course may be suspended. In more severe instances, the teacher may be tossed right out of the school or university.
So much more welcome would it be if students focussed their accusations on real and serious abuses. China’s universities play host to all sorts of unethical conduct by teachers and professors, including bribe taking and harassment of female students. Unfortunately, in the rare cases where students do report other real abuses, these are generally brushed aside by university bureaucrats, and the ugly fact is that in the vast majority of cases in which teachers are targeted, this has to do with something the teacher dared to say.
And this culture of political tattling has unfortunate consequences for education in our country.
In ancient times, the relationship between teacher and student was one of the five cardinal relationships (五伦), and it could be regarded as a statutory relationship. Just as a son couldn’t be encouraged to raise accusations against his father, society looked with contempt on accusations made by a student against his teacher. If real abuse did take place, procedures permitted a student to accuse a teacher. But in such cases, the identity of the student had to be carefully concealed, otherwise they would ever afterwards be a social pariah, such was the disgust people generally felt for perceived breaches of Confucian obligation.
Fortunately, few teachers or students were ever embroiled in disputes, and these social relationships were governed by the maxim “like son to father, like father to son” (子为父隐，父为子隐). In the past, even the government would do its utmost to recuse itself of such matters.
In the olden days, there were cases of in the past of teachers raising accusations against students, but it rarely happened the other way around. For a teacher to accuse a student was like a father accusing a child, and the act could be construed and understood as the sacrificing of blood ties to uphold righteousness (大义灭亲). This was something done on occasion to demonstrate allegiance to the emperor.
Ethical relationships (伦理关系) were the keystone of the nation and of society back then, and the sum product of these ethical relationships, the so-called three cardinal guides and five constant virtues (三纲五常), were the orthodoxy in China. Even the emperor used the imperial examination system to establish his own teacher-student relationships with advisers and ministers, thereby solidifying his rule. Obviously, accusations by students against their teachers could not be encouraged lest the same game rules apply when important political matters were at stake.
Simply speaking, it was Westernization that destroyed this social status quo. Foreign students and teachers were not restricted by the same set of ethical rules as their Chinese counterparts. There were few mental or other obstacles for Western students inclined to make an accusation against a teacher in cases of wrongdoing.
Even so, as new schools opened up in China from the late Qing up to the Beiyang Period of the Republican Era, the traditional set of relationships remained dominant. As Mr. Ma Yifu (马一浮) once said, the relationship between teacher and student was already then like a market exchange, opening with a bell and closing with a bell, but there were few cases of students accusing teachers. Chen Duxiu (陈独秀), who was called the “commander” of the May Fourth Movement, was not detained because someone raised accusations against him, but because he went out into public himself and distributed fliers.
What really prompted the trend of students accusing their teachers was the culture of revolution. The Kuomintang had all along referred to itself as a revolutionary party, and after undergoing a Leninist remake [in 1926], the flavor of revolution in the party became much more pure.
For the sake of revolution, traditional ethical relationships could be disregarded. Therefore, under the leadership of the Kuomintang, student spies (特务学生) appeared in China’s universities. In principle, student spies existed to preserve the revolution, but the teachers and students they accused were working toward a different revolution. Under this situation it happened that in many cases students and teachers in secondary schools and universities who were accused by others had no choice but the leave their schools. This was actually the best-case scenario. In some instances they were packed off to prison, or taken to the chopping block.
Of course, in those days these so-called student spies weren’t actually students. They were students with a special mission. They had no interest in seeking degrees. They were really ne’er-do-wells hired by various organizations and placed in the schools. These spies were readily recognizable when they were placed in academic environments, and they were universally despised. The upshot was that they weren’t really all that useful. Aside from serving as muscle and wreaking havoc on student activities they were basically a huge pain. In other words, the KMT found it impossible to really infiltrate the academic environment with loyal students, and these sore-thumb spies were their only recourse.
During the 22 years that the Kuomintang ruled mainland China, it was only during the second decade, as KMT rule was in crisis, that student spies become more and more prevalent. In the end, thought, student spies were of no avail in saving the Party or the country.
For honest-to-goodness cases of actual students informing on their teachers we have to look further on to a time when revolution deepened. In the cultural and educational spheres after 1949, political movements came one after the other — thought reform (思想改造), the three-anti five-anti campaigns (三反五反), the elimination of counterrevolutionaries (肃反), the anti-rightist movement (反右), the Cultural Revolution (文革). One key distinguishing feature of these movements was the informing on teachers by students. Teachers were a favored target of revolutionary activity, seen as bourgeois intellectuals that had to be dealt with sternly.
As the Cultural Revolution neared its end, student accusations against teachers became a virtual addiction. In middle schools, primary schools and universities, students rushed to raise accusations. It was as though everyone feared falling behind the craze, and even professors in fields like engineering couldn’t escape censure.
Thankfully, that era of unrestrained accusations against teachers has long ago passed. But acts of student squealing today remain divisive and destructive. In most cases, students make accusations on behalf of certain players and interests in the background, and few if any do so out of a consciousness of their own rights in cases of real abuse.
What we need to realize, however, is that while teachers seem to be the ones losing out when such political accusations are made, the ones who are ultimately suffering are our students.
A version of this editorial originally appeared in Chinese at Southern Metropolis Daily.