Agreed, for society to engage with the state, the government, rules have to be prescribed and followed, and yet, engagement, on society’s part, is as much a matter of orderly procedure as it is a staple of creative novelty, especially when demands appear to fall on deaf ears on the receiving end. Few regimes in the world, with the patent exception of North Korea, openly advocate the irrelevance of the people—and even for supremo Kim the Third, it is only because he has been led to believe that he is the stellar guide and the god-like embodiment of “his” people on earth. For idealist and progressive minds, the strength and balance of a democratic regime depend on the existence of a vibrant “civil society” engaging the state, even though very often this means contesting it. This has proven true for most of the peaceful transitions from authoritarian rule to democracy, and this is equally significant in more established democratic settings, those in which citizens have started to question the validity of a purely electoral definition of democracy that only cares about citizen-voters every 4 to 5 years—what scholars dub “liberal democracy disenchantment”. Hence the fad for participatory democracy, public consultations, deliberative polling and “civil sector” partaking in government to partly compensate for the ubiquitous “careerisation” of politics. I am being cynical here, as if it was a mere instrumentalisation on the side of politicians—some kind of conspiracy to preserve the domination of the few on the many by defusing revolutionary threats—, but these forms of engagement are actually designed to restore the legitimacy of a regime that claims to be by, of and for the people.
The same rationale goes for dictatorships and for what political scientists call “anocracies”—a midway between autocracy and democracy in which vested interests compete among themselves and yet confiscate power. Whatever the regime, what matters ultimately is for ruling elite to last and moreover, for their natural or anointed inheritors to outlive them in the same capacity—here, Kim the Third is truly an exception, and even the most obscure despotic apprentice knows it. Hence the necessity for the “people” to be solicited and consulted in order to keep track of the common good, even though there are no electoral mechanisms to make the rulers accountable. Of course, the exercise has its limits, even in a place as sophisticated as China. Cao Shunli, one of the most respected and eminent “petitioners” paid this very fact with her life on March 14: arrested at Beijing International Airport on September 14 last year while on her way to Geneva to attend a human rights event, she was only indicted in December for “picking quarrels to create disturbances” and ultimately fell into a coma at the end of February because of appalling detention conditions, only to die a few weeks after. Petitioning for Cao Shunli, a law graduate, had become the only “channel” to reach a government necessarily comprehended as benevolent—her “petitioner” crusade started back in 2002 after she had been sacked from her work unit for exposing corruption in housing distribution. This time around, many believe she was actually arrested because of the two-month long sit-in she organized along 60 other petitioners in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to request to participate in the drafting of the ‘National Human Rights Action Plan’, as law—Chinese law—entitled her to.
In Macao, petitioning is not as lethally hazardous, but the fact that out of 900 petitions addressed to Mr Chui Sai On in 2013, only 82 have been answered directly, a bit less than 600 sent to relevant secretaries and 306 archived without any kind of reply has prompted disquieted comments by some analysts—mainly stressing that the Chief Executive was wrong to treat so lightly the ever expanding power of the people to directly voice their anxieties. I would add that first of all we would need to know a bit more about the relevance of the answers produced by the Chief Executive and his secretaries—ask legislators how their queries to the government are being timely and adequately treated… And then, why should “direct” contacts with the highest authorities via petitions or radio call-in show take precedence over “mediated” and “informed” probing coming from “concerned groups”, media and legislators?
Published in Macau Daily Times, March 21 2014
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