观点习近平打破了中共建立的社会契约Xi Broke the Social Contract That Helped China Prosper黄亚生2022年12月2日 白纸已成为中国抗议的象征。 JEROME FAVRE/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCKThe protests in China against the government’s draconian Covid controls have been compared to those in 1989, when students demonstrated for political reforms and democracy. The 1989 pro-democracy movement occurred in the most liberal, tolerant and enlightening period in the history of the People’s Republic of China, and the regime opened fire in Tiananmen Square — after the ouster of the liberal leader, Zhao Ziyang — because it had run out of every other control tool in its possession. This is called the Tocqueville paradox: An autocracy is most vulnerable when it is least autocratic. 中国反对政府严苛新冠防疫措施的抗议被认为与1989年的抗议类似，当时学生为争取政治改革和民主举行了示威。1989年的民主运动发生在中华人民共和国建国以来最自由、包容和开明的时期，而当自由派领导人赵紫阳下台后，已经找不出其他控制工具的政府在天安门开了枪。这就是所谓托克维尔悖论：专制政体在最不专制的时候最为脆弱。 But a closer analogy is April 5, 1976. On that day and the days before, protesters gathered in Tiananmen Square, demonstrating against the tyrannical rule, deteriorating economic conditions and political persecutions by the Gang of Four and, by implication, its patron, Mao Zedong. That was a movement born out of grievances, not aspirations. 但更贴切的对比应该是在1976年4月5日。那天和在那之前的几天，抗议者聚集在天安门，抗议暴政、恶化的经济状况和四人帮（因而也牵涉到他们的保护人毛泽东）的政治迫害。这是一场出于民怨而非渴望的运动。 The Covid protests are occurring at the height of China’s autocratic moment. While there are calls for free speech and elections, the rallying cry since Sunday has been against a jarring oppression: the incarceration of hundreds of millions of people in their homes and in field hospitals. Autocracies — whether in China or elsewhere — are oppressive, but has another autocratic regime ever taken away the rights of so many people to lead a normal life? 对新冠的抗议发生在中国专制的巅峰期。虽然也有要求言论自由和选举的呼声，但周日以来的抗议口号是在反抗耸人听闻的压迫：数以亿计的人民被关在家中或是方舱医院。无论在中国还是在其他地方，专制政权都带有压迫性，但有哪个专制政权曾剥夺过如此多民众正常生活的权利吗？ Politically, Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has violated a time-tested technique his predecessors used to defuse social tensions: divide and conquer. After 1989, most of the Chinese protests were localized and issue-specific. Rural residents lost their land, but urbanites were showered with benefits. State workers lost their jobs, but private entrepreneurs were wooed to open businesses. 从政治层面看，中国最高领导人习近平违反了他的前任们用来化解社会矛盾的一种久经考验的办法：分而治之。1989年之后，中国人的大多抗议都是针对地方性和具体的问题。农村人口失去了土地，城市居民却获得了大量福利。体制内员工失去了工作，私营企业家却被鼓励经商。 The benefits and losses evened out in the end. Different people harbored different grievances, and their grievances were not synchronized. Not only did the Communist Party survive those scattered protests; it grew and prospered. Today the party has some 96 million members. If it were a country, it would be the world’s 16th largest. 最终得失相抵。不同群体有不一样的不满，他们的诉求并不相通。中共不仅挺过了那些分散的抗议；其力量还不断发展壮大。如今，该党拥有约9600万党员。如果算成一个国家，其人口将排在全球第16。 Now consider China’s zero-Covid policy. Its lockdowns put nearly everybody in exactly the same situation, and according to one estimate, almost 400 million people were put under some sort of lockdown in 2022. The affluent Shanghainese have very little in common with people in Urumqi in Xinjiang. Yet when 10 people died in a fire in a high rise in Urumqi, with building doors allegedly locked because of Covid restrictions, empathy, a crucial ingredient in collective actions, arose among Shanghainese who inhabit similar high rises. Never, not even in 1989, had a Chinese regime confronted protests in many cities at the same time. 现在再来看中国的新冠“清零”政策。封锁措施几乎让人人都有了相同的处境，据估计，2022年有近四亿人都处于某种程度的封锁之下。富裕的上海人和新疆乌鲁木齐人原本几乎没有共同之处。但当乌鲁木齐一栋高楼起火，据称楼栋出口因防疫被封导致10人丧生，住在类似高层建筑的上海人也产生了同理心，这是集体行动的关键。中国任何一个政权都从未面对过多座城市同时发生抗议的局面，即便在1989年也没有。 Mr. Xi’s autocratic style has undermined the institutional interests of the Chinese Communist Party. After Tiananmen Square, Chinese leaders came up with a successful formula to preserve one-party rule while delivering growth, engineering innovations and seeding entrepreneurial success. That formula required loyalty from the Chinese citizens, but it also gave them space. 习近平的专权作风损害了中共的制度利益。天安门事件之后，中国领导人想出了一个成功的模式，既能维护一党统治，又能实现经济增长、鼓励创新、并为创业成功提供土壤。这一模式需要中国公民保持忠诚，但也给了他们空间。 Young people could go to karaoke and rock ’n’ roll concerts and worship whichever K-pop stars they fancied. Intellectuals could vent their anger and frustration on China’s vibrant social media. And entrepreneurs were so busy making money that they could not even spell the word “politics.” This social contract, in which the Communist Party would observe certain boundaries in exchange for society observing its own, was instrumental in bringing China from the brink of disaster of the Tiananmen crisis and contributed to economic growth and prosperity. Whether we in the West like it or not, opinion surveys during those years showed that young people in China were more supportive of the government’s nationalistic policy agenda than older residents. 年轻人可以去卡拉OK和摇滚音乐会，崇拜他们喜欢的K-pop明星。知识分子可以在中国充满活力的社交媒体上宣泄他们的愤怒和不满。而企业家正忙于赚得盆满钵满，压根无心理会所谓的“政治”。这是中共通过遵守一定界限以换取社会遵守其界限的社会契约，是把中国从天安门危机的悬崖边拯救回来并推动经济增长繁荣的关键。不论西方的我们接受与否，那些年的民调都说明，中国的年轻人比老年人更支持政府的民族主义政策议程。 Mr. Xi broke that social contract. As early as 2013, his government began to channel bank credits to chronically inefficient state-owned enterprises, at the expense of the private sector. Then his government began to crack down on nongovernmental organizations such as feminist groups and on lawyers who helped rural migrant workers negotiate better wage contracts. Even environmentalists were not spared, despite the fact that one of Mr. Xi’s policy priorities was to combat China’s pollution. Censorship was tightened significantly on social media and at Chinese universities. In 2020 and 2021, his government began to target — through fines and regulatory restrictions — China’s crown jewels of technology and entrepreneurship: Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and many others. 习近平打破了这一社会契约。早在2013年，他的政府就开始以牺牲私营部门为代价，将银行信贷引向长期低效的国企。然后，他的政府又开始打击各类非政府机构，如女权组织和帮助农民工协商工资合同的律师。即便是环保人士也未能幸免，哪怕习近平的政策重点之一正是解决中国的污染问题。对社交媒体和大学的审查明显收紧。在2020年和2021年，通过罚款和监管限制，他的政府开始打击代表中国科技和创业领域最巅峰的企业——阿里巴巴、腾讯、百度等等。 The crackdown on big tech was counterproductive. China’s private sector generated the tax revenues and appreciations of land assets that have underwritten the Communist Party and its many costly operations, including, yes, its mandatory coronavirus tests. China’s high-tech companies contributed critically to its early success in containing the virus by rolling out health codes at record speed. They also created millions of jobs for China’s young people, and the entrepreneurs who ran those companies became role models for the ambitious Chinese to go into entrepreneurship rather than agonize over human rights and free speech. The Communist Party had the best of both worlds: a private sector that increased the G.D.P. and, as academic research has shown, did not demand political openness. 对大型科技企业的打压结果适得其反。中国私营部门是税收和土地资产增值的来源，为中共及其许多成本高昂的项目——是的，也包括强制核酸——提供了资金支持。中国的高科技企业以惊人的速度推出了健康码，对早期控制病毒的成功做出了关键贡献。这些企业还为中国年轻人创造了无数就业机会，管理这些企业的企业家也成了榜样，与其为人权和言论自由烦恼，还不如一心创业。中共手握两全其美的优势：一方面是推动GDP增长的私营部门，另一方面则如学术研究表明的那样，社会没有政治开放的要求。 Zero Covid is another example of a self-inflicted wound. In 2020, Mr. Xi’s government scored an early victory by locking down the city of Wuhan and quickly flattening the infection curve. Instead of using the window of opportunity in 2021 and 2022 to vaccinate its population with all available vaccines, including ones by Pfizer and Moderna, the Chinese government doubled down on the zero-Covid policy against the highly transmissible Omicron variant. It was an effort doomed to failure because it is like “trying to stop the wind,” as Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist, put it. 新冠“清零”成了又一个自伤案例。2020年，习近平政府靠着武汉封城迅速拉平了感染曲线，取得了抗疫早期胜利。但中国政府没有利用2021年和2022年的窗口期为民众接种所有可用疫苗，包括辉瑞和莫德纳，面对传染性极强的奥密克戎变异株，反而对“清零”政策不断加码。正如流行病学家迈克尔·奥斯特霍尔姆所说，这就像“试图让风停下来”，是注定要失败的。 Mr. Xi’s decision spoke of hubris of the highest degree — a leader staking his reputation on a mission impossible. While the lockdowns brought untold misery, Covid infections rose to a record high, to around 30,000 a day in a recent count. He overpromised and, predictably, underdelivered. 习近平的决策体现了极度的妄自尊大，成了一位把自己的声誉押在不可能完成的任务上的领导人。在封锁带来无尽苦难的同时，新冠感染数还上升到创纪录的水平，最近统计每日新增感染都在三万左右。他夸下海口，结果未能兑现承诺，实属意料之中。 Inadvertently, Mr. Xi has lowered the bar for democracy. When students were holding up blank pieces of paper at protests, they were not thinking of defending the rights of those voicing unpopular, contrary views. They were defending their right to be human — the right to take a walk in the park, to cross the street to get lunch or to visit friends to play a game together. 习近平在不经意间降低了民主的门槛。当学生们在抗议中举起白纸，他们想的并不是要捍卫那些不受欢迎的、对立的观念。他们在捍卫自己作为人的权利——是去公园散步、去马路对面吃午饭、或是找朋友一起打游戏的权利。 Chinese citizens just want their lives back, an argument John Stuart Mill never thought of as a defense of free speech. If that is the battleground on which debate on democracy and autocracy is waged, democracy wins every time, and we have Mr. Xi to thank for it. 中国公民只想要回自己的生活，约翰·斯图亚特·密尔从未想过这会成为捍卫言论自由的理由。如果这就是打响民主与专制之争的战场，那民主必将胜利，而这都得感谢习近平。 黄亚生(Yasheng Huang)是麻省理工学院斯隆管理学院全球经济与管理学教授，即将出版《The Rise and the Fall of the EAST: Examination, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology in Chinese History and Today》。 翻译：纽约时报中文网 点击查看本文英文版。 相关报道中国抗议浪潮挑战习近平威权统治2022年12月2日 扒下习近平“皇帝的新衣”2022年12月1日 中国共产党正在失去民心2022年12月2日 那些第一次上街的中国年轻抗议者2022年11月30日 最受欢迎中国共产党正在失去民心 习近平“加冕”后，抗议浪潮挑战其威权统治 习近平的新难题：如何悼念江泽民？ 习近平打破了中共建立的社会契约 扒下习近平“皇帝的新衣” 全国多地抗议后，中国释放调整“清零”政策信号 中国防疫困境：“清零”难持续，开放恐致病例灾难性激增 中共前最高领导人江泽民去世，享年96岁 中国抗议者面临的阻碍与前景 广州城中村民众抗议封控，接连两日与警方发生冲突 国际 中国 商业与经济 镜头 科技 科学 健康 教育 文化 风尚 旅游 房地产 观点与评论 免费下载 纽约时报中文网 iOS 和 Android App 点击下载iOS App点击下载Android App点击下载Android APK © 2022 The New York Times Company.