China | China’s security state

Guarding the guardians

The party makes sure that the people who guarantee its rule are themselves under tight control

|BEIJING

CHINA'S leaders, it seems, are stepping up the policing of the police who help secure their rule. In the provinces police chiefs are being put more firmly under the Communist Party's thumb. Some liberals detect in this a sign of possible reform in the way the party polices China's citizens. More probable, however, is that after a season of tumult, the control of the police force itself is now under scrutiny. China's vast and costly domestic-security apparatus is still behaving as aggressively as ever.

In the run-up to this autumn's Communist Party Congress, at which China will change its most senior leaders for the first time in ten years, provincial- and lower-level party committees have already been revamped. In the process, provincial chiefs of police are being taken down a peg.

First, they are being dropped as leaders of the party's “political-legal” committees, which oversee the police, courts and prosecutors. These committees have enormous power. The security forces they oversee are not just officers of the law but guardians of Communist rule. In recent years they have faced a series of crises, such as ethnically charged unrest in the regions of Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, and challenges from lawyers and activists. Their response has been to crackdown, often with mass detentions; some detainees disappear.

According to Southern Weekend, a Chinese newspaper, the party's organisation department decreed in 2010 that political-legal committee heads should no longer double as police chiefs. The paper seems to have been right, at least about the trend. Of the 30 secretaries of provincial political-legal committees chosen this year, only nine are police chiefs, down from 13 out of 31 less than five years ago. And—unthinkable until recently—in Guangdong province in the south and Qinghai in the west, not one of the 29 police chiefs at the administrative tier below the province, the prefecture, is also the political-legal head.

A corollary of this trend is a second blow to the police chiefs' standing: they are also being denied places on the Communist Party's regional standing committees. These rule the provinces much as the nine-member Politburo standing committee in Beijing rules China as a whole. Of the 30 provincial-level committees named so far this year (ie, all except Beijing's, whose congress begins on June 29th), only ten include the regional police chief, down from 14 less than five years ago. This change makes the provincial set-up look more like that in the central party and government, where the minister of public security, Meng Jianzhu, is not on the 24-member Politburo, let alone the standing committee.

One reason to think the power of the police is on the wane is the recent decline in the fortunes of the central political-legal chief, Zhou Yongkang. Mr Zhou was party secretary at the ministry of public security from 2002-07, before becoming the Politburo's man in charge of domestic security—secret police and all. He was an ally of Bo Xilai, a fellow Politburo member, until Mr Bo was purged earlier this year.

Mr Zhou, who is said to have backed Mr Bo to succeed him, has presided over heady days for the men and women in blue (and plainclothes). China's domestic-security budget has surged to an astonishing $110 billion a year, larger than declared defence spending. Some party rivals must surely have chafed at such a grab for power and money, and grumbled privately about Mr Zhou's effectiveness. After all, the number of destabilising protests across China has continued to climb, to as high as 180,000 in 2010, by one estimate.

No senior leader has argued in public, however, that the rise of the security state has been counterproductive. Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, who presents himself as reform-minded, may have opposed Mr Zhou's preference for the iron fist. But if so, he was outnumbered. Police and security powers have steadily expanded at the expense of legal procedure, the courts, prosecutors and even other party leaders. Their leadership of the political-legal committees, which are charged with balancing the interests of the police, courts and prosecutors, enhanced the police chiefs' scope to sidestep formal institutions. Lofty hopes for the rule of law have repeatedly dashed against the rocks of the security state.

Cheng Li, an expert on Chinese elite politics at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank, says police power grew partly because Mr Zhou lacked powerful rivals in China's “collective leadership” system; partly in response to the threat posed by lawyers and activists keen to use the law against the party; and partly in reaction to the crises of unrest.

Until this year each perceived new challenge to party rule seemed to bolster Mr Zhou's personal standing. As central political-legal chief, he is also in charge of state security and shadowy irregular units, including the 610 Office, which was created in 1999 to crush the Falun Gong spiritual movement and remains active today.

The security strategy itself has not changed this year. But Mr Zhou seems a diminished figure. A turning-point came in February when Wang Lijun, the former police chief of the south-western municipality of Chongqing, briefly took refuge in an American consulate. That was one tile in a tumble of dominoes that ended the career of Mr Bo, Chongqing's party secretary.

Mr Zhou's record, damaged by his links to Mr Bo, was further besmirched in April, when Chen Guangcheng, a blind legal activist, escaped from his home in Shandong province, where he was being detained—illegally—by the authorities. The episode highlighted the extralegal powers of the security forces, which had hired thugs to guard and intimidate Mr Chen and his family, and to keep well-wishers at bay, sometimes by beating them up. The political-legal chief and the police chief in Shandong were both soon sacked. Reformers took this as a hopeful sign, but it was hardly surprising: when Mr Chen also sought American protection, the incident became a national embarrassment.

There is much speculation in Beijing as to whether the successor to Mr Zhou as political-legal chief to be named this autumn will also join the new Politburo standing committee. Mr Li of Brookings and Fu Hualing of the University of Hong Kong believe that the system of political-legal committees will eventually be abolished as a step towards the rule of law. That reform, however, does not seem imminent.

Put simply, it looks as if China's police chiefs are being reminded who is in charge. In the same vein, since the downfall of Mr Bo, who counts some army generals among his friends, party leaders have also repeatedly reminded the army that its master is the Communist Party, not the state, let alone any individual.

Out of the barrel of the party

The dilemma for the party, as Mr Li sees it, is that the very factors that threaten the party and made Mr Zhou and the security state powerful still exist: “If you reduce the spending on police, on security, then how to deal with the possible protests?” So murky units such as the 610 Office, whose members have surfaced, for example, in Mr Chen's security cordon, still thrive. Ai Weiwei, a dissident and artist who was detained in irregular fashion last year by police, says security officers can be vague about precisely which branch of the party-state they work for. One way or another, though, they do the same job. Communist Party leaders cling tightly to their security state, even as they struggle to control it.

This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline "Guarding the guardians"

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