Wishing a more equitable Year of the Monkey

We will welcome the Year of the Monkey in a couple of days. The monkey is a part of not only the Chinese Zodiac but also many Chinese idioms — such as “killing a chicken to scare a monkey” or “a monkey calls the shots in the mountain where there is no tiger”. But the most formidable image of the simian in Chinese society is the Monkey King; the Monkey King also gives wings to Chinese people’s imagination.

A legendary figure from the Chinese classic novel Journey to the West, the Monkey King is still popular among Chinese children and adults thanks to his wisdom and magic powers — with his special pair of golden eyes, he can identify a demon or monster at the first glance.

What I am particularly obsessed with is the struggle between the Monkey King and his master, the Buddhist monk, who always fails to identify the traps set up for him by demons. So there is always a verbal fight between them, which generally culminates in the monk reciting an incantation that forces the golden ring around the Monkey King’s head to squeeze so hard that he ends up with a very bad headache and is forced to obey whatever wrong decisions his master makes.

These episodes don’t seem to have anything to do with the symbolic animal of the Chinese Zodiac. But there is close association between the incantations the Buddhist monk uses and the way the top leaders at various levels exert control over people under their auspices.

Most of the top leaders have absolute say over almost everything in State-owned enterprises, which central inspection teams’ reports have cited as one of the unhealthy working styles. There is hardly any democratic decision-making in most of the central SOEs and local government leaderships that have been inspected, which is not what is expected given the design of the local Party committee structure.

Several deputy Party secretaries and members of the Party committee are supposed to share the decisionmaking powers. Yet such a power structure very often fails to function as the top leader has his/her own way of bringing all of them under his sway. Ridiculous, but true. If a leading member wants to do something his/her own way, he or she has to curry favor with the top leader, who can bring the appellant under his/her influence by granting the favor.

A top leader’s close relationship with his immediate senior or even higher-level leadership is also a guarantee for the absolute authority he/she can exert over colleagues as well as subordinates. As a result, anyone objecting to or challenging his/her absolute authority would hardly get any support from either colleagues or higher-level leaders. That explains why a top leader of an SOE or any Party committee almost always has absolute authority over everything, which has become the very source of abuse of power and/or destructive decision making.

Such absolute authority is an obstacle to the collective leadership, which the Party hopes to overcome to eradicate corruption and prevent wrong decision from being made.

The absolute authority a top leader uses to force his/her will on colleagues is very similar to the incantations used by the Buddhist monk to subdue the Monkey King to neutralize the latter’s power to disobey his wrong decisions.

To further the fight against corruption and end the unhealthy working styles within the Party in the Year of the Monkey, it is imperative that the absolute powers top leaders enjoy be diluted through tighter supervision or other institutional constraints. If a New Year wish is necessary for the ruling Party and the nation in the Year of Monkey, it should be to allow collective leadership to prevail at all levels — similar to removing the golden ring around the Monkey King’s head — to facilitate the healthy development of the country.