One recent case is the "Fat Cat" incident. "Fat Cat" was a 21-year-old internet personality who recently jumped to his death from the Chongqing Yangtze River Bridge. According to his sister, the reason he took his own life was that he had spent 500,000 yuan over the course of dating his girlfriend, only to suffer "cold violence" from her. Another case is the murder of a middle-school student in Handan. The incident took place in March: a 13-year-old middle-school student was killed by three of his classmates, allegedly over 191 yuan that had been forcibly transferred out of the victim's account.
The Emergence of a "Society Where People Harm One Another" in China
Incidents like these vary in severity, but scarcely a day goes by without one. The "chained woman" case that broke in Fengxian County, Jiangsu, in early 2022, and the beating at a barbecue restaurant in Tangshan that summer, are among the most prominent cases to draw widespread attention. The sheer viciousness and cruelty of the perpetrators in these cases is appalling. This latest murder of a middle-school student in Handan is no different: the three young perpetrators repeatedly smashed the victim's face with a shovel, beating him beyond recognition. Whether or not this qualifies as "widespread" may be hard to gauge, but surely the repeated occurrence of such incidents amounts to a "deep" or "severe" social collapse?
So-called social collapse means that society's civilized norms are working less and less effectively, while the factors and effects of people harming one another in their words and actions keep increasing. Here, the word "social" refers to the fact that this kind of "mutual harm" phenomenon occurs largely outside the realm of public power struggles or economic activity governed by the coercive distribution of interests, showing up mainly in the interpersonal relationships of everyday life. That people harm one another in the pursuit of power is a familiar phenomenon, one that grows even more extreme within the CCP and its political system — the darkness, treachery, and lawlessness involved need no elaboration here. And the emergence of zero-sum competition, of grabbing and scheming, even outright deceit, in economic activity likewise seems unsurprising to most Chinese people.
But the cases at hand here involve no struggle for public power at all, and the people caught up in them had no great conflict of interest between them to begin with. Where money was involved, the transfer of what was, in fact, not an enormous sum arose in the first place out of affection, friendship, trust, or at least deference. And yet it is precisely within this realm of relationships built on feeling, friendship, and trust — relationships that ought to be relatively positive and beautiful — that these vicious incidents have now emerged, incidents in which the parties involved paid with their very lives. Can it really be called an exaggeration to describe this as "social collapse"?
For ordinary people, it is precisely this kind of social collapse — and especially the formation of a "society where people harm one another" — that is, in fact, more harmful, more direct, and more all-pervasive than any power struggle or clash over interests. The reason is simple: ordinary people's lives are not necessarily always caught up in struggles for power, and clashes over interests, more often than not, either follow some kind of rules or are approached by participants with a high degree of wariness. By contrast, interpersonal social relationships are a major part of ordinary people's daily lives, and people generally do not remain constantly on guard within them. As a result, the collapse of rules, the erosion of morality, the evaporation of trust, and the weaponization of emotion in this realm can wound every single person, every single day, at every hour — and can wound them very deeply and very severely. In this sense, the scope of impact of social collapse itself is bound to be enormous.
Although social collapse, in how it manifests, is not directly related to political power struggles, its deeper roots are certainly connected to the political system. Of course, many factors lie behind the formation of a "society where people harm one another," and political factors are not the only ones. But as a scholar of politics, what I see first and foremost in the cases of social collapse described above are political causes. In fact, in a country like China — one that is not merely politically authoritarian but politically totalitarian — politics dominates everything, and is in truth the root cause of every social phenomenon.
An article on the Chinese internet reporting on the Handan middle-school student murder opened with the line: "Hell stands empty, for its demons walk the earth." My first reaction upon reading it was: hell is packed full, and its demons have come down to earth. Then, as a political scientist, I had a second reaction: authoritarianism itself is hell, and its demons reside in politics. There is an old Western saying that people are half angel, half devil. So when are people angels, and when are they devils? The logic of institutional analysis holds that a good system cultivates people's angelic hearts and brings out their angelic smiles, while a bad system builds up people's demonic viciousness and unleashes their demonic ferocity. If this is true even of those who wield enormous power, how much greater must be the influence of institutional arrangements on ordinary people?
Just imagine: in a society where power reigns supreme, capricious and tyrannical, in a country where university students consider passing the civil service exam their best possible future, where officials are steeped in greed, high-handedness, moral corruption, and decay — how could such a society not be filled with rage and hostility? How could this fail to exert a powerful "demonstration effect" on young people? Here is a small example from not long ago: in Kailu County, Inner Mongolia, farmers were ready to begin spring planting, but local officials refused to allow it unless they were paid over a million yuan in so-called "irrigation fees." Just like the notorious line "my father is Li Gang," the officials there reportedly said, "Don't talk to me about the law — I don't know the law!" And indeed — the man who chained up the mother of eight children didn't know the law either; neither did the men who beat people at the Tangshan barbecue restaurant; and neither did the three middle-school students who beat their classmate to death with a shovel. They are all products stamped from the very same mold!
It is not that they don't know the law — in truth, they understand perfectly well that there is no rule of law under this system, and that the law can therefore be ignored and trampled upon; indeed, only by ignoring and trampling the law can one display one's privilege, ability, and power. If Deng Xiaoping could disregard the constitution and use tanks and machine guns to kill people in the streets of the capital, Beijing, then a "Zhang Xiaoping" can freely beat people at a barbecue restaurant, and a "Li Xiaoping" can just as well beat a classmate to death with a shovel.
Yes — this is exactly how the demon within human nature gets unleashed: those who commit the most utterly evil acts hold power and status, wealth and glory; the entire system is designed to make you do evil, and the more evil you do, the more it guarantees your success. Under such a political arrangement, how could a society filled with goodwill, honesty, warmth, and mutual support among people ever take shape? Yes — authoritarian politics does not merely strip people of their basic rights; it is also destroying their conscience and their very humanity!