First impressions are often the deepest. You arrive in a new place, a new country and mass of unfamiliar sights, smells and experiences assault your mind - good, bad, confusing. Every sense is heightened. You may not understand everything you see, but you remember it. Later, if you stay long enough, routine sets in. You know more, but maybe see less.
When I first arrived in Beijing at the tail end of winter in 1999, one of the countless number of deep impressions came on my third day here when a friend took me to the bars of Sanlitun. Middle of the night and there were young girls selling flowers - children - they worked until the last bars closed around dawn.
One of them would become my friend, and she wasn’t a child - she’d been lying about her age for years. She was 19 when I met her that night - about four feet tall and probably the toughest, loudest flower seller in Beijing.
She might not have been a child anymore, but she had been when she first started and the other kids really were just kids. One of them, from a neighbouring village in Hunan, was offered 1,000 yuan by a middle-aged foreigner to go back with him to his apartment. Occupational hazard. She didn’t go. But supposing she had? She was 13. <!–more–>
The flower-selling kids and begging kids - they were the obvious in-your-face signs of inequality. For that reason, they attracted attention from foreign journalists, as in this article. Most other things are hidden in places like the countryside where most people live and factories where most of us don’t go.
I was talking to a student friend one day back then about these kids. I can’t remember what I said, it was something about morality. Right and wrong. She gave me a look that said something like: I know foreigners don’t understand China, but I thought you at least knew a bit more than that.
"It’s got nothing to do with morality. It’s about being poor."
She was right. This is what poverty does. The answer is development. Or part of it is. But maybe that’s not the whole story.
The countryside - one of the places where city people and foreigners don’t go. Whatever its faults, the Cultural Revolution did one thing - a generation of city people learnt what life is like for the majority.
Sitting on the train from Hong Kong to Beijing in 1999 - 27 hours looking out over the endless fields, scattered with villages. The incredible urge to know what was there and how do you get there to see it?
As it happened I didn’t even have to try. An old friend’s best friend in the southern suburbs of Beijing was a migrant from a village in Hebei. I wouldn’t have asked, but I didn’t have to. We were all invited and went.
Everything was fascinating. And everything was poor in a way I had never really conceived. No one was starving - this wasn’t life like the great disasters when warring armies swept across the country or famine took its terrible toll. But it was rough.
I wanted to know what everything was, why and what everything did. One of those things was a brick kiln. Suddenly, now in June 2007, those words have a different resonance. Less benign images appear in the mind.
Go to the villages around the country - different provinces, different regions - everywhere is different but some things don’t change all that much. Poverty of a kind that most city people cannot understand. But when you see it, you know why so many people want to escape it.
Why was my flower-selling friend in Beijing? To pay for her brother to finish school and her father’s hospital fees. With nothing but a son to look after you in old age, you need to make sure that your son can support you. When I visited her family at Spring Festival in 2001, her brother had finished school and she didn’t have to go back to Beijing again. She got married and had a kid. The 13-year-old girl who did not go back to that foreigner’s flat - she did have to go back to Beijing.
…….
Brick kilns. Slave labour. The story of the month. One of the reports in that link comes from last week’s Southern Weekend (or Southern Weekly, as its ever-changing English name now is). That was the front and second page story. As it should be.
The front page banner read: "An ultimatum for corrupt officials… see page A3".
The main article flagged on the left column was different: "Social democracy in Sweden".
Of course President Hu Jintao had just visited Sweden, so why not learn more about the country. Except that this is part of a series that Southern Weekend is running asking what exactly does socialism mean? And it doesn’t take much imagination to connect this to Xie Tao’s essay in Yanhuang Chunqiu. And this is a political year. The battle of ideas and search for consensus is now in its final months ahead of the 17th Party Congress.
So Sweden might seem to be a long way from China. But if anyone wants to know what one Chinese writer thinks about the Swedish Model, how it developed and what it achieved, I’ve translated it below.
(Actually, there were more sections on Swedish social democracy here and here, but I decided I was tired and this one would have to do.)
Democratic Socialism in Sweden
(Southern Weekend)
Sweden’s practical experience shows that without a spirit of equality, without a just system of distribution guided by that spirit of equality, continued accumulation of wealth is hard to achieve, and so is efficiency. The reason is simple: unequal and unfair distribution creates turmoil and restricts economic development.
It takes justice to make a big cake
Ding Gang
Our misunderstanding of Sweden often comes from starting with the concept of a "cake". Thinking of social safeguards as a cake has also produced this kind of idea: If you want to perfect the system of social safeguards, you must first boost the economy.
However, at the beginning of the 1930s, when the Swedish Social Democratic Party set about achieving their ideals — to establish a "People’s Home", they were not simply considering social safeguards as a cake. At that time, even if there was a piece of cake for you to cut, it wasn’t very big. What the Swedish Social Democratic Party painstakingly considered was how to establish a "free, equal, democratic and cooperative society", to establish a foundation for continuous, stable economic development. To put it simply, how to divide the cake more fairly.
Sweden has no poor people
A brief look back at the process of Sweden’s GDP growth can help us understand the effect that social welfare had on the Swedish model.
The Swedish Social Democratic Party won the election in 1932, remaining in power for more than 40 years and succeeding in creating the Swedish Model. At that time, Sweden’s per capita GDP was 1,234.9 Swedish kronor (1 Swedish krona being about 1 RMB). It ranked about 7th in Europe. In 1960, after just 30 years of Social Democratic Party rule, Sweden’s per capita GDP had reached 8,615 Swedish kronor, more than US$1,000. Had it not been for World War II, this process would have been shorter. After the war, Sweden’s social welfare system was gradually set up - full employment and pensions, health insurance and free education for all. One by one, all these programs were put into effect. Sweden entered a "golden age of development". By 1980, within 20 years, Swedish people had raised their per capita GDP to 57,161 Swedish kronor, 6.6 times that of 1960. Sweden was not just one of the most developed countries in the world, it ranked fourth in the United Nations social development list.
What Sweden displays to the world is obviously not just symbols of economic strength - businesses and leading brands like Ericcson, Volvo, Ikea. More than this, it is a fair and transparent society. We can see this more clearly if we compare poor people in Sweden with poor people in the United States. When I was studying in Sweden at the beginning of the 1990s, my landlord - an old retired man called Nordilus - received a monthly pension of only 6,000 kronor, which was then worth about US $1,000. Income-wise that would put him among the poorest 10%. But he lived in his own two-storey detached house. (A much higher rate of Swedish people own their own homes than in the United States.) It was the kind of "separate villa" that we often see in real estate adverts in China. At the back of the building was a small courtyard with all kinds of flowers growing in it. The old man’s neighbour was a university professor who lived in a similar house. Nordilus’ two sons had both studied at a top Swedish university. The eldest was a professor. The younger one was an engineer. In the United States, people like Nordilus who earned just $1,000 would find it very hard to send their children to a top private university with their own money; and they would certainly not be able to live in this kind of house.
The main reason this landlord was able to buy a house was that he did not need to save money for his children’s education, and he did not need to save money to pay for medical expenses after he retired. He had no family worries. If we look at health care, for example: Sweden has universal health insurance. When I worked in Sweden, if a year’s medical expenses, including registration, buying medicine, injections, check-ups, tests etc, cost more than 1,800 Swedish Kronor (at today’s value, roughly the same figure in RMB), all further treatment would be free.
There are obviously many other differences. A Swedish friend told me that in Sweden, even with a low monthly income, as long as you were 18 or over, it was very easy to get a loan and banks sometimes would not ask any detailed questions at all. In the United States, this would be impossible. Many poor Americans cannot even open a bank account. When they get their pay check they have to go to a pawn shop which will often charge a 3% to 10% handling fee. Statistics show that 28% of working families have to use this kind of service. This comparison reflects the different foundations of the quality of life under two different economic models. Americans value income; and the influence of income on quality of life is relatively high. Swedes value social welfare; and welfare depends on relatively fair distribution.
Viewed only from a point of view of income, there is quite a large gap between Sweden and the United States. But how much money is free education for all worth? Putting everything together, what effect does it have on the quality of life for Swedish people? A World Health Organisation official reports that if statistics took medical expenses into account, there would be at least 78 million more poor people in Asia. Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, said: "on important issues such as these - the freedom to live a little longer, the ability to escape from avoidable diseases, the opportunity for employment with suitable compensation, to live in a peaceful community without crime - the level of income is often not the right measure." [obviously, translating into Chinese and then out again will have changed Amartya Sen’s words] The more a society requires a person to buy quality of life with money, the more likely it is for greater inequality to appear. Therefore, it does not seem very meaningful to compare the incomes of Swedes and Americans. To put it another way, if a comparison really must be made, when everything is included, the net income of Swedes is higher. We could also say, the the poor in Sweden have far more decent lives than the poor people in the United States; and a decent life for the poor directly determines harmony and stability of a society.
Turning crisis into opportunity
In the 19th century, Sweden was still a poor country. Sweden’s industrial revolution came relatively late, beginning in the 1830s, but really starting to develop in the 1870s. Driven by the industrial revolutions of countries like Britain and Germany, Sweden became a supplier of raw materials like iron ore and timber. Conditions were terrible for Swedish workers at that time. They could not even afford to buy the products that they made and they were politically inferior as well. Under the rules at that time, to take part in parliamentary elections required an annual income of more than 800 kronor. In The Red Room, Swedish writer and winner of the Nobel prize for literature, August Strindberg [note: Strindberg was a major author and playwright, but he did not win the Nobel prize] described the thoughts of a carpenter: "Ladies, let me speak frankly, our days are already thoroughly harsh, and they get even worse. But when that day comes - that day, we will be like the roar of a waterfall surging out of the slums. We will return to our beds. We will return? No, we will recapture!" [don’t trust my translation!] Like many western European capitalist countries, such desperate living conditions meant that the whole of society entered a period of turbulence and the rise of socialist movements.
In the early period of the Swedish socialist movement, there was an important figure called August Palm who took part in the workers movements in Germany and Denmark. After he returned home from Germany in 1881, Palm made a historic speech in the southern city of Malmö called "What do socialists want?" His main stance was that socialists did not demand the equal division of all capital, but rather workers get back a part of what the capitalists had taken from them. As an example, he said, workers took 50 kronor. The capitalist took 50 kronor. But there was one capitalist and 50 workers, so this was unfair. The workers should unite and struggle against the capitalist, but the goal was not to seize back all of the capitalist’s property. Instead, it was to overturn the capitalist system and carry out a more fair distribution in the country.
In 1889, the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) was established. At that time, although its ultimate goal was to eliminate class and establish a classless society, the path it took was to strive for universal suffrage, and not violent revolution. Later, the results of social development showed that as soon as workers achieved universal suffrage, they became an major force influencing the country’s politics, and so were able within the existing system to change the system of distribution. At the the same time, they abandoned the desire for total socialization (nationalisation). So, the great workers’ strikes were aimed at universal suffrage until it was put into practice in 1921. The mighty trade union movement made it possible for the Social Democratic Party to achieve long-term political power.
The global economic crisis of 1929 dealt Sweden a heavy blow. Unemployment shot up and the gap between rich and poor continued to widen. Two years on, there was a strike in Ådalen in the north. The government sent troops to crush it, killing five people. This was Sweden’s most famous massacre and it provoked further turmoil. In the same year, the "Match King" Ivar Kreuger committed suicide because of the stock market bubble burst, dragging a host of businesses into the mud. The cabinet collapsed because Prime Minister Carl Ekman was exposed as having received "allowances". This grave state of affairs showed that Sweden, like other capitalist countries had arrived at the crossroads of reform.
In 1932, the Social Democratic Party carried out their "People’s Home" plan and began to create a welfare state. Sweden’s reform coincided with the general reform in other western countries, including the United States. The difference was that Sweden’s union movement was stronger and equality, compromise and cooperation had penetrated deeply into the traditions of the Swedish nation. In particular, because of the strength of the union movement, the strength of Swedish society achieved a new balance. When representatives from the unions, employers’ associations and the government sat down at the negotiating table, they really were often deciding the fate of the country. Through negotiations coordinated by the government, labour and capital ultimately achieved wage agreements, and also actually sought out an ideal combination to ensure that the economy ran smoothly.
Traditional morals are the main driving force of reform
The vast edifice of Sweden’s welfare state was obviously not built on flat ground. In fact, before the Social Democratic Party took power in 1932, Sweden already had some rudimentary social safeguards. This was intimately connected to the influence of religious tradition.
It was very easy for the Christian idea of "love your neighbour" and the spirit of mutual help and cooperation formed in the Swedish nation’s Viking period to create a powerful resonance. The two blended together and deeply influenced the Swedish national spirit.
In Swedish history textbooks, the 19th century was the embryonic period of modern welfare policy. The government gradually began to take over the responsibility for social welfare from the Church. There were two big factors behind this change. One was that industrial development caused a huge flow of people from the countryside into the cities, the gap between poor and rich widened and the number of poor people rapidly grew. The second was that separation of government and religion greatly weakened the authority of the Church. In 1847 and 1853, the Swedish government passed two poor relief laws to ensure that "every parish and every city has the unshirkable duty to provide enough food for every poor person". But as the government took over the framework of social welfare from the Church, it also inherited the moral ideas of the Church.
In 1847, Sweden passed the "poor relief law". In 1901, it passed the first "law on compensation for industrial injury". In 1910, it passed the "sick leave insurance law". In 1913, Sweden passed a law on pensions - considered to be the foundation stone of the social safeguard system - when Sweden’s per capita GDP was 656 kronor (using the exchange rate in 2000, roughly the same amount in RMB), ranking ninth in Europe.
It cannot be denied that these statutes established a fairly good foundation for the Social Democratic party to later create the Swedish Model. But in essence, from a social and developmental point of view, the social safeguard system at that time was still passive and supplementary. It was more an attempt by the ruling class to alleviate workers’ conflict and polarization. A European scholar of early Swedish and German safety net policies gave this appraisal: "Bismarck’s ’social state’ can be seen as resisting the good medicine of socialism. The working class was often the object of early social policy, and not the subject." For example, although Sweden had an early pension law, until the 1940s, more than 40% of the elderly did not receive a pension and had to depend on charity to survive. Moreover, according to the "poor relief law" of the time, those who received this relief had to abandon their right to vote, and this rule was not changed until the 1940s. Therefore, the thinking behind the social safeguards of that time and the welfare system set up by the Social Democratic Party were totally different. There were essential differences between the Social Democratic Party’s goals and what went before.
In the Swedish Model created by the Social Democratic Party, the people became the subject. Social safeguards were no longer charity or favour. Instead, they were a stage on which all citizens could develop in freedom and equality, and an essential force for economic development. The Danish scholar Andersen gave this example: when he investigated the welfare situation of 18 western countries, "workers’ movements opposed the old tradition of poverty relief because they wanted to strive for solid ‘citizen’s’ rights". In northern European countries where social democracy was dominant, this kind of poverty relief almost completely disappeared. Only in countries like the United States and Canada did it continue to have a prominent place.
It must be mentioned that while the methods used in Christian practice of helping the poor may have fundamentally changed, its moral ideas had an important influence on the later reforms of the Social Democratic Party. Research by western scholars on social development shows that the driving force behind social reform has been moral conviction. Most of all, it is the concepts of universal love [or philanthropy/ universal brotherhood] and humanitarianism of traditional western religion. In his book ‘The Challenge of the Social Welfare State’, the German scholar Franz-Xaver Kaufmann holds: "A desire based on freedom and equal rights, with the help of a market economy and social welfare to achieve a political entity where the citizens are united and help each other, can only be produced in a western European society with the deep influence Christianity and the Enlightenment." The Socialist International’s ‘Declaration on Socialism and Religion’ also clearly stated, "In Europe, Christian teaching is a spiritual source and a prime source of socialist thought."
Legal transparency is a precondition of institutional reform
In the election campaign of 1932, the Social Democratic Party did not put forward its earlier goal of "socialization". Rather, it stressed "a spirit of equality, care, cooperation and mutual help". As the Social Democrats of that time saw it, before a big cake of social welfare could appear, the system of distribution must be reformed and a just foundation for dividing that cake must be established. Later practical development showed that without this kind of reform and regulation, Sweden’s welfare cake could not have become so big.
The reforms of the Social Democratic Party were promoted in a particular political environment. When we see that the Swedish economy of that time was relatively backward, especially the widening of the gap between rich and poor, we must also notice more the political foundation of Swedish society of the time: the comparatively stable political system, and particularly the transparency of law in operation.
Sweden was the first country in the world to practice open government. As early as 1766, the Swedish parliament established the principle of open government affairs. This statute is also considered to be the world’s earliest "information disclosure law". Because of this, some American scholars believe that the when the US Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act in 1966, it was 200 years behind Sweden. The enactment of this law was no accident. After the experience of the "Age of Liberty" in the early 18th century, Sweden had already become quite an open country. An embryonic system of political parties appeared, culture became rich and varied, and public political consciousness gradually rose. In "A History of Sweden" [Ingvar Andersson] describes that period as "although there was a side with magnificent rays of light that was full of poetry, there was also an ideological struggle and factional conflict". Precisely because of this period, in 1809, Sweden passed "the earliest written constitution in Europe". The Invest in Sweden Agency’s promotional booklet ‘Coming to Sweden’ says this: "Apart from internationalization, Swedish people have always been proud of transparency. If internationalism is largely driven by the economy, transparency arises from the demand for fairness and equality in the hearts of the Swedish people."
It is precisely because of specific moral concepts and political traditions, that the Swedish Social Democratic Party was able to push further with political transformation, especially the reform of the system of distribution.
The essence of distribution reform is equality
The economist Alva Myrdal, who has been called the architect of the Swedish Model, once said that this Swedish Model had two most prominent goals: one was full employment; the other was equality. These two goals were the focal point of the reforms begun in the 1930s by the Social Democratic Party. It precisely reflected the deep mark of the time.
In Europe at that time, although the Swedish economy was relatively backward, it wasn’t the most backward; and following the development of the industrial revolution, there was some accumulated wealth. However, none of this is important. What is important is that problems of distribution emerged that were far from the Social Democratic Party’s ideas of "freedom, equality and cooperation", and severely restricted the possibility of continued development.
The "full employment" proposed by Swedish Social Democratic Party was achieved through a series of measures, including the expansion of public departments and strengthening vocational training. The economic policies to increase employment had quite a strong Keynesian flavour, but were not exactly the same. In the Social Democrats’ view, "full employment is both a social and economic goal. It enables everyone to take part in the establishment of social welfare, and prevents the inequality, personal harm and social exclusion engendered by unemployment." (Swedish Social Democratic Party website) After the Social Democratic Party came to power in 1932, it dramatically increased public expenditure, and the proportion of spending on creating employment opportunities was much greater than before. In the 30 years from the 1960s to the early 1990s, unemployment in Sweden never rose above 3.5%, something very rarely seen in western countries.
From the 1930s, the reform of the distribution system emphasized the essence of taking care of the everyone. In the book ‘Functional socialism: A Swedish theory for democratic socialization’, Gunnar Adler-Karlsson wrote, "The first prerequisite to achieve any socialist policy is that the administrative power in a poor country must be willing to use its power to do benefit the broad mass of the people, and not protect the privileges of a minority. So it is not simply an issue of more or less money, rather it is a issue of fairness. It is an issue of enabling all citizens in the country, whether they are male or female; whether they are a worker, farmer or official; regardless of position or rank; whatever their income; that all of them can enjoy social safeguards. For example, the government has a responsibility to help every unemployed person find a job; everyone has a right to a pension in their old age, not just people with jobs; the same goes for child benefit - every household should have a share for each child; all citizens should have the same health insurance that does not differ according to status or occupation; and housing policy should be that everyone has a home".
To understand the term "all citizens", you have to understand the term "redistribution". From the 1930s, the Swedish Social Democratic Party began to put forward and perfect a complete set of theories, and make policies according to these theories. In fact, all along, the business of the Swedish Social Democratic Party has been to "take over and control certain functions. These functions were previously controlled by capitalists, as they still are in many capitalist countries like the United States."
What are these functions? For example: vocational training, education, health care, care for the elderly - the resources for all of these fields must be brought together by the state and distributed fairly. This is the so-called privatization of the economic sphere and socialization of the social sphere.
Although this writer lived and worked in Sweden for six years, truly understanding this complete system of "all the people" was a fairly long process. At first, I only half understood it and had to ask friends. A friend laughed and said: "I’ll give you an example you can understand. If there are three people - one of them is a worker who doesn’t earn very much, another is a professor who earns quite a lot, and the other is an official with quite high social status. Supposing they all have the same illness - they will receive the same treatment, pay the same amount for their medicine, stay in the same ward, and have the same examination and operation." My friends words turned on a light in my mind. The idea of equality that the Social Democratic Party pursued wasn’t complicated after all.
Now, looking back, the establishment of the Swedish Model, although there were fierce social contradictions at that time, it was because of these increasingly sharp social contradictions that the results of a new round of reform appeared. The journey from poverty to affluence in this northern kingdom is a practical demonstration that there are many components to creating a fair society, like moral concepts, a theoretical foundation, the political environment and cultural tradition. But, even more, it is a question of the system of distribution, and not a question of accumulating wealth to a particular level when problems can be spontaneously resolved. A fairer system of distribution is probably more important for maintaining the harmonious development of society than accumulation of wealth.
(The writer is a senior media worker in Beijing)
