The recent Chinese censorship skirmish is over and the lively Southern Weekly newspaper is for sale as usual across the country. No reporters lost their jobs and the local Communist Party bureaucrats who control what can be put in print have relaxed their grip slightly. The provincial propaganda official blamed for starting the whole dispute managed to stay in office, protesters are gone from the streets of Guangzhou and normality has returned.

But things are not quite the same as before. Another public demonstration against the way the Chinese Communist Party manages the nation has ended with some marginal gains for the complainers but no major reforms in sight—either at the Southern Weekly or more generally across the land. The status quo forces have held their own and begun striking back. Yet it seems certain this embarrassing (for Beijing) row at a southern Chinese newspaper will have longer term repercussions as one more example of the kind of trouble that new national leader Xi Jinping would like to avoid but cannot escape.

The problem at the Southern Weekly was fairly straightforward. Known nationwide as one of China’s more daring publications, it planned a New Year’s editorial calling for something the ruling party finds dangerous—letting people enjoy the many freedoms guaranteed by the state constitution but never permitted in real life. But after the editors had signed off and gone home, a provincial propaganda official named Tuo Zhen reportedly rewrote the editorial, turning it into a paean of praise for Communist rule. Though censorship is standard, this revision was exceptionally blatant. Journalists threatened to strike and, thanks to the Internet, a national wave of complaints soon followed. Sympathetic demonstrators began placing flowers before the newspaper office.

Cooler heads prevailed before any serious confrontation occurred. The provincial government, newly headed by a rising star on the national political scene, agreed to stop interfering directly with the paper’s content before publication—though it will continue issuing advance “advisories” about what is permitted. Although no protesting journalists were fired, the chief editor’s fate remains unclear. And after a few days passed, police across China began detaining and questioning the more vocal protesters; for example, a famous film actress who blogged on behalf of the protesting journalists was invited to “have tea” with security officers, a euphemism for a brisk interrogation and warning.

In addition, the party’s Central Propaganda Department in Beijing sent an “urgent memo” to senior media executives and local party officials to emphasize that no major changes will be forthcoming. “The party has absolute control over the media and this principle is unshakable,” it stated, resorting to the usual tactic of placing part of the blame on “external hostile forces.”

But out of sight is not necessarily out of mind, and that’s where problems lie for new Communist Party general secretary (and soon-to-be president) Xi Jinping and his senior colleagues. The Southern Weekly case is just another on a long list of public complaints about party and government actions that rile Chinese citizens. The Internet, especially via Chinese microblogs called weibo, spreads 100 million or more daily messages across the land. Despite increasingly intense official purging, many relay popular complaints about party and state malfeasance. A jaundiced population, fed up with corruption, nepotism, injustice and other ills, has grown increasingly cynical about self-interested bureaucrats who too often use high office to enrich themselves, friends and relatives. More and more citizens demand serious economic and political reforms.

Thus party rulers feel growing pressure to respond; Xi himself has warned that without a crackdown on corruption, for example, the party’s future could be in jeopardy. In some ways, Xi appears to patterning his actions on those of the late Deng Xiaoping, revered as China’s great post-Mao reformer. But while Deng demanded economic change, he had no tolerance for political reform; he ordered the 1989 Tiananmen shooting of student protestors, for example. Whether Xi will prove any more liberal remains unknown; the early evidence is contradictory and inconclusive.

But the party’s new Politburo, which Xi heads, can no longer ignore or suppress protests as readily as during pre-weibo days. Several items that have surfaced since the Southern Weekly fracas illustrate why. Consider, for example, the laojiao problem.

The laojiao system is an extra-judicial “re-education through labor” program which allows officials to send people they find disruptive for up to four years in prison camps, where they usually do farm or factory work. There are no formal charges, no trial and almost never any chance for appeal; those punished can include drug addicts, prostitutes, people who petition the government about grievances or anyone else whom local officials find annoying. According to some Chinese legal experts, the system violates the state constitution and Chinese law but it has been in place since 1957; CCTV, the state broadcaster, recently said 310 camps hold 310,000 prisoners, a sizeable portion of the estimated one million or so in various Chinese jails. (The United States, despite its much smaller population, has some 2.2 million prisoners plus another 4.9 million on probation or parole.)

The potential for abuse is obvious and growing weibo protests may help explain why the central government recently announced the system will end this year. In one of the more egregious cases, a Hunan Province mother was given an 18-month sentence by local cadre after protesting that seven men who raped her 11-year-old daughter got off too lightly. Her plight became known nationwide thanks to the Internet. In another case, a college graduate serving as a village official was given two years at hard labor for having a tee-shirt in his closet with the slogan “freedom or death” (a public uproar got his term reduced).

But exactly what Beijing plans to do about this unpopular program remains unknown. At best, it may be folded into the regular judicial system with much of its arbitrary nature purged. However, many detainees are minor criminals or socially disruptive by any standard and must be dealt with somehow, so simply abolishing it may not be possible. Moreover, it’s believed that party and state bureaucrats who supervise labor camps often profit from their production, making real reform even more difficult. As in many other areas, Xi—even if truly reform-minded—will have no easy choices before him.

The same is true of record pollution now plaguing Beijing and northern China. Readings of dangerous particles are off the official scale; “crazy bad,” according to a U.S. embassy official. Air, road and rail traffic has suffered, hospitals are crammed with people complaining of respiratory problems, and thick smog even makes it difficult to see across the capital’s streets. Broadly speaking, the pollution is an unintended consequence of rapid economic growth; higher production has long outranked environmental regulation as a national priority, with ever-more petroleum and coal pollutants spewing forth each year. Public complaints about bad air and unsafe water have increased dramatically.

Beijing has long promised to get serious about an environmental cleanup but hasn’t delivered much. And the controlled press previously has generally been allowed to publish only misleading, even falsified, accounts of the problem. But suddenly the media nationwide is full of factual reports about adverse health implications and demands for remedial action, presumably due to public concerns. “More suffocating than the haze is the weakness in response,” headlined the China Youth Daily, a party-run newspaper. But it’s difficult to know what Chinese leaders can do quickly that won’t raise production costs or curtail output, or both, at a time when the economy already has serious problems. Temporarily taking official cars off city streets and closing Beijing factories solves nothing, while a new pledge to somehow improve Beijing’s air quality by 15 percent over the next several years may not impress the critics. Again, there are no simple solutions.

Meantime, other problems persist. Endemic corruption, which Xi has promised to address, breeds public cynicism; teachers may demand bribes for better grades, doctors for appointments and even army recruiting officers from those who seek to enlist (a military background can help in later careers). Xi already is trying to improve the style of governance; unlike the robotic Hu Jintao whom he succeeded, Xi sometimes appears in casual clothes, chats with ordinary folks and appears to be enjoying himself. He has warned against red-carpet receptions, lavish banquets, disruptive motorcades and unjustified publicity. “The behavior of the leadership, particularly the top leadership, has a big impact on the overall climate for the party and government as well as society at large,” said an official statement. “….what you tell others not to do, you must absolutely not do.”

But reform can be a difficult concept for party veterans. The Chinese Communist Party was created as a conspiracy against existing authority some 90 years ago, and that origin has affected the mind-set ever since. Party conservatives all too easily suspect critics to be potential enemies, perhaps conspiring against them, and tolerance does not come easily. Many consider the party and nation as indivisible, despite China’s long history as a great civilization before Europeans invented communism. As the Southern Weekly case illustrates, party leaders can find giving up control all but impossible.

Most members of the ruling party’s new seven-man standing committee, which Xi heads, are older than he is and considered more conservative. Since they took command, for example, controls on the Internet have tightened considerably. Just how the more personable Xi fits into this group is a bit of a mystery. The optimists consider him to be a secret reformer whose true instincts will emerge over time. But what he truly believes, and how much authority he will wield, remains unclear. The future of reform is still unknown.

Robert Keatley is a former editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal and the South China Morning Post, both of Hong Kong.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Bilonhw. CC BY-SA 3.0.