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One for the history books
By Francesco Sisci
 BEIJING - In the official textbooks
all Chinese Communist Party congresses are historic,
almost by definition. Summoned every five years,
shrouded in secrecy, and occasionally interrupted by
extraordinary plenums of the central committee, the
congresses set the course of China for half a decade.
Yet while they were important to China, they
didn't really matter to much of the rest of the world.
Despite the size of its population, until the 1990s
China did not have much weight in world affairs.
However, its recent and lasting economic growth has
placed China in a position impossible to overlook (see
Another China: The awakened giant,
October 31), so the 16th Party Congress that begins on
Friday is more historically significant than its
predecessors, as it is the first one of truly global
importance.
This is even more so for two
reasons:
1. It will be the first time the
Communist Party of China has carried out a seamless
succession. In the cases of Mao Zedong and Deng
Xiaoping, the successions were accompanied by power
struggles that left many people dead. The Cultural
Revolution or the Tiananmen Movement were parts of those
power struggles. Now, however, the party is showing
itself to have reached a level of unprecedented internal
cohesion.
2. The next generation of leaders will
stay in power for the next five or 10 years. During that
time China's economy is expected to continue its rapid
growth, overtaking the size of any European national
economy. Thus China will become the largest economy on
the planet next to Japan and the United States, and this
will in turn create new issues with Japan, the US and
the world as a whole.
If China manages to
continue its growth successfully without getting
embroiled in political wrangles with other powers in the
next 10 years, then Beijing can plan with some
confidence on a path of continuous economic expansion
for many more years. This could eventually lead to
ordinary Chinese enjoying the same material benefits as
their counterparts in developed countries.
This
implies careful diplomacy and even more careful
management of the domestic economy. However, the
paramount issue is the domestic stability that both
conservatives and progressives in the Party believe is
the mainstay. And recent years have not been free of
political threats to stability. In 1999 the central
government felt threatened by the protests of the
Falungong spiritual movement. If a threat of this kind
had popped up or was perceived even as recently as 10 or
15 years ago, the country would have been plunged into
political unrest that would have caused great stress to
society and the economy. This actually occurred during
the early 1980s with the campaign against spiritual
pollution, and 10 years later after the Tiananmen
crackdown. But the curbing of Falungong took place
without much impact on society or the economy. Many
people disagreed with the crackdown but steered away
from confronting the government on the issue and were
left in peace. In the past the Party would not have
tolerated this kind of skeptical abstention, but would
have pressed for active support.
The political
leadership has thus managed to achieve greater
effectiveness in pursuing its goals while actively
shrinking its power. The government in principle will
(a) leave the people alone, as long as they do not
confront the central authorities, and (b) try to make
sure that politics will facilitate the economy and not
obstruct it.
Furthermore, new sets of domestic
and internationally binding regulations put growing
constraints on the leeway of the government at any
level. The accession to the World Trade Organization
(WTO) is the most vivid example of this: at every level
China is actively trying to adapt to WTO rules that
reduce the room for maneuver of the central and local
authorities. It might not yet be rule of law, as in many
cases the central government issues regulations to
improve its exercise of power, but it is no longer only
rule by law, as many laws, especially if internationally
approved, limit the scope of action of the government.
These restrictions are self-imposed, that is,
there is no clear division of power limiting the
arbitrary discretion of the government, yet there are
strong domestic and foreign economic constituencies
pressing to defend their interests with the government.
The government is therefore pulled in many opposite
directions by contrasting interests and it has moreover
accepted the idea of trying to do things according to
transparent rules. Open differing interests and laws are
the two pillars of modern democracy, and as China has
accepted these two pillars it has accepted modern
democracy.
Yet it has become clear, especially
in the past five to seven years, that reforms won't be a
party for everybody: many will lose out or will be left
out of the sun. In other words what we may call
capitalism will develop according to its own rules -
there will be rich and poor people side by side, and
farewell to the hypocritical Maoist egalitarian system
that distributed the same tiny salary to everybody but
allotted different perks throughout a very hierarchical
society. In other words, Chinese society is changing
from a feudal system to a modern one. But while in the
first years of reform everybody was benefiting, now
millions have lost their jobs in the cities or are being
expelled from the countryside. This gigantic historical
and social change could easily lead to a new communist
revolution that would throw China back into the past, if
social protests find political leadership.
Therefore the Chinese leadership has to deal
with two contrasting demands:
1. It needs to
give a consistent and unconfusing voice to the different
economic needs in society. Therefore it needs different
political entities to represent different interests.
2. It needs to keep the political arena united
to avoid a revolution.
In principle this dilemma
is being solved by trying to represent all differing
interests within the Party. As we reported more than a
year ago (Jiang's party turns a brighter shade of
red, September 12, 2001) this congress will for the
first time experiment with bringing more democracy into
the selection of its leadership. For the first time a
large number of the Central Committee (CC) members will
be elected by fellow congressmen from a shortlist that
will have more people than available posts. In other
words some people, though shortlisted, will end up with
no position. This experiment could be further expanded
in importance and scope in the next years and could lead
to full-fledged democracy, by basically having different
parties springing out of the one Party.
This
system in the next months leading to the plenary session
of the National People's Congress (NPC) could make
high-to-medium-ranking leaders' lives quite hectic, as
every position in the CC corresponds to a post in a
ministry or in a province. As many posts in the CC are
undecided, positions in the ministries and provinces
will be settled only after the congress. In the past,
basically everything was done during the congress. This
process could also lead to the beginning of a greater
separation between the state (ruled by the NPC) and the
Party.
The issues confronting the Party are
basically the same ones confronting every modern state
torn between the requirement to represent different
interests and maintaining the unity of the country and
avoiding violent domestic clashes. China, however, has
to do this in the midst of great historic
transformations, while furthering development and trying
to avoid cleavages with its past, which legitimizes the
present leadership and thus also the present reforms.
Can the new leaders do it? The record of the
recent past should give us some optimism.
(©2002
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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