HONG KONG - Seven years ago, as part of
the understanding for Beijing to hold the 2008
Summer Olympic Games, Chinese authorities promised
democratic reforms and human-rights improvements.
Today, human-rights violations are still
frequently reported and many rights activists feel
disappointed and infuriated, and many are
criticizing the Chinese government for failing to
honor its words.
On the other hand,
running the international sports event does push
Beijing to start or consider gradual reforms to
make the country more open. And calls for
political reforms are burgeoning, although the
fragile buds may still not be strong enough to
survive political storms.
In 2001, Beijing
Olympics organization committee official
Liu
Jingmin said the Games would be
"an opportunity to foster democracy, improve human
rights, and integrate China with the rest of the
world". Rights activists were keen to watch how
Beijing would take real actions to reassure a
suspicious world that the Games would be good for
China.
Indeed, should they hold high
expectations, frustration is inevitable.
Human-rights violations in China are still
frequently reported. In 2006, Chen Guangcheng, a
blind activists in Shandong province, was
sentenced to more than four years in jail for
sabotage.
Hu Jia, an outspoken
Beijing-based volunteer for AIDS victims, received
a three-and-a-half-year jail term for calling for
"Olympics with a human rights touch". Both Chen
and Hu were harassed for at least several months
by thugs, allegedly plain-clothed police, before
their arrests.
However, it must also be
noted that the Chinese leadership is not as
unanimous as it seems. There are calls from
high-ranking officials for more aggressive
political reforms. Among the reform-minded
officials, Politburo member and newly-appointed
Guangdong Communist Party chief Wang Yang is seen
as the champion. Wang openly called for more
reforms on his arrival in Guangdong, which was the
stronghold of economic reform and openness in the
1970s. He told Guangdong officials they should
further "emancipate their minds" to allow
Guangdong to continue to lead other provinces in
reforms.
Before Wang's initiative, Yu
Keping, deputy director of the Central Translation
Bureau, had already advocated political reforms. A
member of a think-tank for the Hu Jintao-Wen
Jiabao leadership, Yu, published an article in
Beijing Daily, the official newspaper of Beijing
municipal party committee, in October 2006,
arguing that "democracy is a good thing" for
China. Given that democracy has been seen as a
hypersensitive topic among the Communist Party's
protocol since 1989, his special relations with
the top leaders, along with his high profile
remarks, have attracted a lot of attention.
Many analysts believe that Premier Wen
Jiabao is probably backing reform-minded officials
in China. Wen, widely seen as mentor of Wang Yang,
published an article on the party's flagship
newspaper, the People's Daily, on February 26,
2007, stressing that civil rights protection,
anti-corruption, along with "expansion of
democracy" and pressing ahead political reform,
were priorities on the agenda of his cabinet.
Wen's remarks were echoed by a
high-caliber taskforce led by Zhou Tianyong,
director of policy research center of the Central
Party School, the training center of top
officials. Zhou is a key figure in drafting the
Central Party School's so-called "political reform
roadmap" which was published in February 2008. The
"comprehensive political system reform plan" Zhou
helped draft argues for steady liberalization to
build what he calls a "modern civil society" by
2020 and "mature democracy and rule of law"
afterwards. The study warns that China risks
dangerous instability unless it embraces
democratic reforms to keep the power of the ruling
Communist Party under check and supervision.
It should be noted that the political
reform they are talking about is not quite the
type perceived by many Western scholars or
overseas China watchers. Because late leader Deng
Xiaoping so overtly objected to Montesquieu's idea
of "separation of powers" and "multi-party
democracy", no leaders in China dare to depart
from his position. Instead, reformers now harbor
hope for a "division of powers", so that there
will be more checks and balances for the
government.
Even talk of such mild reforms
can become the subject of controversy in China. Wu
Bangguo, chairman of the National People's
Congress (NPC) and No 2 leader of the party,
openly warned that there are "bottom-lines" for
political reforms. According to Wu, "multi-party
democracy" is out of question, "separation of
powers", too, is a taboo, and he also vetoed the
introduction of a bicameral system in parliament.
He admitted, though, that "China must positively
draw experiences from civilizations including
political civilizations created by human
societies."
In addition, some Chinese
officials are attempting to make use of the
Beijing Olympics to gain more "room for maneuver",
if not total freedom, for the press. In December
2006, Chinese authorities announced a new
regulation allowing foreign journalists to travel
across the country for news coverage without prior
approval from local authorities. For China, where
foreign media have always under restrictions and
tight surveillance, this was a very significant
"compromise" in terms of "security concerns". The
state-run Xinhua News Agency praised the
regulation as "a landmark in China's reform toward
openness".
The new regulation has been
promulgated following President Hu Jintao's order
on October 1, 2006, for greater transparency in
the construction of Olympics venues.
The
regulation stipulated it that it would
"automatically become ineffective from October 17,
2008" - after the end of the Beijing Olympics. But
on December 28, 2006, Cai Wu, director of the
State Council's Information Office, revealed to
journalists what the real intention of China's
reformists might be. "If such a provisional
regulation would prove to be good in practice with
its implementation in the coming one year or so, I
think there is no need for a good policy to be
changed again," Cai Wu said.
In China,
even such a mild reform can backfire. The new
press policy has been more enthusiastically
carried out in places like Guangdong, but there
are have been reports suggesting many other
regions have been turning a blind eye to the
central government's policy. On October 15, 2008,
foreign reporters trying to cover the Tibet riots
were stopped in cities of Lhasa, Beijing, Chengdu,
Xining, and several places in Gansu province. The
Foreign Correspondents' Club in China said they
received more than 30 complaints. On March 17,
2008, at least six Hong Kong media outfits were
ordered to leave Tibet immediately. On April 20,
police in Anhui province also confiscated
reporters' credentials who tried to report
protests against the French supermarket chain
Carrefour.
It is fair to say that China's
reform efforts have not met Western expectations
in many aspects, but that doesn't mean there is no
momentum pressing ahead for democratic reform in
China's own way. It is a paradox that many
accusations by the West, some of them not
completely objective, have only resulted in the
reining in of China's reformers.
Fong
Tak Ho is managing editor of the Chinese
edition of Asia Times Online.
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