The
most pertinent message of the 18th Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) Congress has perhaps come
from Premier Wen Jiabao. This is despite the fact
outgoing General Secretary Hu Jintao's 101-minute
Political Report to the 18th Party Congress
(hereafter Report) dominated Chinese and
international media coverage of the seven-day
mega-event.
"We must strengthen and
improve the leadership of the Party," Wen said
last week while talking to members of the Tianjin
delegation to the Congress, "In particular, we
must push forward the reform of the leadership
system of the party and state". It is true that
Hu, who remains state president until next March,
devoted a good part of his Report to political and
institutional
reforms. Yet the most
important function of the Congress - picking a new
slate of Fifth Generation leaders - was dominated
by old-fashioned, non-transparent factional
intrigue as well as the resurgence of the
influence of long-retired party elders.
That the choice of the members of the 18th
Politburo and its seven-member Politburo Standing
Committee (PBSC), China's supreme ruling council,
was the result of backroom skullduggery and
horse-trading was evident from the first few
minutes of the Congress's opening ceremony at the
Great Hall of the People.
First to appear
before the cameras was the 69-year-old Hu, who was
followed closely by the 86-year-old ex-president
Jiang Zemin. A distance of several meters
separated these two putative "cores","
respectively, of the Third- and Fourth-Generation
leadership collectives on the one hand, and two
other groups on the other: the out-going members
of the 17th PBSC and long-retired PBSC members.
The oldest member of the latter group was Song
Ping, 95, the one-time CCP organization czar who
left the PBSC 20 years ago.
The appearance
of the octogenarian and nonagenarian cadres was
not just a symbolic gesture to demonstrate party
unity. At least a couple of these past state
leaders have played the role of kingmaker in the
choice of PBSC members this year. For example,
three of the seven members of the 18th PBSC are
believed to be proteges of Jiang, who still heads
the Shanghai Faction in party politics. They are
new General Secretary Xi Jinping, who owed his
promotion to the PBSC in 2007 to Jiang's
nomination; the soon-to-be-named chairman of the
National People's Congress Chairman Zhang Dejiang;
and Executive Secretary of the Central Committee
Secretariat Liu Yunshan.
Jiang and former
premier Li Peng, 84, were instrumental in
preventing two of Hu's cronies, Li Yuanchao and
Wang Yang, from making it to the PBSC. Both Li and
Wang, who have reformist reputations, have managed
only to hang on to their Politburo seats. Wang,
age 57, the outgoing Party Secretary of Guangdong
Province, is set to become a vice premier in
March.
As in his Political Report to the
17th Party Congress of 2007, President Hu on
November 8 devoted two long paragraphs to
"democracy within the party" (dangnei
minzhu) as well as reforming the party's
personnel system - particularly fairer and more
transparent ways for picking leaders. For example,
Hu said the authorities must substantiate party
members' "right to know, right to take part [in
party deliberations], electoral rights and
supervisory rights". Regarding the selection of
senior cadres, Hu indicated the party must
"comprehensively and correctly implement
democratic, open, competitive and meritorious"
goals.
While discussing the issues of
leadership five years ago, President Hu, however,
laid emphasis on systems of "democratic centralism
and collective leadership" and indicated the party
must "oppose and prevent dictatorial [practices]
by individuals or a minority [of leaders]". There
were no more references to the dictatorial
practices of strongman-like figures in this year's
report. Hu's failure to lash out at the apparent
resumption of Mao-style "rule of personality"
could reflect his frustration at the machinations
of the likes of Jiang Zemin in the past few
months.
It is in this context that Wen's
comment on the "reform of the leadership system of
the party and state" seems as timely as it is hard
hitting. Although Wen has in the past two to three
years made dozens of appeals to speeding up
political reform, including upholding the late
patriarch Deng Xiaoping's edicts on the subject,
this was the first time that he made an indirect,
but obvious, reference to one of the most
celebrated speeches of the chief architect of
reform.
In a 1980 address entitled "On the
Reform of the System of Party and State
Leadership", Deng cited the following daunting
obstacles to political and institutional
liberalization: "bureaucracy, over-concentration
of power, patriarchal methods, life tenure in
leading posts and privileges of various kinds."
Deng had this to say about the party's
"patriarchal" traditions: "Besides leading to
over-concentration of power in the hands of
individuals, patriarchal ways within the
revolutionary ranks place individuals above the
organization, which then becomes a tool in their
hands".
While there is no concrete
evidence to show that Wen was zeroing in on the
recent activities of patriarchs such as Jiang, his
comments made to Tianjin Congress deputies were
omitted inexplicably from CCTV's evening news last
Thursday. Xinhua News Agency also only reported
his remarks one day later. Remarks made by other
PBSC members during group discussions of
provincial or municipal delegates, however, were
publicized within hours by the official media.
Fighting graft is another area where the
Hu report seems to have fallen short. Hu echoed
warnings sounded by ex-president Jiang in the late
1990s that the party's failure to eradicate
endemic corruption could "deal a body blow to the
party and even lead to the collapse of the party
and country". He warned: "We must never slacken in
fighting graft and in building clean governance.
The alarm bells must be rung unceasingly."
Yet Hu has failed to introduce new
measures such as party regulations requiring all
senior cadres to publicize the assets of their
close relatives - and to disclose whether the
latter have foreign residency status. It is also
significant that while reading out his speech, Hu
omitted this clause that was in the printed
version: "Senior cadres must not only discipline
themselves stringently but also strengthen the
education of and constraints over their relatives
and close associates".
In the run-up to
the Party Congress, Bloomberg and the New York
Times published detailed reports about the
business activities of the relatives of Vice
President Xi and Premier Wen. Despite immediate
action taken by state censors to block these
articles from Chinese cyberspace, millions of
netizens are believed to have read them.
While Hu's warnings about the exacerbation
of graft could be the party's answer to growing
criticism about greed in high places, no
investigations are believed to have been launched
on the well-publicized business activities of the
close kin of top officials. This is despite the
fact that while participating in discussions among
provincial and municipal deputies to the Congress,
top cadres such as Wang Yang and Shanghai Party
Secretary Yu Zhengsheng claimed effective steps
had been taken to prevent their relatives from
improperly making money.
In the Report, Hu
also touched upon ways to restructure the economy.
Reiterating that China's growth had been
"unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable", the
president vowed to "comprehensively deepen the
reform of the economic structure". He called on
party cadres to pay more attention to indigenous
innovation and, in particular, to boost consumer
spending as a new pillar of GDP expansion.
Perhaps due to the conviction that the
CCP's status as "perennial ruling party" is
contingent upon the party-state apparatus' tight
control over major chunks of the economy, Hu
indicated Beijing must "unwaveringly consolidate
and develop the public sector of the economy". Hu
went further, adding "[We should] invest more
state capital in major industries in key fields
that comprise the lifeline of the economy and are
vital to national security."
The Report
contradicts the concerns of renowned economists,
such as Mao Yushi of Beijing's Unirule Research
Institute, who have deplored the trend of "the
state sector advances even as the private sector
retreats" (guojin mintui). Moreover,
Premier Wen recently had pledged to give more
support to embattled private companies: "We must
complete and implement policies and measures aimed
at promoting the development of the non-state
economy, break [state] monopolies and lower
industry thresholds for new entrants".
On
the eve of the Congress, observers speculated the
Hu-led leadership might signal its willingness to
contemplate liberalization by removing Mao Zedong
Thought, which is synonymous with conservatism,
from the CCP Constitution. After all, it seems
almost certain that disgraced Politburo member Bo
Xilai, who spearheaded a vigorous campaign to
revive Maoism, will be given a stiff prison term
after his recent expulsion from the party.
The only major constitutional revision
approved by the Congress, however, was to elevate
the "Scientific Development Concept" (kexue
fazhan guan) which is Hu Jintao's contribution
to CCP canon, to the status of "guiding principle"
of the party and state. This has put the
"Scientific Development Concept" on the same level
as ex-president Jiang's "Important Thinking of the
Three Represents" (san ge daibiao zhongyao
sixiang).
In his Report, Hu urged
party cadres and members to work harder at
"innovation of the implementation [of policies],
theoretical innovations, and the innovation of
institutions". Yet he also repeated this same
point that he made five years ago: "While [the
party] will not go down the old road of
ossification, it will also avoid devious paths
that will change the flag and standard [of
socialist orthodoxy]."
Given the
predominance of conservatism in the Report - and
the Byzantine fashion in which the new corps of
leaders has been chosen - it seems unlikely that
the leadership under General Secretary Xi Jinping
will push reformist goals and policies in the
foreseeable future.
Dr Willy Wo-Lap
Lam is a Senior Fellow at The Jamestown
Foundation. He has worked in senior editorial
positions in international media including
Asiaweek newsmagazine, South China Morning Post,
and the Asia-Pacific Headquarters of CNN. He is
the author of five books on China, including the
recently published Chinese Politics in the Hu
Jintao Era: New Leaders, New Challenges. Lam is an
Adjunct Professor of China studies at Akita
International University, Japan, and at the
Chinese University of Hong Kong.
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