China Digital Times

China news tagged with: political reform (151)

• Yang Yao (姚洋): The End of the Beijing Consensus

  

  In Foreign Affairs, Yang Yao, Deputy Dean of the National School of Development and the Director of the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University, asks whether Beijing’s model of authoritarian growth, known as the Beijing Consensus, can survive:

  Despite its absolute power and recent track record of delivering economic growth, the CCP has still periodically faced resistance from citizens. The Tiananmen incident of April 5, 1976, the first spontaneous democratic movement in PRC history, the June 4 movement of 1989, and numerous subsequent protests proved that the Chinese people are quite willing to stage organized resistance when their needs are not met by the state. International monitoring of China’s domestic affairs has also played an important role; now that it has emerged as a major global power, China is suddenly concerned about its legitimacy on the international stage.

  The Chinese government generally tries to manage such popular discontent by providing various “pain relievers,” including programs that quickly address early signs of unrest in the population, such as reemployment centers for unemployed workers, migration programs aimed at lowering regional disparities, and the recent “new countryside movement” to improve infrastructure, health care, and education in rural areas.

  Those measures, however, may be too weak to discourage the emergence of powerful interest groups seeking to influence the government. Although private businesses have long recognized the importance of cultivating the government for larger profits, they are not alone. The government itself, its cronies, and state-controlled enterprises are quickly forming strong and exclusive interest groups. In a sense, local governments in China behave like corporations: unlike in advanced democracies, where one of the key mandates of the government is to redistribute income to improve the average citizen’s welfare, local governments in China simply pursue economic gain.

  More important, Beijing’s ongoing efforts to promote GDP growth will inevitably result in infringements on people’s economic and political rights. For example, arbitrary land acquisitions are still prevalent in some cities, the government closely monitors the Internet, labor unions are suppressed, and workers have to endure long hours and unsafe conditions. Chinese citizens will not remain silent in the face of these infringements, and their discontent will inevitably lead to periodic resistance. Before long, some form of explicit political transition that allows ordinary citizens to take part in the political process will be necessary.

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  • February 3, 2010 10:31 PM

• “It’s Time To Stop the Absurd Promotion of John Naisbitt’s ‘China’s Megatrends’,” (Updated with Photo)

  

  On the Diane Rehm show, the host interviews John and Doris Naisbitt about their book, “China’s Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society” According to the book’s promotional materials:

  China is creating an entirely new social and economic model, fitting to Chinese history and society just as America created a model fitting its history and society more than 200 years ago. [Naisbitt] identifies eight pillars of this new system.

  The Emanicipation of the Mind
  Planning by Trial and Error
  The Limits of Freedom and Fairness
  Framing the Forest, Letting the Trees Grow
  Balancing Top-down with Bottom-up
  Artistic and Intellectual Ferment
  Joining the World Stage
  The Mighty River of Innovation

  When asked by Rehm why the Chinese government bans websites such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, John Naisbitt replies, “Because there are things on those websites that do not contribute to the stability of the country.” He later replied to a caller by misinforming him that Liu Xiaobo was arrested “not for speaking his mind,” but for “organizing an alternative government.” Listen to the interview here. Learn more about the Naisbitts and their work in China at their China Institute’s website.

  Updated: How are the Naisbitts and their new book viewed in China? Here are some illustrative examples:

  (1) From the official website of China’s State Council Information Office (SCIO is the Chinese government’s main propaganda organ, which is in charge of “explaining China to the world 向世界说明中国” as well as controlling the content of the domestic Internet.):

  

  On September 12, 2009, the Director of the State Council Information Office Wang Chen (王晨) met authors of “China’s Megatrends” John and Doris Naisbitt in the offices of SCIO.

  Jiang Wenqiang (江伟强), the Director of the Second Bureau of SCIO (Second Bureau is in charge of “developing international public relations, promoting communication and collaboration with foreign news agencies and other relevant agencies”), Guo Changjian (郭长建), the Director of the Third Bureau of SCIO (Third Bureau is in charge of “planning and organizing books, films, and videos for foreign audiences and other general cultural exchange activities”), and Wu Wei (吴伟), the deputy director of the Third Bureau of SCIO also attended the meeting.

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  • January 5, 2010 10:13 PM

• Nicholas Bequelin: The Limits of the Party’s Adaptation

  

  Nicholas Bequelin, senior Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch, writes in the Far Eastern Economic Review:

  The CCP’s success in both modernizing China and maintaining its monopoly on power, received wisdom holds, comes from the lessons Beijing drew from the upheavals of 1989, abroad and at home. The system had to be reformed, but in the reverse order from the one Gorbachev attempted: economic reforms first, political ones later, or else everything risked unravelling. But in fact political reforms were actually never on the agenda. The real lesson drawn by the CCP from the events of 1989 was much more far-reaching: In order to survive and keep power, the Party concluded, it needed to adapt and respond to social change. Unceasingly.

  Indeed, in the eyes of Beijing’s rulers, the reason why the protests had spiralled out of control was that the Party had failed to prevent an array of social demands—from curbing inflation to fighting corruption and lifting unnecessary restrictions on private life and social mobility—from coalescing into broad disaffection with the Party and then into a political movement. Since that time, the Party has made its central task not just economic development, but identifying and responding to social demands before they have a chance to morph into demands for political reform and democratization.

  By following this principle, the CCP has become what could be best described as the first Darwinian Leninist Party in history, one that sees constant adaptation as the key to survival.

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  • December 7, 2009 8:54 PM

• Jeffrey Wasserstrom: The German Wall That Fell – And the Chinese Regime That Didn’t

  

  For the Huffington Post, Jeffrey Wasserstrom reviews David Shambaugh’s China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation in light of commemorations of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

  Written by a high-profile political scientist and published in hard cover in 2008 and then in a paperback edition this year, Shambaugh’s book is a very fitting one to turn to just now, as the media is filled with retrospective looks at the last days of the Berlin Wall. Why? Because the destruction of that great Cold War symbol, more than any of the other wondrous events of 1989, inspired the erroneous belief that the days of all Communist Party regimes were about to end (they live on not just in China but also Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea). And because Shambaugh provides one of the best accounts yet of the post-1989 reinvention of the Chinese Communist Party that has kept China a Leninist country during what many assumed would be a post-Leninist era — not just for Europe, but for the world. He sheds important light, in other words, on why, when speaking of China, we need to think not of a Leninist Extinction but rather a Leninist Mutation.

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  • November 9, 2009 12:23 PM

• Qian Gang: How the Next Ten Years Will Decide China’s Future

  

  On China Media Project, Qian Gang looks ahead to the 70th anniversary of the PRC in 2019:

  If I may be allowed a bit of simple prognosticating, let me say that the next ten years will decide China’s future.

  2012 is the year that Hu Jintao will pass power to the next generation of leaders. While the CCP’s statutes do not place limits on the tenure of the general secretary, provisional rules on term limits issued in 2006 (党政领导幹部职务任期暂行规定) specify that party leaders should hold office for no more than two terms.

  If during the coming ten years China’s political climate continues at its present tempo, if there are no dramatic political bumps, we can be fairly certain that the leader who takes the reins at the 18th Party Congress in 2012 will remain as China’s national leader when the 70th anniversary rolls around in 2019.

  China cannot be allowed to slide into chaos. This is something all Chinese can basically agree on. But if the CCP continues to drag its feet on political reform, we should all be deeply concerned.

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  • October 29, 2009 10:43 AM

• John Lee: No More Excuses for Growing Rich-Poor Gap

  

  In Der Spiegel, John Lee writes about why a lack of political reform in China can no longer be blamed on the chaos of the Mao years:

  First things first: Why does the building of institutions that might lead to democracy matter in China? Because in one important respect, authoritarian China is failing: While the Chinese state is rich and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) powerful, civil society is weak and the vast majority of people remain poor. The health, wealth, and well-being of Beijing and the Party are not the same as that of its people. Since the 1990s, what is good for the Chinese state is no longer automatically good for the vast majority of its people.

  How then do we establish the best possible conditions that will eventually lead to greater political reforms that benefit the Chinese people? We need a strong civil society where there is rule of law. Courts need to be independent and officials need to be accountable. Private property needs to be protected, individual enterprise needs to be given a chance to succeed, basic human rights must be enforced, and the government needs to be restrained. This is the meaning of just and decent rule for the Chinese people. These are the foundations for a just society that are sorely lacking in modern-day China.

  China has grown sixteenfold since reforms began. But in the absence of effective institutions that restrain the discretionary powers of CCP officials and render them accountable for their actions, it is the state and the CCP that grows stronger rather than the Chinese people and civil society.

  Lee wrote a similar article recently for Foreign Policy; read it here via CDT.

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  • October 6, 2009 1:40 PM

• The Party’s Not Over

  

  In Foreign Policy, John Lee looks at why the “reform period” in China has lasted so long with no end in sight:

  China’s leaders since Deng have been telling the world that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will soon relinquish its dominance over the Chinese economy and society, and is assiduously laying the groundwork for fundamental economic and political reform, and eventually democracy — but only after it recovers from the chaos and destruction of the Mao years. After all, Deng famously declared that democracy was “a major condition that emancipated the mind.” But the reform period of 31 years has exceeded Mao’s 27 years of terrible rule. The excuse that the party will “let go” its economic and political power but for the ghost of Mao and his terrible legacy is wearing thin.

  So, first things first. Why should the party “let go” more power and instead work toward building institutions that will aid political reform and eventually democracy in China? Because in one important respect, authoritarian China is failing: While the Chinese state is rich and the party powerful, civil society is weak and the vast majority of people remain poor.

  But aren’t China’s leaders doing a magnificent job of at least leading the country toward prosperity? After all, since Deng’s reforms, Chinese GDP has grown 16-fold. And isn’t this ultimately for the benefit of most of the country’s people? Not in China’s model of investment-led state corporatism hatched after the 1989 Tiananmen protests to preserve the economic power and relevance of the party.

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  • September 29, 2009 2:04 PM

• China at Age 60: From Pariah to World Power

  

  AFP looks back at the transformation of Chinese politics over the past 60 years:

  A country that was once seen as a pariah, stuck between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and which barely gained United Nations membership in 1971, slowly emerged from its isolation.

  In 1978, Beijing agreed to establish diplomatic relations with Washington. Then, under paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, it launched a programme of economic reforms that opened up the country to foreign investment.

  Francoise Lemoine, a China expert at the Research Centre for International Economics (CEPII) in Paris, says the country’s authorities quickly understood how to reap the benefits of the new world order.

  “China is opening up at a time when other countries are ready to move their intensive manual labour activities offshore,” the French economist told AFP.

  “China knows how to take advantage of this new globalisation, of the worldwide movement of capital and goods, and is claiming its rightful place in this new global division of labour.”

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  • September 23, 2009 8:45 PM

• Party’s Agenda in China Seems to Fall Flat

  

  The New York Times reports on what didn’t happen at this year’s recently-concluded Party plenum:

  China’s Communist Party elite had billed its four-day strategy session as an attack on “acute problems” that threatened the party’s political standing, like official corruption, China’s yawning gap between the rich and poor, and the lack of democracy within the party’s own ranks.

  But besides an anticorruption directive that would force officials and their families to disclose their property holdings and investments, initial reports from the meeting last week suggested that the Central Committee’s members either were reluctant to make major changes, or disagreed over how those changes might be made.

  State news media reports of communiqués issued Friday and Saturday, after the Central Committee and subcommittee meetings ended, said little that differed from past policy sessions on the need for party democracy, which had been cast as the major theme of the session.

  See also “Doubts emerge about Beijing’s succession plan” from the Financial Times and “Chinese puzzle: who is Hu’s heir?” from The Age about the failure of the plenum to nominate Xi Jinping to the Central Military Commision, thus casting his anticipated role as Hu Jintao’s heir apparent in doubt.

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  • September 20, 2009 8:22 PM

• Leadership Struggles May Put Potholes in the Smooth Road of Reform

  

  The Sydney Morning Herald reports that China’s political institutions have not evolved enough to handle other transformations underway in society, and that ongoing political struggles are responsible for the clamping down on activists and free expression in recent months:

  There are some well-connected political observers in Beijing who believe that the party’s recent across-the-board political and security tightening, including a ruthless attack on the legal profession, is linked to efforts by the vice-president, Xi Jinping, to secure the leadership of the country by 2012.

  They say Xi is desperately wooing the hardliners, mainly allies of former president Jiang Zemin, who control the party’s core security apparatus: internal security, propaganda and the military. Xi’s immediate goal is to lock in a promotion to be vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission this month, in time for the National Day military extravaganza on October 1. President Hu Jintao received the same promotion at the same point in his transition to the leadership in 2002.

  Beyond Xi, senior party figures are manoeuvring to get themselves or their allies into the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee by the time of the next party congress in 2012. Everywhere, cadres are competing to out-tough each other.

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  • September 6, 2009 9:04 PM

• Critic Leaves Beijing Red-faced

  

  Asia Times writes about the political impact of a widely-circulated article, which contains a sharp critique of China’s current political system, allegedly written by an anonymous former senior official. (Some say the official is former National People’s Congress chairman Wan Li, though that has yet to be proven). A full translation of the article is available via CDT here. From the Asia Times article:

  The government has reasons to fear the impact of such a critical essay, whoever its real author may be. Against the backdrop of rising unemployment, a widening rich-poor gap and widespread social discontent, it would not welcome such a candid appraisal of its performance.

  “The People’s Republic of China does not have a modern political party system … even now, although 60 years have gone by, a truly competitive system of elections has not been established,” the article says.

  The author laments that 60 years on, China is still under one-party rule and the state is still regarded as “the party’s state”. He also lambastes the party for clinging onto power in the government as well as over the military – even now, he says, the army is the party’s army, not the country’s army.

  “Is ‘no change’ a good thing in politics? Or a kind of political inertia? Or a kind of political stagnation?” the article asks.

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  • September 3, 2009 11:36 AM

• Are China’s Leaders Becoming More Responsive?

  

  China Media Project asks whether the Internet is helping the Chinese government become more responsive to citizens’ demands and, “to what degree some of the apparent signs of greater ‘deliberation’ are in fact more aggressive, grandstanding attempts by the leadership to massage public opinion”:

  We have only to look at the party’s own discourse on news and propaganda policy to understand that the CCP is interested in harnessing the power of the Internet, not unleashing it.

  A few interesting articles have emerged from Chongqing this month about how the CCP can become more effective at “channeling public opinion on the Internet.”

  Chongqing’s deputy propaganda chief, Zhou Bo (周波), published an article in the official Chongqing Daily earlier this month called “Leaders and Cadres Must Continually Strengthen Internet Public Opinion Channeling Capacity.” The piece argued that the Internet has transformed “the structure of public opinion channeling.” Leaders, said Zhou, must appreciate the new and growing role of the Internet and “move away from misunderstandings about the Web.”

  Typical Hu Jintao “use the Web” kind of stuff, right? It doesn’t really sound that bad. Zhou seems to be saying that party leaders should not fear the Internet and should not react to it irrationally. He is advocating a change of attitude, and that’s probably a good thing if you’re looking for reasons to feel encouraged.

  But while Zhou’s article talks about the Internet as “an important agent for promoting the building of democracy in our country,” “an aggregation platform through which people can vent their emotions and voice their demands” and “a new point of economic growth” (a profit-making industry in its own right, in other words), he also views the Internet in dangerous and aggressive terms as “a key strategic position as we battle our enemies for public opinion.”

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  • August 13, 2009 6:04 PM

• Senior Official: The Governing Party Needs to Establish Fundamental Political Ethics

  

  Chinese censors are busy these days, chasing news from Africa linked to the son of the president, or voices protesting imprisoned rights scholars, lawyers, and activists. Now they have set their eyes on the following text, circulating in Chinese QQ groups, blogs, online forums and Twitter networks, entitled “The Governing Party Needs to Establish Fundamental Political Ethics – A Talk by an Old Comrade on the Eve of the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Founding of the PRC” (执政党要建立基本 的政治伦理 ——国庆60周年前夕一位老同志的谈话), which alleges to convey the words of an unnamed senior CCP official. As Qian Gang pointed out on China Media Project last week, the authenticity of the document has not been verified, but as he writes, “Whatever the case, I believe this article, which urges China and the CCP to mark the 60th anniversary of the PRC’s establishment by engaging in deep reflection rather than indulging in empty eulogies, does represent the views shared by leaders of conscience within the CCP.” The Chinese text can be found here, and CDT thanks the anonymous translator for his permission to publish the translation in full here:

  The sixtieth anniversary of the PRC is coming, I hear that now is a busy time preparing for military parades. I am old and can’t walk anymore so perhaps I won’t be able to go to the reviewing stand on Tiananmen. Although I was never in charge of propaganda work, I know that for the sixtieth anniversary of the PRC there will be a great deal of propaganda work done. The propaganda will concentrate on achievements and how much progress the country has made. That is the way it has been done for all these past sixty years. A few days ago a professor from the Central Party School, a very young person but someone has been doing some deep thinking, visited me for a talk. He said that he belongs to the reform generation and an old guy like me belongs to the revolution generation. He said that young people these days are very broad-minded in their thinking and so they ask me a lot of questions that are hard to answer. Some of their views seem to violate the ways of thinking about things and doing things that we have in the Party. However, the more I talk with them, the more I believe that they are quite honest in their thinking and they are not just thinking recklessly. Sometimes I am offended by their way of thinking, but perhaps that just goes to show that I am not as real and sincere as these young people. I keep telling them, you young people need to understand some history.

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  • August 9, 2009 9:29 PM

• Frank Ching: An Old Idea That Really Would Set China Free

  

  From New Straits Times:

  The publication of the secretly recorded memoirs of former Chinese party leader Zhao Ziyang, who spent the last 16 years of his life under house arrest for opposing the crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, provides a rare glimpse into how elite politics works in China.

  The memoirs show that, as widely suspected, Deng Xiaoping was the one who decided to call in the troops even though he was formally not the head of state, the party or even of the government. But he was the country’s supreme leader, which reflected the abnormal state that the country was in at the time.

  Deng Xiaoping made an ineradicable contribution to China after he came to power following the death of Chairman Mao Zedong. Mao had put his personal imprint on the country from the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 until his death in 1976.

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  • June 25, 2009 1:35 AM

• Can China Embrace its History and Zhao Ziyang’s Memoir?

  

  On East Asia Forum, Richard Rigby of Australian National University, reviews Zhao Ziyang’s memoirs:

  The fascination of the book, though, goes much further than Zhao’s account of the June 4 events.

  It will be mined in great detail by many for the insights it provides into the evolution of the economic reform program, the twists and turns of internal party struggles, the paramount role of Deng Xiaoping (but even his power was not unlimited), the serious differences within the reform camp over political reform (and in Zhao’s case, the way his thinking on this issue changed, and continued to do following his removal from power), Zhao’s insightful pen-portraits of his erstwhile colleagues, and his frank admissions of various policy mistakes (in particular the mishandling of the price reform of 1988).

  Most of all, the book stands out as the sole account of how things worked – and in some, but not all ways, presumably still do – at the very top of the Chinese political system, by one who was there.

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  • May 24, 2009 5:07 PM

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