I went through a few days ago an article from Forbes Magazine titled "A rule of law in China? written by Merle Goldman is a professor emerita of history at Boston University and an associate of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard.
China has just concluded its 17th Party Congress, which re-elected its present, Communist Party leader Hu Jintao, to another five-year term, and has put in place the next generation of party leaders. What can be expected from this new generation?
Will they embark on political reforms to match the economic reforms that have transformed China into a market economy and produced 9% to 10% growth for almost 30 years?
In the post-Mao Zedong era, beginning in 1976 with Mao's death and the assumption of power by his Long March comrade Deng Xiaoping, who became China's paramount leader, China has not been completely devoid of political reforms. In reaction to the totalitarian, repressive one-man rule under Mao, who launched disastrous political campaigns culminating with the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Deng decreed that no party leader should serve more than two five-year terms.
This political reform helped move China from a totalitarian state, in which virtually every aspect of life was controlled by the party--or more specifically, by one man--to an authoritarian government. The one-party state retains government control of the media and cracks down harshly on political dissent, but its population is allowed to develop more personal and artistic freedom.
Outside observers had great expectations for the current generation of party leaders, led by Hu Jintao, when it came to power in 2002. It is the best educated generation in China's modern history. Unlike their Communist Party predecessors, whose education had been generally haphazard, China's current top leaders were educated at China's most elite institutions, such as Peking University and Tsinghua.
Although they talk about political and legal reforms, these leaders have been educated as engineers and are more interested in building dams and roads than in introducing political reforms. In fact, the major political reform of the post-Mao era--the elections of village heads and village councils--had occurred in the late 1980s, when Deng was the paramount leader.
China's current leaders have introduced policies to narrow the economic inequalities between rural and urban areas and coastal and inner provinces. They have faced up to the increasing degradation the enviroment and water supply, problems caused by China's fast-paced economic development. At the same time, they have narrowed the space for the political discourse that opened up in the late 1990s.
While addressing the issues of economic and social disparities and talking about "democratic" reforms, in reality, they have stepped up political repression by arresting defense lawyers, freelance intellectuals, newspaper editors, journalists and cyber-dissidents who have challenged the party's authority and attempted to assert their political rights.
Soon after Hu Jintao came to power, a number of outspoken journalists were arrested in an effort to rein in the media. The group Reporters Without Borders report that 50 journalists are in prison today in China, more than in any other country. Prior to the convening of the 17th Party Congress, there was a renewed crack-down on dissent.
Outside observers had expected that China's dynamic entrepreneurial class and growing middle class, spawned by economic reforms, would become the basis for a bourgeoisie, comparable to the middle class that arose in the West with the industrial revolution and became the class base for Western democracy.
Unlike what happened in the West, however, China's rising middle class is not an independent entity. Its entrepreneurs are dependent on the party for their economic livelihood. They need the help of party officials to initiate and maintain their enterprises. Local party officials determine whether they can get access to resources, land and markets. Without the support of party leaders, they cannot survive economically.
At the same time, the party is co-opting China's entrepreneurs into the party. A third of the party's new members now come from China's rising middle class. Despite China's move to a market economy and integration into the world economy, its fourth generation of leaders has reinforced China's authoritarian, one-party state and introduced procedures to make it more durable.
So a central question today is whether the new generation of leaders tapped at the 17th Party Congress will follow in the footsteps of the current leaders or, alternatively, introduce political reforms and broaden the space for political discourse.
The two "new generation" names most cited as possible successors to the current leaders are Li Keqiang, a prodigy of Hu Jintao, who also rose through the China Youth Leagues and was party head of Liaoning province in China's Northeast, and Xi Jingping, currently the party boss of Shanghai.
Both resemble their predecessors in that they have been educated at China's elite universities, but they differ in important ways. They are in their early 50s, about 10 years younger than the current leaders. This means they came of age during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), when Mao, in an effort to dislodge members of the party whom he believed were conspiring against him, mobilized the Red Guards--members of the younger generation, particularly the educated youth, who were sent out to rebel against authority.
Following orders from Mao, these Red Guards not only rebelled against the party, but against all authority, including their teachers and families. When they created chaos, Mao then sent them to the countryside to learn from the peasants. In the countryside, they saw the Communist revolution they had fought for had not transformed peasants' lives--the peasants continued to live in poverty. When they returned to the cities after Mao's death in the late 1970, some of them began to question party authority and call for political reforms, which resulted in the Democracy Wall movement of 1978-1979.
Even if Li and Xi may not have participated in political movements during and after the Cultural Revolution, they were members of this questioning generation. Moreover, they entered political life during the 1980s, when party leaders appointed by Deng Xiaoping, such as Hu Yaobang, in office 1980-1987, and Zhao Ziyang, in office 1987-1989, talked about the need for political reforms. In addition, unlike their predecessors, they were not trained as engineers, but were educated in the law, which may make them more interested in establishing the rule of law than building China's economic infrastructure.
After all, it was Mikhail Gorbachev, Russia's first party head trained as a lawyer rather than an engineer, who opened up Soviet society, stopped the repression of Soviet dissidents, and sparked the beginning of the end of the Communist system in the Soviet Union.
Still, the late 1980s Gorbachev scenario, which allowed more freedom of speech and association that led to the implosion of the Soviet Communist Party in the 1990s, deters party leaders from following a similar path. In fact, the goal of China's current leaders' continuing crackdown on dissent and independent political discourse and association is to ensure the Chinese Comunnist Party does not follow the path of the former Soviet Union.
Certainly, as we have seen, a younger, better-educated leadership in China, presiding over a dynamic market and international economy, does not guarantee China will move in a democratic direction in the near future. However, if the repressive methods of China's current authoritarian populist leaders prove unsuccessful in dealing with the urgent problem of increasing inequality, environmental degradation and growing protests, China's new generation of leaders may be more willing to turn to democratic and legal procedures to channel rising discontent into less disruptive actions and more constructive results.
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