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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