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CHINA'S
MAKEOVER
Part 1:
Political reform on tap
By Francesco
Sisci
BEIJING - Real political reform appears to be
coming to China, and coming fast. In recent months, the
communist leadership has been publicizing new proposals
indicating its strong drive toward substantial political
reforms. The ultimate goal of these proposals is to
convert the People's Republic of China from its
socialist roots to a capital-oriented country with an
economy based on private ownership.
Some of the
more significant proposals:
At the plenary session of the National People's
Conference next month, a new civil code based on the
protection of private property will be introduced. The
code is based on extensive study of the existing civil
codes and the translation and research of the basis of
civil rights in the West, the Corpus Iuris
Iustiniani. The code
will integrate traditional civil law and commercial law,
with the Italian Code as a template. The code will
finalize China's abandonment of socialist principles,
which started 14 years ago in 1997 with the
constitutional amendment that made private property as
important as public property. In the past weeks Chinese
newspapers have also been publishing editorials and
commentaries defending the right of gaining wealth and
protecting it as a driving force of development, as
Jiang Zemin's much-touted theory of the "Three
Represents" also maintains.
Experimenting with elections,
which has occurred both at local and central levels,
shall continue to expand. There are already elections at
the district level in some provinces. This is a move up
from the elections at county level that were fairly
free, with the central authorities frequently ruling
against local authorities that tried to subvert the
results. For the first time at the central level, some 5
percent of the posts of the Central Committee at last
year's 16th Party Congress were decided by elections
with a short list of candidates. The appointees had to
be elected by their fellow representatives. Elections at
both the local and central level will be expanded over
the next few years.
Township-level governments may face elimination or
heavy reductions. Currently, every township has a wide
array of administrative organs, some superfluous,
(party, government, people's congress, etc) that are
highly cost-inefficient. In recent years there have been
trends toward merging existing townships to generate
economies of scale and designating certain townships
xiao qu, or "little districts" of a larger
administrative district. The idea is to promote more
self-governance, a move in the direction of a stronger
administrative state. A complete overhaul of
administration division has been suggested in a book
that has recently come out, Zhongguo Xingzheng Quhua
Gaige Yanjiu ("A Study of China's Administrative
Division"), arguing for the clarification of
competencies at every administrative level and the
return of the ownership of land to the peasants. This
will give a stronger and clearer basis for the
representation of the individual and their interests as
the land in the countryside still officially is
collectively owned by the village. While this changes
the countryside, there is a strong trend toward
urbanization that must be addressed, as the legislation
of the 16th Congress of the Communist Party of China
(CPC) recognized.
Beijing is stressing the importance of protecting
migrant workers and increasing the mobility of urban
residents through reforming the outmoded hukou system of
residential registration. In 2001 the government allowed
peasants to apply for regular residence in the cities.
In the past week new legislation forbade the collection
of "irregular fees" and pressed that migrant workers
ought to actually get paid for their labor. Throughout
China, not paying migrant workers either on time or in
full has become customary. Additionally, children of
migrant workers will be officially allowed to attend
school in the cities. In 20 years some 70-80 percent of
the Chinese population are projected to live in cities,
the first time in its history that China will be
something other than a land of peasants.
Beijing is taking a new look at division of
authority, as is evident in experiments with Shenzhen's
bureaucracy. The judicial, legislative and
administrative powers will no longer report collectively
to the city party chief, but will report individually to
a higher level of administration. In this way the
various powers in the city will be able to balance and
check on each other. The difference with full-fledged
democracy is that in a democracy, one or more of these
bodies will have to report to the people who elect them,
in Shenzhen they have to report ultimately to Beijing.
But if the trend toward elections is combined with that
of separation of power, we will have actual democracy.
This is a dramatic change from the old communist
mold, as Michal Korzec noted in the South China Morning
Post on January 29 ("Absorption of the Party by the
state"): "In the 1990s, we have been watching a
different kind of process - the slow and silent
absorption of the Party by the state.
"There can
no longer be any mistake about this process. The
official silence has now been broken. The January issue
of the Hong Kong monthly Zhengming gave the following
description of a recent speech by Jiang Zemin:
"'In mid-December 2002, the CPC Central
Secretariat convened a meeting on the work of
organization development. Jiang Zemin attended as an
ordinary party member and issued directives at the
meeting to the whole party regarding the present state,
stage and development orientation of the CPC as an
organization.
"'Jiang pointed out that by 2010
the CPC membership is expected to grow to 80 million and
the workers and peasants, who currently are the party’s
nucleus, will be replaced by the middle class of
socialism with Chinese characteristics as the nucleus
... Jiang continued, when party building and
organizational development reach 2010 or 2015, we are
expected to become a political party boasting of a
nucleus including state organs' and government
departments' functionaries, the army, the armed police,
all structures of the superstructure, the various
democratic parties, and the industrial and commercial
circles. This is inevitable when a political party
advances along with social development. This will also
show we are a political party that has vitality, is most
widely representative of the society, and has vision.'
"Jiang's statement about the future of China's
political system is a succinct, sophisticated
'non-communist manifesto' ... describing how the nation
can evolve from a party-state to a state-party."
The state is certainly more important than the
party, which is evidenced linguistically by the current
political parlance in Beijing. Jiang likes to be called
"President Jiang" (not chairman Jiang, though in Chinese
he is Jiang zhuxi, a term that with Mao Zedong
was translated as "chairman") and he is very rarely
referred to as the CPC's zong shuji, or general
secretary.
Korzec argues that this move away
from the Marxist tradition is actually based on a strong
Marxist perception of reality: political reforms are
necessary to solve the present economic troubles. The
work of the past five years has been to dismantle the
socialist state. This has been achieved with significant
success: at least 20 million workers from state-owned
enterprises (SOEs) were laid off, and more than 100
million more were de facto expelled from their jobs in
the countryside. The state has given up the pretense of
providing total security for its people - there are no
longer cradle-to-coffin jobs, known in China as the
"iron rice bowl". Medicare, education and housing have
all been privatized.
All this has been achieved
with remarkable stability. Something that would have
ripped apart any other country in the world was managed
in China with relatively little social protest. Now the
dismantling of the state must be followed by the
construction of a new state.
But this
requires taking a step back and looking at the current
state's shortcomings.
Next: A leaner, meaner economy
(©2003
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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