Chris Buckley's article of 14 February in the New York Times "Vows of Change in China Belie Private Warning'' rightly puts Party Secretary Xi Jinping's reform rhetoric in the context of a host of contradictions. The fight against corruption and inequalites is pitted against opposition from vested interests. Calling for constitutional checks on top-down state power is coupled with warnings about lessons of collapse of the former USSR. Mounting social pressures for political liberalization are cited with a harking back to Maoist socialism.
One can be forgiven for drawing the conclusion that Xi's apparently vigorous reform stance is at best "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma," in the words of Winston Churchill's famous dictum.
The confusion and myth are a product of binary thinking - either giving up single party leadership or sclerosis, either Western democracy or risk of a "French Revolution", either forward to the future or retreat to Maoism.
In fact, all the apparent contradictions cited in the article are signs that Xi is continuing China's on-going quest for her own model of democracy. There is a conviction that there is no one-size-fits-all formula, least of all of the kind of quick-fix that mandated glasnost and perestroika within 500 days which precipitated the collapse of the former USSR.
Indeed, in modern-day enlightened Communist Party intellectual debate, the original Paris Commune is hailed as a form of local democracy ("we the people") and Mao's original vision of "the mass line" also contained seeds of representing the will of the grassroots (the 99%) against social injustice.
Not many in China believe that the country's future lies in downloading Western multi-party confrontational "democracy", with all its recent fault-lines. But how to make the Party truly represent and accountable to the people within a one-party state continues to test the ingenuity of the Party leadership.
For starters, China is likely to implement the kind of reforms proposed in a 468-page World Bank report jointly undertaken with the Development Research Centre of the State Council - "China 2030: Building a Modern, Harmonious, and Creative High-Income Society." It is known that Li Keqiang, China's Premier-in-waiting, is the report's staunchest supporter. Amongst its recommendations are measures to enhance social provisions, reform the monopoly of state-owned enterprises, change the "hukou" registration system marginalizing migrant labour, and promote the role of civil society in monitoring official governance. Click here
Another pointer to the kind of feasible change was provided by Professor Yu Jianrong of the Chinese Academy of Social Science, who recently circulated a succinct, down-to-earth, 10-year outline for China’s social and political development. First promulgated in April this year, it went viral on Sina Weibo amongst his 1.5 million followers on the popular micro-blogging site. The plan includes such reforms as legalization of peasants' land rights; centralized control of judiciaries to rid them of dependence on local authorities; abolition of certain retrograde top-down state organs such as the ""political and legal committees" and the "labour re-education system"; promotion of greater transparency of administrative information; and declaration by officials of their private assets. Click here Indeed, recently some of these measures are brewing, if not already being experimented with.
The debate on China's on-going development is intensifying. The jury is still out.
For background, it is well worth visitng the intellectual debate on Chinese socialism, democracy and re-thinking of the Chinese model in "The Transformation of Chinese Socialism", Lin Chun, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2006.
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