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Shanghai - News from Archives
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Tiananmen Legacy Endures
Political Overhaul Has Lagged
Behind Economic Development
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By ANTHONY KUHN Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL June 2, 2004 BEIJING -- Since the violence that crushed peaceful protests and left hundreds dead in Tiananmen Square here 15 years ago, China has been transformed as phenomenal economic growth has brought rising living standards, some freedoms and increasing international stature. But the legacy of the June 4, 1989, massacre endures -- in its influence on the lives of ordinary people and in its imposition of a conservative leadership and agenda that has frozen political reform at the top. Since 1989, the suspension and rollback of the incipient democratization begun in the 1980s has continued to concentrate power in the Communist Party, fueling a steady rise in corruption. And as the Tiananmen-era leaders retire and a new generation takes the helm, the fundamental question remains: How sustainable is economic development without political reform? There is no doubt China's political landscape has changed significantly over the past 15 years -- aging revolutionaries have been replaced by urbane young technocrats, while Marxism itself has become little more than an ideological fig leaf. But much of the change has been a bottom-up transformation, not top-down overhaul, more the result of increasing access to information and changing attitudes than of official policy directives. Nor are bold moves expected from Beijing in the immediate future. Under the leadership of Hu Jintao, who has been party chief since November 2002 and president since March 2003, "there's been no political reform to speak of," says Yan Jiaqi, former head of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Political Research Institute and a leading intellectual involved with the Tiananmen Square protests. "This is understandable, as Hu has yet to assume full power from Jiang Zemin," the former head of state and party who still controls China's military, Mr. Yan says in a telephone interview from the U.S., where he has lived in exile since 1989. Mr. Yan sat on a committee that drew up political overhauls for Zhao Ziyang, the party chief from 1987 to 1989 who was purged at the height of the Tiananmen protests for sympathizing with the students. Wu Guoguang, now a political scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was also a member of the committee. "A basic criterion of political reform," Mr. Wu says, "is whether or not it limits the power" of the party. The key to limiting the party's power was to separate it from the government. The plan, as outlined in Mr. Zhao's report to the 13th party congress in 1987, was to scrap party committees in government ministries, courts, schools and factories. The goal was to make the government accountable to the people, not the party. After Mr. Zhao's downfall in May 1989, those plans were criticized as too liberal and were scrapped. Fifteen years on, Mr. Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao have substituted bureaucratic change for political change. In their first year in office, they announced plans to make government officials more accountable. In March, Mr. Wen told the annual session of China's legislature: "Where there is power, there must also be responsibility. When power is used, there must be supervision. When rights are infringed, there must be compensation." Backing up the rhetoric, state media recently have highlighted the resignations of several senior officials after a spate of deadly disasters. Among them: China National Petroleum Corp.'s chief executive, Ma Fucai, who resigned to take responsibility for gas-well explosions that killed 232 people in Sichuan in December, and Gang Zhanbiao, mayor of Jilin city, who resigned following a February shopping-mall fire that claimed 54 lives. < br> However, observers note that these resignations were hardly voluntary. Mr. Gang's was the decision of the city's Communist Party committee, while Mr. Ma's was decided by Premier Wen at a State Council meeting -- implying that officials' accountability is primarily to their superiors, not to the citizens they are supposed to serve. Moreover, officials have been made accountable only for catastrophic accidents, not for the infringement of citizens' rights or conflicts of interest. Mayors and ministers have been punished, but not the party secretaries above them. Observers also are concerned about official interference in village-level elections begun under the Zhao administration in 1987. "Many instances of backsliding or stagnation of democracy have occurred in localities nationwide," elections expert Li Fan of the World and China Institute wrote in a recent Internet essay. One example cited by Mr. Li: Several provinces require county and township party committees to approve the candidates that villagers nominate for the post of village chief. In his report to the 13th party congress in 1987, Mr. Zhao also had pledged to legislate specific protections for the rights of free speech and free association guaranteed by China's constitution. That pledge was dropped following his fall from grace. Earlier this year, the National People's Congress approved amendments to China's constitution to include respect for human rights, but this hasn't been accompanied by concrete legislation. In response to calls for political reform, Mr. Hu's government instead has dusted off the decades-old goal of democratizing China by first democratizing the Communist Party. To this end, new regulations published in February call for protection of party members' political rights as guaranteed by the party charter, and mandate inspection teams to supervise the work of central and provincial party officials. But the rules also call for maintaining the party's Leninist system of "democratic centralism," whose main feature is the obedience of each party level to the tier above it. This, critics say, essentially concentrates supreme power in the hands of the party's nine-man Politburo Standing Committee. In the run-up to the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen protests, dissidents and relatives of victims are coming under increased scrutiny from police, though less than in years past. But their voices now are submerged in the din of daily protests against corruption and crime, lost homes and livelihoods, by hundreds of farmers and workers thronging the capital daily. -- David Lague in Hong Kong contributed to this article. | | |||||