Stray Thoughts On 16th CPC Congress

Harkishan Singh Surjeet

 COMING as it did in the background of tumultuous changes in the world, the recently held 16th congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) had been a subject of intense discussions and speculations all over, for months together. The bourgeois-imperialist media had been posing as if radical shifts were going to take place in China’s politics and economics, and also in the structure of the ruling party, once Jiang Zemin resigned from the top leadership position. There were also wiseacres who, whether they themselves believed it or not, tried to make others believe that China was just poised for a “peaceful transition to capitalism.” It was therefore quite natural that this immense propaganda barrage had added to the deep concern even among many who are not inimical to socialism.

MOMENTOUS EVENT

IN a sense, the fears haunting the wellwishers of socialism the world over were natural. China is not only the most populous country in the world; in fact all eyes are naturally centered on this country after the setbacks the socialist systems suffered in the USSR and East Europe. At the same time, the country has also witnessed inner-party convulsions on a couple of occasions during the past half a century. There was a lot of convulsion in the period of the so-called “Cultural Revolution.” Then the “Gang of Four” tried to capture the party and state power after the death of Comrade Mao Zedong, but was defeated. Still later, a group of people sought to challenge the very concept of socialism, leading to what was called the Tienmann Square episode. A number of stalwarts of the Chinese revolution were disgraced, removed from their positions and marginalised, though some of them like Liu Shao Chi (posthumously) and Deng Xiaoping were reinstated later on. In this situation, the very news that Jiang Zemin was going to step down from the party’s top leadership gave the media an occasion to indulge in its favourite pastime of weaving web after web of speculations, creating apprehensions among the wellwishers of socialism. 

There is no doubt that the 16th CPC congress will go down in history as one of the most important events in the beginning of the new century. But this will not be for the reason the bourgeois-imperialist media had been advancing for months. The congress will in fact be remembered for having paved the way for a further acceleration of the far-reaching transformations that China has been witnessing since the past two decades. 

Even a cursory glance at what happened at the CPC congress is enough to show how ill-founded the media speculations were. Jiang did step down from the party’s top position, clearing the way for election of a low-profile Hu Jintao as the CPC general secretary. Yet the party has retained Jiang’s services as chairman of its Central Military Commission, thus showing full faith in him. This is in line with the tradition of a balanced evaluation of personalities the CPC has evolved. For example, even while frankly pinpointing the mistakes Comrade Mao committed in the last years of his life, and some of them were of a very serious nature, the CPC duly recognises his weighty contributions first in taking the Chinese revolution to the victory post and then creating grounds for its all-round development. In fact, if “a country of opium-eaters,” a country that was repeatedly humiliated by imperialist powers in the 19th century, emerged as a powerful nation in the second half of the 20th century and stunned the world by its growth and development, Mao has his own share of credit for it, and the CPC does recognise his role in this process. This fact itself left no scope for believing the media speculations that the CPC was all set to dump Comrade Jiang Zemin.  

HISTORIC LEAP

AS for the country’s achievements since it began to open up in 1978, much before Gorbachev came out with his concept of perestroika in the Soviet Union, there is no doubt that the policy has yielded more than tangible results. Compared to 1690.92 billion yuan in 1989, China’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew to 9593.33 billion yuan in 2001 --- a more than fivefold increase. The overall growth rate of GDP has been 9.3 per cent in this period --- much more than the rate even in many developed countries. (At one time, the growth rate even went up to 13 per cent, causing concern about the “overheating” of the economy.) The per capita income has increased from 151.2 to 754.3 dollars in the same period. The disposable income of the urban residents has grown from 343.4 yuan in 1978 to 6859.1 yuan in 2002; that of the ruralite Chinese grew from 133.5 to 2366.4 yuan in the same period. Therefore there was no exaggeration in Jiang’s report to the CPC congress that, in the period 1989-2001, “China came up to the sixth place in the world in terms of economic aggregate. On the whole, the people made a historic leap from having only adequate food and clothing to leading a well-off life. As is universally recognised, the 13 years have been a period in which China’s overall national strength has risen by a big margin, the people have received more tangible benefits than ever before, and China has enjoyed long-term social stability and solidarity and had a good government and a united people.”  

Giving figures, the report presented to the congress delegates showed how all the major objectives set by the 15th CPC congress five years ago have been achieved in the intervening period.

This only gives a glimpse of the progress made by the country since the time the CPC corrected, in 1978, the earlier mistaken notion of socialism, and said that the country would reach the stage of advanced socialism only by 2050. The progress is in accordance with the aim the CPC had set for itself --- of vigorously developing the productive forces as a prerequisite of reaching the stage of socialism and then of communism.

This is also in accordance with the maxim set by Marx and Engels, as far back as in Communist Manifesto (1848), that socialism means not an equal distribution of poverty; rather it means an equal distribution of prosperity.  

Needless to say, this progress could not be achieved without corresponding changes in the institutional framework --- in the structure of governance from top to bottom, in party organisation, in its leadership quality, and so on.

AWARENESS OF DIFFICULTIES

ALL this, however, dos not mean that it is a success story all through. The fact is that there are still many hurdles to be overcome. But the important thing to note is that the CPC and the Chinese government are acutely aware of these hurdles and are taking suitable steps to cross them over. The Jiang report to the 16th CPC congress summed these hurdles as below: 

“We must be clearly aware that there are still quite a few difficulties and problems in our work. The income of farmers and some urban residents has increased only slowly. The number of the unemployed has gone up. Some people are still badly off. Things are yet to be straightened up in the matter of income distribution. The order of the market economy has to be further rectified and standardised. Public order is poor in some places. Formalism, the bureaucratic style of work, falsification, extravagance and waste are still serious problems among some leading cadres in our party, and corruption is still conspicuous in some places. The party’s way of leadership and governance does not yet entirely meet the requirements of the new situation and new tasks. Some party organisations are feeble and lax. We must pay close attention to these problems and continue to take effective measures to solve them.”

This is the main thing --- the CPC has shown in practice that it has no intention to gloss over the difficulties and even the evils prevailing in society and governance. But this openness in recognising the problems and evils is itself a prerequisite of mobilising opinion against them. It is known that the CPC has taken vigorous steps to root out corruption from state and society. The growth of disparity in income distribution --- not only between individuals, but also between rural and urban areas, between various regions of the country, etc --- is one more serious problem to be tackled. But the way the party and the government are trying to tackle it, gives hope for future. The special attention currently being paid to the north western region of the country, a region that is backward compared to other regions, and the steps taken to overcome the region’s backwardness are a proof enough of the CPC’s seriousness in tackling the problems it has identified.

The Jiang report, in fact, sets forth a long list of tasks that are required to meet the challenges. Here the space constraint prevents us from going into the details of these tasks; we would only say that one must carefully go through the full report to put in a proper perspective whatever is happening in China and to form a balanced opinion on that basis.

Here the main thing to note is that the CPC is currently traversing a hitherto unexplored path and that is the main source of the difficulties it is facing. As the report itself says:

“To develop a market economy under socialism is a great pioneering undertaking never tried before in history” (emphasis added).

Incidentally, we may also recall here what the Resolution on Certain Ideological Issues, adopted by the CPI(M)’s 14th congress (Chennai, 1992), had said on the issue; the resolution had categorically underlined the need of distinguishing between a capitalist market economy and a socialist one. The resolution had warned against equating market economy per se with capitalism. In fact, this equation was itself one of the sources of the mistakes committed in erstwhile socialist countries, as it meant an attempt to skip over certain stages of development.  

CONFIDENCE & OPTIMISM

IT is therefore natural that the progressive and revolutionary forces all over the word are watching, with bated breath, what the outcome of this pioneering undertaking will be. In case China succeeds in evolving a vibrant socialist market economy, it will certainly give a boost to the revolutionary movement the world over.  

Be that as it may, there are grounds to believe that the experiment is not to go in vain. The Jiang report itself says that the CPC is out to overcome the obstacles by sticking to the principles of democratic centralism. The level of their confidence is evident from the oft-repeated saying: if one opens the windows, flies will also come in along with fresh air. But while one must see to it that the flies are driven out, one must not deprive oneself of fresh air by shutting the windows. 

In fact, the sense of confidence of the Chinese people and their leader, the CPC, is so great that it has unnerved even the most developed countries. As we know, contrary to India, China entered the WTO from a position of strength and that too by overcoming the obstacles the US had been putting in the way of her accession to the WTO. The cheap and comparatively durable goods from China are already overwhelming many national markets in the world and giving the local industrialists sleepless nights. It is true that China is still much behind the developed countries in science and technology, a fact the Jiang report frankly admits, but the country feels it will be soon able to overtake the developed countries in this respect too.

It is not surprising that China has been attracting far more foreign direct investment than, say, India, and that too on its own terms, without succumbing to the direct or indirect pressure of imperialist countries.

The sense of confidence among the Chinese is also reflected from what the report said about China’s external relations. The report to the CPC congress said once again that it would seek the unification of Taiwan with mainland China through peaceful means, on the basis of “one country, two systems” principle that has been applied in case of Hong Kong and Macao. 

Once again affirming the country’s adherence to Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, which we call Panchasheel, the report reiterated that “China will never seek hegemony and never go in for expansion.” A reiteration of the no-first-strike stance was a logical conclusion of the same principle. This is in utter contrast to the Indian prime minister’s letter to the US president, dubbing China as the main threat to India’s security, in a bid to justify his nuclear jingoism.

MEMBERSHIP QUESTION

IT is in the background of this confidence that the question of opening the party membership for certain strata of society needs to be viewed. The CPC congress has reaffirmed its adherence to the Four Cardinal Principles --- i e, to socialism with Chinese characteristics, to people’s democratic dictatorship, to the leadership of Communist Party, and to Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. It also said it would abide by “Deng Xiaoping theory” and the idea of “Three Represents” that means advancing the productive forces, an orientation towards advanced culture and keeping in view the fundamental interests of an overwhelming majority of the Chinese people. Propounded by Jiang Zemin, the idea of three R’s in fact codifies the aims that have been guiding the CPC in the last quarter decade.

But yet, what has caused a degree of concern among the progressive forces outside China is the decision to open the party membership for members of some newly rising social strata. For this purpose, an amendment to the CPC constitution has also been made.

In this context, Xu Wenhua and Chen Dong, researchers at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, run by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, have sought to clarify two points. Writing in China Daily on November 7, they said the “CPC has identified itself as a political party of the Chinese working class since its founding and has remained the vanguard of the working class.” Moreover, after it became the ruling party, “the class foundation of the CPC has been further consolidated.”

The second point raised by the said researchers is: “In the past 13 years, the party has made new explorations and reached new consensus on how to expand its public support and increase its social influence. This consensus includes the belief that people belonging to new social strata can also be admitted to the party.” This flows from the fact that as China experiments with a socialist market economy, the conditions she is facing “are quite different from those the founders of Marxism were faced with and studied.” 

To the bourgeois media, however, these strata basically mean the capitalist class, though the actual text of the amendment does not use the word capitalist. The provision says: “Any Chinese worker, farmer, member of the armed forces, intellectual or any advanced element of other social strata who has reached the age of eighteen and who accepts the party’s programme and constitution and is willing to join and work actively in one of the party organisations, carry out the party’s decisions and pay membership dues regularly may apply for membership in the CPC.”

This amendment has been a subject of debate within the CPC. In the party, one section thought that private entrepreneurs are also “labourers.” (It is true, though, that these strata may be called labourers only in a very loose sense, if at all.) But another section was of the view that they are exploiters and should be excluded from the party.

The outgoing general secretary, Jiang Zemin, raised this point too in his presentation. He said while workers, farmers, intellectuals, servicemen and cadres are the party’s backbone, the new social strata too have contributed to the development of productive forces under the party’s guidance. He said not the amount of money one has, but one’s willingness to implement the party line wholeheartedly and meet the requirements of party membership will be the main criterion for admitting a person to the party. 

In itself, there is nothing objectionable in all this. As Marxists, we all are of the opinion that not a person’s class background but her or his readiness to declass should be the criterion to judge whether she or he is fit for party membership. Therefore, the main thing is not whether or not the CPC should have opened its doors for the “other strata” of society including the newly risen capitalists. (In fact, such individuals have been in the party in the past as well, and the fact of their joining the party only reflects the ongoing changes in Chinese society and economy.) The main thing is whether the party would be able to make such individuals abide by the party programme, constitution and discipline or whether they will take over the party and thereby pave the way for capitalist restoration in China.

The last-mentioned possibility seems to be a far-fetched one --- at least at the moment. According to the figures available, for instance, by 2001-end party organisations in non-publicly owned enterprises across the country were over 71,000, and the figure was 2.1 times that in 1997, while the party membership totalled around 66 million. This gives rise to a hope that, given their political consciousness, the rank and file of such a big party would not allow any attempt at capitalist restoration to succeed. Yet there is no doubt that, regarding this aspect, the whole world will be keenly watching the developments that will be unfolding in China in the days to come.