By Bill Smith
Beijing, (DPA) Faced with calls for democratic reform from dissidents, rights activists, retired cadres and Western governments, China’s ruling communist party occasionally responds, at least indirectly.
The party says yes, but urges patience. It points to its commitment to develop village elections, greater openness in governance and democracy within the party.
It calls on all Chinese people to unite behind the party’s “socialist modernisation” drive and wait for democracy – for about 100 years.
“Democratic reform must take into consideration 1.3 billion people and China’s national situation, so it cannot move too fast, otherwise it might bring bad effects on our society,” said Yang Fengcheng, a Marxist scholar at People’s University in Beijing.
“There are more than 70 million members of the Communist Party and there is a common wish that democratic reform inside the party could be speeded up, which could affect and push ahead democratic reform in the whole society,” Yang said.
State media praised state and party leader Hu Jintao for using the word democracy more than 60 times in his speech at the opening of the five-yearly party congress Monday.
Hu said China was “in the primary stage of socialism and will remain so for a long time to come”.
He said China’s modernisation drive under the party would need “unremitting efforts by several, a dozen or even dozens of generations”.
Hu again promised to expand democracy and transparency within the party, but made no mention of any wider democratic reform.
Congress spokesman Li Dongsheng said Sunday that the party would “never copy the Western model of a political system”.
The key ideology of former leader Deng Xiaoping, enshrined in the party constitution, holds that “socialist modernisation” must adhere to four “cardinal principles”.
In his official biography, Deng is quoted as saying the most important of the four principles is to “uphold leadership by the party and to keep to the socialist road, opposing bourgeois liberalisation and a turn to capitalism”.
Since Deng first coined the term “socialist modernisation” in 1979, China has managed nearly three decades of rapid economic growth in its major cities and coastal areas, without allowing the development of a political opposition.
Any move towards multi-party national elections would apparently require the party to amend its constitution again and perhaps undergo a divisive reassessment of the role of Deng in the 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy protestors in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
“Deng Xiaoping abandoned Mao’s ideology on class struggle,” Yang said. “Deng emphasized that the economy and stability were of overwhelming importance,” he said. “And his order is rigid.”
Party leaders have suggested several times in recent months that the “socialist modernisation” stage – and therefore the absence of multi-party democracy – would last about 100 years.
China would continue to develop its system of direct elections for village heads, and could expand it to township and even provincial level in the future, Premier Wen Jiabao said last year in a rare interview with five media organizations.
“The conditions are not yet ripe for conducting direct elections at higher levels of government,” Wen said.
“Democracy and direct elections in particular, should develop in an orderly way in keeping with the particular conditions of a country,” he said.
Xu Xianglin, an expert on China’s government at Beijing University, said that even the expansion of village elections was “very complex”.
“It is related to the definition of democracy,” Xu said. “Democracy is one of the ways to resolve social contradictions but it will also cause many problems,” he said.
In an article carried by state media in February, Wen echoed Deng in saying democracy could not be allowed soon because China’s economic development must continue to take precedence over political reform.
“We are still far away from advancing out of the primary stage of socialism,” Wen said. “We must stick with the basic development guideline of that stage for 100 years.”