By: YANG Jianli
This week the ruling Chinese Communist Party holds its fourth Plenary Session of the 17th Central Committee. From the publication of the politically explosive Charter 08 in December, 2008, to the festering unrest in Tibet and Xianjiang, this session convenes against a backdrop of ethnic, religious, and social tensions not experienced in China since 1989. Sinologists around the world will be carefully scrutinizing speeches and reports to gain insight about the rulers’ direction leading up to the 18th Party Congress in 2012.
Following the tradition of establishing a theme for Plenary Sessions, this session is said to focus on the issue of promoting democracy within the party. The idea of cultivating democratic processes within a framework of totalitarian rule aptly communicates the conundrum now facing China’s rulers. After 60 years of absolute rule backed by a media machine that portrays the CCP as the provider of stability and harmony to Chinese society, the stark reality of widespread discontent and instability is now closing in on the rhetoric.
The challenge for this Plenary Session is to move beyond the rhetoric of reform to address the very infrastructure of one-party rule that feeds and rewards corruption and social unrest. If history is any guide, the prognosis for such real reform is not encouraging. Five years ago, the 16th Plenary Session promised a “scientific, democratic administration and ruling according to the rule by law.” While progress has been made, it is largely superficial and ephemeral. China today, remains a country with laws on the books but without the rule of law. In recent testimony before the Congressional Executive Committee on China, esteemed New York University law professor, Jerome Cohen, characterized the legal situation in China as “lawlessness without lawyers.” Human rights lawyers routinely have their licenses revoked for practicing human rights law, highly respected citizens such as Liu Xiaobo are arrested and charged with “subverting the state” merely for publishing recommendations for improving government, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate is judged a terrorist for promoting peaceful dialogue with the Chinese government. The absence of the rule of law and respect for peaceful dissent cannot be changed by high sounding rhetoric. The governmental structure that has China’s judicial system controlled by the Communist Party must be changed. Until the CCP can take this step of creating an independent judiciary, ideas of promoting democracy within the party and establishing the rule of law, will remain just empty rhetoric.
Signals from the top are also point to the paradox of establishing democratic processes within the Party. In earlier discussions, President Hu Jintao in June and Xi Jinping (presumably Hu’s successor) in September, emphasized “protecting party authority”. That is to say, anything that threatens party authority should not be implemented. If this be so, how will democracy manifest itself within the party?
However, the absence of a strong Deng Xiaoping-styled figurehead, together with a weakened Hu-Wen administration, may create a space for opposing voices to emerge. Differences, disagreements between members often occur behind closed doors while a false unity is made public. The emergence of democratic voices will reveal differences within the Party. Whatever happens, the paradox of engineering needed democratic reform within a totalitarian framework remains the conundrum of the CCP. The discontents continue to simmer, and the goal of a peaceful transition to a free society in China still hangs on the horizon. Its realization is only a matter of time and free societies must to prepared to prepared to support that peaceful transition. The biggest mistake western democracies can make is to assume that the CCP is a monolithic bloc. This clearly is not the case as illustrated in the Secret Memoirs of former Premier, Zhao Ziyang, published before the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen. In 1989, the international community did not understand this point and did not use the opportunity to encourage the democratic voices within the Party. This Administration would be wise to learn from that history. It should listen hard for those voices promoting real structural reform that will bring true harmony and stability to China, and be prepared to encourage them. Hopefully, as the opportunity for supporting those voices arise in China, the international community will, this time, stand on the right side of history.