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The juggernaut of political reform in China

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Newly-named Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, front left, poses with newly-named Chinese President Xi Jinping, while delegates clap when Li was announced to be the nation's new premier during a plenary session of the National People's Congress held in Beijing's Great Hall of the People Friday, March 15, 2013. (PHOTO: AAP)

In Brief

Author: Peter Drysdale, Editor, East Asia Forum

All the commentary suggests that there has been a substantial crackdown on free political expression in China since the new political leadership took over.

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Outside China, the New York Times reported in late August that Document No. 9 — supposedly promulgated by China’s president, Xi Jinping, himself — identified ‘Western constitutional democracy’, promoting ‘universal values’ of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic participation, pro-market ‘neo-liberalism’ and ‘nihilist’ criticisms of the party’s traumatic past among the seven ‘perils’ to the Chinese state. In China, netizens and political reformers appear to be under new threats of repression. These reports have unleashed a new round of angst and scepticism about where the new Chinese leadership is taking the country.

Half a year into the assumption of their new responsibilities, the latest issue of East Asia Forum Quarterly (EAFQ) edited by Kerry Brown and Richard Rigby provides one of the first in-depth assessments of how China’s leaders are travelling in dealing with the huge internal and external challenges they face going forward.

The fifth-generation leadership, with President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang at its core, is a leadership — as the articles in this issue of EAFQ make clear — that practices incremental reform. On internal issues, like managing the falling growth rate and the structural issues of increasing consumption, supporting sustainability and making the Chinese economy more competitive, it maintains faith in the market but also in state control. Its members support private-sector development and greater international access to the domestic market — but up to a point that is still being made clear.

On China’s international role, they inherit the problem of managing the country’s increased profile and importance while maintaining constructive relations with America, Japan and other key countries. They continue to plan policy around what many in China perceive as US attempts at containment and a Japan who they see as interfering with their strategic space through behaviour over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands.

At the heart of both these issues is the dominant contradiction in China’s current role — a major country central to global growth and stability, but one that is still beset by immense internal challenges and the need to give them priority rather than involve itself in the affairs of others.

Xi’s language, of a ‘China dream’ and of needing to create a more urban, sustainable economic model starts to move away from GDP measurement as the dominant yardstick. But, as our analysis shows, the challenges in creating political consensus among a highly fractured polity remain dauntingly high. And it is too early to say just how radical the new leaders will be as reformers when the time comes to make choices between the options available to them.

Certainly our two EAFQ essays this week from John Garnaut, one of the world’s best-informed media analysts of China’s political elite, and Yu Keping, one of China’s most authoritative commentators on political and ideological affairs,would seem to suggest it might be a tad naïve to judge where China is going on fundamental economic, social and political reform from the recent excitement about Document No. 9 and interference with the freedoms of the social media. This is a time at which China’s leaders are facing huge tests: on the economy, with the trial of Bo Xilai, and how the old verities are to be reconciled with the new Chinese economic, social and political realities at home and abroad. It’s a time when sending unsubtle and simple messages would easily jeopardise the whole enterprise.

Garnaut’s essay on the Bo trial deserves a careful read by anyone who still needs to be informed about the degree of the difficulties in which the Chinese leadership are trapped but have to work their way through while effecting transition at the same time as maintaining social and political stability.

Garnaut concludes that ‘Xi’s strategy of manipulating the coercive apparatus to purge enemies and use their confessions to taint and intimidate rivals comes directly from Bo’s Chongqing and Mao’s Yan’an. Xi’s propaganda apparatus is brandishing “swords” to enforce discipline across the contested spaces of the internet. His security apparatus has renewed the previous administration’s attack on lawyers and constitutionalism. And Xi’s personal willingness to extend the Bo investigation to the doorstep of some of the most powerful patrons in the country shows that a winner-takes-all logic remains firmly in place. But the fact that Bo was given probably the most transparent trial in the history of the People’s Republic shows the rules are continuing to evolve’.

Yu offers a more plausible and nuanced interpretation of ‘anti-Westernism’ than is commonly out there. He reminds us that China cannot escape its ‘Chinese characteristics’. ‘China is in a unique situation and … it should adhere to socialism with Chinese characteristics, develop it as required by the times, constantly enrich it in both practice and theory and enhance its distinctive national features in keeping up with the times’. And though China ‘will never copy a western political system’, there is no denial, in the deliberations of the 18th Peoples’ Congress, of ‘the existence of universal values … the concepts of democracy, liberty, equality, fairness and rule of law — basic values common to all mankind — as core elements of the socialist value system. [The report of the 18th Congress] also calls for the whole country to “actively draw lessons from the achievements of human political civilization” and to “actively absorb and draw lessons from the successes of foreign cultural achievements”’.

Peter Drysdale is Editor of the East Asia Forum.

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