China puts off the millennium: It isn't even trying to finish modernizing for another 60 years
By Emily MacFarquhar with Marlowe Hood in Beijing
Communist Party congresses in China have mostly been monuments to misplaced hopes. Every congress since Mao seized control of the party in 1935 has approved a new party constitution, only to see it scrapped at the next round. Every congress since the ninth in 1969 has anointed a new party leader or leader-in-waiting, only to see him purged. The 13th party gathering in Beijing last week followed tradition by confirming a new party chief and revising party rules yet again. It would be tempting history to predict that either will survive a full term. Signs of familiar factional struggle were evident even before congress delegates left Beijing.
The biggest surprise of the meetings was what didn't happen. No acting Prime Minister was chosen to replace Zhao Ziyang, who moved into the ejector seat as party leader. Zhao has held both top jobs since last January when his partner-predecessor, Hu Yaobang, was felled by conservative fire. He was expected to give up the Prime Ministership after the congress. The question had been whether his replacement would be a like-minded reformer or a conservative. Now, Zhao is to stay on in both posts until spring. Mao did the same before shedding a job in the 1950s. This gives credence to the official story that the rules require a Prime Minister to be chosen by China's National People's Congress, which meets next March. But the rules also permit an "acting" replacement. That none was appointed suggests a political deadlock that could not be broken.
Zhao's reforming allies may also have feared that his strength would be sapped if he were cut off too abruptly from his power base in government. A similar worry prompted a debate about whether 83-year-old Deng Xiaoping, China's untitled boss and Zhao's patron, should stay on in the Politburo, in spite of an agreement that all golden oldies would step down. There was courtesy in this conflict but probably also real concern that without Deng, his latest successors might not endure.
Iron vs. steel
The divide between reformers and conservatives, both led by iron-willed octogenarians, is not about whether China should restructure its command economy by introducing market forces but only about the pace of change. For now, Deng's policies seem too have prevailed. His reformist handwriting was all over the political report to the congress by Zhao Ziyang. The report, which went through six drafts, did not even retreat, as stock markets crashed worldwide, from the plan to expand China's infant stock offerings. (China's bankers in Hong Kong were offering to bail out the local stock exchange.)
But some key questions remain unresolved: How and when China's prices are to be freed from controls and allowed to find their market level, and when a new law permitting companies to go bankrupt is to be put on the books. Both are vital to China's move toward a market economy, but both are so sensitive politically that they are easiest deferred for another day.
Most of Zhao's reforms had already been endorsed by the party. But there were hints of radical departures to come, such as leasing state-owned companies and permitting the transfer of agricultural land. This would enable dynamic peasants to farm larger, more-economic tracts and produce the extra food needed to keep inflation down.
"Utilization rights"
Socialist China cannot yet swallow private landownership, so land sales would be known as "transfer of utilization rights." Private farming, another unmentionable, has been Deng's most successful reform, bringing about a 75 percent increase in farm production and a 100 percent increase in farm incomes between 1980 and 1985.
Still, as Zhao admitted, the new Jerusalem has been slower in coming than the reformers had foreseen. China no longer talks about overtaking advanced economies; its target date for catching up with "reasonably developed countries" is the mid-21st century. Its nearer goal is to double incomes, from $ 500 a head today to $ 1,000 by the year 2000. This presumes a growth rate of 6 percent a year which is slower than its present 7.5 percent but does not allow for the odd "cultural revolution."
Zhao's formula for avoiding another cultural revolution is to bring in the rule of law and to sort out China's overlapping and inefficient bureaucracies. The only way to stop the party from interfering in day-to-day administration, the Dengists have decided, is to remove party branches from government departments. Zhao is setting out to do this and also to reinforce government independence by creating a civil service based on examinations. This is a revolutionary notion in a Communist state even though China's emperors operated such a system for 1,000 years. China's party is also boldly experimenting with multicandidate elections; fully 5 percent of the Central Committee faced opposition this time.
Political reform in China touches a nerve that even rural-land sales cannot reach -- the central nervous system of the ruling Communist Party. Deng Xiaoping, committed as he is to hauling China's economy into the modern age, is in no hurry to invite more political risks than he already faces. Which on last week's reckoning is a few risks too many.