How China Is Swinging To The Right
(by Joseph Kahn | NYT News Service | November 10, 2002)
Beijing: After a 20-year transition, the world's last major left wing dictatorship, the Communist Party of China, has trasformed itself. It is now, arguably, the world's last major right-wing dictatorship.
With the convening of the 16th Congress is its 81-year history, the party is rewriting its constitution to declare that it represents 'advanced forces' – capitalists – as much as workers and peasants. Rich people have begun joining its policy-making Central Committee.
This is China's baldest acknowledgment since veering from orthodox socialism in the late 70s that it will make workers and peasants fend for themselves. Dictatorship of the proletariat has failed. So the party is giving plutocracy a chance.
Jiang Zemin, the Communist Party chief who plans to retire after the Congress adjourns, has buried the last real pretences of socialism. 'All legitamate income, from work or not, should be protected,' he told the party congress on Friday.
The old China defended the working class against the capitalist class. In the new China Jiang said: 'The fundamental interests of the people of the whole country are identical.'
This new strategy marks a new calculated gamble to 'keep up with the times', as Jiang said repeatedly, by mimicking capitalist-oriented authoritarian regimes, like the old South Korea, Taiwan and Chile. The fact that those countries have long since become democracies does not disturb party officials. They argue that the transition took 30 years in South Korea and Taiwan, China has just begun.
It could work — at least for a time. China's output is on track to grow 8 percent this year, faster than any other big economy, and private business has become the leading force for growth. In fact, the state-run companies that once dominated here now make up, by many calculations, only a third of economic outputs.
Foreigners have invested more money in China so far this year than anywhere else, including the United States. All that money is flowing because the party has used its near-absolute power to create favorable conditions for the capitalists.
Companies setting up factories in Guangdong or Shanghai can employ workers from the hinterlands, often payng them less than $100 a month for 12-hour days.
Migrant labourers can stay in cities only so long as their employers need them: without urban residence permits, they have no urban rights. The government does not allow independent unions.
Friends of Tibet (INDIA),
PO Box 16674, Bombay 400050
www.friendsoftibet.org