Party slams its door on Jiang's plan
Asia Times Online (Hong Kong) Oct. 23, 2001
By Xu Yufang
BEIJING - With no fuss and without a word in public at all, the ruling
Chinese Communist Party (CPC) has repudiated the bold plan of its
leader, General Secretary Jiang Zemin, to open the party to
capitalists and entrepreneurs.
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the US, it seems no one
bothered to check on the fate of
Jiang's plan, which he first made public in an historic announcement on
July 1. The proposal met its
end, in fact, in the CPC Central Committee plenary session of
September 24-26, according to informed
sources.
That the Central Committee at the same time did endorse Jiang's theory
of the Three Representatives
appears to have confused observers, who have been misled into believing
that the theory means nothing
less than opening the party to capitalists.
Jiang's imaginative idea of granting party membership to people who at
present are not eligible - the
bourgeois, and entrepreneurs in particular - was dead even before the
Central Committee met. A consensus was reached at a "Minzhu Shenghuohui"
("democratic life meeting", a sort of informal tea gathering) in early
September, attended by most members of the Politburo and three high-brow
senior elders, Qiao Shi, Song Ping and Liu Huaqing. During the meeting,
Jiang was targeted for making his bold announcement before going through
the normal channels of formulating major party policies. Subsequently,
the central secretariat, headed by Jiang's heir-apparent Hu Jintao,
decided to drop the open-door proposal from the business of the Central
Committee plenary session.
To save face for Jiang, it was agreed not to make an issue of his
proposal, not even to debate its pros and
cons. Leftist hardliners such as Deng Liqun agreed to this. The plenary
session thus simply ignored the
proposal. It flopped, ipso facto, in the time-honored Chinese way of
defeating a major policy change.
Instead, the plenary session carried a resolution calling upon the whole
party to pay attention to the
conduct of cadres, lest the party should come to be detested by the
general population.
Jiang's plan might still have had a chance at the plenary session if he
had been able to muster a simple
majority of votes in its favor. He failed to do that, and the Central
Committee's resolution omitted any
mention of the proposal, which meant another nail in its coffin.
However, the biggest blow to Jiang is perhaps not the rejection of his
plan, but the criticism aimed at him
by his senior comrades for trying to institute dictatorship.
In the "democratic life" meeting, Ding Guangen, the CPC propaganda chief
and Jiang's major protege,
received the most rebukes for having tried to suppress discussion on the
plan's merits while the party had
yet to make a decision. Prior to the meeting, Ding had gone all out to
instruct editors of all media to
suppress anything that did not conform to Jiang's July 1 proclamation.
Ding was reported to have said that
there was no longer any room for discussion since the head of the party
had made a statement. In criticizing Ding for having confused a leading
cadre with the collective leadership, the party elders were in fact
reminding Jiang that he should submit himself to the collective will of
his peers.
Hu Jintao, Jiang's vice president, was also censured. His misdeed was
having said in early September that
Jiang's open-door proposal was the result of collective wisdom. Not
true, said the elders, as no
collective decision had been reached. Hu tendered his self-criticism,
which was immediately accepted.
Jiang himself was not directly criticized. He was even given credit for
having come up with an innovative
idea, albeit a somewhat impractical one. But the heavy rebuke for Ding
sent a loud and clear message that
Jiang's attempt to create history had failed. Had he succeeded, his
innovation would have been sufficient
to rank him on a par with Mao Zedong, who founded the People's Republic,
and Deng Xiaoping, whose economic reforms led the country out of
poverty. Now he will be remembered merely as one of the party's general
secretaries.
All this has been obscured by the fact that the Central Committee
plenary session did indeed uphold
Jiang's theory of the Three Representatives. But this was not the first
time the theory had been endorsed,
and its inclusion in the committee's resolution amounts to little more
than a reiteration of the
theory and not an endorsement of Jiang's July 1 speech.
The Three Representatives theory is perhaps the most misunderstood part
of contemporary Chinese politics. As a major success of the propaganda
machine of the CPC, the world has been led to believe that it was a
calculated move by the mainstream of the party to change the party's
color. The reality is entirely different.
It all began as an attempt to tackle growing chaos, and the theory's
originators did not foresee that it
would spawn further chaos.
The term "Three Representatives" was first uttered on February 25, 2000,
by Jiang in a brief address - any speech of less than an hour is brief
in China.
"Summarizing the more than 70 years' history of our party, an important
conclusion can be reached, that
is, our party won the support of the people because throughout the
historical stages of revolution,
construction and reforms, our party has always represented [1] the
development demands of China's
advanced productivity, [2] the forward direction of China's advanced
civilization, and [3] the fundamental
interest of China's broadest populace," Jiang told a gathering of
village and township cadres during a tour
of Gaozhou, an underdeveloped part of economically vibrant Guangdong
province.
"All CPC members and leading cadres have to deeply understand and firmly
grip these 'three
representatives', to instruct one's thoughts and deeds ... Today I bring
up this issue and request everyone
to study it together, in terms of theories and practices."
The invention of the Three Representatives was meant to patch up a
situation that had got out of control.
The purpose of Jiang's tour to Gaozhou was to inspect the implementation
of his "Three Talks" campaign, at least according to newspaper headlines
then. But during the tour, the party chief was exposed to how the "Three
Talks" had gone awry.
The "Three Talks" - talk studying, talk politics, talk righteousness -
were initiated by Jiang as a means to
screen cadres of all levels, nationwide - effectively a party purge. Led
by Organizational Works Department director Zeng Qinghong, the former
director of Jiang's private office, the campaign began in 1999 with
the emphasis on the "second talk" - politics, or factional line. At the
start, the general populace was encouraged to scrutinize local cadres
and make open to criticism. Inspectors from Zeng's office went to all
corners of the country collecting those criticisms, and used them as
reasons for promoting or demoting officials. However, it was commonly
believed that this was only a pretext to cover the granting of partisan
or factional favors.
Things soon ran out of control. Rural peasants, 90 percent of them yet
to experience the benefits of
economic reforms, burst out with their decade-old grievances. What
happened was described in some places as the return of the Cultural
Revolution, with the populace indiscriminately bringing down cadres.
In relatively rich Guangdong, most of the wealth is concentrated in the
Pearl River Delta, a triangular
piece of estuary with the provincial capital, Guangzhou, and two former
European colonies, Hong Kong
and Macau, as the vertices. The rural areas in the west and the north of
the province are not much better
off than the backward west of China. In rural Gaozhou, Jiang heard in
person the countless complaints of the ordinary peasants and felt the
urgency of putting a stop to things. Against that background, he
preached the "Three Representatives" gospel as a morale booster for
local cadres, reassuring them of the CPC's support.
Immediately after the Gaozhou tour, the Three Talks campaign was
drastically scaled down, confined only to city-level localities and
"danwei" (work entities). At county-level and above, people were told
to recite the Three Representatives, to remind themselves that the CPC
as a whole was not subject to
criticism.
The Three Representatives did not receive an immediate, official party
welcome. When Jiang returned
to Beijing, he encountered challenges by some members of the Politburo
who said it was arrogant to claim that the CPC had always upheld the
theory. After some amicable exchanges, the party set the official
tone: to strive to achieve the Three Representatives. That was something
of a deviation from Jiang's first speech on the topic, but it was the
line stuck to by him in his second public pronouncement, made in his
political base of Shanghai in the middle of May, 2000. The line has
been pretty much intact ever since.
The Three Representatives theory became a substantial part of the
resolution of the fifth plenary session of the CPC Central Committee in
October last year, and was subsequently reiterated at other meetings,
including ones on discipline, economics and ideology.
Then, on July 1, Jiang made his keynote speech marking the 80th
anniversary of the party, and expounded at length on the Three
Representatives. Nothing new was found in those definitive paragraphs,
but a bombshell was dropped in the following chapter, entitled
"Strengthening and Improving the Construction of the Party According to
the 'Three Representatives'." The party's chief steward proposed nothing
less than broadening the base of the party by recruiting members from
among the founders and technocrats of privately-owned information
technology enterprises,
management and technical employees of foreign-invested enterprises, the
self-employed, proprietors of privately-owned enterprises, operatives of
intermediary agencies, and freelance people.
All of a sudden, many observers found the phrase "CPC representing the
fundamental interest of China's broadest populace" to imply that the
CPC would no longer represent only the proletariat, but also an
advanced section of the bourgeois. It was therefore said that the Three
Representatives theory was calculated to open the door of the party to
capitalist friends such as Henry Fok, the Macau casino tycoon.
The multibillionaire Fok was indeed referred to as a qualified new
entrant to the party during internal discussions.
In the months since Jiang's July 1 speech, the political scene in
Beijing has been chaotic. Some revered ideologues, such as former
propaganda chief, Deng Liqun, have voiced their opposition, while his
successor, Ding Guangen, has insisted that the debate was closed.
In June 1989, the then patriarch Deng Xiaoping said, "Fortunately we,
the old folks, are still alive," in referring to disgraced party
general secretary Zhao Ziyang almost abdicating the dictatorship of the
party
in the face of students demonstrating for democracy. The same words
must have been repeated by retired elders who turned up at
early-September's "democratic life" meeting and quashed Jiang's
proposal to broaden party membership.
Now, the party position has returned to square one: no bourgeois
allowed. The CPC will still strive to represent the broadest section of
the populace, but not all the populace - at least not the capitalists.
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