chinese communist party must reform or wither

THE TIMES UK
Chinese Communist Party told it must reform or perish
BY: LEO LEWIS, BEIJING From: The Times October 25, 2012 12:00AM


IT is the mighty institution at the heart of China that, under Hu Jintao's decade-long leadership, has signed up an average of one new member every 14 seconds.

If it were a country, the Chinese Communist Party, with its 81 million members, would nestle between Germany and Egypt as the sixteenth-biggest nation on Earth.

Judged variously as immoral, invulnerable or perilously brittle, the party has somehow emerged all-powerful after 91 years of famine, war, popular revolt, epic leadership folly and scandal.

Now, as a new generation of leaders prepares to take power, it stands on the brink of upheaval.

"Inside the party there is a strong sense of crisis: political crisis, social crisis and economic crisis," said Zhang Ming, a political scientist at Renmin University.

"They have realised that they are on the threshhold of fundamental change to both the government and country as a whole.

"They just haven't worked out what they should do about it."

A government think tank recently warned that the party must "reform or perish" as the wealth gap widened. It was a particularly blunt challenge.

During the whole of Mr Hu's tenure, China has never officially published an estimate that would confirm how immense the gulf between rich and poor has become.

Mainstream Chinese scholars now openly question the ability of China's sole political party to prosper over the next 10 years, and whether the distortions created under Mr Hu will prove the undoing of his expected successor, Xi Jinping.

The questions have become even more acute after the Bo Xilai scandal and its exposure of divisions in a political bloc that has done everything possible to preserve the facade of unity.

But the party's weaknesses are easily obscured by its success. Its achievements under Mr Hu's tenure are extraordinary.

It has presided over China's ascent to becoming the world's second-biggest economy and allowed a fledgeling private sector to generate wealth and jobs at a far swifter pace than anyone had predicted.

Since 2002, its policies have lifted more than 60 million people out of poverty and fed 1.3 billion; the problems that burden China's health system are the ailments of surfeit, not starvation. Unlike its few surviving equivalents around the world, the Chinese Communist Party has - for now at least - successfully yoked authoritarianism and capitalism.

Mr Hu's decade of double-digit GDP growth suggests that China's economy has bent the onslaught of the 21st century to its will, rather than crumpling before it.

And one of the party's greatest achievements may now be a few weeks away. If, as appears likely, the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party smoothly transfers power from one generation of leaders, under Mr Hu, to the next, under Mr Xi, it will be the first consecutive handover without bloodshed, disorder or purge.

Nonetheless, analysts say, the party faces massive challenges that some believe will condemn it to either wholesale restructuring or extinction. The conventional wisdom is that its achievements on the economy are the party's biggest insurance of legitimacy.

The present slowdown could draw even more attention to the huge social problems - pollution, land seizures and corruption - that have built up during the boom years.

Mao Yushi, a dissident economist, told The Times the difficulties over the next 10 years would be far greater than over the past decade. A failure to reform would force the party into a transition of its own. Within the decade, he said, factions might split from the party as rifts widened.

"The new leaders may want to start reforming the party and the country, but it will be impossible for them to do so immediately," Mr Mao said.

"Reforms will hurt too many people's interests, too many state-owned enterprises and too much of the political and legal system.

"Big change will take place when the conflict between the party and the people reaches breaking point. That will probably happen in three to five years."

Others question the sustainability and confidence of a regime that has spent the weeks before the most important political event of the decade rounding up lawyers, bloggers and other perceived threats to its authority.

"The party thinks that by controlling ideology and the media, it can win the love of most Chinese," said Chen Ziming, a political commentator.

"Without that, they know they would barely carry 20 per cent of the country with them. The party has two types of natural supporter: vested interests and those who fear China will fall into chaos."