China's reforms

Some of the most important results that came out of the 15th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party which ended yesterday were, among other things, the endorsement of ambitious reforms proposed by the party's secretary-general, Jiang Zemin, and the departure of Jiang's main rivals from the central committee, Qiao Shi, the head of parliament, and Liu Huaqing, the army's top representative.

It was a momentous congress in that all decisions made during the week-long meeting will help map out China's economic policy and development as the world's most populous nation tries to achieve its perennial dream of fuqiang, prosperity and strength, in the coming millennium. As Jiang, who is also the country's president, put it at yesterday's closing ceremony, it was "a unified... and victorious congress."

China has achieved tremendous economic progress over the past years since it began its open-door policy in the early 1980s, while it continues to adopt a socialist system with Chinese characteristics spearheaded by the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, whose reformative policies were enshrined in the party's constitution.

Although China's economy continued to grow at a controlled rate of just under 10 percent and inflation was below 7 percent, most of the state companies have failed to support the government's ambitious plan and were operating in the red, some even went bankrupt, thereby threatening economic progress.

These failures were chiefly blamed on the inefficiency of government or party officials involved in the joint-ventures between village enterprises and households, a move that the party undertook to prevent the spread of "red capitalists" in a country adopting socialism and Marxism.

Now that the congress has ended and Deng's reform blueprint is endorsed -- not to mention the resignation of two staunch conservatives like Qiao and Liu -- Jiang, who was Deng's chosen heir, can carry out China's reform programs, such as restructuring poorly managed state enterprises and eradicating corrupt party officials, at an ever faster pace.

We believe that Jiang, along with his Shanghai faction moderate technocrats including economic tsar Zhu Rongji, can tackle the problems of the debt-ridden state-owned firms and turn them into productive and profitable companies by encouraging more participation from the private sector.

We believe the key to fuqiang may lie less and less with the Chinese Communist party and that the costs of social and economic reforms could be very dear unless commensurate steps are taken to liberalize China's political structure.

That is why we gladly welcome the unprecedented call by Jiang for China's greater political liberalization without cloning western-style democracy.

"As the ruling party, the Communist Party leads and supports the people in exercising their power of running the state, holding democratic elections, and making policy decisions in a democratic manner," Jiang said while opening the congress last Friday.

Despite economic success, the Beijing government obviously has a lot of problems it has yet to cope with, such as providing employment for tens of millions in the ranks of the unemployed as well as narrowing the gap between the minority wealthy urbanites and the poor rural majority. Experts have forecast that China needs to generate 40 million new jobs for the urban workforce in the coming decade if its wants to enjoy political stability.

Evidently, the stability of a country such as China, with its 1.25 billion population, is of utmost importance not only to the Asia-Pacific region, but also to other parts of the world.