Ideological turn around: Jiang's new clothes

By Karl Grobe

FRANKFURT, Germany (DPA): China's Communist Party leaders were unable to enjoy a carefree summer in the seaside resort of Beidaihe. Yet they would have had good reason for a victory ceremony or two. Beijing has been awarded the 2008 Olympics, China is about to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) and neighboring Russia has opted for a strategic partnership (whatever that might be) with China. Even the crisis in relations with the United States has been resolved in the wake of the spy plane affair.

But there has been trouble too -- within the Party. To mark the 80th anniversary of the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party, leader Jiang Zemin coined a phrase that wrought havoc in Party circles.

The class struggle, he said, had been won and the most important people in China were the "progressive productive forces." In future, "excellent people from other sectors of society who acknowledge the Party's program and statutes and self-assuredly advocate the guidelines and program of the Party" were to be accepted as Party members.

The first generation of Chinese Communists, that of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, spent nearly half a century bitterly fighting everything that was or appeared to be capitalist, and people died by the million as a result.

Many a Party member who disagreed with them were condemned for having taken the capitalist road -- including Deng Xiaoping.

The second generation, as represented by Deng, followed the so-called cat theory ("it doesn't matter whether they are black or white as long as they catch mice"), kept an eye on economic growth and accepted that some people were becoming richer than the majority of Chinese.

Using military might on the streets of Beijing, this generation enforced the supremacy of the Party. Now, the third generation is welcoming to the Party that rules all a new class of comrades, the "progressive productive forces."

This change of direction in Party membership policy makes sense since the Party put wealth before equality. Deng Xiaoping advocated this change. He set aside the extremely egalitarian ideology of Maoism and replaced it with pragmatism, an ideology that ran pretty well contrary to its predecessor.

This was never said in as many words but was always discussed. Phrases such as "socialism of a Chinese kind" are full of inner contradiction and testify to the Party's embarrassment on matters of political theory and self-portrayal.

Jiang's invitation to the progressive productive forces to join the Party is a first step in the direction of honesty, but its logical conclusion is that the Chinese Communist Party ought not to call itself Communist any longer.

A number of older Party cadres saw this coming. In the monthly theoretical journal Zhenli de zhuiqiu (Truth Research) they wrote that letting capitalists join the Communist Party was an "international joke."

The magazine was promptly banned and the Academy of Social Sciences, headed by Li Tieying, was not allowed to give it any further support.

A 10,000-word essay circulating in China (and on the Internet) accuses Jiang Zemin of betraying the working class, the peasants and Party history. It was probably written by left-wing Party veteran Den Liqun, its propaganda chief from 1982 to 1986.

The Party leadership is unlikely to have much difficulty in handling this left-wing ideological protest, which is backed by no more than a tiny minority of the Party's 60 million members.

Few people care whether the Party leader has now been caught wearing new clothes that are not in the Socialist mold. They will certainly not be worried as long as they feel confident he can point the way to prosperity for all -- and can prove it.

That is the real problem. The Party is hard pressed by serious corruption. Incompetence, this time not at the top but in the provinces, has assumed dangerous proportions for the Chinese, as evidenced by the contamination of some parts of the country by HIV as a result of profit-oriented use of unsterilized needles on blood donors.

Agricultural reforms and industrial reconstruction are also putting hundreds of millions of people out of work.

Disillusionment with the government is indicated by the growing support that is enjoyed by esoteric cults. These cults are basically individualistic and purport to be unpolitical, but the Party sees them as a threat because it itself is no longer able to offer the people a fundamental orientation.

So that leaves the Chinese Communist Party, assuming that it fails to face up to the challenges in a socially acceptable way, in much the same sartorial state as the Kuomintang after 1945: with no clothes at all, like the emperor in the fairy tale.

Where that left the Kuomintang when it was as naked as the day that it was born is a well-known historic fact that goes back to 1949.