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The Mirage of Political Reform in China

09.09.2010

Last month, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited Shenzhen, the special economic zone in southern China that has been the symbol of the past 30 years of economic reform and opening. During his visit, he raised the most sensitive issue in China—political restructuring. His remark seemed to resume a discussion that had stopped more than 20 years ago. His doing so has had a big impact both in and outside China.

Premier Wen said, “[China] should push forward not only economic restructuring but also political restructuring. Without the safeguard of political restructuring, China may lose what it has already achieved through economic restructuring, and the targets of its modernization drive might not be reached.”

Wen continued with more-specific goals that included “to guarantee people’s democratic rights and legitimate rights”; “to mobilize and organize people to manage state, economic, social, and cultural affairs in accordance with the law”; “to solve the problem of over-concentration of power without effective supervision by improving institutions”; “to create the conditions to allow people to criticize and supervise the government” and finally, “to build a fair and just society, in particular, to ensure justice in the legal system.”

Political restructuring, also called political reform, is one of the most confusing and misunderstood concepts in China. If what Wen said in Shenzhen is the content of political reform, all those rights are already in the Chinese Constitution and in numerous laws. If political reform is about having multiparty elections and the guarantee of the freedoms of press, religion, assembly, and speech, it has never been and will not be the ruling party’s consideration.

A Dropped Topic

Political reform is understood in at least two different ways. One is that political reform has been carried out along with the economic reforms and has never been stopped.

If we accept this idea, there is no need to talk about political reform today at all. In 2003, Wang Huaichao of the Central Party School wrote the article “Twenty-Four Years of Political Restructuring,” in which he divided the political restructuring into four stages: the primary pioneer stage, the full deployment stage, the adjustment stage, and the continuing political restructuring stage.

Even from this article, we can see that true political reform has never really happened. The second stage is said to have been the latter part of the 1980s. There was a lot of talk about political reform in the 1980s.

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