China Sets Public Straight on Party Summit Priorities

In the days leading to this week’s important national meeting of the world’s largest and most powerful Communist Party, rumors and political intrigue were so rampant here that editors of the People’s Daily newspaper felt compelled to scold the Chinese for speculating about personnel changes in their country’s leadership.

“Instead of doing their job,” the official party newspaper preached, “some comrades spend their working hours discussing issues such as who will be made the next party secretary or the next mayor.”

As usual in the run-up to the national party meeting, held every five years, most public speculation centers on subtle and not-so-subtle reshuffling--promotions and purges--in the Politburo and key government posts.

The main unanswered question, for example, of the 15th National Party Congress, set to begin Friday in the Great Hall of the People, is what to do with Li Peng, China’s hard-line premier, whose term of office will expire in the spring.

One duty of the congress is to endorse candidates for key government posts when the National People’s Congress, China’s lawmaking body, convenes in the spring. Party nomination, of course, is tantamount to election.

After this summer’s annual leadership retreat in the seaside resort of Beidaihe, many diplomats and political observers here are convinced that Li, remembered internationally as the man who declared martial law and called in the troops during the 1989 student demonstrations at Tiananmen Square, will be replaced as head of government by Politburo member Zhu Rongji.

Zhu, 69, is China’s widely respected economic czar and one of the principal architects of the country’s amazing growth rate.

But according to Communist Party historians and several of the 2,048 official delegates to the weeklong meeting, the most important item on the agenda of this congress--the first since the death of “paramount leader” Deng Xiaoping in February--will be a change in the interpretation of the Chinese Constitution to allow private ownership of some state-owned industries.

Already, in a preliminary meeting that ended Tuesday, the party’s Central Committee reportedly approved a speech scheduled to be given at the congress by President Jiang Zemin endorsing widespread privatization. The committee also ended two years of speculation and stripped Chen Xitong--the onetime Beijing mayor and party boss embroiled in the largest corruption scandal in Communist Chinese history--of party membership, leaving him open to prosecution.

“This party congress,” economist Fan Gang said in an interview, “will give a green light to ownership--you in the West call it privatization--of state industries. That means that some state assets will be sold to non-state companies or private owners. This is a breakthrough that will make this party congress more meaningful, more important, than many of those in the past. . . . This is the start of the evolution of the private economy.”

In fact, party permission for private ownership would be an official acquiescence to what has already occurred in many parts of China. Prosperous Guangdong province in the south, for example, has already sold an estimated 90% of its state enterprises. Regions in Shandong province in the east and Sichuan province in the center of the country have also undergone widespread privatization.

But such business arrangements are considered shaky until they get official party approval. “Up to this point,” said Fan, the director of a progressive economic think tank, the National Economic Research Institute, “the government has not prohibited this type of ownership. But until this party congress, it hadn’t approved it either.”

The tricky part for delegates, culled from among 500,000 nominees who were elected in cell meetings last spring, will be how to work around a tenet that requires “socialist public ownership of the means of production.” The key language is contained in Article 6 of the 1982 constitution that states in classic Marxist terms: “The basis of the socialist economic system of the People’s Republic of China is socialist public ownership of the means of production, namely, ownership by the whole people and collective ownership by the working people.”

But as often happens here when Communist Party leaders attempt to apply Marxist rhetoric to capitalist reality, the main challenge at the party meeting will be to come up with a way to explain privatization in socialist terms. “The biggest issue,” said one delegate, “will be how we define public ownership and common welfare.”

One hint as to how this might be done came in a May 29 speech by Jiang, who is also the Communist Party chief, at the Central Party School in Beijing. Although hardly a barn burner, the address was heralded by Communist Party organs as a discourse of “trans-century significance.”

Among other things, Jiang, the 71-year-old former mayor of Shanghai who has emerged as first among equals in the party leadership, urged party members to avoid the temptations of “power, money and beautiful women.”

But the key phrase in the speech was a formulation employed by former Communist Party Secretary-General Zhao Ziyang, an avid political reformer who was purged after the Tiananmen Square crackdown. China, Jiang declared, is at a “primary stage of socialism.”

There are complicated explanations for what is meant by this. But in practice, what it means is that a wide degree of economic freedom will be permitted for an indefinite period of time until China’s socialism matures.

For now, in other words, anything goes.

“People have had a saying for a while,” commented one cynical party member. “They say: ‘The primary stage is a basket. You can put whatever you want into it.’ ”

That Jiang adopted a phrase from a purged party reformer signaled that market-oriented factions in the party have the upper hand over ideological hard-liners. Beginning late last year, political hard-liners, aware that economic liberalism would be an issue in this National Party Congress, waged a campaign to reverse economic reforms introduced by Deng.

The main anti-reform document was a 10,000-Chinese-character paper, reportedly written by former party secretariat member and propaganda chief Deng Liqun. Economist Fan described the debate sparked by that manifesto as “the last stand, the last battle of the hard-liners.”

“When Jiang Zemin saw that the hard-liners didn’t win the support they were seeking,” Fan said, “it gave him the confidence he needed to move ahead more quickly. Frankly, we didn’t expect this to happen so soon. Most of us thought Jiang Zemin would need more time to consolidate his base.”

Besides economic liberalization, the party congress is expected to announce political reforms. What these might be is still vague. But that they are coming was foreshadowed recently by Li, the premier, at a Singapore meeting.

One possible political reform, said a delegate to the congress, is an expansion of the country’s broadly successful village democracy project. According to officials with the Ministry of Civil Affairs--which administers the experimental program--elections for village committees, the basic unit of government in China, now reach 80% of the country’s 1 million villages.

Signs of a relaxation began last month when Shang Dewen, a previously obscure Beijing University professor, boldly stepped forward with a five-page appeal addressed to Jiang. In a message that only a few months ago might have meant jail time, Shang, 65, called for the gradual introduction of a democratic timetable to elect mayors, provincial governors and, someday, China’s top leaders.