Communism at a Crossroads in China

Yin Jiaxu is the model of free-market success in a land where market was a dirty word until only a quarter of a century ago.

The head of an auto maker here, Yin helped transform a floundering state-owned enterprise into a thriving business. His company is listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange; a new line of cars will roll off the factory floor within weeks. Prospects have never seemed brighter for Yin.

From his corporate headquarters, it’s a six-hour drive to where Gu Xiuquan plows away at her job, which could hardly be less glamorous. She runs a crossing signal on the Yangtze River, a monotonous, government-provided post she has held for 19 years.

But not for much longer. Next year, the massive Three Gorges Dam is expected to flood her lonely outpost, washing away her job. “I don’t know what my colleagues and I will do after that,” she said.

Their fortunes may run in opposite directions, but one thing unites Yin and Gu: Both are card-carrying members of Communist Party who will attend a crucial gathering this week in Beijing that could shape the future of the world’s most populous country.

The 2,120 delegates to the 16th National Congress are the most diverse in the party’s 81-year history. They include businessmen like Yin, who have benefited from China’s development, and state employees like Gu, who will suffer because of it. There are intellectuals like Cao Zhenli, a Canadian-trained scientist, and rural cadres like Chang Desheng, who went from collecting dog droppings for fertilizer as a boy to becoming a local party boss.

All four -- Yin, Gu, Cao and Chang -- are attending their first national party conclave, an event held once every five years.

The congress that opens Friday is significant because China’s ruling graybeards, such as President Jiang Zemin, 76, are expected to make way for a new crop of leaders in what would be the most orderly transfer of power in the history of the People’s Republic.

Whoever succeeds Jiang at the helm of the Communist Party inherits a 66-million-member organization in the grip of something of an identity crisis.

The party has ruled China absolutely and often disastrously for the last 53 years. But it is now struggling to stay relevant -- and in power -- amid the profound changes sweeping the country. Two decades of explosive economic growth have unleashed creative forces, new ideas and limited social freedoms among China’s 1.3 billion people, who increasingly view the party as an anachronism, if not an outright hindrance to progress.

Jiang has made it his mission to haul the party abreast of the times and to co-opt China’s growing economic elites -- to the point of inviting private business owners to join the party, a policy that turns Communist orthodoxy on its head.

This week’s congress is expected to write Jiang’s ideas into the party charter, enshrining them alongside the theories of Marx and Mao. Analysts say the party may even introduce a limited form of internal democracy, although it would not extend to the rest of the people, who still have no power to pick their leaders.

Yin, Gu, Cao and Chang were chosen as delegates to the congress at low-level gatherings this year. None will have a say in who takes over the top spots in the hierarchy. None sits on the Central Committee, which will set the party’s agenda for the next five years.

But their views and experiences point up how the world’s largest Communist Party has evolved from its origins as a ragtag band of uneducated farmers and workers.

In interviews, the four delegates show themselves willing to come to an accommodation with the party and its new brand of communism, which some old revolutionaries think hardly merits the name. They take a flexible, fuzzy or forget-about-it approach toward Marx but embrace Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s market-oriented economic reforms, who supposedly once declared that “to get rich is glorious.”

For them, as for many Chinese, communism has ceased to be a grand nationwide experiment or mass ideological movement. Instead, party membership has become a personal, pragmatic matter: a way to get ahead and enrich yourself or your hometown.

“Society has changed,” Chang said. “The party should follow the trend and catch up.”

The Cadre

Chang, 58, knows firsthand just how much the country has changed and in how short a time.

He joined the party as a young man, convinced that it was China’s best hope for ending the grinding poverty he experienced growing up in Jiangsu province near Shanghai.

The third of five children, Chang helped his father dredge mud in the river and picked through human waste at outdoor toilets for worms to feed the family’s pigs and ducks. His parents gave away one of his sisters four times because they could not afford to keep her.

“My strongest memory is of going hungry,” he said. “My childhood was all about being bullied, humiliated and famished.”

As a boy, Chang tagged along with his father to Communist Party meetings and absorbed the idealism on display. “I got to know that the goal of socialism is to give the poor a better life. I yearned for a better life and had faith it would come one day.”

It did -- but not under Mao’s disastrous policies of collectivization and class struggle. Chang’s entry into the party in 1966 coincided with the beginning of the 10-year reign of terror known as the Cultural Revolution.

For eight years he toiled as the head of the production brigade of Jiangxiang village. It was only after the Cultural Revolution ended and economic reforms began that Chang found a way to put his creativity and junior high school education to use as Jiangxiang’s party secretary.

He persuaded villagers to join him in starting a collective enterprise manufacturing steel door and window frames and other items.

Today, Jiangxiang is a success story almost beyond imagination. Chang’s Jiangsu Changsheng Group Co. boasted $32 million in sales last year. Residents watched their annual per capita income shoot up from $163 in 1989 to $1,212 last year. And Jiangxiang has been transformed from a poor backwater into a planned community -- tract homes, schools and all -- that looks more like Irvine than a rural Chinese village.

Chang grows a tad embarrassed when asked if the fruits of his labor resemble those of capitalism. He still credits the Communist Party for his achievements.

“Without the party’s policy of reform and opening up, it would’ve been impossible for me, a poor boy who collected garbage from the Yangtze River 40 years ago, to have my achievements today,” he said.

Chang has no trouble allowing private entrepreneurs, who were once condemned as “exploiters,” into the fold. He is prepared to see that written into the party charter at the congress.

Economic development, he says, is the key. Old-fashioned notions of the downtrodden masses, which the party still claims to champion, are subordinate.

“The party has changed greatly, just as the country has,” he said. “When I joined in the ‘60s, party members in the countryside were mainly peasants. But there are all kinds of folks in the party now. I think it’s a good thing.”

The Worker

Gu, the Yangtze River signal worker, agrees that the party needs fresh faces and fresh ideas to stay in step with the modern world, which China has gradually joined after decades of self-imposed isolation.

“Entrepreneurs and intellectuals are new blood,” said Gu, 37. “With them the party has more outstanding people to strive for its great causes.”

But Gu is concerned about ensuring that, in the rush to embrace the new forces in society, one of the party’s original great causes -- improving the lot of workers like her -- does not get cast aside.

For decades, industrial and state workers were the privileged in Chinese society, the “leading class” of the revolution that was supposed to create an egalitarian utopia. The regime’s “iron rice bowl” policy guaranteed them housing, medical benefits, pensions and high status.

Millions of these laborers are now out of work, made redundant by the demands of the market. Those once considered masters of the new society now often work as servants in the newer society -- as nannies, cooks and housekeepers -- when they can find jobs at all. Keeping a lid on their disillusionment and anger has become one of the regime’s biggest headaches.

Unemployment will be a bitter reversal of fortune for Gu, who was named a national model worker last year. A television miniseries is being shot based on her life, an inspiring tale of how she overcame a physical disability and little schooling to become a labor hero.

Last year, Gu traveled to Beijing to accept her award, her first visit to the capital. In wonder, she toured places such as Tiananmen Square that she had seen only on TV or in textbooks. This week, she plans to return clear-eyed and determined to speak up.

“Lots of waterway workers will be laid off after the dam is built, and most of them have worked here for generations. I have an obligation to report their problems to the central party,” she said.

Gu joined the party four years ago out of a sense of personal ambition and development. Membership has its privileges: access to connections, better chances at promotion.

“The best way to get ahead is to join the party. That’s why I wanted to be a member,” said Gu, who is among the small proportion -- only 18% -- of delegates to this year’s congress who are women, despite Mao’s contention that “women hold up half the sky.”

She is also among the even tinier fraction who do not boast a college education. A record 92% of this year’s delegates have a college degree -- another indication of the party’s increasing emphasis on China’s elites.

The Intellectual

Cao, 43, not only holds a bachelor’s degree but a master’s and a doctorate as well.

That classifies him as one of China’s intellectuals, a label that seems to sit easily on a man who speaks fluent English and heads the 300-member Pulp and Paper Industry Research Institute in Beijing.

Cao is the first to acknowledge that where he is today is due in large part to an accident of birth. A native of Shandong province, he was just the right age to take the national university entrance exam in 1977, the year Deng reinstituted it after the Cultural Revolution.

That allowed Cao to continue an education that had been interrupted because of his “bad” class background: His grandmother came from a land-holding family. Only the intervention of a dedicated school principal got him back in school.

The experience probably helps explain why Cao so firmly supports throwing open the party’s doors to people according to merit, not background or profession.

“No matter what kind of work you do or where you work, as long as you contribute to the common good, then you’re part of the leading class,” he said.

His training as a scientist, including a doctorate from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, has imbued Cao with a dose of realism, which he applies to politics and the party. What matters, he says, is results, not ideology.

“What Marx wrote about was how to establish power. But once you’re in power, you have to use it to develop society, or else what’s the use?” Cao said. “The government’s responsibility is to get everybody rich. That’s true of everywhere -- the U.S., Canada or China.”

For Cao, the benefits of development have been stark.

When he left for college in 1977 in the southern city of Guangzhou, he was able to wrap all his belongings in a single piece of cloth, which he then slung over his shoulder like a hobo. A dozen years later, he packed up again to continue his education in Canada. His possessions filled two large suitcases.

While he was overseas, China was seized by the tumult of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, in which hundreds of pro-democracy protesters were killed by troops. Cao, who joined the party in 1987, kept a watchful eye on his homeland as he pursued his studies. A 1992 speech by Deng, which helped jump-start a languishing economy, persuaded Cao to return home.

What he sees now is an increasingly but unevenly prosperous country, a place of dismaying contrasts between rich and poor. The party, as it sets its agenda for the next five years, must address this widening disparity.

The Beijing gathering must also push for the rule of law, Cao said. But he stopped short of advocating Western-style political reform.

“The political structure isn’t important,” he said. “The ultimate goal is the same, which is to help people prosper.”

The Businessman

Prosperity for Yin has come in the form of a mammoth enterprise called the Changan Automobile Group, based here in Chongqing.

Despite a venerable history stretching for more than a century, the company was steadily losing market share until Yin took over as general manager in 1998. Changan now boasts 23,000 employees and more than $1 billion in assets.

The 46-year-old Yin is also Changan’s party vice secretary. As a state-owned enterprise, the company has a party hierarchy in addition to its corporate structure, a messy, often confusing arrangement from an outsider’s perspective but one that allows the Communist regime to keep a hand in company affairs.

Yin sees no contradiction between his capitalist pursuits and Communist ideals.

“You can compare it to religion,” he said. “In the U.S., a state governor can be a Protestant or a follower of the Eastern Orthodox Church, but it doesn’t prevent him from being a governor. It’s the same way with my situation.... Being an entrepreneur is my work, my vocation. Which party I join reflects my ideals and beliefs. There’s no conflict there.”

Yet what Yin describes as his ideals do not sound terribly Communist. They come across more as a set of personal values -- hard work, public service and self-improvement -- than a grand social blueprint. And even those values get subjected to the demands of the bottom line.

The company has had to lay off hundreds of people during recent years of retrenchment, although Yin says a good portion get retrained and rehired. Benefits such as housing and health have been phased out, replaced by pay hikes.

“You have to develop your business first; only then can your workers’ wages rise,” he said. “If the business is struggling, then you have to tell your workers that they’ll have to bite the bullet and strive harder.”

The son of a poor coal miner, Yin credits the party with pulling his father up from “the lowest level of society.” Yin joined in 1984.

But like Cao, he sees problems -- primarily official corruption, which has spread like a cancer and created a credibility gap for the party.

In fact, as the head of a successful state-owned enterprise, Yin belongs to a class that many Chinese assume profited dishonestly.

He plans to bring up at the congress the dissatisfaction harbored by so many ordinary people.

“The party should stress ideological development and clean government,” Yin said. “These are the people’s basic demands.”

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How the party is set up

The structure of China’s Communist Party:

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Chinese Communist Party: With 66 million members, it is the world’s largest political party. Established in 1921 in Shanghai. Its leading role is not specified in China’s Constitution.

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National Congress: 2,120 delegates. Convenes every five years. Elects Central Committee by secret ballot and is the highest organ of party power according to the charter. Delegates can replace or refuse to vote for candidates.

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Central Committee: 190 members and 149 alternate members, serving five-year terms and meeting once a year. Elects Politburo and its standing committee. Selects Central Military Commission members.

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Profile of delegates

College graduates -- 91.7%

Government officials -- 75.7

55 years old or younger -- 63.1

Women - 18.0

Ethnic minorities -- 10.8

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Politburo: 21 members. Includes vice premiers and top regional and military officials.

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Politburo Standing Committee: Seven members. Although not specified by party charter, it’s the true highest organ of power. Party secretary must be a member.

The committee commonly includes president of nation, heads of parliament and Cabinet and party officials in charge of personnel, propaganda, security, etc.

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Sources: Chinese Communist Party Charter, New China News Agency, Times research