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.
Hu Yaobang was general secretary of the Communist Party from 1980 to 1987. He talked about political reform, and for that reason he was forced to resign as General Secretary in 1987.
Zhao Ziyang was premier from 1980 to 1987 and helped put in place China’s economic reforms. He was General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1987 to 1989, and his sympathy for political reform was his undoing. After the Tiananmen Square massacre, he was sacked and endured 17 years of house arrest before his death.
According to the second explanation of political reform in China, it ended before it began.
In either case, political reform has only been talk and has never involved action. Wen has picked up the topic Hu and Zhao dropped.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
