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After 80 years CCP looks to future



By Willy Wo-Lap Lam
CNN Senior China Analyst

(CNN) -- As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) prepares for its 80th birthday, is anything being done about its Leninist structure or the declining quality of its 64.5 million members?

It seems unlikely president and party chief Jiang Zemin will give a satisfactory answer when he addresses the nation on July 1, in spite of dwelling on the question of retooling the party structure and raising the standard of cadres over the last year.

According to a well-placed party source, at an internal talk he gave last month Jiang cited what he called the "socio-political chaos" in Asian countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines and India to buttress his claim that one man one vote won't work.

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    "There are also problems with presidential systems such as the United States," Jiang reportedly said. "The president may be elected by the people. But he proceeds to appoint cronies to high positions."

    Jiang said he favored the elitist systems in Singapore and Malaysia.

    He added the future of reform in China would consist in the popular selection -- under the criteria and supervision of the CCP -- of well-educated, elitist elements to fill senior posts.

    "We have confidence in picking a whole new corps of young, professionally qualified, reformist and politically trustworthy cadres," Jiang reportedly said.

    Cadre responsibility

    Premier Zhu Rongji has for the past year been putting into place a cadre responsibility system to, in his words, "protect the masses' property and safety and to maintain social stability."

    Particularly targeted are cadres responsible for what Zhu calls tofu ('beancurd' or shoddy) engineering projects -- and officials whose dereliction of duty has led to accidents with large casualties.

    Last April, Party Secretary of Jiangxi province She Huiguo was demoted after an explosion in a peasant school that killed 42 pupils.

    A month later, Shaanxi Governor Cheng Andong was reprimanded for a series of mishaps -- including a stampede among tourists who were touring the famed Hua Mountain -- that killed 103 people.

    Veteran CCP observers, however, have queried the efficacy of this limited tinkering with the system.

    According to Jiang's blueprint, the selection and appraisal of cadres must be done under the context of one-party dictatorship.

    The president has ruled out suggestions made by members of his own think tank since 1998 that the CCP takes gradual steps to legitimize new political parties.

    It is questionable whether "open" recruitment of officials or scrutiny of incumbents can be effective in the environment of what Chairman Mao called a "chamber with [only] one voice."

    Party clean up

    In an apparent effort to impress international opinion, the CPP announced last week that in the past 12 years, party authorities had kicked out 473,000 incompetent or immoral members.

    Western analysts have pointed out, however, that this figure represents less than 1 per cent of total CCP affiliates.

    Yet in both open and internal publications, departments including the police and customs have admitted that close to 10 per cent of their staff are corrupt.

    Despite the Jiang leadership's apparent commitment to fair and open recruitment, the majority of the governors or provincial party secretaries named in the past six months have come from three prominent CCP factions.

    For example, Jiang picked a former Shanghai official, Meng Jianzhu, to replace Jiangxi's disgraced Shu as party boss.

    Paradoxically, a major flaw underlying the CCP's bid to improve the cadre system is the leadership's obsession with perfecting the cadres' virtues, world views and work style.

    Analysts see here a curious mixture of the Confucianist credo of nurturing mandarins with lofty values and Mao's teachings on being "an undying screw for the revolution."

    One of Jiang's axioms is the Theory of the Three Emphases, that cadres must give priority to studying the Marxist canon, on being righteous and on being politically correct.

    In his address last week to Tsinghua University, deemed a cradle of CCP leaders, Zhu asked students to "be forthright and clean, and to brim with the righteous spirit."

    The premier also played up the ideal of otherworldly virtues while talking to engineers and workers of the Three Gorges project.

    "Don't become a sinner who will be scolded for a thousand years," he said.

    Beating the system

    The problem with this quasi-Confucianist approach, however, is that unless there are checks and balances in the polity -- as well as media scrutiny -- even a saintly cadre won't stay spotless for long.

    And as long as some elite CCP committees -- such as the secretive Central Commission for Disciplinary Inspection -- have the sole power to investigate corruption and other wrongdoing, politically savvy crooks can always beat the system.

    This point was raised in a manifesto by a group of intellectuals who went on hunger strike at Tiananmen Square two days before the June 4 massacre.

    The protesters said: "We'd rather have a rogue leader in a system with checks and balances than an angel running an undemocratic and non-transparent state machinery."

    AIDS cases
    Primitive sanitary conditions in blood banks have led to thousands of AIDS cases  

    Despite the almost daily homilies on good behavior issued by Jiang and company, cadres nationwide have continued to commit ghastly errors.

    No sooner had Jiang left Jiangxi province after delivering his long talk on Maoist morality did yet another shocking incident come to pass.

    Sixteen kindergarten kids perished in a midnight fire that could have broken out only due to lack of oversight by different levels of bureaucrats.

    Subsequent investigations showed that even in prosperous coastal provinces, the majority of educational institutions had flunked fire regulations.

    Yet another scandal erupted last month in rural areas in Shaanxi and Henan provinces, where officials had for years profited from encouraging villagers to sell their blood as a "sideline income."

    Sanitary conditions were so primitive the malpractice had spawned tens of thousands of AIDs cases.

    According to Singapore-based Sinologist Zheng Yongnian, phenomena like the so-called AIDS villages in Henan demonstrate that "China has to a considerable degree entered into a state of anarchy."

    "People can't help asking, 'Where is the government'?" Dr Zheng said. Indeed, where are the elitist, saintly cadres?






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