Democracy without democrats
The tension between democratic centralism and democratic practice in China and the Communist Party has been around for a long time. Centralism seems to be winning again.Control freaks
[T]he ruling Communist Party is acutely conscious of its own frailties. Although students are still desperate to join the party, that is not because they believe in Marxism, but because they are worried about their job prospects and party membership can pull strings. Once in, they find an organisation that cloaks itself in the mind-numbing dogma of yesteryear, pays little heed to the will of its 76m members and revels in costly, time-wasting meetings to rubber-stamp the leaders’ decisions. It is a formula that buys the party short-term comfort at the expense of long-term instability...
Party leaders admit that this is a weakness. The party’s immunity to scrutiny, even by its own members, fosters corruption and leaves decisions prone to error. Giving supposedly elected posts in the party to hand-picked favourites generates resentment and cynicism. Members from the private sector are often still marginalised. So too, at the top, are women...
China’s leaders have begun manoeuvring their favourites into senior positions in readiness for them to take power in 2012 when Mr Hu, it is assumed, steps down as party chief. Success or failure in the struggle for power will be decided not by the ballot box but by backroom deals between factions...
Optimists in China have suggested that internal democracy could help the party evolve into something like Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, which ruled for 54 years with only a brief interruption until its defeat this year. But that would happen only if party factions could compete openly before facing the electorate. Mr Hu, for all his talk of democracy, stresses the need to uphold the party’s tradition of “centralism”—following the leader, with no open dissent...
Big surprise
“INNER-PARTY democracy is the life of the party,” enthused China’s former president, Jiang Zemin, as he prepared to hand over to Hu Jintao seven years ago. It could, he said, promote democracy in the country as a whole. But Mr Hu’s cautious experiments with reform inside the party appear to have fizzled. So too, it seems, has his own commitment to the idea...
Party reformers had hoped that the new generation of leaders who will come to the top in 2012 would be chosen after at least a modicum of competition. The transfer of power, during which Mr Hu himself is expected to step down, is getting under way. But the stagnation of reform experiments at the bottom, together with the recent appointment at the top of five new provincial party leaders, apparently without any real consultation, does not bode well for inner-party democracy...
The core of the problem is the principle of “centralism”. This means that members must uphold party decisions without dissent. Liberals think reforms will not work unless this requirement is changed. But at the party meeting in September, Mr Hu qualified his predecessor’s remark. “Inner-party democracy is the life of the party,” he said, before adding: “Centralism and unity are the guarantee of its strength.”...
PS: This is entry #1600 for the Teaching Comparative blog. Access to past entries is easy since entries are indexed.
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Labels: China, Communist Party, democratization
posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:47 AM
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