The 14th national Party Congress in Beijing probably won’t come up with an answer: the world’s biggest Communist Party (and one of the few left) can no longer ignore the ever-widening gap between its ideology and reality. In fact, this week’s session runs a strong chance of becoming China’s last ruling-party congress ever to call itself Communist. The label already seems spurious. State-owned newspapers constantly sing the praises of private entrepreneurs, and the country’s stock and real-estate markets are booming. Behind the red walls of Beijing’s Zhongnanhai leadership compound, market-economy seminars have replaced political-study sessions. Even administrators at the Central Party School seem enraptured by the profit motive. One school official privately admits that their top priority in recent months has been “to find a way to become a business.”
But the party doesn’t know how to make free enterprise work. In the name of economic growth, Beijing has simply eliminated many of the old socialist limits on the marketplace without setting up the regulatory framework that maintains a semblance of order in capitalist markets. In August, when directors tried to issue shares by lottery rather than by bid, 1 million would-be investors descended on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. The riot that ensued showed the damage that poorly planned reforms can cause.
While the party struggles to prop up the facade of ideological orthodoxy, much of society has already transformed itself. The socialist ideal of public-spirited altruism is dead, supplanted by a me-first attitude that fosters corruption and rampant speculation. Mao Zedong may still serve as a symbol of patriotic pride, but the real role models now are entrepreneurs who don’t necessarily play by the rules. “We are creating a new value system,” says Mu Qizhong, a Beijing businessman. “Young people must succeed through individual achievement.”
On their own, the wheeler-dealers would pose little threat to Beijing. Allied with local and provincial chiefs, however, they threaten to alter the economic and political landscape. The Chinese press constantly finds new cases of local officials imposing border taxes, staging product boycotts and ‘using cutthroat competition to get favors from Beijing. Unchecked, such activity could lead to the rise of economic baronies. The provinces already exploit Beijing’s inadequate system of tax collection, deepening the central government’s worst budget deficit ever. Beijing’s fiscal troubles, in turn, further strengthen local leaders.
Despite the need for decisive action, the Party Congress will probably move more cautiously than the previous session did in 1987. The star of that show was Deng Xiaoping’s handpicked successor, Zhao Ziyang, who laid out his vision for China’s future. Two years later, when People’s Army tanks rolled through Tiananmen Square, Zhao dropped out of sight, blamed by the party’s hard-liners for stirring up the pro-democracy movement. (Late last week the party ruled, after a three-year investigation, that Zhao would not be rehabilitated.) The main focus of interest this week will be a glimpse of the leaders who must hold China together while the party seeks its bearings. Among them are Vice Prime Minister Zhu Rongji and security chief Qiao Shi, both moderates. Prime Minister Li Peng, unpopular for his perceived role in the Beijing massacre, is widely expected to keep his job.
No one in the senior leadership-not even Deng himself-likes the idea of a barefaced leap to a free market. “We need a theoretical breakthrough if we want to keep calling ourselves communist,” says a former Chinese diplomat. The party’s ideologists have been doing their best to oblige. Some note that Marx himself once played the London stock market, bringing in a tidy profit. After months of searching the communist canon for clues, party theoreticians recently produced an economic scheme billed as a “socialist market economy.” But no one seems able to explain how the socialist version differs from a capitalist market economy. At a forum sponsored by the newspaper Economic Daily several weeks ago, one group of experts offered a daring solution: simply drop the word “socialist.” The paper’s editors refused to print such heresy.
The party’s effort to redefine itself may soon become irrelevant. Two weeks ago Hu Qiaomu, 81, a chief party theoretician, became the fourth old-guard revolutionary to die in as many months. Deng’s son, Deng Pufang, found himself compelled recently to deny rumors that the paramount leader was dying-a move that hardly discouraged such speculation. When the old generation finally passes, it will leave a legacy of budget deficits, an overheated economy and catastrophic environmental damage. The new leaders won’t have time to waste on ideological debates.
