China's Political Feet Of Clay

By Willy Lam

Somebody has rained on the Chinese Communist Party's parade. In the runup to Oct. 1, the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic, China's netizens were enthralled by a 10,000-character essay calling for political reform. As propagandists saturated the media with paeans to the country's economic and technological achievements, this Internet manifesto lamented that "Stalinism is wreaking havoc on [China's] political, ideological and cultural construction."

When China's development seems to be progressing smoothly, why should such an attack on government policy gain so many supporters? The piece has struck a chord because its critique goes to the heart of China's political stagnation. Basic constitutional issues such as the delineation of the functions and jurisdiction of the Party, government, the legislature, the judiciary and the army remain murky, even as the economy develops at break-neck speed.

"The country is still the Party's country," the essay noted, and the Party comes before the state and the people. "There is no differentiation between the Party's and the state's coffers." Moreover, the People's Liberation Army is a "Party army," and not a "state army" as in the rest of the world. The CCP still towers over the legislature, the judiciary and all other institutions.

Despite all its manifold achievements, the CCP's celebrations are overshadowed by its monumental failure to create modern institutions and political systems. Even as the leadership boasts about the "China model" or the "Beijing consensus," the country's fundamental political institutions are in disarray. This is hardly an academic question of interest only to constitutional lawyers and political scientists. Institutional dysfunction underpins problems ranging from corruption and social injustice to the P.R.C.'s failure to embrace globalization.

In a much-noted speech last December, CCP General Secretary and President Hu Jintao vowed that Beijing would never go down the "evil path" of Western-style democracy. But the Party's problems are more than just an aversion to the idea of "one man, one vote." Mr. Hu reiterated that China will continue to spurn global norms such as checks and balances among the executive, legislature and judiciary.

This is why the CCP rides roughshod over the legislature and judicial departments such as the procuratorate (prosecutor's offices) and the courts. The Party's Central Commission on Politics and Legal Affairs, headed by Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang, assumes total control over the police, the procuratorate and the courts. The Party's dominance over the judiciary has compromised the integrity of judges and other zhengfa ("political and legal") cadres. Because justice can hardly be sought in the courts is a key reason why there are an estimated 100,000 cases of "mass incidents," meaning protests and riots, annually.

Despite promoting the slogan of "running the country according to law," Messrs. Hu, Zhou and colleagues have heavily politicized the courts, for instance by appointing Party functionaries as senior judges. This reverses a longstanding trend toward greater professionalism in the judiciary. The official press has admitted that half the provincial-level chief justices in China's 31 major administrative districts do not possess any legal background; most of them are CCP apparatchiks who worked in departments dealing with law and order and Party discipline. President of the Supreme People's Court Wang Shengjun and Minister of Justice Wu Aiying are both veteran Party-affairs specialists who never attended law school.

While such judges may be more ready to toe the Party line, their quality and probity has drastically deteriorated. In the past year, a dozen senior jurists at central and regional levels have been detained for taking bribes and related misdemeanors. They include spc Vice President Huang Songyou, Executive Director of the Guangdong Higher People's Court Yang Xiancai, Vice President of the Intermediate People's Court of Qingdao Liu Qingfeng, Vice President of the Chongqing Higher People's Court Zhang Tao and Director of the Chongqing Municipal Judicial Bureau Wen Qiang. Several high-ranking members of the bench are being investigated for abetting organized crime. Chongqing's Mr. Wen, a former vice head of the Chongqing police force, allegedly accepted close to 100 million yuan ($15 million) worth of properties and other advantages from the triads.

The devastating sociopolitical impact of the judicial system's bankruptcy cannot be exaggerated. Citizens who have been bullied or dispossessed by wayward officials can, in theory, take cadres to court by virtue of administrative litigation law. Since the early 2000s, about 100,000 citizens a year file suits against Party and state departments or individual officials. Yet the plaintives' success rate is less than 30%, down from more than 50% in the 1990s.

Many of those who have lost faith in the legal system choose to shangfang, or to personally present petitions to authorities in the provincial capital or Beijing. Petitioners, however, are constantly harassed by the police. In the run-up to the Oct. 1 festivities, tens of thousands of petitioners who usually congregate in Beijing were driven away from the capital. There are indications that many Chinese are losing faith in the system. The suspect who wounded an 82-year-old French tourist shortly before National Day was a shangfang peasant from Jiangxi province who allegedly committed the crime to vent his frustration.

Since their accession to power in late 2002, President Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao have repeatedly emphasized the imperative of eradicating graft. The just-concluded plenary session of the CCP Central Committee vowed that "combating corruption is a major political task, and that measures must be taken to tackle both the symptoms and deep-seated causes." Yet the CCP has run a nationwide anticorruption campaign almost every year since the early 1980s, with little lasting effect.

Institutional drawbacks, however, seem to have doomed such efforts. There are at least three major anticorruption bureaucracies in the polity: the CCP Central Commission on Disciplinary Inspection and its regional branches; the Ministry of Supervision and its sister unit, the National Bureau of Corruption Prevention; and the anticorruption bureaus within national- and local-level procuratorates. None of these organs, however, has any semblance of independence; battling graft is basically a matter of "the Party investigating itself." Thus, cadres and their relatives with political connections are always one step ahead of the investigators.

Given Beijing's failure to grapple with the population's dissatisfaction, the CCP has to rely on brute force to keep so-called "destabilizing forces" at bay. The Tiananmen Square massacre set the precedent for the CCP calling on the PLA and the paramilitary People's Armed Police -- whom late patriarch Deng Xiaoping famously called "the loveliest people of them all" -- to defend itself against the people's wrath. And the unprecedentedly large-scale military parade on Oct. 1 was a show of force aimed as much at the Party's myriad domestic enemies -- dissidents as well as Tibetan and Uighur "splittists" -- as at China's foreign foes.

Hence the leadership's insistence that, as CMC Vice-Chairman General Guo Boxiong said recently, military personnel "must safeguard the Party's absolute leadership over the defense forces" and "uphold the Party's military theories as scientific guidance for army construction." While the defense forces' fast-increasing budget comes from the taxes and other contributions of 1.3 billion Chinese, the PLA and PAP swear loyalty only to the CCP, whose 76 million members represent about 6% of the population. Since becoming chairman of the policy-setting CCP Central Military Commission in 2004, Mr. Hu has banned all discussions that the PLA might one day be converted from a "Party army" into a normal state army.

Disturbing consequences stem from the fact that the PLA is at the beck and call of only the CCP elite. One organ -- the CMC, which consists of 10 senior generals in addition to Chairman Hu -- has authority over matters ranging from the deployment to the development of China's formidable war machine. As the CCP increasingly relies upon troops and paramilitary police to maintain domestic law and order, more power has been given to top brass.

Since Mao's days, about 20% of the seats of the CCP Central Committee have been reserved for military personnel. In the past decade, however, the military has garnered a much bigger say in foreign and security policies -- on occasions even economic issues. For example, under the doctrine -- recently reaffirmed by Mr. Hu -- of the "synthesis of [the requirements of] peace and war," new infrastructure projects such as railways, bridges and airports have to be vetted by PLA staff to ensure that facilities can serve wartime purposes. The relentless expansion of the PLA's clout and the modernization of weaponry is behind the popularity of the "China threat" theory.

While the CCP's poor track record on the political front is relatively well known, the Hu-Wen leadership has generally elicited world-wide admiration for the "Chinese economic miracle." This refers not only to the country's enviable GDP growth rate but also Beijing's apparent success in transforming the Stalinist diktat economy of the 1970s into a market-driven one. State media like to tout the fact that the prices of 98% of commodities and 95% of producer goods are determined by supply and demand.

The reality, however, is that almost 10 years after China's accession to the World Trade Organization, the economy is tightly controlled by about 150 state-owned corporations. These are mammoth monopolies in key areas including oil and gas, steel and other minerals, banking and insurance, telecommunications, transportation, and military and aerospace industries. The CEOs and most members of the board of directors of these firms are appointed by the CCP Organization Department in conjunction with relevant government ministries.

The all-too-visible hand of the Party and state is evidenced by the fact that the great majority of China's recently announced "500 Strongest Enterprises" are state-controlled. And while Beijing likes to boast that these giants raked in $70 billion more in profits than their American counterparts last year, ordinary citizens have no share of the loot. Much of it enters central coffers, the companies' gargantuan investment funds and the pockets of senior management, who include offspring of top cadres and former ministers. Even ordinary personnel in these firms make four to 10 times more than staff in nonstate companies.

Much worse is the fact that the monopolistic powers of these behemoths have stunted the private sector's development, which does not even enjoy "national treatment," such as getting certain types of loans from state-held banks. Because the bulk of the 4 trillion yuan ($586 billion) stimulus package unveiled last November has gone to government-controlled projects, the state sector has been gaining at the expense of private enterprises.

One reason why so many bosses of private companies have in the past year been nabbed for corruption is that they must pay huge bribes to officials in different departments to compensate for their lack of political connections. For instance, Huang Guangyu, the former chairman of Gome Appliances and one of China's richest men, is now under detention for allegedly greasing the palms of cadres in the police, customs and other departments. The two-tier system in China's political economy has exacerbated the polarization between the minority elite and the majority of workers and farmers.

Members of the privileged upper crust include gaoganzidi (cao cán tử đệ), or sons and daughters of Party and government leaders, who account for a lopsided proportion of the country's superrich. Last month, four central-level units, namely the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the research wings of the State Council, the Central Party School, and the CCP Department of Propaganda took the unusual step of publicly denying the much-circulated figure that "princelings" account for 90% of China's multimillionaires. But how large a percentage of the aristocracy consists of Party elders' descendents? The four think tanks' refusal to give a specific number buttresses popular belief that senior cadres and their kin subscribe to French King Louis XIV's famous L'etat, c'est moi adage.

Despite the Hu-Wen team's slogans about "seeking profits for the sake of the people," it has preserved age-old discriminatory practices against underprivileged social groupings. The most obvious example is hukou, the residence-permit system. Introduced in 1958 to segregate urban and rural residents, hukou restricts the ability of farmers to freely work and settle in the cities. The bulk of Chinese are thus barred from health, educational and other benefits taken for granted in urban regions.

According to Sun Liping, a Tsinghua University sociologist, the standard of living in cities is six times higher than that in the villages. The average urban-rural discrepancy world-wide is only one-and-a-half times. In a briefing on the P.R.C.'s achievements in the past 60 years, Pan Jiancheng, a senior official at the State Statistical Bureau, pointed out last month that the hukou system has created "social disharmony" and that "its abolition has become a historical necessity." A few days later, the SSB issued a statement that Mr. Pan's remarks represented "purely his personal viewpoint."

Since 2003, the Hu-Wen administration has adopted redistributive measures to ensure that the socioeconomically deprived will get a slightly bigger share of the pie. The agriculture tax was abolished in 2005, and some forms of social security payouts -- albeit at levels much lower than those of urban areas -- are being gradually extended to rural areas. However, the odds remain stacked against the disadvantaged sectors, even as the authorities are trying to uphold stability and sociopolitical "harmony."

These antediluvian systems of governance have remained frozen because the slightest change is seen as potentially subversive. This is despite the fact that not long after he kicked off China's reform epoch three decades ago, Deng Xiaoping made an impassioned plea for institutional change. "Good institutions and systems can prevent bad people from wanton misdeeds," he said in 1980. "Bad systems result in good people not being able to do good deeds -- and they may even end up doing evil things." Even former President Jiang Zemin, who began his tenure in mid-1989 by shelving political reform, repeatedly emphasized "institutional innovation."

Throughout the Hu era, however, not even lip service has been paid to the modernization of institutions and political procedures. The preservation of the virtual omnipotence of the CCP and allied power blocs is the be-all and end-all of politics. Taking advantage of the blow the global financial crisis has dealt the U.S.-led capitalist system, Beijing's propagandists have gone into overdrive extolling the "China model." Yet in reality, Mr. Hu and his Politburo colleagues have become more paranoid about losing the CCP's "perennial ruling party" status.

As the president said last December, "whatever we had in the past may not be ours now; whatever we have now we may not possess forever." In its annual meeting late last month, the Central Committee pledged to be "brave in reform and innovation and never to become fossilized and stagnant." Rather than looking ahead for new formulas to cure China's woes, Hu has dredged up the discredited dogmas of yesteryear. At the Central Committee plenum, Mr. Hu stunned even Party veterans with throwback to the ideology of Mao in the 1930s, saying that the CCP would "push ahead with the Sinicization of Marxism and rendering Marxism contemporary and popular."

In light of the disasters that Maoism has wrought, Mr. Hu would be better advised to consider a famous dictum of Deng: "Except reform and the open door, there is no way out" for either the Party or the country. And the best way to start what Deng called "resolute and thorough institutional reform" is to clearly demarcate-and separate -- the powers of the Party, government, legislature, the judiciary and the armed forces, and to institutionalize proper checks and balances among them.

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Mr. Lam is a professor of China studies at Akita International University, Japan, and adjunct professor of history at Chinese University of Hong Kong