Russell Leigh Moses
The Wall Street Journal, China Realtime Report
China’s leaders appear to have misgivings about the fate of their reform programs once they’re gone.
Multiple times in the last week, the Communist Party’s main newspaper People’s Daily has devoted swathes of its highly scrutinized front-page real estate to essays on reform policies initiated under Hu Jintao. These are not the newspaper’s standard, stale restatements of party achievements. They’re something stronger: An active defense of the current leadership’s policies under Hu’s tenure aimed at those in the party ranks who are clearly disquieted by the current pace and direction of reform.
A front-page commentary on Monday, for example, lauds the country’s rural reform program, heaping praise on efforts made to provide “peasants more autonomy with an innovative model of rural governance.” All of these labors, the essay notes, are part of a general strategy to move “today’s village from traditional agriculture to modern agriculture.”
The picture is not entirely rosy, however. As the Monday essay acknowledges, even after nearly ten years “of battling cultural reform,” China’s “system of organizing culture is not in good order” and there’s been an absence of “a high degree of cultural awareness and cultural self-confidence.” Party cadres need to make “greater efforts to promote cultural reform and development,” the piece argues.
What’s going on here? Certainly, part of the intent is to burnish the Hu leadership’s legacy and defend it against critics. But the commentaries also have another message: There should be no retreat from reform when the new leadership starts to take over in the fall.
Addressing of the party’s response to the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, Wednesday’s front page essay makes that message explicit. As the party looks to the future, the essay argues, the best approach is “not to simply clone the past, but to stand on the higher starting point” already provided by the reforms under Hu.
That may not turn out to be an easy sell. Other parts of the Party media have been engaged recently in fashioning an image of the next leadership as having deep experience with self-sacrifice as sent-down youth during the Cultural Revolution. That’s no doubt accurate and deservedly laudatory, but it’s more nostalgic than it is the stuff of visionaries and reformers.
There are good reasons for Hu’s successors to be cautious. Against a background of economic uncertainty and political drama around fallen party star Bo Xilai, there’s a very real risk of the new leadership alienating some in the party ranks with an abrupt turn in one direction or another. Steering a safe, middle path is tempting, especially as every senior cadre knows very well the political capital that’s needed to keep reform going.
The commentary that kicked off the People’s Daily series addresses that reality, observing that “deepening reform requires not only drastic political courage, but [it] also needs to be accompanied by political wisdom.” In other words, it’s important for the new generation of leaders to continue to be reform-minded, but doing so will require consummate political skill.
That doesn’t leave a lot of room for maneuver and makes reforms more vulnerable to attack from those within the party who harbor a different vision for country. Where once the discussion used to focus on what sort of reforms the next generation of leaders might take up, this conspicuous series of commentaries suggests a more appropriate debate might revolve around whether the next generation is interested in reform at all.
Russell Leigh Moses is a Beijing-based analyst and professor who writes on Chinese politics. He is writing a book on the changing role of power in the Chinese political system.
