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Politics in China: Stirrings From Below
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14225 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1988 |
1,432 Words |
| Author
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Harold C. Hinton
Harold C. Hinton is a professor of political science and
international affairs at the Institute for Sino-Soviet
Studies, George Washington University. His latest book is
Korea under New Leadership: The Fifth Republic. Several of his
books will be published soon, including China's Long Ascent:
The Foreign Policy of a Dissatisfied Power. |
The buzzword in China today is reform. The emphasis is on overhauling the cumbersome economic system, but there have been some limited and tentative official steps in the direction of political liberalization--the so-called fifth modernization--as well. Much as in the Soviet Union, the reformers are split into liberal and conservative wings; one of the differences between the wings is that the former is more serious than the latter about political reform.
It is clear that the liberals were shaken and temporarily weakened by the wave of student demonstrations at the end of 1986, which expressed political as well as economic demands. The demonstrations were suppressed, but the reactions did not last long and did not take the form of a sustained campaign of pressure against intellectuals and students. By mid-spring 1987, the liberal wing, led by Communist Party General Secretary (former Premier) Zhao Ziyang and generally supported by strongman Deng Xiaoping, had regained the initiative in political as well as in economic affairs.
It was during this period--in March 1987, to be exact, as it has recently been learned from the left-wing Hong Kong journal Cheng Ming--that a research institute in Beijing conducted a nationwide survey of over 3,000 respondents. Most were young people and many were presumably students.
By the standards of Chinese political life, where the Communist Party and its policies are held sacred, the questions and responses were rather daring.
The boldest set of questions and responses dealt with the role of the Communist Party. Only about 10 percent of the respondents held that the party "should have unlimited control of national and social life." Only a slightly larger percentage believed that the party should "administer" the government, as it tends to do in practice, although not in theory; some 75 percent considered that the party and the government should be completely separate. Such an arrangement would leave the overall role of the party somewhat unclear; it appeared that about half of the respondents believed that the party should set the country's ideological line, determine basic policy, and supervise the work of the government, but little more.
If the respondents had been given the chance to be even more daring--by answering questions such as: Should the communist Party be abolished? Should China's noncommunist ("democratic") parties be allowed to share power, rather than merely symbolizing the
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