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China: A Movement Toward Reform?
| Article
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19223 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
1,850 Words |
| Author
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Ting Wang
Ting Wang, a veteran China watcher, is the editor in chief of
the Tide Monthly in Hong Kong. He was a fellow of the Mass
Communication Research Center at the Chinese University in
Hong Kong and a visiting scholar at the East and West Cultural
Center in the United States. He has published numerous books
on Chinese affairs. |
In February and March, a series of articles was published in Liberation Daily (Jiefang Ribao), the journal of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). These articles severely attack the "rigid thinking" of the hard-liners in Beijing. In April, Zhu Rongji (age sixty-two), the secretary of the Shanghai Municipal CCP Committee and the mayor of Shanghai, was elevated to be a vice-premier in the State Council and given the task of centrally managing economic reform and foreign investment. This is a prelude to China's second "North-South War" and a new signal of a power struggle among the Chinese Communist elite, a development that has been overlooked by most analysts and the media in the West.
When Zhu Rongji visited the United States as the head of a delegation of Chinese mayors last year, some American journalists spoke of him as China's future Gorbachev because he has impressed most foreign observers as pragmatic, reform minded, and having done a good job in governing China's largest city. He is not the Chinese Gorbachev, at least not yet. However, there are signs that he could become in the 1990s the vanguard of a new reform movement initiated by Deng Xiaoping.
As China's paramount leader, Deng is making a move by putting together a leadership team to revive economic reform. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he assembled an economic reform group led by Hu Yaobang (former CCP general secretary who was disgraced in 1987 and died in April 1989), Zhao Ziyang (former premier and CCP general secretary, disgraced in June 1989) and Wan Li (chairman of the National People's Congress). Deng is making another and perhaps final attempt to get economic reform moving again in the 1990s. The core of the leadership group will be composed of Zhu Rongji and Zou Jiahua, who were appointed as vice-premiers at the same time, the General Party Secretary Jiang Zemin, Politburo Standing Committee member Li Ruihuan (former mayor of Tianjin), and Vice-Premier Tian Jiyun.
Deng Xiaoping has chosen Shanghai as the base of his counteroffensive on the hard-liners. He has also approved a plan to open up Pudong in Shanghai as another special economic zone, which will receive favors from the central authorities and enjoy more privileges than the other five economic zones that are already in existence. In so doing, Deng is reasserting his authority as China's paramount leader. Following the Tiananmen crackdown, most reform measures were halted or even reversed, but now Deng is exerting his influence to start a new campaign to push reforms and extend the open door to the outside
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