The Communist Party is still reluctant to match prosperity with political freedom
CHINA MARKED three decades of economic openness and reform yesterday with President Hu Jintao stressing that single-party rule was the only way of ensuring social stability.
Mr Hu's remarks come in the wake of the global financial crisis. However, he ruled out moves towards western-style democracy.
The year 1978 is regularly cited as a watershed date in Chinese development. But there has been little triumphalism in China about 30 years of reform and economic growth, because the country now has to deal with challenges in improving living standards despite massive pressures on the economy.
Mr Hu's speech to 6,000 party leaders, legislators and military officials in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing emphasised continuity and the success of the quasi-capitalist model known as "socialism with Chinese characteristics". He also stressed how Communist Party rule was central to development in the world's most populous nation.
In China, the global economic crisis is seen as a failure by western governments to deal with overconsumption and poor credit control, and the leadership feels the crisis shows the need for more, not less, state control.
Mr Hu, who has developed a reputation as a force for economic reform rather than social liberalisation, said the party's efforts to counter the effects of the downturn were working, and he reiterated his goal of creating a more "harmonious society".
"Making economic development the focus is the key to national rejuvenation and it is the fundamental imperative for our party and our country achieving prosperity and development and enduring peace and stability," he told delegates.
Exports are falling, which is bad news for the manufacturing sector that has been the engine of expansion for so long. Millions of migrant workers have been laid off and the government has introduced the world's largest financial stimulus plan to counter the effects of the global recession.
The slowdown has translated into growing popular discontent, caused by corruption, land grabs, a yawning wealth gap between rich and poor and mounting anger at factories closing with wages left unpaid.
Economic openness in China has led to greater freedom in society, and hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty by the changes wrought.
The country had to "focus on strengthening and improving the state's macroeconomic controls and overcoming certain shortcomings in the market itself".
Any reform must come from within the Communist Party structure, he said.
Thirty years of economic growth had been founded on reforms that tore down the rigid controls of Chairman Mao Zedong's era. But this did not mean democratisation.
"We must draw on the beneficial fruits of humankind's political civilisation, but we will never copy the model of the western political system," Mr Hu said in a speech liberally peppered with the language of Marxist-Leninist theory.
The event which marked the beginning of China's remarkable economic miracle does not sound particularly auspicious in itself. The decision to open China up to the world and reform the economy was made at the third plenary session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which started on December 18th, 1978, under the auspices of Deng Xiaoping.
It endorsed small-scale private farming, an almost innocuous step that ultimately triggered the biggest peacetime period of social change the world has seen.
The landmark meeting came two years after the end of the period of tumult known as the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), 10 years of ideological extremism which left China on the brink of chaos.
The reform programme began a process that has transformed China from an agrarian backwater into the world's fourth-largest economy, where per capita income has increased from 380 yuan (€38) to an average of 19,000 yuan (€1,900) over the period. However, the government remains unwilling to allow calls to match economic prosperity with political freedoms.
Last week saw the publication of Charter 08, a petition for democracy signed by more than 300 intellectuals to mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but several of the key signatories have been arrested.
China remains a developing country. According to the World Bank's most recent estimates, more than 100 million of the 1.3 billion Chinese still live on less than €0.70 a day. That's way down from 800 million three decades ago, but hundreds of millions manage on less than €1.38 a day.