THE AWARD of the Nobel Peace Prize to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo and growing calls for political reform formed the backdrop to a closed-door meeting of elite cadres in China’s ruling Communist Party, which began yesterday at a hotel in western Beijing.
Or perhaps the elephant in the room is a better description of the calls for reform. The plenum is generally a routine four-day talking shop on policy and party housekeeping, and details are only revealed after it finishes. The headline issue this year, in the official version, is the economy, and the leadership will “discuss proposals for the nation’s next five-year development plan” from 2011 to 2015, the Xinhua news agency reported. This is expected to involve finding ways to get Chinese consumers to buy more to help stimulate the economy.
However, this year’s meeting of the 300-strong central committee has taken on new significance because Premier Wen Jiabao, who will attend the meeting, has recently made some high-profile, if somewhat opaque, calls for reform, and this could dovetail with Mr Liu’s winning the Nobel prize to make for a more interesting gathering than usual.
In an interview with CNN, Mr Wen said “the people’s wishes for and needs for democracy and freedom are irresistible”, which is not a million miles away from what Liu Xiaobo wrote in the Charter 08 document which earned him 11 years in jail for subversion. However, there was little detail in his comments and he is certainly not arguing for Western-style democracy, rather for ways to ensure the 78-million strong Communist Party maintains the iron grip on power it has held for more than six decades.
A group of 100 activists, lawyers and academics in China have signed a petition calling for Mr Liu’s release, and also picked up on the reformist message in Mr Wen’s recent utterances, including a speech in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen, where, significantly, former supreme leader Deng Xiaoping began the reform process that has led China to its current strength.
“In a recent series of speeches, premier Wen Jiabao has intimated a strong desire to promote political reform. We are ready to engage actively in such an effort,” it said. It came just days after a letter signed by 23 Communist Party elders circulated calling for an end to restrictions on the freedom of speech.
Also believed to be on the agenda are leadership issues, and the plenum will be closely watched for evidence of whether Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang are looking certain to replace president Hu Jintao and Mr Wen, respectively, in 2012. To do this, Mr Xi, who met President Mary McAleese during her recent visit to China, needs promotion to vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, which would be read as a sign that he is Mr Hu’s chosen successor.
While the political machinations take place, the focus as far as the public is concerned is still the economy, which is growing strongly, but the people are looking to see what future direction the plenum might bring.
"As the owner of a private company, I hope the five-year plan does more to lead the economy into the market, within the real sense of 'economic reform'," said Lin Ying, a 44-year-old entrepreneur. Mr Lin said since the economic crisis there were signs of the state sector moving in and pushing the private sector back. He hoped the plan would contain provisions to reverse some of those "retrograde steps". Liu Shanying, a political science researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the China Daily: "Due to the uneven distribution of income, the fruits of economic growth are not equally shared by the people, which has resulted in growing social conflict and instability."