Chinas veteran voices of reform | open Democracy News...
Rated • 1 review • china, change • opendemocracy.net
in OpenDemocracy by Li DatongWhen the Communist Party established its regime in 1949, its main membership could be roughly divided into two groups. One group was impoverished peasants... The other group was very different. Its members came largely from wealthy backgrounds; many were university graduates, and all had received at least a high-school education. They formed a more educated and idealistic group within the party.
More than half a century since the birth of the communist regime, these people have now all retired. When they see how this regime - for which they fought their whole lives - has turned its back on its original ideals, they are deeply saddened, and some have become extremely outspoken.
We should recognize that such a class composition was typically European in nature and did reproduce nowhere else. In that sense it is difficult to imagine that political evolutionary processes in other countries could ever reproduce an outcome that is a European particularity.
But it is also a fact that in our globalized world starters are emulating the solutions adapted by early achievers. Thus elements of Western democracy have been mixed with local traditional practices in non-Western countries that successfully industrialized their economies: Japan, Korea, Taiwan,...
China is on the road of its transformation from an agrarian into an industrial economy but this transformation is far from over. Meanwhile the enormous economic changes that have been wrought upon the Chinese population over the last 30 years have disrupted much of its traditional societal organization and there is a sense that the country needs to rebuild its institutional machinery in order to cope with the challenges induced by ultra fast societal change.
In the West many voices loudly proclaim that China should "democratize" meaning adopting the rules of the "societal game" as practiced by Western countries. But this is simply not possible. China is not Europe. China carries a very long societal experience that just can't be erased. So much more so that this long societal experience successfully reproduced the Chinese civilization and nation for over 5000 years.
We have to come to terms with this reality in the West, for, the Chinese have not the slightest intention to risk a collapse of their unity just now that they can see their nation rebounding economically. China is presently debating the contours of the new institutional machinery that it will be building up along the next decades and many intellectuals hope that the 17th National Congress of the CCP that takes place this autumn will issue some first elements of a future sketch of that future Chinese institutional machinery.
Political reform in China shall be something akin to a very long march.
