China's Great Political Leap Backward

By QIAN GANG

After years of parsing China's political jargon, I wasn't expecting anything dramatic from the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, which opened in Beijing last week. It was foolish, I knew, to look for bold statements on the issue most critical to China's future: political reform.

Standing in the Great Hall of the People and delivering the political report that would set the tone for the country's next generation of leaders, President Hu Jintao wouldn't call for bold change with words like "constitutionalism" or "separation of powers."

But it was possible he might signal a renewed push for political reform by including some of the party's more liberal language. Phrases like "power is given by the people," used in 2010 by China's leader in waiting, Xi Jinping. Or "checking power and protecting rights," featured prominently this year in the party's mouthpiece, People's Daily.

Instead, this year's political report showed little or no momentum on this crucial issue. The course set by Mr. Hu's report suggests we can expect no real action on political reform. China now stands at a political crossroads, but the Communist Party isn't budging.

Twenty-five years ago at the 13th National Congress, discussion of political reform focused on the over-concentration of power, a phenomenon that was criticized by reformist leader Deng Xiaoping himself. How was reform to be accomplished? Ahead of the 1987 congress, General-Secretary Zhao Ziyang said political reform was fundamentally about "separating the party and the government." "If the problem of the substitution of the party for the government is not dealt with," he said, "there is no way to begin the process of political reform."

The 13th National Congress was the high-water mark for dealing with core issues of political reform, including reform of the party's leadership system. And it was only on that basis that related issues—such as restructuring government administration and turning the National People's Congress into a real legislature—were to be tackled. Unfortunately, the reforms that were to have started after 1987 came to an abrupt end with the events of June 4, 1989, in Tiananmen Square.

Today the problem of over-concentration of power is more serious than ever. Bo Xilai, the disgraced former party chief of the city of Chongqing, is a case in point. His policies, including a heavy-handed anticrime campaign, essentially restored the despotism that reigned during China's Cultural Revolution. Cases like his, and more generally the endemic corruption within the party, are a direct result of the breakdown of the 1980s momentum for political reform.

Deng Xiaoping's "southern tour" in 1992, coming ahead of that year's 14th National Congress, set China on the path of economic expansion. But political reform was shoved aside, as it has been ever since. The idea of separating the Communist Party and the government was dropped from the 1992 political report.

But even against the lukewarm precedent set by his predecessor Jiang Zemin, President Hu Jintao has proved cold on the issue of political reform. There was actually an uptick in political-reform rhetoric at the 16th National Congress in 2002, the year of Jiang Zemin's last political report. In certain respects, the language of that report drew closer to the reform language in 1987. The 2002 report raised, for example, the issue of "reforming and improving the party's leadership methods and governing methods." It also talked about "strengthening checks on and oversight of power."

Mr. Hu has added nothing to Mr. Jiang's agenda, and if anything he has taken China backward on the issue of political reform. In Mr. Hu's first political report, delivered at the 17th National Congress in 2007, there was a notable cooling in political-reform rhetoric. Most obviously, "political reform" was no longer the title of a report section, as it was consistently in every report since 1987. In this year's report, "political reform" has been reinstated to a section title but the language on the subject is weak throughout.

This year's report carries on the practice, begun in 1992, of making the "improvement of the National People's Congress system" the first task of political reform, but it now sounds more banal than ever. How can meaningful reform of local people's congresses occur without addressing the core issue of separating the party and government?

That's why there has been no real progress on reform of the National People's Congress system over the past 20 years. Since 2002, it has been routine for top party chiefs in every province to chair their local people's congresses, recentralizing power.

Just like a quarter century ago, real political reform in China requires a change in the party's power structure. This entails tough questions, and even tougher answers, about the origin of power, the independent exercise of power, and safeguards to ensure power is effectively checked and monitored. Instead, Mr. Hu's pronouncement that China "will resolutely not follow Western political models" revives a hard-line phrase that has often presaged a stubborn unwillingness to carry out any sort of meaningful reform.

Mr. Qian is director of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong and worked as a journalist in China for more than three decades.