The Chinese Communist Party's Crisis
by Liang Jing

The November issue of Hong Kong's Zhengming ["Contention"] magazine states that President Hu Jintao made a secret report to the Third Plenary Session of the 17th Central Committee of the Communist Party, offering a grim estimate of the unprecedented crisis facing the CPC. Zhengming reports are at times unreliable, but I don't think this was based on mere hearsay evidence. Part of the evidence was that after the plenary session, the CPC carried out unprecedented emergency training of Party secretaries from thousands of counties convened at the National Central Party School. Jingji guancha bao [Economic Observer] reported on 1 December that an important content in the training for county party secretaries was how to deal with emergencies like that in Weng'an. This showed that Hu's secret report was not scare talk, but an emergency mobilisation order to the whole party, to deal with an unprecedented crisis. So what did Hu Jintao actually say? Zhengming magazine revealed that Hu's secret report cited eighteen major political, economic and social problems in China.

Political issues included: loss of ideas and ideals among high-ranking cadres; leadership everywhere is very lazy, lax, soft, exhausted, decadent; colluding for private gain is very serious. Localities and ministries took what they need from central policy, putting up a sham of compliance.

Economic issues included: solution to the "three rural" issues had in general been retarded, and serious decision-making issues existed; Macro-control was seriously interfered with by localism; there was a serious shortage of domestic demand, rich and poor continued to be divided; the stock market had slipped abnormally, and the confidence of investors was shaken. The unemployment rate was high, with over 35 million people unemployed by the end of September, and continuing to deteriorate.

Social issues included: relations between party and government, public security and the people were in a tense situation of confrontation; Mammonism, society was enveloped by the lust for profit; communications and public order were chaotic; dark forces and triads infiltrating party and government, public security and the judiciary were rampantly injuring the people; there was a significant increase in the rate of juvenile delinquency; sexual license, gambling and drug abuse had spread through urban and rural areas around the country, had shaken society's normal order and life harming the growth of the next generation.

Hu's "secret report" is clearly different from Khrushchev's; the problems he cited have long been facts known to all. As a result, the real interesting aspect is, why does Hu say such things at this moment? My view is that Hu the Unready has finally realized that his dreams of ruling the land with rhetoric and then retiring has been completely shattered. Faced with China's overall crisis of a greatly accelerating financial tsunami, with four more long years of his term, Hu senses the real danger of ruin to himself and his reputation, the CPC in disaster and the state in all-round chaos.

Zhengming magazine also said that President Hu Jintao not only issued another warning about the death of the party and chaos in the state, but at an expanded Politburo session prior to the plenary meeting, went so far as to use the pre-Cultural Revolution language of student counseling, and address long desensitized Party bigwigs thus: "We face a crisis that cannot be changed by our own will. History is written by oneself. Each of the party's leading cadres should always ask themselves, have my speech and actions deviated from my oath of loyalty to the party, from the Party spirit and the Party's organizational discipline? Have I deviated from the party's work and mission, from my commitment to the people, from heart's blood of the motherland and parents who nurtured my upbringing?" I don't think that this dumbfounding remark could possibly move any Chinese person, but will make many people think of Emperor Chongzhen before Chuang Wang burst through the walls of Beijing.*

Hu's secret report tells everyone that modern China's version of the "emperor's new clothes" can't be played any longer. It is precisely because of this point that, after the end of the Third Plenary Session of the 17th Central Committee, leaders of China's "democratic" parties issued an unprecedentedly sharp critical statement at a forum held in mid-October. According to the same issue of Zhengming, the forum, originally scheduled for three hours, lasted for six and still had more to say, and Hu Jintao had to choose an appropriate time to continue the discussion. Zhou Tienong (Chairman of the KMT Central Committee) and Chen Changzhi (chairman of the Central China Democratic National Construction Association) said at the meeting, if the CPC did not resolve to carry out its own reform, it was bound to lose popular support and reach a dead end. Chairman of the Central Committee of the China Democratic League, Jiang Shusheng, stated that if the CPC continued to ride over the people and oppress them, the time when the party would perish and country fall into in chaos couldn't be too far away. Other participants clearly wanted the CPC to "return profits, civilian rule, and rights to the people." The report also mentioned a meaningful detail: Jia Qinglin, twice tried to block the eruption of the truth, and was stopped by Hu Jintao.

There is no doubt that another major political struggle that will decide the fate of many people has come to China, and the CPC is in an unprecedented crisis. Its biggest crisis does not lie in the widespread corruption, but in its lack of any way of changing its disastrously incompetent leader. The CPC could do nothing about Jiang Zemin's chaotic politics, nor can they do anything about Hu Jintao's mediocrity. The tragedy of twentieth century China is that a generation of the elite were captured by radical ideas, and the whole country was held hostage by the CPC, who entwined the fate of the Chinese people with its own. Can China end this logic in the new century, and change the CPC's crisis into a life-opportunity for twenty-first century China? Heaven help our people, and let them gain lessons and enough political wisdom from the disaster of the twentieth century, to escape from the predestined cycle of order and chaos.

* In the late Ming Dynasty, Li Zicheng proclaimed himself Chuang Wang ("dashing King")... In 1644 Li Zicheng established a regime in Xi'an with the title of Dashun (Grand Obedience). In the same year the rebel forces captured Beijing and Emperor Chongzhen of Ming committed suicide. Hence the Ming Dynasty came to an end.

Another source states that Li Zicheng (a grand equestrian statue of whom may be seen on the Badaling Expressway in Changping) had replaced another peasant leader, also styled Chuang Wang.