China political reform honeymoon over, scholars say
BEIJING : Amendments to China's constitution being deliberated at an ongoing Communist Party meeting have fallen far short of officials' and scholars' expectations, signalling China's new top brass have little appetite for political reform, the scholars said.
The annual meeting of the party's central committee is expected to approve two amendments to the 1982 constitution, one that will enshrine the theories of former president Jiang Zemin into state ideology and the other which calls for the first-ever protections of private property in the Marxist document.
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"If the only amendment is to bring (Jiang's) 'Three Represents' theory into the constitution, then this won't be too significant," said Cao Siyuan, a noted political reformer and head of the Beijing Siyuan Research Center for Social Sciences.
"If they approve the amendment to protect private property, then this will be a little more significant," he told AFP.
The party will announce the results after the meeting closes on Tuesday. Any constitutional changes will then be handed over to the National People's Congress (NPC) which will duly rubber stamp the amendments when it meets in March.
Debate over the changes have raged since the transfer of power beginning last November to President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao and parliamentary head Wu Bangguo replacing the elderly triumvirate of Jiang, Zhu Rongji and Li Peng.
In June, the party allowed scholars to discuss the amendments, but as soon as the debate started reformist elements began criticizing the present constitution and its obvious failure to protect constitutional guarantees, most notably the freedoms of speech, press and association, Chinese academics said.
"Basically what these people were saying is why should we continue to amend the constitution, when the present constitution doesn't work," Kang Xiaoguang, a political scientist at the China Academy of Sciences, told AFP.
"The debate was pretty intense and I think a lot of people lost hope in the direction of political reform (in China)."
By the end of August, the party closed the debate and banned scholars and academics from writing on or holding seminars on political and constitutional reform.
The restrictions were also slapped on the media which was warming up to the issue.
"I would say the honeymoon between the new leadership and the intellectuals and academics is finished, especially those scholars who work for the government," said Wu Guoguang, a former editor of the People's Daily and now a China scholar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
"At first, some people felt that the new leadership was not a bunch of hardliners because at most the political reform discussion was better than before, but now there is more and more evidence to support the conclusion that this atmosphere does not exist anymore."
Much of the debate called for the establishment of a constitutional oversight committee that would be responsible to ensure that constitutional guarantees were actually implemented and not just empty talk, but the party flatly refused to entertain such proposals.
"My proposal, as a private citizen, was to establish a constitutional committee in the National People's Congress," Cao said.
"If the constitution is to be implemented, we need to have a mechanism, that would be the role of a constitutional commission. The NPC has a lot of commissions, so to have a constitutional commission is not completely out of the question."
Cao, who once was employed by the State Council, China's cabinet, said he remained optimistic that in the future political reform in China would move forward, while adding that the amendment on protecting private property was better than nothing.
"To write this in the constitution is significant, without it being written into the constitution, we can't even hope for the protections to be implemented," Cao said.
"What we have is two different things, first get the amendment written into the constitution and then work on realizing it."
- AFP
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