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Hu girds for political reform
By Willy Wo-Lap Lam
HONG KONG, China (CNN) -- New party chief Hu Jintao has created great expectations with his campaign to honor the constitution and the principle of rule by law. Quite a number of liberal cadres and academics think the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary may be firing the first salvo in incremental political reform. In a speech last December marking the 20th anniversary of the promulgation of the 1982 Constitution, Hu repeated a key clause of the charter: "No organization and individual has special powers to override the constitution and the laws." Whether Hu -- and his Communist Youth League Faction of relatively forward-looking cadres -- is serious about legal reform will become clearer at the First Session of the Tenth National People's Congress (NPC) set for March 5. While generally regarded as a rubber stamp, China's parliament could spearhead the kind of limited, though still significant, political reform that Hu's team may be comfortable with in its first five-year term (2002 to 2007). The party chief's priority will likely be to seek a revision of the constitution so as to promote checks and balance among different governing organs -- and to safeguard a certain level of civil liberties. Partly in response to Hu's emphasis on "administration according to the constitution and the laws," liberal legislators have already begun work on retooling the 1982 charter. And should the defend-the-constitution drive gain steam at the upcoming NPC, a full-scale revision of the document can be accomplished at the plenary legislative session in March 2004. According to renowned law professor and former NPC deputy Jiang Ping, the constitution is "the basis of a country's democratic political system." He says, however, that China's constitution has yet to adequately fulfill functions such as protecting the rights of citizens. Highest authority of the land
Jiang and other experts think the revised version should make it doubly clear -- and embody guarantees -- that the Communist party has to subordinate itself to both the charter and the laws. As Hu pointed out in his December address, "all state units, armed forces as well as different political parties and social organizations must safeguard the dignity of the constitution." According to a retired party cadre, President and former general secretary Jiang Zemin has under the "party is supreme" principle, expanded the CCP's clout at the expense of the government as well as judicial and civil-society organizations. The cadre said Jiang, who had retained the chairmanship of the Central Military Commission, had also elevated the CMC's authority to that of the Politburo Standing Committee. "It is clearly in Hu's own personal interest -- as well as that of the requirements of reform -- to ensure that a particular faction in the CCP cannot not ride roughshod over the constitution and the laws," he said. Beijing's intellectuals hope Hu could attend to civil rights issues such as workers' rights to strike and to organize unions after the controversy of whether the party -- or its armed forces -- is superior to the constitution is sorted out. To promote rule by law, Hu and like-minded cadres must also restore the powers and prerogatives of the NPC, which according to the constitution is the highest authority of the land. The legislature's supervisory powers over the party, government and other branches of the polity have been cast into doubt by the frequency with which the State Council and party headquarters have ignored the NPC when embarking on major policies and projects. A glaring case in point is the scheme to divert water from the Yangtze River to the northern provinces, deemed China's grandest-ever engineering feat. Costing at least 480 billion yuan, the water-diversion works is more than twice as expensive as the controversial Three Gorges dam. When the Three Gorges blueprint was deliberated upon at the 1992 NPC, it won the support of barely 1,767 out of 2,633 legislators despite heavy-handed party and government lobbying. Perhaps mindful of this, the administration of Premier Zhu Rongji has chosen not to refer major projects -- including the Qinghai-Tibet Railway as well as multi-billion yuan pipeline to pump gas from Xinjiang to the coastal regions -- to the Congress. Arm-twistingAnother key function of people's congress of all levels -- the endorsement and appointment of officials -- has been eroded by President Jiang's long-standing effort to boost the party's control over personnel. In the early 1990s, the people's congresses of the provinces of Guizhou and Zhejiang made history when they rejected candidates for governors nominated by the CCP Organization Department. Particularly after Jiang protégé Zeng Qinghong became Organization Department chief in 1999, however, party authorities have bypassed the people's congresses when making many senior appointments. Partly to boost the Jiang Zemin Faction's control over provincial cadres, Zeng has engineered regional reshuffles with dizzying frequency. "Zeng has simply disregarded the opinions of provincial and municipal legislators when he goes about his marathon reshuffles of provincial and municipal officials," said a Western diplomat. The recent re-appointment of the unpopular mayor of the city of Yueyang in Hunan Province, Luo Bisheng, is a good example of the truncation of legislative privilege. When the Yueyang Congress was convened on New Year's Day to discuss Luo's candidacy for a second term, less than half of the 431 deputies expressed confidence in the mayor. Alarmed, municipal and provincial authorities referred the matter to the Organization Department, which ruled that the legislature should meet for a second session two days later. Thanks to arm-twisting by the authorities, Luo was re-elected after he had won the grudging endorsement of 335 deputies. Asserting influenceApart from political liberalization, the success of many of Hu's just-unveiled initiatives depends on whether the prerogatives of the constitution and the NPC can be re-asserted. Take, for instance, his much-applauded bid to redress regional imbalance by diverting more funds and resources into agricultural provinces in central and western China. Since the CCP Politburo and the State Council have for more than a decade been dominated by cadres who speak for Shanghai and other eastern boom-towns, the bulk of state investment has gone to the rich coastal strip. Unlike most legislatures in the world, China's parliament has next to no control over the government budget. A dozen or so outspoken deputies have privately indicated they want to introduce constitutional amendments ,or at least new laws, to give the NPC a bigger say in government spending. Given that each province and directly administered city has roughly the same number of representatives in the NPC, such reforms could ensure that there are legal and institutional guarantees that the western provinces can get an equitable share of the economic pie.
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