Well, You Got MY Attention

HONG KONG - Over the past 16 years, the Chinese leadership has tried its best to dodge democratic reform while looking for alternative measures to stamp out rampant corruption and increase government efficiency. However, it seems to have recently come to the conclusion that there is just no way other than democratic reform.

Chinese President Hu Jintao has indicated that China will institute a program of democratic reforms, and Premier Wen Jiabao has given more detail, pledging to introduce direct elections at the township level "within a couple of years".

Hu and Wen chose to make their announcements during international events shorthly before Hu's trip last week to the United Nations summit meeting in New York. This could be a sign that both are eager to project a reformist image to the international community as part of efforts to defuse the theory of a "China threat" from what is still officially a communist government.

"China will press for democratic progress, unswervingly reestablish democracy, including direct elections," the premier, who favors mild reform, told a news conference prior to the 8th EU-China summit on September 5. "If we Chinese people can manage a village, I believe they can manage a town in several years. This system [of direct voting] will be realized step by step."

The article goes on to explain why the Party is even considering this - rampant corruption at the village and township level. Because the party seems unable to clean it's own house, they're hoping the Chinese people can play a role. Excellent news.

Of course, China's problems on the horizon go so far beyond corruption that this is only the beginning. Take, for example, the state of China's state-owned enteprises (SOEs). China has far more unserviceable debt than even Japan, because of the Party's need to finance the SOEs, which still account for about 50% of employment, albeit only 25% of GDP. The only way China is going to solve this problem is to de-politicize the banks. Partly, this will be accomplished by the entry of western lending institutions as part of China's WTO membership. This doesn't solve the fundamental problem, however - the Party needs to stop writing blank checks for the SOEs. The only way this is going to happen is with democratic reforms. This will mean elections at the national, not just the local level.

There's another reason the Party might want to consider national elections, and it has to do with the history of the Soviet Union. One of the reasons the USSR fell apart the way it did was because Gorbachev allowed elections in the sub-national republics of the USSR - this is where Yeltsin was elected by the Russians, originally. Of course, this gave the regional governments more legitimacy (in the eyes of their people) than the Supreme Soviet. After the coup attempt in August 1991, the USSR effectively broke in to the democratically-constituted republics. Or rather, they were "elected", though perhaps calling them democratic is a stretch. Certainly, places like Turkmenistan aren't exactly bastions of freedom...

Back to China: The primary concern of the Party is still - and always has been - national unity. It's said that Deng Xiaopeng was rehabilitated by Mao because of Mao's concern that his death would bring back the era of warlordism that existed before the Communist takeover. Deng was one of the only people who Mao trusted to run the country after his death. But by allowing local elections throughout the country while holding national power firmly in it's hands, we can see a similar dynamic to the terminal phase of the USSR - local officials with more credibility than national leaders. After all, who's going to have more clout - the elected mayor of Shanghai (or Shenzhen, or Beijing, or Guangzhou) or the President of China?

The party might keep control for a while, but if it goes forward with this plan for local elections, national unity will require them to hold national elections not long after.