China's Communists Walk a Thin Line.(Brief Article)

Just prior to the U.S.-China aircraft incident, the following remarks were delivered at the American Enterprise Institute by Willy Lam, China correspondent for 12 years at Hong Kong's South China Morning Post.

A recent, important development within China is the Communist Party's shift of focus to economic themes in order to justify its own existence and right to rule. As a result, China must make economic progress for the regime to remain in power.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Deng Xiaoping initiated a round of economic reforms and said China would not follow in the the USSR's footsteps because China could still improve its standard of living. After the fall of Milosovich in Yugoslavia, President Jiang Zemin repeated Deng's message in private discussions. He said Beijing would not go the way of Yugoslavia because China still has 5 to 7 percent growth every year, and the Party can satisfy the people's basic needs.

When Premier Zhu Rongji was in Singapore, he said something very interesting to reporters: He could understand the frustration of people in Hong Kong, because their wages are frozen and consumer confidence is very low. He said he had learned a lesson from Hong Kong, and that wages in China will definitely be raised this year, because he didn't want to see the people disappointed. According to various reports, the salaries of civil servants could rise 30 percent.

This focus on giving benefits to people to justify the Communist Party's continued monopolization of power is very different from the earlier obsession with revolutionary ideas.

Jiang Zemin has harped over and over that the Communist Party must represent the foremost in economic, technological, and cultural trends of the world. If the Communist Party best advances the economy, technology, and culture, he says, then it can stay on forever as the ruling party of China. While this might seem a prosaic and not very original statement, it has important implications.

First, the Communist Party was traditionally known as the party of the proletariat. By saying the Party should focus on the most advanced achievements of technology and so forth, Jiang Zemin is in fact saying the Party's future lies in the hands of scientists, high-tech people, the Internet crowd, private entrepreneurs, and so forth.