Wen Jiabao began his tenth and final year as Premier of China with a challenge to his successors and a warning against leading the country into the chaos of a second Cultural Revolution.
His thinly veiled attack on Communist Party conservatives yesterday offered the public a rare glimpse of the fault lines that divide the top levels of Chinese power.
By invoking the intense national trauma of the 1966-1976 era, Mr Wen smashed one of the great taboos of party rhetoric — presenting the bloodiest and darkest of Mao Zedong’s social experiments as the stark alternative to reform.
“Without successful political structural reform . . . new problems that have arisen in Chinese society will not be fundamentally resolved and such historical tragedies as the Cultural Revolution may happen again,” Mr Wen said.
He also referred to the “mistakes of the Cultural Revolution” and the need to reform the “leadership system of the party and country”.
Advertisement
Hu Xingdou, a political economist at Beijing University of Technology, said that such candour suggests that Mr Wen may be fearful of China being plunged back into turmoil. However, beyond repeated calls for reform, Mr Wen’s comments offered few concrete suggestions of how it might be pushed forward. The tone was intended to suggest that he had spent the past decade as a frustrated reformer, blocked at every turn. Much of that was conveyed through an apology worked into his annual press conference. Asked to evaluate his years as Premier, Mr Wen headed off criticism that neither he nor Hu Jintao, the President, had seriously tackled reform. “I have many regrets,” he said. “Due to my incompetence, institutional and other restraints, there are many shortcomings in my work.”
Some scholars, and people in online communities, questioned why Mr Wen had waited until the dying months of his term in office to express its importance. Others pointed out that, while his challenge to the next generation of leaders was potently worded, China could still face years of snail-pace change.
Mr Wen may leave other headaches for Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, the presumed heirs to the presidency and premiership respectively. For the past 12 months Beijing has intensified a crackdown on dissent, partly through fear of Arab Spring-style uprisings in China. But Mr Wen said: “The Arab demands for democracy must be respected. It is a force that cannot be held back.”
Within hours, the phrase was circulating on China’s equivalent of Twitter, and may haunt the incoming leadership. At the heart of Mr Wen’s address were calls that linked the needs for political and economic reform. That link, analysts said, was a sign that China’s top leadership may have recognised fundamental flaws in the way the country is run under a one-party system.
“This was Mr Wen saying, in rather dramatic terms, that China’s leadership needs to be undertaken on a new basis,” David Kelly, research director at the China Policy think-tank, said. “He is using these extreme terms to invoke the need for reform because he knows that, at the local level, the party has been criminalised by the pursuit of GDP growth.”
Advertisement
Mr Wen also paid lip service to his more traditional line on reform: that it must be undertaken step by step and in accordance with China’s unique national circumstances. He acknowledged the need to give people greater say in political affairs but was careful to limit the scope. “If the people can run a village well, they can run a township, if they can run a township, they can manage a county,” he said.
He included a swipe at Bo Xilai, once a political star whose maverick management of the city of Chongqing incited nostalgia for the Mao era with the mass singing of “red songs”. Mr Bo’s fortunes have crumpled since Wang Lijun, his closest ally in a purge of organised crime, attempted a defection to a US consulate last month.
“The present Chongqing Municipal Party Committee and the municipal government must learn from the Wang Lijun incident,” Mr Wen said.
Analysts said it was hard to recall when a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo — the nine-member body at the summit of Chinese politics — had so openly criticised another senior politician. Zhang Ming, a political scientist at Renmin University in Beijing, said that the terms used by Mr Wen were a clear indication of his distaste for Mr Bo and his evocation of the Cultural Revolution. “It could not be more obvious that when he was talking about the Cultural Revolution Mr Wen was in fact referring to Chongqing and showing that he has always been opposed to that model,” said Mr Zhang.