Communist reform broadens democracy

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2007-10-18 00:00

Lai Hongyi, lecturer at the University of Nottingham School of Contemporary Chinese Studies, said China's economic success has a lot to do with the ruling party's focus on people's livelihood and its pragmatic pursuit of market reform. "This focus needs to be sustained in the coming decades," Lai said.

Nevertheless, Lai said, with a rising education level of the public and development of mass media, public opinion should be an important reference in policy making.

In order to ensure that officials would heed people's concerns, democracy should be incrementally introduced, Lai said.

Rapid growth is unnecessarily a cure-all, Hu warns the Party of yawning wealth gaps, resources-squandering way of development, injustice and corruption. In addressing those challenges, the 70 million-member political organization needs to recruit outside brains and unite as many forces as possible.

Two non-communists, Wan Gang and Chen Zhu, were promoted to cabinet posts this year to overwatch the Ministry of  Science and Technology and the Ministry of Health.

Wan is an auto technologist who had worked for Audi for a decade and France-educated hematologist Chen is a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences.

Their landmark appointments were the first to non-communists in nearly 30 decades, but will never be the last as the ruling party has pledged to recruit more non-communists for high governmental positions.

In the words of Prof. David Shambaugh, founding director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University and nonresident senior fellow at Brookings, the CPC's political reform is to "enliven the Chinese Communist Party from the bottom up, giving fuller scope to cadres to exchange views and provide input to policy deliberations rather than just implementing and rubber- stamping decisions made at high levels."

"The goal is to create a dynamic party apparatus, rather than an ossified and inflexible one," Shambaugh said.

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