By Meng Na (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-12-26 10:58

The CAPD takes credit for improvements such as the nine-year compulsory education and equitable distribution of teaching resources. "The party is now focusing on how to vigorously develop community and privately run schools, and develop vocational training," says Yan.

"I think education is closely related to the country's abundance of human resources and capabilities in scientific innovation. The public has higher expectations of education, too. So the CAPD will conduct more studies and submit more proposals on the issue," she says.

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The multi-party cooperation system has two basic modes of political dialogue: consultations among the eight non-Communist parties and the CPC and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), attended by representatives of all walks of life. From 1990 to last year, the CPC Central Committee and the State Council organized more than 230 consultations, seminars and briefings, out of which 74 were presided over by President Hu Jintao, who is also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee.

The number of non-Communist party members and independent representatives was 1,343, about 60 percent of the total, at the First Session of the 10th National Committee of the CPPCC in March 2003. That should give a fair idea of the importance attached to such parties.

Their suggestions "facilitate the scientific and democratic decision-making of the CPC and helped it resist and overcome the bureaucracy and all negative and corrupt phenomena more consciously. This reinforces and improves the CPC's work," says Zhuang Congsheng, spokesman for the United Front Work Department of the CPC Central Committee.

Zhuang cites the saving of the Minnan culture, the distinctive customs of southern Fujian Province, from near extinction five years ago as a major achievement of the CPPCC. The Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League submitted a draft proposal to protect Minnan's culture and its unique dialect and art forms. The result was the establishment of China's first State-level cultural ecological protection zone - the Minnan cultural and ecological zone in June this year.

At their national congresses earlier this month, the eight non-Communist parties discussed and adopted their own work reports and elect new central committees. Jiang Shusheng, re-elected chairman of the China Democratic League Central Committee, says in his online interview that his predecessors sacrificed their lives along with CPC members for the revolution.

Though the younger members of non-Communist parties don't have that experience, they still have common commitments with CPC members, such as the multi-party cooperation system and socialism with Chinese characteristics.

The combined membership of the eight parties is more than 700,000, about one percent of the CPC's 73 million. The first CPPCC convention in September 1949 marked the formal establishment of the multi-party cooperation system under the leadership of the CPC. More than 90 percent of the existing non-Communist party members entered politics after the country's reform and opening up in the late 1970s.

The system suffered a serious setback during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) but has since been improved and consolidated, most notably with the appointments of China Zhi Gong (Public Interest) Party's Wan Gang as Minister of Science and Technology in April and Chen Zhu as Minister of Health in June.

The first non-Communist party cabinet minister since the late 1970s, Wan was elected the Zhi Gong Party Central Committee chairman last Friday. The 55-year-old minister is an automobile engineer, has worked with Audi Corporation in Germany and was president of Shanghai's Tongji University before assuming the science and technology portfolio.

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