Does China contradict the liberal paradigm, part deux

Following up on my post a few months ago on whether China’s economic liberalization will lead to democratization, the Economist asks similar questions about the trajectory of Hu Jintao’s government — and comes up with the same muddled answer:

Mr Hu’s (in fact, fairly consistent) conservatism has been evident in his belief that the Communist Party, riddled with corruption and other abuses of power, is quite capable of cleaning up its own act without the need for any checks or balances. This year, for instance, he has ordered millions of party officials to take part in many hours of mind-numbing ideological training designed to tighten party discipline (known as the ?education campaign to preserve the advanced nature of Communist Party members?)…. Publicly, Mr Hu’s comments have been moderate in tone. But he has been tougher at closed-door gatherings, such as during a meeting of the party’s Central Committee last September. The plenum was of crucial symbolic importance for Mr Hu. It appointed him as the supreme commander of China’s armed forces, thus completing his takeover of the country’s three top positions, following his appointment as party leader in November 2002 and president in March 2003. The contents of Mr Hu’s maiden speech have not been published in full. In the still secret portion, Mr Hu reportedly railed against ?Western hostile forces? and ?bourgeois liberalisation?. It was a worrying throwback to the paranoid language that suffused official rhetoric in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989…. Yet for all Mr Hu’s rhetoric, he has yet to strike out at perceived wayward tendencies with anything like the vigour shown by Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping or even Jiang Zemin, whose crackdown on Falun Gong, a spiritual movement, in 1999 sent many thousands to labour camps. The complaints of Beijing’s intellectuals are offset by other signals that China’s economic reforms are continuing, even if government enthusiasm for the kind of mass privatisation of state-owned enterprises that occurred in the late 1990s and early this decade may have abated. In February the government issued new guidelines for private investment in areas hitherto the preserve of the state. This month it issued a draft of China’s first law on property rights, aimed at protecting individuals and companies from arbitrary appropriations by the state. Many say the new law is inadequate, but it is still something of a concession to a growing middle class. Even in the realm of privatisation, the government continues to experiment. In May, a new attempt was launched at off-loading state-owned shares in the 1,400 companies listed in China’s stockmarkets. The government has indicated that the reform plan will not mean selling off its controlling stake in ?key enterprises?. But it will relinquish at least some of its firms. Given the increasingly conspicuous inequalities emerging in China as a result of the country’s embrace of capitalism, it suits Mr Hu to appear to pour cold water on the idea of laisser-faire economics, blamed for a growing gap between rich and poor, between regions and between urban and rural areas. In the past couple of years there has been an upsurge in the number of protests triggered by these disparities, as well as by rampant corruption. Mr Hu is trying to strengthen the party’s legitimacy by stressing its sympathy for the disadvantaged. Mr Hu’s catchphrase is ?balanced development?. This will be a central theme in a new five-year economic plan (a still cherished relic of the central-planning era) due to be discussed by the Central Committee in October and ratified by the legislature next March. It will be Mr Hu’s first opportunity to put his stamp on a long-term economic strategy. But rapid growth will remain his first priority. Mr Hu has shown no sign of retreat from the core belief of party leaders since the early 1990s: that growth is essential to social stability and thus the party’s survival. If redistributing wealth were to jeopardise that, even the conservative Mr Hu would back off.