BY EVA CHENG
Public anger against escalating corruption, smuggling, tax evasion, fee extortions and other forms abuses of power by Communist Party officials found expression among the delegates in the traditionally uncontroversial annual sessions of China's legislative assembly — the National People's Congress — and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference held in Beijing during March 5-15 and March 3-11.
According to the Chinese constitution, the NPC, with about 2800 delegates, is the highest decision-making body in China. The CPPCC, with 2200 delegates, is constitutionally supposed to "supervise" the ruling Communist Party through giving advice. Each March, the two bodies hold their annual general meetings in Beijing at the same time to allow some joint sessions.
Token recognition of the burning corruption problem has been made before by these two bodies, despite their nature as constitutional rubber stamps for the decisions of leading committees of the CP bureaucracy. But never has the touchy issue of corruption been so sharply featured.
Corruption is a particularly touchy political issue in China because the country's Stalinist political system means that large-scale corruption cannot happen without the involvement or endorsement of leading party officials or top military commanders. Furthermore, any serious examination of this ballooning problem inevitably leads to the question of whether the CP still holds enough authority and trust to run the country when its officials are amassing private wealth at the expense of the workers and peasants whom they claim to represent.
Graft at dangerous levels
An unexpectedly stern warning has come from NPC chairperson Li Peng in his official report: "Historical experience shows any grip on power that's unchecked and unsupervised will inevitably lead to corruption. Any failure to stamp out the problem and promote clean government could risk dragging both the party and the country into oblivion."
In a passionate address in closing the CPPCC session which reportedly attracted the loudest response from participants — seven rounds of applause in half an hour — CPPCC chairperson Li Ruihuan, while tackling the corruption issue, made the unusual repeated references to the people being the ultimate source of power. He stressed that party and state officials should listen to and respond to the people's grievances about corruption.
The fact that two members of the CP's seven-member Politburo standing committee felt the need to make such statements suggests that the clique at the head of China's ruling bureaucratic elite fears that public anger at the bureaucracy's corrupt practices could explode into mass protests that would threaten its totalitarian grip on power.
Li Ruihuan continued: "At the moment, corruption is still rife and continues to spread in some parts of the country and is constituting an obstacle to reform as well as development. It potentially destabilises society and has resulted in widespread resentment among the people, a scenario hard to change. Corruption is hard to stamp out and prevent without the checking and supervision of [the CP's] power."
Liu Ji, renowned as a close advisor to CP general secretary and state president Jiang Zemin, conceded in an interview during the NPC to Ta Kung Pao, Beijing's main mouthpiece in Hong Kong, that there's a thriving underground market for official positions in China because "power can bring money". Liu said: "The going price for a department head position in some localities is several tens of thousands [of yuan], but that position can bring millions, very quickly... This is the reason why corruption is getting worse and rising in scale."
In his report to the NPC, procurator-general Han Zhubin openly admitted that not only were the legal qualifications inadequate among "some" of China's legal personnel, "a minority of them" are "highly receptive to a privilege mentality, violent in their work style, abuse their power, break the law, implement the law only half-heartedly [and] reap personal gains through their official capacities".
Supreme People's Court president Xiao Yang in his report admitted that "some" departments and local authorities resisted, increasingly violently, attempts by higher authorities to abide by the country's laws.
Han and Xiao reported that 45,113 corruption/bribery cases were investigated last year, said to be a big rise from previously, which resulted in 4.7 billion yuan (US$570 million) being recovered. However, this is small change compared to the 800-1200 billion yuan a year that Hong Kong's Ming Pao daily on March 11 quoted one NPC delegate as estimating was the total amount of funds illegally appropriated by Chinese officials. This estimate — equal to almost 18% of China's gross domestic product — was based on a recent joint study by the Chinese School of Social Science and Shanghai's Qinghua University.
NPC delegates were told that 17,931 defendants were successfully prosecuted last year for corruption but only three of them had been senior provincial or central government officials. Though capital punishment has been imposed, such as on former NPC vice-chairperson Cheng Kejie and former vice-governor of Jiangxi province Hu Changqing, both executed last year, undoubtedly the majority of the big fish are still at large.
Xiao promised NPC deputies that from now on the heads of departments where corruption cases were proven would be sacked. But the assurance seemed to have little impact on the deputies' apparent anger at the inability of either the procurator-general's department or the Supreme People's Court to stamp out corruption. Only 67.2% of the delegates approved the Supreme Procuratorate's report (with 584 against and 332 abstentions), down from 71.2% last year. The Supreme People Court's report did slightly better, with 70% of deputies voting for it (530 against and 306 abstentions), but this was still down from last year's 74.4% vote of approval.
10th Five-Year Plan
While Premier Zhu Rongji's NPC report on the outline of China's 10th Five-Year Plan (2001-2005) affirmed Beijing's proclaimed intention to build a "socialist market economy", the detailed plans in the report indicate that further steps will be taken to restore capitalism in China. More privatisations of state-owned enterprises are to be undertaken and what still remains of China's post-1949 system of social welfare provisions will be further undermined.
"The state will continue to hold controlling shares in important enterprises that matter to the country's economy and national security", Zhu said. However, he did not specify what enterprises fell under this category. He went on to say that most enterprises which were categorised as "significant" by the state have been corporatised, with those wholly or partly owned by the state making a total profit of 239.2 billion yuan.
Zhu didn't say what essential entitlements the workers employed by these firms have foregone in order for these profit levels to be achieved, but he hesitantly admitted the working class in China as a whole is paying a high price for China's creation of a "socialist market economy".
"The pace of reform mustn't go beyond what the society can bear", said Zhu. He added that it was only inevitable that deep-seated social interests would be upset by the reform process.
In the shrinking state sector alone, 26 million workers were laid off in the last three years, with only half of them finding a new job, according to State Planning Commission chief Li Rong Rong. A little more than 50 million workers are now employed by the sector.
Compared to an annual rate of GDP growth of 8.3% per year under the previous five years, the new plan now projects the average annual growth will be 7% over the next five. While these growth rates may sound impressive, Zhu commented that "shoddy repetitive constructions" have been a problem and must be avoided, hints that qualitative increases in output have been achieved at the cost of poor quality.
China had been battling against soaring inflation until the 1997 Asian economic crisis. Since then it has faced a growing problem of deflation caused by that uniquely capitalist economic phenomenon of overproduction. It has been relying on government deficit spending to power the economy. Cumulative central government debt now amounts to about 28% of GDP, attracting a debt servicing cost in 2001 of more than 157 billion yuan (out of a total expenditure of 1.74 trillion yuan). For 2001, finance minister Xiang Huaicheng projected a record budget deficit of 259.8 billion (which was exactly the actual deficit in 2000).
One hundred and fifty billion yuan worth of government bonds will be issued to fund construction in 2001 with a third of them specifically designated for the major infrastructural projects in China's west. The key projects include a plan to pipe natural gas and transmit electricity from China's resource-rich west to the more developed east; to divert half the flow of the Yangtze River in the south to the Yellow River in the industrial north, 1000km away; and to build a railway between Qinghai and Tibet.
China has spent only 2.5-2.8% of GDP on education in the last few years, far short of the 4% pledged four years ago for the year 2000. Education attracted only a pitiful 16.5 billion yuan of budget allocation in 2000, compared to 120.5 billion yuan for military expenditure which will be increased to 141 billion yuan in 2001. In apparent disapproval of these allocations, only 80% of the deputies voted in favour of the budget, down from 87% last year.