Home Is Where The Heart Dwells

Hu Shuli, the chief editor of Caijing Magazine and a prominent political commentator, recently published an article on the scheduled administration reform of China. Citing the recent newsletter from the People’s Congress and Political Consultative Conference, she noticed that the newsletter coined a new term of “holding higher the banner of people’s democracy” (“更高地举起人民民主的旗帜”), and unprecedentedly emphasized the institutionalization of socialist democracy. She therefore understood that the core of this reform as essentially democratization.

Deutsche Welle’s comment, however, was not as positive. It pointed out that the current government was trying to use administration reform to obscure the emergency of the needed political reform, such as breaking the Party’s monopoly of political power. Administration reform could do little good, and would not lead to democratization, concluded Deutsche Welle author Xiaoyang.

Is the reform nonsense or meaningful? I guess it depends on context, and it should not be viewed as a one-or-the-other question. The two views are held by insiders and outsiders respectively. Insiders, when facing the reform, would like to make it meaningful, for it could help create some disruption of the current system, and hence some opportunities for meaningful change. Outsiders who are facing the same reform, however, needs to resist hollow promises from the Party and push for more concrete promises of change, and therefore have to claim it nonsense. The reform indeed is both nonsense and meaningful, which is typical of many other Chinese reforms.