In China, the More Things Change . . .

By Joseph Kahn | The New York Times
October 23, 2007

To judge by the reports in China's state-run news media, the Communist Party took a bold step toward democracy at the just completed 17th National Congress, which approved a new leadership team to run the country.

President Hu Jintao used the word democracy 61 times in his main address to the congress. The official Xinhua news agency reported that the party nominated 221 candidates to fill the 204 full seats on the Central Committee, meaning that 7.6 percent of those declared eligible did not get a seat. Xinhua called this a "competitive election."

In reality, of course, China's one-party system still owes more to Lenin than to Jefferson. It convenes congresses every five years to ratify leadership decisions on policy and personnel. The message is not change, but continuity.

After months of secretive negotiations, the nine members of the new Politburo Standing Committee, the country's top ruling group, were presented to the public for the first time on Monday morning. Their appointment was a fait accompli, and the stiff, scripted ceremony to introduce them, which lasted barely 10 minutes, resembled a Communist coronation.

The Communist Party has run China for 58 years. Despite the dynamic, even reckless expansion that has become the norm for the country's frothy economy, the party has become more entrenched, more predictable and more enamored of its rituals.

Decisions are made collectively by a small, often invisible elite. They tussle over the spoils of one-party rule. But they agree on the big issues facing the country. They want fast growth, a nonaligned foreign policy and political stability. If they are about to try something new, their secret is safe.

"China has a tyranny of the middle," said Frederick C. Teiwes, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of Sydney in Australia. "From the perspective of the leadership, things are going pretty well. They all want stability."

In his first five years as China's No. 1 leader, Mr. Hu argued repeatedly that the growth-above-all philosophy that began under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s had side effects. Too many workers and peasants had not benefited from the long economic boom. The party should redistribute more to the least well-off by providing better state-financed pensions, health care and education.

Mr. Hu has tried to rein in provincial authorities who pay lip service to central government directives while managing local affairs their own way. He pushed to recentralize some decision making, reduce wasteful state investment and slow the rampant expansion of polluting industries.

Some progress has been made. Agricultural taxes were eliminated. Tough directives to fight pollution and improve energy efficiency have been issued, if not fully put into use. Mr. Hu's theory of governance, labeled "scientific view of development," was enshrined in the party's constitution on Sunday.

Yet most of those changes are incremental, enacted only after the full leadership reached a consensus. Far from distancing himself from his predecessors, Mr. Hu has repeatedly pledged to follow the dictums of Mr. Deng and Jiang Zemin, presenting his own ideas as evolutionary.

And little in the proceedings of the congress foreshadowed a faster pace of change or a sharper break with tradition.

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