People’s Daily Says Stick to Path of Reform
June 8th, 2006
Monday of this week the People’s Daily carried a prominent editorial affirming (and exhorting everyone else to affirm) China’s commitment to the path of reform. This has been interpreted as a way to end debates that have raged about the pace, scope and manner of China’s reformist agenda. In other words, the Party’s main mouthpiece has said, shut up already with your neo-leftist and other contrarian strains of discourse; China will stick to a pro-growth, pro-market, “socialism with Chinese characteristics” path.
For some time Western media have been reporting on vigorous internal Party debates (such debates should be a good thing, right?). This editorial has been covered as a public admission and simultaneously as a suppression of those debates. See for example coverage from the Financial Times here and the Times of London here.
I was struck by this sentence from the Times coverage:
Nostalgia is widespread for the days of Chairman Mao Zedong when everyone was equally poor.
Right. Back when nobody had anything, back when we sometimes tortured people for keeping a few chickens at home in an effort to raise themselves above communal misery. Those were the days!
The Hu-Wen administration has shifted rhetoric and perhaps some policies to a more “people-centered” (yi ren wei ben) approach that emphasizes the overall quality rather than mere quantity of growth. The editorial doesn’t change that. It simply indicates China is sticking to 1) socialism, 2) reform and 3) balanced development. That agenda, like my own country’s current policies of spending feverishly while cutting taxes, is fraught with internal tensions. But as the Deng Xiaoping billboard in Shenzhen says, the basic line shouldn’t change in China for a long, long time.
The editorial is available in Chinese here. It’s headline reads 毫不动摇地坚持改革方向 (Haobu dongyao jianchi de gaige fangxiang), which, with some license, can be translated as, “Don’t even think about not continuing to reform.”
The People’s Daily website provides an English article about the editorial here (though not a full translation; maybe it’s like the Koran and cannot be translated).