Populism in China brings smiles, not change

Xiong Deming was returning from a day tending her cabbage patch, her hands caked with soil and manure, when a well-dressed man stopped her and asked if she wanted to meet the prime minister of China.

She was escorted to a neighbor's courtyard, where she had a chance to tell Prime Minister Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) that the authorities had repeatedly failed to pay peasant workers, including her husband, for work on prominent government-financed construction projects.

That night, after Wen left to continue his inspection tour, Xiong recalled, a local official handed her US$300 in cash, the amount the county government owed her husband, Li Jianmin.

For Xiong it was manna. But hundreds of other people who worked on the same projects never were paid. For them, Wen's personal touch was no substitute for good government.

Despite efforts by China's new leaders to cast themselves as populists, issues like income distribution, labor rights, taxation and land policy tend to divide the Communist Party against itself, central versus local, urban versus rural, creating pockets of opposition that top leaders often seem unable or unwilling to overcome.

Political analysts say Wen and President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) fear that the party can collapse unless it does more to share China's increasing prosperity with more of its 1.3 billion people. Yet that requires that local officials, government-backed companies and well-connected businessmen give up power and profits. The bureaucracy often prevails through inertia.

Wen, in his current post since last March, and Hu, who became president then and has been Communist Party chief since late 2002, have been unusually attentive to everyday concerns of workers and farmers.

They have pioneered a form of populist politics that sometimes seems closer to Western-style campaigning than the cloistered decision making that remains the norm for China's leadership.

The two men frequently mention the gap between those who have benefited from China's capitalist-style urban economy and those left behind in the countryside. They have descended coal shafts, toured AIDS and SARS wards and abolished some conspicuous perks of high office.

During trips outside Beijing, Wen sometimes surprises local officials by halting his motorcade at random villages and inviting peasants to share their grievances, giving him a reputation for earnestness and sensitivity.

But despite a few new programs intended to reduce some rural taxes, Wen and Hu are finding that the Communist Party and government apparatus sometimes pay only lip service to their demands.

That seems to be the case in Yunyang, the poverty-stricken village where hundreds of colleagues of Li, the peasant who was paid, are still fighting city hall for their wages.

"We have gone to the government offices time and time again, and they pay no attention," said He Diren, a local construction crew chief whose workers have received less than half of their promised wages last year. "If they don't listen to the prime minister, are they going to listen to us?"

Taming the bureaucracy is a tougher challenge for Hu and Wen than it was for their predecessors, because they are of it rather than above it. Mao Zedong (毛澤東), Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) and even Jiang Zemin (江澤民), the three previous top leaders, all joined the Communist Party before it came to power in 1949. They were said to have revolutionary credentials.