All quiet as anniversary of key Beijing meet passes

Twenty-five years ago, China's political elite gathered for a four-day meeting that would eventually turn out to have world-transforming potential.

Although it is not commemorated in the manner of D-Day or the Kennedy assassination, the Third Plenum of the 11th Communist Party Congress, which opened on Dec. 18, 1978, ranks among the most significant events of the 20th century.

The gathering ushered in an era of economic reform, but did not match it with political freedom, leaving many a quarter century later with a painful sense of wasted opportunities.

"Of course, I'm disappointed," said Bao Tong (鮑彤), a former member of the Communist Party's Central Committee, who was later purged.

"They didn't take the road of democracy, and that's a real pity," he said.

The Third Plenum came as a breath of fresh air at a time when China had exhausted itself in futile ideological struggles over the decade-long Cultural Revolution.

It set in stone the victory of reform champion Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) over a group of powerful leaders known as the "whateverists" because they notoriously wanted to adhere to whatever late chairman Mao Zedong (毛澤東) had said or done.

At the end of the plenum, a string of measures were adopted that in retrospect formed the seeds of a revolution that would lift hundreds of millions out of poverty.

The economy was to be run according to what worked in practice, officials were to be rewarded according to their performance, and strongman rule was to be abandoned for collective leadership.

The meeting set in motion events that not only transformed China, but the whole world as it signaled the end of a generation of self-imposed isolation from the global market economy.

"It was a starting point for the rise of China and for the reemergence of China as a global player," said David Zweig, a political scientist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

"And the reemergence of China is one of the two or three most important events in the latter half of the 20th century. It will have dramatic effects on the entire history of the 21st century," he said.

For China, it was a last chance to take part in the massive expansion of Asian wealth.

Many observers had expected China to also jump on the democracy wave that hit southern Europe in the 1970s and the Soviet bloc a decade later.

But that was not to happen, as the massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989 was to make clear.

"They should have set up a democratic system," Bao said, who became the highest-ranking official to wind up in jail after the Tiananmen crackdown.

"It's very sad," he said.

As good Marxists, many Chinese assumed democracy was inevitable, and that the political system would sooner or later reflect the freed-up economy, said Frank Lu, a Chinese who now heads a rights group based in Hong Kong.

"The idea was that once the economy had been reformed, political reform would follow as a matter of course. But it didn't happen," he said.

With 67 million members, the Chinese Communist Party today is a huge organization vigorously defending its own interests, which do not include the introduction of democracy, Lu said.

"As long as this system persists, it's hard to bring about any change, no matter how much the economy is reformed," he said.