The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) concluded its 16th National Congress yesterday, with Vice President Hu Jintao (
TV footage of the congress shows delegates casting their votes in order. The voting results also came out as planned, an indication that the party maintains absolute control. The scene was reminiscent of the KMT's 5th National Congress in 1976, during which then president Chiang Ching-kuo (
The KMT and the CCP are fraternal twins born of the Soviet Communist Party's model -- but they followed very different paths of development. After retreating to Taiwan in 1949, the KMT followed an authoritarian capitalist road, liberalizing the economy while maintaining a tight grip on politics.
Later Taiwan's middle class became the mainstay of society and a driving force behind social and political liberalization. After the lifting of martial law and the ban on political parties and newspapers, the democratization process in Taiwan became irreversible. It led to the peaceful transition of political power in 2000 that saw the KMT become an opposition party.
Will the CCP follow in the KMT's footsteps? At this week's congress in Beijing, Jiang's "Three Repre-sents" dictum was incorporated into the party charter. The dictum labels businesspeople an "advanced force" on a par with labor and farmers. This has already sowed the seeds for qualitative change in the party.
The CCP can no longer claim to represent Maoist proletariat rule after a capitalist market mechanism was incorporated into "socialism with Chinese characteristics." Given the tremendous economic developments in Jiang's era, China no longer looks like a communist state. It uses its cheap labor, abundant resources and a huge market to attract investment and grab overseas markets. China is now more capitalist than many capitalist countries.
The CCP now looks like the KMT of 30 years ago -- a party facing the conflict between an open economy and an authoritarian political system. Economic development has created a formidable middle class and the party can no longer ignore this new force in society. The party must incorporate it. The people who attracted the most attention at this week's congress were not bureaucrats, but the new capitalist nobility.
The CCP's 16th National Congress marks the beginning of qualitative change in the party. The new generation of leaders must solicit help from business tycoons and the middle class to deal with the growing gaps between rich and poor and between regions as well as a rising unemployment rate. This in turn means party leaders must give more power to business leaders and the middle class to ensure their cooperation. This will be the beginning of quantitative change in the party.
The middle class was an important driving force behind the KMT's transition. Will it play a similar role in China? The just-concluded congress has planted the seeds for such change. Hopefully these seeds will grow into trees.
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past