- BEIJING AFP) - China's landmark
Communist Party Congress held its first full day of discussions with leading
delegates saying plans to throw open its doors to capitalists would be
written into party statutes.
-
- President Jiang Zemin's controversial personal theory
backing the move was certain be enshrined in the charter at the key meeting,
they said.
-
- This outcome, confidently predicted by cadres attending
the 16th Party Congress in central Beijing, would count as a major victory
for Jiang in his efforts to secure a lasting legacy after his likely retirement.
-
- It would also greatly bolster speculation that Jiang
plans to exert considerable influence from behind the scenes over probable
successor, Vice President Hu Jintao.
-
- "Our party will soon write Three Represents into
the party charter," Lu Ruihua, governor of the southern province of
Guangdong told a meeting of delegates on Saturday.
-
- "(Party) Secretary General Jiang's proposal to write
Three Represents into the charter is completely correct," he said.
-
- The clumsily-named theory decrees that the party does
not only represent workers and peasants, but the masses in general including
"advanced production forces," understood to mean capitalist entrepreneurs.
-
- Enshrining the theory in the party's core beliefs would
elevate Jiang's thought alongside that of his predecessors, whose ideas
-- known as Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory -- were not written
in until after their deaths.
-
- Governor Lu's comments were echoed by other delegates
at the meeting.
-
- "As long as we follow the Three Represents, we will
have the masses' approval, and as long as we don't, then we won't,"
said Guangdong deputy party secretary Huang Huahua.
-
- Officially the decision should be made by the Congress's
2,000-plus delegates, but most observers assume this has already been done
by an elite coterie.
-
- The Congress is expected to mark the start of a landmark
generational change of China's leaders, although nothing has been publicly
announced.
-
- Jiang, 76, is due to hand over his post as party head
to the younger Vice President Hu during the Congress, which lasts until
next Thursday, and then also stand down as president in March.
-
- Hu himself, a dour 59-year-old career official with a
reputation for avoiding controversy at all costs, devoted himself to praising
Jiang in his first comments of the Congress.
-
- Jiang's opening address to the event on Friday morning
was "a good guidance for building a well-off society and boosting
socialist modernisation", Hu told delegates from Tibet, state media
reported.
-
- Elsewhere at the Congress, delegates separated into smaller
meetings at the Great Hall of the People on Saturday and devoted virtually
all talk to gushing praise for Jiang.
-
- "We were all very pleased with the contents of his
work report," said a delegate from the southwestern province of Sichuan.
-
- Jiang's many references in the speech to the importance
of private enterprise and the rights of entrepreneurs also struck a chord
with the country's rich set.
-
- "(After hearing the speech) we feel as if having
taken a 'reassurance pill' and all our remaining worries and fears are
completely gone," the Xinhua news agency quoted company director Nan
Cunhui as saying in the southeastern city of Wenzhou.
-
- However ordinary people in the provinces -- supposedly
still the core of the party -- voiced minimal enthusiasm for the proceedings
underway in distant Beijing.
-
- "Yes, I know the Congress has started," said
one pedicab driver in the smog-enveloped city of Chengdu, the capital of
Sichuan.
-
- "But I'm just a common person," he said and
pedalled off into the traffic-choked street as if no further explanation
were needed.
|