- BEIJING (Reuters) - President
Jiang Zemin called on China's Communist Party to open its doors to the
new capitalist rich on Friday at the opening of a watershed congress expected
to usher in a new generation of leaders.
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- But Jiang, speaking before a backdrop of a giant hammer
and sickle, also stressed the China would not follow Western-style multi-party
democracy or abandon its traditional support base of workers and peasants.
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- Jiang told the 2,114 delegates in Beijing's cavernous
Great Hall of the People the theme of the congress was modernising the
party to adapt to the wrenching social and economic changes as China opens
its potentially vast market to the world.
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- Outside, streets lined with glitzy office blocks and
shopping malls were splashed with red flags and slogan-bearing banners
highlighting how China's Socialist political system lags far behind its
breakneck capitalist-style economic development.
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- Vice President Hu Jintao, 59, is expected to take over
as party chief after the congress as head of the new "fourth generation"
of leaders after Chairman Mao Zedong, paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and
Jiang.
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- But Jiang, 76, is expected to pull the strings from behind
the curtain by installing allies in the new leadership and having his "Three
Represents" political theory, which sanctions admitting capitalists,
written into the party constitution.
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- Jiang offered no clues about the personnel changes, which
have been kept under tight wraps. The final line-up will not be known until
the chosen ones emerge from behind a screen in the Great Hall a day after
the congress ends on November 14.
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- But in a break from precedent, he reviewed the 13 years
since he took power after the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations ended
in bloodshed and a leadership purge, rather than the usual five since the
last congress.
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- REVAMPING THE PARTY
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- Jiang said the party should recruit "mainly from
among workers, farmers, intellectuals, servicemen and cadres, thus expanding
the basic component and backbone of the party."
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- "We should admit into the party advanced elements
of other social strata who accept the party's program and constitution
in order to increase the influence and rallying force of the party in society
at large."
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- He also urged party delegates to act fully on his "Three
Represents" theory.
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- "We should never copy any models of the political
system of the West," he said.
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- Jiang echoed Chairman Mao Zedong's refrain "Let
100 flowers bloom and 100 schools of thought contend" in an apparent
appeal for academic and political openness.
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- But police have thrown a tight security cordon around
Beijing and detained a prominent democracy activist, while censors have
threatened Chinese reporters with jail sentences for leaks about the highly
secretive meeting.
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- Just before delegates arrived for the opening session,
police detained two women who threw leaflets in the air outside the Great
Hall of the People and grabbed the flyers from reporters before they could
be read.
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- Moments earlier, they detained three women who tried
to push their way to the entrance of the Great Hall in what appeared to
be another protest.
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- POLICY SHIFTS
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- Jiang's speech was filled with political rhetoric but
delegates, diplomats and China watchers scrutinized it for the slightest
hint about the leadership change or a subtle shift in language which could
indicate a major policy change.
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- Jiang said China and rival Taiwan should put aside political
differences to resume talks, but upheld Beijing's right to use force against
the island.
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- "On the basis of the one-China principle, let us
shelve for now certain political disputes and resume the cross-strait dialogue
and negotiations as soon as possible," he said.
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- Taiwan has been self-ruled since 1949, when the Nationalist
army led by Chiang Kai-shek fled there to escape Mao Zedong's Communist
forces, which seized control of mainland China.
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- Beijing regards Taiwan as a rebel province that must
be brought back into the fold, with force if necessary.
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- "Our position of never undertaking to renounce the
use of force is not directed at our Taiwan compatriots. It is aimed at
the foreign forces' attempts to interfere in China's reunification and
the Taiwan separatist forces' schemes for 'Taiwan independence',"
Jiang said.
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- On the economy, he said China should expand reform of
state companies, introducing more competition and keeping only a handful
of firms under total government control.
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- The government would encourage urbanization and agricultural
investment to help people in the countryside -- where the majority of Chinese
live and where the income gap with urbanites is gaping dangerously -- make
more money, he said.
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- He also pledged to fight terrorism, official corruption
and "evil cults," a term used before to describe the banned Falun
Gong spiritual movement.
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