Chinese leaders take to capitalism

BEIJING -- The setting matched that of eras past: ranks of China's Communist Party leadership, some in military regalia, seated before a backdrop of hammer and sickle flanked by crimson flags.

But the message from party leader and President Jiang Zemin was revolutionary for a leadership that still claims loyalty to Marxism, Leninism and "Mao Zedong Thought": admit capitalists to your ranks.

In short, adapt to the times or risk failure.

"Competition in overall national strength is becoming increasingly fierce," Jiang told 2,114 communist faithful Friday in the Great Hall of the People. He said entrepreneurs are "builders of socialism."

Caught in a curious time warp, China is becoming capitalist in almost everything but name, clinging to a political dictatorship established in long-ago revolution while struggling with the realities of a mutating, increasingly open society.

Seems misplaced

The communist pomp and pageantry of the party seems oddly misplaced in today's Beijing, a landscape dominated by billboards, skyscrapers and expressways. The subway line across Tiananmen Square is decorated not with political slogans, but with ads for Nescafe and Kodak.

"Their communism is only lip service. It's capitalism in the starkest form that I can imagine," said Takashi Inoguchi of the Institute of Oriental Studies at Tokyo University.

The flood of political fanfare in the state-run media barely hints at that reality. At critical times, the party invariably reverts to propaganda and scripts aimed at preventing any risk of disruption or embarrassment.

On Friday, government television showed legions of soldiers, farmers, students and shoppers sitting rapt before televisions as Jiang made his 90-minute speech, and celebrations featuring ethnic Mongolians and other groups in minority dress dancing and waving flags.

"These ways were used before, and did not create any controversy. But they're very boring," says Ding Xueliang, a former Communist Party official and professor of social sciences at Hong Kong's University of Science and Technology.

Underscoring the party's struggle to remain relevant in a post-Cold War world, television and newspapers carried the usual congratulatory messages from fellow "workers' parties" in the handful of other countries still professing to be communist: North Korea, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam.

Though it once trumpeted the call, "Workers of the world unite!," China's 66-million-member Communist Party long ago gave up any pretense of leading a worldwide proletarian revolution.

Instead, at Jiang's behest, it is inviting capitalists to join up. During the era of revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, entrepreneurs were attacked as "running dogs of imperialism."

and targeted in political witch hunts during the anti-rightist campaign of the 1950s and the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.

These days, entrepreneurs are feted as the vanguard of development, and the party is anxious for their support.

"A lot of capital leaves China because Chinese businessmen don't have confidence in the political environment," said Zheng Yongnian of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore.