Top goal for China's new leadership- breaking from past and fac

BEIJING -- If it wasn't clear enough already, the generational leadership change of the Communist Party revealed exactly what propels today's China: a frantic longing for better tomorrows, the same fuel that fired the revolution of Mao -- but with a profit motive.

The departing top man, Jiang Zemin, used the word "new" 90 times in his speech to open the Communist Party Congress, and official media obediently counted them up. Hu Jintao, Jiang's newly ascended successor, invoked the notion repeatedly Friday, talking of a "new situation," a "new century," a "new phase."

"New thought and new ideas dominate," the Beijing Evening News enthused.

The communists have been experimenting with ways to stamp their vision onto China's unique society for 53 years now, and recent history is littered with promises of progress that failed, from the disastrous Great Leap Forward to the excruciating Cultural Revolution. But since shortly after Mao Zedong died in 1976, the future has been increasingly about cash.

It's not just that China is obsessed with changing, which it must do to keep its 1.3 billion citizens fed, at work and too busy making money to turn against the party. It's also that the leadership desperately needs to swagger about its evolution -- and persuade the world that the changes are no threat.

Struggle to maintain rule

Together, those twin motifs will define the next decade of Chinese communism as the party wrestles to maintain its rule over a civilization many millennia old.

As head communist, and as the likely president from next March, Hu will probably have less control over China than any party leader before him. He will rule by committee and internal consensus, probably even more so than Jiang did. But more significantly, Hu's predecessor has left him with the chaos of a free market waiting in the wings.

Jiang's oddly named "Three Represents" doctrine, now party policy, does what no one would have dared mention while Mao was alive: It makes a communist out of a capitalist, a deft deployment of pragmatism that has been adeptly hidden within reams of party literature.

Jiang's patron, the late Deng Xiaoping, saw it first -- the arrival of an invader that even the Great Wall couldn't repel. When Deng began to open China in the late 1970s, he realized ideology couldn't prevent his people from wanting Nikes and Cokes. So he co-opted them instead.

The result was the "socialist market economy," which seemed a linguistic paradox in a self-declared dictatorship of the masses. Yet foreign investment is pushing up the masses' living standards like never before, and the social forces that have been unleashed are tearing across the land.

China -- the same China where, as recently as 1980, refrigeratorless residents of the capital cooled their cabbages on rooftops during winter -- now has suburban developments, roads choked with Mercedes-Benzes and a busy market in fake Gap merchandise. It now has one of the things Mao feared most -- a middle class.

The trouble is, that rush to prosperity also means less control.

Less control of the market is the most obvious change. The days of the party redirecting the economy on whim are long gone. But even more momentous is the fallout from what leaders call "kaifang," or "opening-up."

No social safety net

Economic reforms have yanked away the lifetime social safety net known as the "iron rice bowl" from employees of state companies; 26 million have been laid off in the past four years. Many are angry, and some are protesting and becoming violent. Corruption thrives in the party, and crime is rising on the streets.

While its economy may be opening, China remains a police state. Luo Gan, one of the leaders of Hu's New Openness generation, is doing his utmost to control the Internet and prevent Chinese from seeing ideas that might get them thinking about who rules them. Dissenters and followers of "unauthorized" religions are arrested.

China calls them criminals and wonders aloud why the democracies don't get it. To the Chinese government, at this moment in history, it's the economy, stupid.

All the same, yesterday hangs heavy over China. Newscasts still talk regularly of Maoist ideology and Marxist thought, but never mention the rights and wrongs of the 1989 crackdown on democracy campaigners at Tiananmen Square.

"China's tomorrow will surely be better," Hu said Friday. On that count the new boss is determined to be right, even if the bourgeois running dogs have overrun the house.

Mao's children have defied the Great Helmsman, but they are honoring him, too. They're hard at work building his robust tomorrow -- still pushed onward by that vision of Chinese utopia, retooled for a brand-new century in a way no five-year plan ever could have imagined.

------

EDITOR'S NOTE -- Ted Anthony is China news editor for The Associated Press.