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China : Differences in Communist Party over new reforms |
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China’s official media has rallied to the defence of President Jiang Zemin against critics who say his new reforms are “threatening the future of the Communist Party”. National Television has been showing scenes of government and military officials studying a speech Jiang made last month in which he proposed that private businessmen should be allowed to join the party. A dissenting manifesto from old-guard party socialists has objected saying that the proposal “will split the party and, if successful, will destroy the organization’s support base in the working class.”
Jiang has prepared the way by propounding a new theory to “develop” the ideas of Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong. Known as the theory of “three representations”, it says that the party should represent the majority interests of society. It rejects by implication a class-based approach to politics and legitimises the approach to private business which represents society’s “advanced productive forces”. The idea has been taken up enthusiastically in the go-ahead southern province of Guangdong. Party commentators’ manifesto argues that far from the class struggle becoming less important, it has become “increasingly vigorous”.
The text of the manifesto, circulating on the Internet, was signed by a group of former officials who describe themselves as “veteran party members of decades’ standing”. Led by former propaganda boss Deng Liqun, the group includes Yuan Mu, the chief government apologist in 1989 for the suppression of the student movement in Tiananmen Square.
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