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China Charts Course for Expansion
// Priorities Include Militarization and the Export of Labor
Yesterday was the first day of the annual session of the National People's Congress (NPC), the main Chinese legislative body. The documents approved by the deputies will define the country's development strategy for the next few years, and the current session, with its regime of economic liberalization, may turn out to be one of the most crucial in the history of the People's Republic of China. The country is also pushing forward with sharp increases in its military capacity, and the NPC's expected decisions on migration policy may have serious implications for neighboring countries, including Russia.
Consolidation
The annual session of the Chinese National People's Congress, which is taking place in the Great Hall of the People on Tianamen Square in Beijing, is one of the most important events in the political life of the country. It is a completely different affair from the closed sessions of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee plenum, which take place far from prying eyes and are cloaked in a curtain of secrecy. The fifth session of the 10th NPC, in contrast, is being attended by 2,978 deputies, who are being protected by 500,000 soldiers and policemen.
The current session is the last that will take place before the upcoming Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plenum, which occurs every five years. The next party session, the 17th, is scheduled for next fall and will be Chinese Chairman Hu Jintao's first since coming to power in 2003. Mr. Hu's attitude at the upcoming party meeting will in large part depend on the outcome of the current NPC session. He has prepared the ground well: shortly before the beginning of the NPC session, not a single opponent of the chairman remained in the party's leadership.
Last September, Mr. Hu succeeded in sidelining a key opponent, CCP Shanghai Committee Secretary Chen Liangyu, who was accused of corruption and abuse of power. The allegations were followed by a wave of high-profile arrests that decimated the top ranks of the Shanghai clique. A week before the current session, the authorities arrested another nine ranking party members and businessmen in Shanghai, and it was announced at the same time that Mr. Chen had been arrested and will not be participating in the NPC session. Interestingly, China's Xinhau news agency included his arrest on a list of the "ten most important events in the process of building democracy in China."
Yesterday's session of the NPC opened with a speech by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, whose talk focused on lowering China's GDP growth from a raging 10.7% to 8% next year. Beijing is also allocating significant resources for the development of China's countryside and assistance to the rural poor. According to Mr. Wen, the government will pump approximately 392 billion yuan ($51 billion) into the countryside, a sum that is 15% more than last year. Spending on education, which currently stands at around 86 billion yuan ($11 billion) will increase by almost 42% next year, and another 209 billion yuan ($27 billion) is slated to be spent on the creation of a social security system.
In his speech, Mr. Wen largely repeated the basic development premises that he laid out at the last NPC gathering, which boil down to a single fundamental problem: bridging the income gap between the country's 400 million city residents and more than 800 million rural residents. This strategy is calculated to protect Mr. Hu's government not only from internal upheavals within the ranks but also from the possibility of revolt from below. However, Mr. Hu did not limit himself to simply repeating old chestnuts about achieving harmony in Chinese society.
Liberalization
During the NPC session, the deputies are expected to adopt a resolution reorganizing the system of "labor reeducation." A law that was introduced in 1957 allows the country's security services to send citizens to labor camps for up to four years of "reeducation" without a trial. The official goal of the system to was combat crime, but in practice it has turned into a weapon for dealing with dissenters who do not toe the party's official line. It is expected that the current NPC session will finally mean the end of prison bars, barbed wire, and towers manned by machine gunners. The camps will now be called "correction centers," and the maximum term of imprisonment will be 18 months. Most importantly, the police will no longer be able to send people to the correctional centers on their own authority – instead, confinement to a camp will require a sentence from a judge. The possible abolition of the system of labor reeducation was immediately hailed by observers as the dismantling of the most odious institution of the Chinese regime and as a harbinger of the incipient liberalization of China's political system.
The Chinese Communist Party's leadership is sending clear signals that support this view. For example, last Thursday CCP vice chairman Zeng Qinghong talked about the necessity of "strengthening democracy in the education of the cadres" and "democracy within the party." Last Friday, at the opening of the new session in Beijing of the government's top advisory body, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the conference's official spokesman declared that "some of the leaders of the democratic parties will soon take up leadership positions in the country's government." This may mean that the CCP is considering allowing individuals who are not members of the party to serve in the government.
According to Kommersant's sources, the future of modernization in the country has already been a topic of discussion in the Chinese leadership for a long time. It may turn out that the signal to begin liberalization will be given at the fall meeting of the CCP. Most likely, Beijing is considering dismantling a significant portion of the Communist system and creating in its place a new ideological core for a regime of Chinese nationalism. The most important issue for China's leadership will be to ensure that liberalization does not lead to domestic strife that could be exploited by foreign interlopers. Beijing is well-armed against that eventuality, however, with a powerful military that is slated to be beefed up even more with the consent of the NPC.
Militarization
On Sunday, NPC spokesman Jiang Enzhu announced that this year China's military budget will grow by 17.8%, to over $45 billion. This will be the largest increase in the country's military budget in five years and will finance an almost total overhaul of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, a goal on which Beijing has recently made significant progress. For example, in December of last year the Army's leadership announced that China's armed forces have acquired the first Chinese fighter jet, the J-10. A month later, China successfully tested its first anti-satellite missile. Another area of focus is improving living conditions for soldiers, which is aimed at turning the People's Liberation Army into an army of professional soldiers and a secure prop for the Chinese regime.
The latest announcement of increased Chinese military spending is causing unease in Washington, where the Pentagon is suggesting that China is spending greater sums on its military than it is owning up to. Beijing's counterargument is simple: this year, the American defense budget is $481.4 billion, almost 11 times greater than China's.
Colonization
The predicted liberalization and militarization of China are not the only tricks that the NPC has up its sleeve for this session. The deputies will also be considering an important law entitled "Concerning Relocation Assistance." Within China, the law will help Beijing direct a flood of millions of migrants from the country's rural interior to aid economic development in China's urbanized eastern provinces. The country's leadership is looking to kill two birds with one stone: while pursuing the modernization of the rural provinces, the government will also be making progress in emptying them of "dangerously explosive material" – in other words, the restless population that lives there in poverty.
The law will also create a means of providing government assistance to people who want to work abroad, of which there is an increasing number among highly-qualified specialists in China's developed provinces. Until recently, the process of leaving China was encumbered by bureaucracy, but the new law will simplifying the procedure and will give the government a monopoly on the export of labor, meaning that Beijing will be able to send its citizens to fill spots in crucial labor markets of its choosing.
In Russia, a similar phenomenon has been derided as "brain drain." Chinese workers who leave their country, however, retain strong links to home. For example, Deng Xiaoping's reforms in the 1970s and 1980s were largely made possible by the money and experience of the Chinese diaspora. Previously this diaspora was formed by those who voluntarily left China to seek work abroad, but the program now being considered would allow the government to create and support a diaspora throughout the world, a vision that is crucial to Beijing's strategy to turn China into a leading world power. The most likely targets for such migration in the near future are regions where Chinese business interests have already put down strong roots: Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Russian Far East.
Military spending in China, Russia, and the United States
| Year | Military budget (millions of USD) | Fraction of total budget (%) | Spending per soldier (USD) |
|---|
| China |
| 2007 | 44940 | 7.49 | 19973 |
| 2006 | 38100 | 7.78 | 16933 |
| 2005 | 29920 | 7.05 | 13268 |
| 2004 | 25500 | 7.89 | 10851 |
| 2003 | 22400 | 7.46 | 8960 |
| Russia |
| 2007 | 30846 | 15.05 | 28041 |
| 2006 | 23660 | 15.60 | 21509 |
| 2005 | 18801 | 17.43 | 15577 |
| 2004 | 14282 | 15.47 | 11833 |
| 2003 | 11233 | 14.69 | 9307 |
| USA |
| 2007 | 439533 | 15.71 | 306936 |
| 2006 | 470241 | 17.36 | 328151 |
| 2005 | 502475 | 20.33 | 350401 |
| 2004 | 456052 | 19.90 | 319588 |
| 2003 | 433024 | 20.07 | 309303 |
Alexander Gabuyev
All the Article in Russian as of Mar. 06, 2007
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