300,000 ‘wrong verdicts’

Press, 30 June 1983, Page 16

300,000 ‘wrong verdicts’

From “The Economist,” London

China’s time of score-settling is over. That was the message to the country’s Parliament, the National People’s Congress, which ended its deliberations, on June 21, in Peking. Drawing a line under past “mistakes,” the congress confirmed the Communist Party’s choice of the 78-year-old veteran, Mr Li Xiannian, as China’s first President for 14 years. Mr Li, who was with Mao on the Long March and who survived both the attacks on “Rightists” during the Cultural Revolution and those on “Leftists” after the fall of the Gang of Four in 1976, is a symbol of continuity and stability. To underline the point, the congress was told that the trials of Cultural Revolution wrongdoers had ended and verdicts on 300,000 people wrongly persecuted by the radicals had been reversed.

It is another sign of the times that most of the cases now coming before China’s courts involve

economic crimes, not political deviation. That is a worry for China’s real strongman, 79-year-old Mr Deng Xiaoping, who is trying to revive the profit motive. Chairman Mao’s “iron rice bowl,” which guaranteed a job and roughly equal pay to all irrespective of effort, has been cracked if not yet broken. The Deng reforms are in their early stages and congress delegates heard plenty about their teething troubles — particularly the excessive growth of heavy industry, over-investment in capital projects and overspending by China’s provinces. But all agreed, as expected, that the reforms will continue. While Mr Deng seems confident enough to trust his main allies — the party leader, Mr Hu Yaobang, and the Prime Minister, Mr Zhao Ziyang — to get on with supervising the economic reforms, he continues to take a keen personal interest in China’s armed services.

The army is being modernised, and Mr Deng, who already heads the party’s military affairs committee, was recently “elected” head of the corresponding Government body, the central military commission. He aims to make sure the army does its modernising his way. The congress itself is largely a rubber-stamp for party appointments and policies decided in advance. Its function is to educate the delegates from China’s provinces on the correct line to take when they return home.

It does not always work that way. But at least this Parliament, the sixth since the Communists came to power in 1949, is better educated and more representative than its predecessors. Among the 2978 delegates this time were two self-employed workers, one a photographer and one a bar owner, representing the 3.2 million people who work in China’s tiny private sector.