Identifier
Created
Classification
Origin
06SHANGHAI6460
2006-10-12 04:29:00
CONFIDENTIAL
Consulate Shanghai
Cable title:  

SHANGHAI CHINA CONFERENCE A PRELUDE TO 6TH PLENUM

Tags:  PGOV PINR EINV ECON CH 
pdf how-to read a cable
VZCZCXRO6544
RR RUEHCN RUEHVC
DE RUEHGH #6460/01 2850429
ZNY CCCCC ZZH
R 120429Z OCT 06
FM AMCONSUL SHANGHAI
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC 4651
INFO RUEHOO/CHINA POSTS COLLECTIVE
RUCPDOC/USDOC WASHDC 0093
RHEHNSC/WHITE HOUSE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL WASHINGTON DC
RUEATRS/DEPT OF TREASURY WASHINGTON DC
RUEHGH/AMCONSUL SHANGHAI 4936
C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 05 SHANGHAI 006460 

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

DEPT FOR EAP/CM, INR/B AND INR/EAP
STATE PASS USTR FOR STRATFORD, WINTER, MCCARTIN, ALTBACH
TREAS FOR OASIA - DOHNER/CUSHMAN
USDOC FOR ITA/MAC - ADAS MELCHER, MCQUEEN
NSC FOR WILDER AND TONG

E.O. 12958: DECL: 10/12/2031
TAGS: PGOV PINR EINV ECON CH
SUBJECT: SHANGHAI CHINA CONFERENCE A PRELUDE TO 6TH PLENUM

REF: A) SHANGHAI 6459; B) SHANGHAI 3843; C) SHANGHAI 155; D) SHANGHAI 3844

SHANGHAI 00006460 001.2 OF 005


CLASSIFIED BY: Simon Schuchat , DPO, U.S. Consulate, Shanghai,
Department of State.
REASON: 1.4 (b),(d)



C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 05 SHANGHAI 006460

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

DEPT FOR EAP/CM, INR/B AND INR/EAP
STATE PASS USTR FOR STRATFORD, WINTER, MCCARTIN, ALTBACH
TREAS FOR OASIA - DOHNER/CUSHMAN
USDOC FOR ITA/MAC - ADAS MELCHER, MCQUEEN
NSC FOR WILDER AND TONG

E.O. 12958: DECL: 10/12/2031
TAGS: PGOV PINR EINV ECON CH
SUBJECT: SHANGHAI CHINA CONFERENCE A PRELUDE TO 6TH PLENUM

REF: A) SHANGHAI 6459; B) SHANGHAI 3843; C) SHANGHAI 155; D) SHANGHAI 3844

SHANGHAI 00006460 001.2 OF 005


CLASSIFIED BY: Simon Schuchat , DPO, U.S. Consulate, Shanghai,
Department of State.
REASON: 1.4 (b),(d)




1. (C). Summary. During an international conference of China
Studies, top Chinese scholars discussed China's political
development and foreign policy, in a prelude to discussions at
the October 2006 Plenum and even the 2007 Party Congress.
Chinese scholars characterized China as committed to the
concepts of "Peaceful Development," "Peaceful Rise," and a
"Harmonious World." They also noted that Chinese economic
development was intertwined with political reform, that China
was promoting its own style of "consultative democracy," and
would not adopt Western-style democracy. End Summary



-------------- --------------
An Authoritative Prelude to the Plenum for Foreign Scholars
-------------- --------------




2. (C) From September 20-22, the Shanghai Academy of Social
Sciences (SASS) hosted the Second World Forum on China Studies,
with the theme "China and the World: Harmony and Peace." The
timing of the conference and the constant barrage of propaganda
left little doubt in the minds of many conference attendees that
the meetings were meant to showcase and explain to the foreign
scholarly community party doctrines that would be discussed at
the upcoming Plenum. As Fudan Public Affairs School Researcher
and conference attendee Hu Xiaoxiu said, there was no mistaking
that the conference theme was related to the Plenum (which in
fact showcased the concept of a "socialist harmonious society")
and President Hu's continued stress of the "Harmony" theme in
the run up to next year's 17th Party Congress.




3. (C) Underscoring the importance of the conference was the

fact that both senior foreign policy advisor and China Forum on
Reform and Opening Up President Zheng Bijian and Central Party
School (CPS) Vice President Li Junru delivered remarks at the
conference. Zheng developed the "China's Peaceful Rise" and
"Harmonious World" concepts (Ref A). Li is China's leading
expert on "consultative democracy" and a close advisor to both
Vice President Zeng Qinghong and, more recently, President Hu
Jintao, according to George Washington University Professor
David Shambaugh who also attended the conference. The CPS was a
silent co-sponsor, further highlighting the conference's
importance in the run up to the Plenum. Although there were no
outward signs indicating CPS involvement, CPS Politics and Law
Professor Liu Yongyan told Poloff that the CPS had selected the
conference theme and helped SASS pull together the invitees name
list.



-------------- --------------
Zheng Bijian: China Seeks for Peace and a Harmonious World
-------------- --------------




4. (U) In his opening speech to the conference, Professor Zheng
stressed that China's development had been and would remain
peaceful. China insisted on peaceful development, refused to
seek hegemony, and was looking for "cooperative development,"
explaining that this was "China's Road" to building a
"harmonious, civilized, and democratic society." Zheng
explained that China's road toward peaceful development had five
elements:



-- China's development stage would last 70 years, from the end
of the 1970s to the middle of the 21st Century.



-- During this 70 year period, China would be focused on

SHANGHAI 00006460 002.2 OF 005


resolving the questions of the right to exist, the right to
develop, and the right to education. China was busy with its
domestic issues and had no time, energy, or need to threaten
others. Of course, Zheng added, even after it was developed,
China would continue in its peaceful ways.



-- China would stress self-reliance, developing its internal
market, promoting domestic science and technology development,
rejuvenating Chinese culture, and transforming and increasing
its industrial capacity, even while globalizing its economy and
striving for "win-win" international relations.



-- China would strive for harmony at home and peace abroad
through its international commitments and domestic covenants.



-- Finally, over the next 50 years, China would seek to restore
Chinese civilization through an unceasing spirit of rejuvenation.




5. (U) Zheng elaborated on the "Chinese Dream," which, he said,
determined China's path of peaceful development. The Chinese
people deeply understood the evils of rule by force and the
value of peace. To that end, China sought first to protect its
national sovereignty and maintain its territorial integrity.
Second, China sought to realize national development and
modernization through peaceful and civilized means. "China's
Road" and the "Chinese Dream" led to what Zheng referred to as
the "Chinese Heart," which was 1.3 to 1.5 billion Chinese people
actively establishing a "harmonious China" while simultaneously
seeking the establishment of a "harmonious world" Developing a
"harmonious world", Zheng said, was a precondition for China's
peaceful development (Ref A).



-------------- --------------
Li Junru: Political Reform Is And Has Been Underway
-------------- --------------




6. (U) In his address to the conference, CPS Vice President Li
Junru said that there was a "big misunderstanding" that China's
reforms had only been economic and that China had avoided
political reforms. In fact, there were at least eight areas on
which the Party had focused over the past 20 plus years as it
implemented political structural reform.



-- The use of economic reform to promote reform of the political
system.



-- Combining democracy with the legal system, stressing that
democracy needed to be institutionalized and legalized.



-- Combining reform of the political system with improvement of
people's lives, to ensure that the people benefited directly
from political reforms.



-- Building grassroots self governance and thereby strengthening
the rule of law nationwide. (Li cited the establishment of
village, and neighborhood committees, professional
representation conferences, and direct village elections in the
countryside as examples of grassroots self governance
initiatives.)



-- Improving the "political and party system with Chinese
characteristics" by allowing other parties to participate

SHANGHAI 00006460 003.2 OF 005


lawfully with the ruling party.



-- Strengthening inner-party democracy to promote "people's
democracy." Li said that along these lines, the Party had
abolished the life-long tenure system, creating job
opportunities for capable people through fair competition.



-- Combining legal supervision and administrative supervision
with direct supervision by the people and improving the public
supervisory and letters and visits systems (Ref B). Li said
that the media's participation in the supervisory system had
also been instrumental in China's democratic development.



-- Finally, combining election-based democracy with consultative
democracy and improving people's "orderly participation" in
politics.



--------------
Get off Our Backs, We've Got Democracy
--------------




7. (U) During a panel entitled "The Goals and Trends of
Contemporary Political Development," CPS Professor Liu Yongyan
asserted that China had democracy, based on the work of the
Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC),an
appointed body whose job it was to understand grassroots issues
and recommend solutions and policy adjustments (Ref C).
According to SASS Deng Xiaoping Theory Institute researcher
Cheng Weili, the CPPCC was instrumental in helping subordinate
the individual interests of the various parties to the overall
national interest. Cheng explained that a consultative
democracy required equal status for all participants, free and
open discussion, the right to criticize others' opinions, and
consensus to be reached after negotiations and consultations.
This kind of democracy emphasized procedure and equality before
the law, including leaders of the ruling party. Cheng, himself
a CPPCC member, noted that some within the Party who wanted to
"avoid" democracy. Those Party members failed to understand
that "without the consultative democratic system, there could be
no Socialism in China," according to Cheng.




8. (U) Liu argued that there were many different types of
democracies and all were legitimate. Although China was
committed to reform of its People's Congress system, it would
not copy Western democratic practices, since those practices did
not conform to China's reality. Li Junru then chided some
Chinese scholars for always clamoring for Western-style
multi-party democracy, adding that it was ludicrous to presume
China could adopt another country's system. Li joked that the
population of all the developed countries combined was 1.3
billion; when they could all get together and elect a president,
then China could do so too.



-------------- --------------
Scientific Development and Harmonious Society Are Key
-------------- --------------




9. (U) According to Chinese scholar Jia Jianfang, to safeguard
China's political system, China needed to focus on building a
"Harmonious Society." He explained that past economic reforms
had produced growing societal conflicts in China arising from
corruption, uneven distribution of income, and unbalanced
development. Jia said that the "Harmonious Society" concept was
aimed at resolving these conflicts by establishing harmony
between people, between people and society, and between people
and nature. To achieve a "Harmonious Society," the Party needed
a "human based approach" that utilized Scientific Development to
balance regional disparities and address the rural/urban divide.

SHANGHAI 00006460 004.2 OF 005


Such a society needed to be constructed on the basis of
equality and the rule of law, requiring transparency, elections,
public participation, and protection of human rights, according
to Jia. He also said that societal "harmony" required a society
to have a shared set of values and applauded Hu's proposed
Socialist concept of the "The Eight Honors and Eight Shames" for
inculcating such values (Ref D).



--------------
Papa's Got a Brand New Ideology
--------------




10. (U) Central Party School researcher Dai Yanjun explained
the importance of ideology for any country and the specific
ideological work China faced. Dai claimed that a ruling party
could not remain in power if its ideas were not in harmony with
the people. If, however, the ruling party's ideology correctly
represented the interests of the majority, the ruling party
could do its job well. The CCP, Dai said, was facing new
challenges regarding its ideological work:



-- competing ideologies seeping in from the outside world;



-- the shift toward a market economy from its traditional
socialist planned economy;



-- social disparities and conflicts arising from reforms;



-- and a freer flow of information due to the development of
information technology.




11. (C) To face these challenges, the Party needed to adapt.
It needed to better understand the needs of the new classes that
were emerging as a result of reforms and be applicable to every
person in every condition. It needed to be practical, easily
understood, and widely disseminated. To that end, propaganda
officials needed to better understand the Internet in order to
expand the Party's influence online and control the guidance of
web pages. (Comment: We took the subtext of Dai's speech to be
the claim that in order to remain relevant, the Party needed a
new ideology that truly reflected the needs of the people, such
as the "putting people first" mantra of Hu's Harmonious Society.
End comment.)



--------------
China's Peaceful Place in the World
--------------




12. (SBU) During a panel on "China's Peaceful Development and
the International System" Renmin University International
Relations School Professor Jin Canrong claimed that the Chinese
government had struck the term "rise" from its vocabulary,
noting that China would stick to "peaceful development." (Note:
Although the government had struck "rise" from its vocabulary,
scholars, including those at the conference, continued to use
it. See Ref A. End note.) China was still a developing
country, according to Jin, not a "superpower" as some Western
academics believed. Peking Normal University History Professor
Zhang Hongyi argued that China was "not capable" of aggression
and was dedicated to peace. China would be able to make a
positive contribution to the world if it was able to rise
peacefully, but to do so China first had to solve its internal
problems. Chinese Academy of Social Sciences History Professor
Cai Penghong added that the Chinese government's position was
that China was an active participant and actor in the
international system. China's rise was impacting the world

SHANGHAI 00006460 005.2 OF 005


order. Although the United States was still dominant, it had
benefited from China's growth. Cai said that China was seeking
a "win-win situation" and opined that there should not be one
single country that takes the lead on everything.



--------------
Comment: Ignore the Man Behind the Curtain!
--------------




13. (C) The Party devoted a lot of resources towards trying to
convince the international scholarly community that it was an
internationally benign democratic dictatorship focused on making
life better and "harmonious" for its people and the world.
Chinese scholars' claims that China's gradual rise since the
beginning of the reform era has been peaceful, and that the PRC
was incapable of aggression, however, appeared to turn a blind
eye towards its history of violent border conflicts, not to
mention continued internal repression of its own population.
Moreover, scholarly insistence that China had its own form of
democracy and that Western-style democracy was simply not suited
for China appeared to us a mere rationale for continued CCP
rule. However, calls for greater transparency, public
participation, and strengthening of the People's Congress system
suggest the direction that some, at least, within the Party hope
to take.




14. (C) It is difficult to assess the personal commitment of
the scholars at the conference to the Party line which they were
spouting. Some, no doubt, fully believe what they say. But
others may not. For instance, on October 6, Wenling City Deputy
Propaganda Chief Chen Yiming (protect) who is formulating
grassroots democratic reforms in Zhejiang Province, told Poloff
that CPS Vice President Li--whom Chen has interacted with in the
past--was actually supportive of genuine Western-style
democratic reform, but was unable to discuss such things
publicly. In an aside, CPS Professor Liu also confided to
Poloff that she admired U.S. democracy and had studied the works
of the American founding fathers. End comment.
JARRETT