LEADING DEMOCRACY THEORIST YU KEPING EXPOUNDS ON

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 05 BEIJING 000904 SIPDIS E.O. 12958: DECL: 04/03/2034 TAGS: PGOV PHUM KDEM CH SUBJECT: LEADING DEMOCRACY THEORIST YU KEPING EXPOUNDS ON POLITICAL REFORM REF: A. OSC 20090316968061 ¶B. OSC CPP20070108332001 ¶C. BEIJING 303 Classified By: Acting Deputy Chief of Mission William Weinstein. Reaso ns 1.4 (b) and (d). SUMMARY -------------- ¶1. (C) Political reform in China was continuing despite recent economic setbacks, prominent Communist Party democracy theorist Yu Keping (protect) told A/DCM March 26. Chinese-style democracy should eventually include competitive elections, rule of law, and checks and balances, Yu said. Democratization would proceed from internal Party reform to society at large, from the grassroots up the administrative chain and from single- to multi-candidate elections. There were a variety of local-level political reform experiments ongoing, including many "semi-competitive" election pilots for government and party leaders. The impulse for such reform projects originated with the central leadership, citizen pressure and local leaders. There had been enormous political change over the past 30 years, including the "institutionalization" of the tenure and power transfer of top leaders, "consultations" for Central Committee and Politburo positions and progress in the "professionalization" of the judiciary and legislature. Yu strongly denied that he was an "advisor" to President Hu Jintao, as some media reports had claimed, asserting that his access to the top leadership was institutional, not personal, due to his position within the Party. Comment: Unusual for a Party cadre, Yu came across as committed to pushing democratic reform in China, an impression that tracks with comments made by contacts who know him well. End Summary. YU KEPING: CHINA'S MOST FAMOUS POLITICAL THEORIST? -------------- -------------- ¶2. (C) Prominent Chinese Communist Party (CCP) political theorist Yu Keping and several of his colleagues provided a broad assessment of the status of political reform in China during a March 26 lunch hosted by Yu for A/DCM. Yu, one of China's most visible public advocates for steady movement toward "democracy," generated considerable controversy in late 2006 for his article "Democracy is a Good Thing," published in the Central Party School Paper "Study Times" (Xuexi Shibao) (ref B). The article was later reprinted in mainstream Party media, widely circulated on the Internet and eventually expanded into a book. Yu's articles and talks advocating political reform appear frequently in a variety of PRC media. In a recent article in a Party magazine, for example, Yu argued that the global financial crisis offered an excellent opportunity to step up political reform. ¶3. (C) Yu Keping serves as Deputy Director and head of research at the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, a CCP Central Committee think tank, while also holding professorships at several elite Chinese universities. Yu described to A/DCM a number of ongoing experiments in "semi-competitive" elections for local government and party offices, the main features of "socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics," and the steps required to achieve it. Yu provided an introduction to the work and purpose of the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, including its various institutes and research divisions. Several of the Bureau's institute directors attended the lunch, including director of local political reform projects, Lai Hairong. (Note: Lai is Deputy Director of the China Center for Comparative Politics and Economics, which is affiliated with the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau.) "I'M NOT HU JINTAO'S ADVISOR" -------------- ¶4. (C) Yu sought to distance himself from foreign media reports claiming that he is an "advisor" to President Hu Jintao or that he has "special access" to the senior Chinese leadership. The Central Compilation and Translation Bureau itself, Yu said, had a direct relationship with top leaders, so his access was institutional, not personal. "I am not even the director," Yu quipped, adding that, "You can say you heard it directly from Yu Keping, 'I am not Hu Jintao's special advisor'." ORIGINS OF LOCAL POLITICAL REFORM EXPERIMENTS -------------- ¶5. (C) The impetus for local-level political reform pilots in various provinces originated from three sources, Yu explained: directives from the central Party leadership, BEIJING 00000904 002 OF 005 demands from local citizens, and local leaders' initiatives. First, the Party center commissioned research and pilot projects because it wanted to encourage political reform, public service, and administrative efficiency and transparency, while also wanting to curb corruption and satisfy the public. Second, local residents often put pressure on local officials to implement political reforms, including democratic elections for local government and Party officials. Yu offered the example of Sichuan Province, which he noted was not very developed economically but was a major locus of local election pilots because the people push for elections and local officials feel this pressure. Finally, local officials themselves initiated projects for their own reasons. A recent example was Li Jing, the Party Secretary in Guiyang, Guizhou Province, who was moving election pilots up from the township to the county level. Under Guiyang's experimental rules, there had to be five candidates for each office, and they had to make presentations to the public before the election. This experiment was the "most advanced in China," Yu declared. (Note: Yu and his colleagues clearly are involved in a number of local-level political experiments nationwide. Yu said he was traveling to Jiangsu Province March 26 to talk with local officials, and he planned to tell them that democracy was not about what they (the local officials) wanted but about "what the people want.") ¶6. (C) Funding for proposed reform projects involving the Compilation and Translation Bureau was always a problem, Yu said. Local governments or ministries requesting research from the Bureau had to provide the funding. However, if the Party center requested research projects, Yu joked, there was of course no money provided, as the Bureau was a central organ and thus had "already" been paid. When local governments initiated projects on their own, they had to provide at least partial funding for the project, although Yu said his Bureau could sometimes assist with the funding. WHAT IS CHINESE DEMOCRACY ANYWAY? -------------- ¶7. (C) While Chinese democracy would reflect Chinese national conditions and therefore would differ from democracy in other countries, it would nonetheless include the "common features" of democracy everywhere, Yu asserted. These common features included "elections, rule of law, and checks and balances," Yu said, noting that he disagreed with some of the other definitions of Chinese-style democracy advocated by different theorists. Democracy was not equivalent to the rule of law, should not be limited to inner-Party affairs, was not the same as the "deliberative democracy" advocated by many (because "deliberative democracy" does not include elections) and was different from the "mass democracy" of earlier periods in CCP history. (Note: "Deliberative democracy" appears to be the front-runner among theorists closely connected with the central leadership, such as Li Junru, the recently retired Vice President of the Central Party School.) ¶8. (C) China was becoming more democratic and continued to evolve, Yu averred, but "it is not easy," given China's thousands of years of (authoritarian) history. There were currently three major steps that could be taken to move China to a "higher stage" of democratic evolution. Democratic processes should first be established inside the Party, where power was currently concentrated, and then expanded outward to society at large. (Note: This idea, dubbed "inner-Party democracy," is currently official Party policy.) Even if a village head was democratically elected, Yu explained, the village Party Secretary held the real power and might be a "bad" official, making the "democratic" election meaningless. Second, the evolution of democracy should proceed from the grassroots up through the administrative hierarchy. Pilot programs for township-level elections had been instituted by the 1990s, and as Guiyang Party Secretary Li Jing's experiments demonstrated, were moving up one rung to the county level, which Yu said was a "significant development." Finally, China needed to move from single- to multiple-candidate elections, a difficult step given Chinese historical tradition and Communist Party practice. ¶9. (C) While democratic evolution would continue to be a gradual, step-by-step process, there would be "incremental" progress, including "breakthroughs" when appropriate, but not "shock therapy." Yu said cost-benefit analysis should be applied case by case to determine whether to move forward in a certain area or to scuttle a particular experiment. Because of the pace and scope of change in the current reform and opening environment, some practices should be "grandfathered," including some in the political arena. He gave the example of current inequities in the provision of housing to Party scholars. New, young scholars had to find BEIJING 00000904 003 OF 005 their own housing and pay market prices, while older cadres continued to be provided housing for free. This was "not fair" but was also "unavoidable," Yu said. SEMI-COMPETITIVE ELECTIONS -------------- ¶10. (C) Pilot projects for "semi-competitive" elections for local government or party positions could be found in many of China's provinces, said Yu's colleague Lai Hairong, but were concentrated in Sichuan, Hubei, Jiangsu and Yunnan provinces. Six to seven percent of China's 40,000 townships now held such elections for township mayor, and 15 of China's 3,000 counties had held them for township vice-mayor (11) or party secretary (four, all in Guiyang). While there was wide variation in how these elections were conducted, the two basic models were "public recommendation, public election" (gongtui gongxuan) and "public recommendation, direct election" (gongtui zhixuan),with the former being the most common for government elections and the latter limited primarily, but not exclusively, to elections for Party leadership positions. Lai said that only five or six township mayors had been elected under the "public recommendation, direct election" model, but "many" Party Secretaries had been elected by that method. ¶11. (C) In the "public recommendation, public election" model, a "preliminary election" was held to generate a slate of nominees, and then a second-phase election was held to determine who would be appointed to office. One or two candidates from the slate of nominees were selected in the preliminary phase to stand for "election" in the second phase. In an election for township mayor, for example, the nominees were chosen in a competitive process by a group comprising various people in the township. Members of this group, which Lai likened to an "electoral college," were free to propose their own candidates in addition to candidates listed by the Party. These preliminary electors typically represented 10-20 percent of the local population, but this varied, and such groups could include a significantly higher proportion of community residents. Many, but by no means all, members of these nominating groups were government or party cadres. In the "public recommendation, direct election" model, all adult community residents participated in the preliminary phase. ¶12. (C) As for Party elections, Lai said that "in theory," both models applied, but to date all of them had been the "public recommendation, direct election" type. There was no preliminary phase or "electoral college" at the township level, and all Party members voted. At the village level, however, there were sometimes two phases in which non-Party members were allowed to vote along with Party members in the preliminary phase. For example, in at least one case, Guangshui Prefecture in Hubei Province, all villagers had voted to nominate the village Party Secretary, whether they were Party members or not. ¶13. (C) Once one or more candidates had been nominated in the preliminary election, a second phase election was held to determine the winner. In the case of election to government officers, members of the local People's Congresses voted to select the new incumbent. In the event of a second-phase village Party election, all Party members voted. ¶14. (C) Asked whether he expected these election experiments to spread to other areas, Lai said this would depend on the outcome of current pilots. An assessment would be made at some point, but for now, the central leadership had remained mute on the future of such semi-competitive elections, having neither rejected nor given the green light to this model as the basis for continued political reform. (Note: Politburo Standing Committee member and PRC Vice President Xi Jinping presided over such experiments when he was Party Secretary in Zhejiang Province 2002-2007 and subsequently when he served as Party Secretary in Shanghai from March to October 2007. Other Politburo members possessing similar experience with local democracy experiments include Wang Yang, the current Guangdong Province Party Secretary and former Party Secretary of Chongqing; Bo Xilai, Chongqing Party Secretary; Yu Zhengsheng, current Shanghai Party Secretary and former Party Secretary of Hubei Province; and Li Yuanchao, who was Party Secretary in Jiangsu before assuming his current position as head of the CCP Central Organization Department.) THE OUTLOOK FOR POLITICAL REFORM -------------- ¶15. (C) The global financial crisis would not derail political reform, according to both Yu Keping and Lai Hairong. Moreover, National People's Congress (NPC) Chairman BEIJING 00000904 004 OF 005 Wu Bangguo's remarks in March (ref A) rejecting Western political models did not necessarily signal a halt to political reform experiments, Lai argued. There were two schools of thought regarding the financial crisis, Lai said, one of which viewed the prospect for new political reform experiments as unlikely while the economy was slowing, and another which saw the crisis as a catalyst for change and further reform. (Note: Subsequent to the March 26 lunch, Yu published an article in Banyuetan, a state news agency Xinhua magazine aimed at mid-level Party cadres, in which he called the financial crisis an opportunity for stepping up political reform, which he argued was as essential as economic reform to China's further modernization.) Lai said there were two ways to read Wu Bangguo's comments. One was to speculate that the leadership, via Wu's remarks, was responding to "increasing demands" for political reform, and that Wu was therefore making explicit the broad framework within which future reform experiments had to be carried out. (Note: Lai acknowledged that "Charter 08," a December 2008 call by a number of prominent intellectuals for democratic reforms (ref C),might have been a factor behind Wu's remarks, but Lai said he had not read the Charter himself and therefore "could not be sure.") The other interpretation of Wu's remarks, Lai said, was that they were a reaffirmation that China would stick to its current system, though Lai said even that interpretation did not mean that political reform would come to a halt. ¶16. (C) There had been great change in China's political order over the past 30 years, Lai asserted, provided one moved beyond a narrow focus on local election pilots and took a "broader view" of Chinese political trends. The changes included institutionalizing limits on power-holding for top Party positions and mechanisms for the peaceful transfer of power. Until the late 1990s, Lai said, top leaders had tried to hold onto power as long as they could, but now there was a ten-year limit on most positions. (Comment: Although various age "norms" have been employed within the Party in recent years, and most officials are limited to two five-year terms, there are still no formal restrictions regarding age or number of terms served for China's very most senior leaders in party and government positions.) The leadership succession in 2002 from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao as Party General Secretary was the first peaceful transfer of power in CCP history. There were now "rules" governing succession at high levels, Lai argued, claiming that the selection of Central Committee and Politburo members was more of a "consultative process" than in the past, when the Politburo Standing Committee or even the top leader had made all the selections. ¶17. (C) Professionalization of the judiciary was also moving forward, Lai claimed, even though the judiciary was still not politically independent. Similarly, in Lai's view, NPC legislators were more professional and increasingly willing to speak their minds, including expressing dissenting views. Lai cited the increasing number of negative votes on resolutions at the annual NPC as evidence of legislators' growing outspokenness. Finally, Lai pointed to continued progress in building civil society, noting in particular the involvement (with Party approval) of NGOs and civic organizations in responding to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. COMPILATION AND TRANSLATION BUREAU BACKGROUND -------------- ¶18. (C) The Central Compilation and Translation Bureau is one of the CCP Central Committee's premier think tanks, although it cooperates closely with other official research organizations such as the Central Committee's Party History Institute and the State Council's Development Research Center. According to Yu, the Bureau had two primary missions, translation and research, with a roughly fifty-fifty division of labor. The Bureau had been originally established to do translation work, translating foreign material into Chinese, primarily the Marxist classics, but also Chinese material into foreign languages, such as leaders' speeches and party/government documents. For example, the Bureau was responsible for translating Premier Wen Jiabao's most recent NPC government work report. The Bureau produces products in seven languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and Arabic. ¶19. (C) In addition to this "traditional" translation function, the Bureau serves as a Central Committee "think tank," with Yu Keping serving as head of its research division. The Bureau conducts two types of research: "academic" and "political." Academic research includes such areas as political philosophy, the history of political thought and culture. Political research, Yu explained, was done in response to Central Committee requests and carried BEIJING 00000904 005 OF 005 out in the Bureau's two institutes and five centers. The main areas of study were Marxist theory, political reform, global studies, good governance, comparative government and socio-economic systems, and European studies. Yu said the Bureau was hoping to convene a conference on Chinese and U.S. political values that would include prominent American experts on U.S. politics and prominent PRC experts on Chinese politics. The focus of the conference would be on domestic politics, not foreign policy, Yu said. Comment -------------- ¶20. (C) In our first meeting with the high-profile Yu, we found him to be an articulate and forceful spokesman for those within the Party who advocate political reform. Given his position as deputy director of one of the Party's most influential think tanks, he apparently has been given a green light to express his pro-democracy views. However, he spoke in very abstract and theoretical terms, leaving the details of local experiments to Lai, which may partially explain the leeway he apparently enjoys to publicly express his ideas. Although he came across as a self-promoter, our impression was that he is genuinely committed to pushing democratic reform in China, an observation that tracks with comments made by contacts who know him well. PICCUTA