Identifier
Created
Classification
Origin
09BEIJING904
2009-04-03 10:33:00
CONFIDENTIAL
Embassy Beijing
Cable title:  

LEADING DEMOCRACY THEORIST YU KEPING EXPOUNDS ON

Tags:  PGOV PHUM KDEM CH 
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VZCZCXRO8706
OO RUEHCN RUEHGH RUEHVC
DE RUEHBJ #0904/01 0931033
ZNY CCCCC ZZH
O 031033Z APR 09
FM AMEMBASSY BEIJING
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC IMMEDIATE 3272
INFO RUEHOO/CHINA POSTS COLLECTIVE
RHEHNSC/NSC WASHDC
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
-------

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