Communist reform broadens democracy

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2007-10-18 00:00

BEIJING -- With his promise to quadruple the local GDP within three years, Chen Guohua won a landslide victory when competing for communist party chief of Longxing Township in the landlocked Chongqing Municipality.

In his five-year tenure, Chen has to make genuine efforts to achieve his highly-set economic targets, as the same people who voted for Chen would review his performance every year, and one third non-confidence votes from the total 900 Party members in Longxing may immediately remove him from the seat.

Longxing is among the 200 townships in Chongqing, Sichuan and Hubei where direct elections for communist party chiefs are experimentally organized.

Multiple candidates and contested campaigns in direct elections have already been tried for over 90 percent of village committees across the country.

Turning 86 years old and having ruled China for 58 years, the Communist Party of China (CPC) is moving step by step to further political reform. At the 17th CPC National Congress that opened on Monday, Chinese leader Hu Jintao vowed in his first political report to "deepen political restructuring".  

He acknowledged, however, the reform should go in a "correct political orientation" and under the leadership of the CPC, echoing his speech at Yale when visiting the United States in April 2006 that China would not embrace Western-style democracy although it is open to any tested experience buttressing democracy.

Hu's prudence has been endorsed by the largest rally in the CPC history. Delegates to the Party congress said the CPC's leadership, people's participation in political affairs as the country's masters and the rule of law are three footstones for "socialist democracy".

Yu Keping, deputy chief of the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, praised democracy as "the least defective" among all political institutions created and adopted by human beings.

"Comparatively, democracy is the best one in the human history, Yu said in an article queerly titled "Democracy Is A Lovely Thing", which was published early this year in the Study Times, a newspaper sponsored by the CPC Central Committee's Party School.

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