Strong Calls for Change on Eve of China’s National Congress

BEIJING â€" Amid lots of Communist red in the Great Hall of the People on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, China’s Parliament, the National People’s Congress, opens Tuesday with some delegates issuing strong calls to end the country’s re-education-through-labor camps.

“The reeducation-through-labor system to a certain extent makes citizens live in fear,” said Dai Zhongchuan, a delegate and law professor from Huaqiao University in Fujian Province, in a report by china.com.cn, the news portal of the State Council Information Office and the National Internet Information Office.

“Not to go through the courts to decide on a crime is to deprive and limit personal freedoms. Not to take steps to restrict and monitor this can very easily lead to the abuse of power,” said Mr. Dai.

The comments reflect an ongoing debate here on so-far vague plans to abolish, or reform, the unpopular, extrajudicial system of punisment set up by Mao Zedong in the 1950s to deal with political opponents of the Communist Party.

As my colleague Andrew Jacobs wrote recently, “re-education through labor has evolved into a sprawling extralegal system of 350 camps where more than 100,000 people toil in prison factories and on farms for up to four years. Sentences are meted out by local public security officials, and defendants have no access to lawyers and little chance for appeal.”

Yang Weicheng, a delegate and the head of the Qindao Law Firm in Shandong Province, said it ran counter to the legal system that China was building and to the pursuit of public justice, according to the china.com.cn report. It damages the country’s image and is in need of urgent reform, the report said.

Deng Hui, a law professor at the Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, said the system was in violation of Chi! na’s human rights treaty obligations and that change was coming. “The arrow is already on the bowstring,” the report quoted him as saying. “Not to reform is not an option.”

These and other significant issues are almost certain to be debated, often in private, at the Congress, which lasts for about 13 days and meets just once a year, unlike parliaments in democracies, which meet year-round. That means there’s a lot to talk about in a very short space of time.

The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body, also meets during this time every year in Beijing.

For weeks beforehand, special interests around the country have been lobbying the nearly 3,000 delegates to the congress try and make sure they are represented at the meeting.

Important institutional issues on the agenda: appointing Xi Jinping, the leader of the Communist Party, as state president (in Chinese, the title is chairman, or “zhuxi,” as it was during Mao Zedong’s day,) and Li eqiang as prime minister. China’s defense budget for 2013 will also be announced at the meeting. Contrary to expectations, the budget was not announced today at an opening news conference, as is customary. “You’ll know after the meeting has examined and approved it,” said Fu Ying, the congress’s newly appointed spokeswoman, holding eager reporters at arm’s length.

China’s military budget has been rising fast in recent years, but Ms. Fu said prosperity and peace in the greater Asian region, which she contrasted with turbulence elsewhere in the world, was to China’s credit. “Because what we have done is successful, in the midst of that success people should acknowledge that China’s peaceful foreign policy has played a core role,” she said.

A key issue this year: the role of state-owned enterprises. Insiders say there is a growing groundswell of support among politicians and businessmen for trying to force the powerful companies, which enjoy financial privileges such as! special,! low-interest bank loans, to privatize, or just to contribute more to public coffers, something that will be fiercely resisted by the powerful bloc.

“A group of private businessmen will meet on the sidelines to push for privatization of state firms, which they view as a ‘vital second round of reforms,’ according to a person knowledgeable about their plans,” Reuters reported.

“Fiscal reforms and changes to let private firms advance and the state retreat will decide whether this round of reforms can succeed,” Xia Bin, an economist at the cabinet think-tank Development Research Center and a former central bank adviser, told Reuters. “There is definitely no way out,” Mr. Xia wrote in the latest edition of China Finance, a magazine published by the central bank, Reuters said.

The champions of the private sector argue that private firms generate nearly 60 percent of China’s economi growth and 75 percent of jobs, Reuters reported. “Favoring state firms that thrive on political connections rather than market discipline skews the economy, undermining future competitiveness,” the news agency said.

The congress is a talking shop that approves measures already worked out by the government, and not a parliament in the democratic sense. Yet increasingly, people want it to reflect their concerns.

For a sense of just how broad is the pressure for change in this nation of over 1.3 billion people, as it experiences fast-paced social change as well as high economic growth: a leading women’s rights group, the Beijing Zhongze Women’s Legal Counseling and Service Center, issued half a dozen documents highlighting key issues it hopes will be discussed at the meeting. These include moving faster on a proposed law against domestic violence; amending laws defining the rape of someone younger than 14 differently from that of someone over 14, to the detriment of the younger vict! ims; prot! ection orders for the victims of domestic violence; and reversing a recent trend in which universities require women to score higher than men in entrance examinations as women begin to outstrip men academically.

And this year, the wining and dining that customarily precedes the congress for weeks, as special interests vie for influence among delegates, has been crimped by strong calls by Mr. Xi for less corruption and less waste of state finances.

In a sign of a different atmosphere this year, the Communist Party secretary and president of Gree, a state-owned air conditioner company based in Zhuhai in the south, Zhou Shaoqiang, was fired from his position in late February for inviting 16 officials from state-owned banks and state-owned companies to a banquet in January, where 12 bottles of red wine were consumed at a cost to the public purse of nearly 40,000 renminbi, or $6,400, Xinhua, the state news agency, reportd.