No Gorbachevs

Lowering expectations from China's Party Congress

The Third Plenum of the 18th Party Congress may sound like boilerplate Communist-speak for just another meeting of party apparatchiks, but the confab that began on November 9 and continues through Tuesday has the potential to be the most significant in decades. Even before he was formally elected president in March this year, Xi Jinping projected himself as a committed reformer. As with any major leadership change anywhere in the world - but even more so in China, because it is a dictatorship - different sections of society have in turn projected their hopes upon the burly president, variously hoping that his government will liberalise controls on the renminbi or grant rural migrants to the cities full residency rights. Some have even hoped he will be the economic and political liberal his father proved to be as a party leader in the relatively freewheeling southern province of Guangdong. With growth slowing, curtailing the clout of huge state-owned enterprises (SOEs) - which, like India's public sector, handicap the economy - is more urgent than ever. With disaffection - and violent protests - among China's farmers growing because local village cadres arbitrarily seize farmers' land that is held in collectives, the pressure to make private ownership of farm land possible is growing.

That is quite a laundry list, but as so often in the recent past in China, hopes for bold economic and political reforms are likely to be dashed. The reason is that even in a dictatorship like China's, Mr Xi must pay heed to the different factions within the party. Bosses of SOEs are powerful party officials, who often go on from such jobs to become the political heads of large provinces. They will fight attempts to rein in the power of the SOEs. The same applies to local government officials who make easy money off land sales of village land that is held communally. They will resist pilot attempts such as those in Guangdong to allow villagers to take mortgages to own their land.

For those optimistic enough to parse Chinese Communist leaders' speeches for hints that they are Gorbachevs in the making, Mr Xi has offered little in the past six months to suggest that he is a political reformer. Allowing China's masses to express themselves more freely, let alone choose local leaders, is likely off the table. One can only hope that the humane demand of several leading editors a couple of years ago that Beijing grant residency rights in the cities, or hukou, to the more than 100 million rural migrants who work in factories and the service sector away from their hometowns is finally addressed. Doing so would put the exchequer of local governments under some strain because they would have to provide health care and social services to these migrants, but it is the right thing to do. The betting is that Mr Xi's reforms are likely to be restricted to further opening up the financial sector and loosening capital account controls. China's dictatorship is not as nimble as it is often supposed to be, in part because even one-party systems have factions. Bold reform is needed in China today, but, other than having a photogenic wife, Mr Xi shows no signs of being a Gorbachev in the making.