CONFIDENTIAL
This
16. Under the general heading of political reform, the Congress could debate the role of the National People's Congress. body has become more important during the past few years, as the leadership has perceived the need for China to create a corpus of law, both in order to protect the citizen and institutions from arbitrary behaviour and in order to encourage foreign investment. Within it, and its Standing Committee, there has been a steady increase in the volume of criticism both of government proposals and of government performance. This is now talk within the Party of encouraging the National People's Congress to initiate proposals as well as react to them.
The Atmosphere of the Congress
I this has
important indirent. (positive) significame
for HK, in
1 my view.
17.
The atmosphere of the Congress will depend on the extent to which there is prior agreement within the Party leadership (the Politburo, the Secretariat and a few senior members of the Central Advisory Commission) about what the documents destined for approval by the Congress should say. It will also depend on the mood of the delegates. On the former, I would expect a pretty high degree of agreement, leading to the submission of drafts which are clear and internally consistent.
There are some in Peking who take a different view, arguing that wide cracks will remain between the centre and the left, as Deng has defined them, and that these will have to be papered over. But I believe that a new consensus has been achieved, that it will hold and that whatever equivocation proves to be necessary in the drafting will not obscure the thrust of the argument on important points.
18.
On the mood of the delegates, I am by no means sure that this will be docile. There are a lot of things about which the "grassroots" are worried. They include inflation, corruption, crime and lack of discipline among the young. If the Congress follows the pattern of the most recent session of The National People's Congress, there could be a good deal of plain speaking on these, and other issues, both in plenary and in committee. It would be wrong to take it for granted that all serious criticism of the Party's policies and performance will be stifled by careful "management".
The Thirteenth Central Committee
19.
A very important act of the Congress will be to elect a new Central Committee. I was told the other day by a Vice-Chairman of the State Economic Commission that the process of drawing up (he called it "brewing up") a slate for the new Central Committee had not so far been taken very far and that, when serious work began, account would have to be taken of the claims to representation of many different interests (he also told me that the processes of selecting military and civilian delegates to the Congress were separate and distinct). Zhou Nan, the Vice-Minister responsible for Western Europe in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, had told me much the same thing a little earlier. He had added that he doubted whether his Ministry could hope to secure more than the four places which it has on the present Central Committee. These statements suggest to me that the composition of the new Central Committee will be the outcome of a process of bargaining among established interests and not the outcome of factional infighting.
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