China, a congress for reform or just self-criticism?

Chinese President Hu Jintao has said in a keynote speech that the Communist Party he leads has fallen short of the people's expectations.

Napoleon once said “Quand la Chine s'éveillera, le monde tremblera”, which means “When China wakes, the world will tremble”. But from the tone of Chinese President’s speech, China hasn’t risen to fulfil its social and economic expectations. It can be a worry just to the rest of the world, which sees in it a rising power blowing hot and cold in every direction.

China has been a great worry to the existing capitalist power when it was implementing rigorous communist principles as it had an influence on emerging countries with communist principles. Its ideology was more frightening although at that time China was economically backward and awkward.

Today China with giant economic rise, the world economic powers are feeling the shake as it is starting to pull the rug from under their feet. It is starting to flex its muscles as it entered the world markets benefiting from trade surplus with the USA amounting to billions of dollars.

But internally, the economic boom has just widened economic disparities across China, which will make Mao Tse Tung turn in his grave with rage. Economic reforms are far from yielding popular results as the economic boom is at the expense of the poorly paid labour. Ironically, when under communism, China was waging propaganda against capitalism because according to it workers were slaves to corporations, now it is allowing these corporations to invest in it benefiting from Chinese cheap labour. In a sense, Chinese labours are just enriching Western corporations and Chinese government treasury.

Economic liberalism isn’t enough as political freedom is very restricted. What is interesting is that China has strong economic relations with the West but also strong political relations with repressive regimes as in Burma. When the West is ready for strong action in Darfur, it is opposing them because of its economic interests.

Chinese President Hu Jintao lashed out at officials who were extravagant, wasteful and corrupt. If the Chinese government fails to redress the economic situation it will have more extravagant, wasteful and corrupt officials. Unequally shared economic boom will create just a minority enjoying lifestyle as that in Shanghai and Hong Kong while the rest will be living under acute poverty which was in the first place the reason for the Communist Revolution.