At the 82^nd anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Hu Jintao delivered a long speech in a symposium on Theory of Three Representatives, organized jointly by various central institutions. It was his first public speech after he became the general secretary of CCP. The following article tries to examine the rationale of the fourth generation of the leadership of CCP.

In his verbose speech, Hu repeatedly applauded Jiang Zemin’s Theory of Three Representatives as a new achievement in Marxist development in China, led by CCP under Jiang’s leadership. He emphasized the importance of the party keeping in touch with the masses. He called upon officials to keep the safety and livelihood of the people in mind and wholeheartedly implement policies of the government to lift the needy out of difficulty. His speech was packed with glamorous rhetoric, but the question is how to put through those ideals and promises?

Hu expected that different levels of officials would actually implement the central policies. Did it mean that they had never carried out the policies? Would they take real actions just because of his recent appeal? Could the policies really get the laid-off workers and peasants out of poverty (particularly when high unemployment and rural poverty were mainly caused by the central polices)?

The answer is NO. Almost all officials lust for power and privileges. Hu urged leading cadres to build up proper values and to solve problems of conflicts of power and interests. It meant that he required them to change ideologically, but there were no actual policies of doing away with their institutional privileges. Thus, his speech was not only a useless *lesson*, but also an idealistic stuff. To achieve the goal of making all officials solve difficulties of the urban poor and peasants, there should be the implementation of political democratization, intra-party democracy, and the abolishment of cadres’ political and economic privileges, and people would become masters of the country and redress the wrong national polices because of dictatorship of CCP.

There was no mention of reforms of democratization within and outside the party. According to Apple Daily, Hu Jintao once proposed for intra-party democracy in his draft speech which led to serious attacks from the conservative within the party. He then gave it up. If it were true, it meant that the conservative still got the upper hand. Since officials and cadres of different levels have long enjoyed political and economic privileges, so it is impossible for the whole party to perform self-democratization. Even if Hu wanted to initiate radical reforms to follow predecessors like Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, he was not powerful enough to challenge forces of existing institutions and bureaucracy. His speech without touching upon the question of democracy is proof.

Undoubtedly, Hu criticized that some cadres failed to resist temptations of materialism and extreme individualism, and there were also some phenomena of corruption. He just gave a very brief description of the phenomena, but as we all know it in fact happens everywhere. This only reveals that it is the natural consequence of corrupted bureaucracy with privileges.

In order to defend official system and cadres’ privileges, China’s media has long been controlled by CCP. As a result, at the outbreak of SARS in Guangzhou and Beijing, any news about SARS was blocked. The public (particularly Hong Kong) could not immediately take precautions, which led to lots of infections and deaths of the medical workers and people. Although Chinese government fired two high-ranking officers, there still emerged calls for lifting news blockade. Li Changchun, a Politburo Standing Committee member, who is in charge of the party’s ideology and propaganda work, wrote an article in the periodical of Qiu Shi, dated 16 May, that propaganda should catch up with the reality and the masses. On the whole page of the feature titled *China’s Media Brew Great Transformation*, of Wen Hui Bao, dated 29 May, it stated that great changes were brewing in mass media. Later, on 28 June, it was reported that researches on cultural institutional reform had already been launched, which included ideology, propaganda, public opinions and others.

Meanwhile, many Chinese scholars and intellectuals have already demanded for various reforms. For example, in his paper published on the magazine of Caijing, Wu Jinlian, a well-known economist, pointed out that the crisis of SARS was a crisis of social governance, which disclosed *the most serious weakness* of governmental management of crises. He urged the government to promote prompt reforms of political and social systems soon after overcoming the crisis of SARS, and then to build up a government with openness, transparency and accountability. In the same magazine, Zhou Ruijin, the former deputy editor-in-chief of People’s Daily, also wrote an article titled *Mass Media to Shoulder the Burden of Publicizing Information*, stating that mass media should take responsibility of breaking news blockade and wrestling with unreasonable administrative hindrances.

There have been consistent calls for intra-party democracy. According to Xuexi Newspaper of the Central Party School, dated 7 July, Yu Yunyao, the general deputy of the School and Hu Jintao’s schoolmate at Qinghua University, said that a party could not be in power forever without any energetic forces. He thought that it was necessary to develop intra-party democracy, and to improve and reinforce democratic centralization. For the sake of protecting party members’ rights, he stressed the importance of improving the congress of delegates and the party committees. From the starting point of reforming institutions and mechanism, there should be intra-party democratic system representing fully the will of party members. Moreover, it was also necessary to strengthen supervisions on leaders, to reinforce intra-party system of supervisions, and to unite with others like the law, the masses, and public opinion.

In his speech, Hu issued a promise that the party would work hard for a long time to further develop the economy and to improve democracy. Actually, since there is completely no democracy in China, it is meaningless to talk of *a better democratic system*, and he even said it would come true only *after a long time*! If Hu’ proposals of putting people first all go into void, which inevitably will lead to loss of popular support, he cannot fight against the conservative in the party. It will turn out that he will become their puppet. Nevertheless, on the eve of Hu’s delivering a speech at the anniversary of the founding of the CCP, the Chinese government took further actions to regulate the media. There were two bans of *illegal* newspapers and magazines within a week in Beijing. First, Beijing New Daily, belonging to Workers’ Daily, was banned and its editorial board was also forced to dismiss, due to an article titled *Seven Signs of Disgust of China*, which was considered to have degraded the nation, insulted the authorities, and violated the rules of national news and publications. The article made a serious critique of politics, economics and society of the past and the present, and criticized that speeches of high-ranking cadres were always upheld as the golden rule. Another was the ban of the magazine of Caijing, published on 20 June, in which there were reports of Zhou Zhenyi’s case and some papers of reflections on the crisis of SARS.

These events happened even after Hu has become the general secretary of CCP. It is a big slap in his statement of *further improving democracy*, particularly on the eve of delivering the 1^st July speech.

July 2003