News
Service March 19, 2003
By CHRISTOPHER
BEIJING, March 11 — Mao warned against "capitalist roaders" overpowering China's revolution. But he perhaps never imagined that actual capitalists would one day press their cause here in his Great Hall of the People.
The presence of more than a hundred of them at the current meeting of the National People's Congress is part of the Communist Party's tightening embrace of the market economy. The assembly is a largely ritual gathering that meets for a fortnight every year to endorse the party leadership's policies. But so far the capitalist representatives have indicated that they will not be meek partners in this marriage of political power and economic muscle.
Since the opening of the Congress on March 5, several groups of pro-business representatives have issued loud public calls for a constitutional amendment to protect private property from arbitrary confiscation and marauding officials.
The national chamber of private businesses warned the legislature that the lack of secure property rights was forcing investors to send money abroad. The Congress should, it said, "make it clear that property is a citizen's basic right and give state protection to citizens' legitimate private property rights."
A group of 30 legislators from Guangdong, the booming southeastern coastal province, called for a constitutional amendment making private property "sacrosanct and inviolable." Other legislators called for special laws to protect and encourage private businesses. Government officials have made it clear that there will be no such amendment during this year's session.
Several of the business representatives attending said they expected that an amendment would be passed in the next couple of years.
One who lobbied for stronger legal protection of private property was Lou Zhongfu, a building entrepreneur from Zhejiang Province, south of Shanghai. In an interview, he explained that private businesses wanted the long-term security that clearer legal recognition would provide.
He added that representatives from the business world had also lobbied for more favorable policies from the government, especially more bank credit, much of which is currently directed to supporting government-owned factories.
Mr. Lou, 50, a short, rough-hewn man with a junior high school education, parlayed a small rural business into a huge private fortune during the 1990's. Like many other capitalist delegates, he juggles membership of the Communist Party and a distrust of sweeping political change with a robustly hands-off vision of the government's role in the economy.
"The government's functions have to change," Mr. Lou said. "It mustn't dominate and control the market. A private economy needs rule of law, not commands."
There are 133 bosses of private enterprise in the Congress, according to a senior government official. That is a sliver of the total of nearly 3,000 representatives, a great majority of whom are government officials and Communist Party members, but it is nearly three times the number in the last Congress. A new Congress is chosen every five years.
Capitalist legislators are concentrated in China's richest, most influential provinces. One representative at the Congress, Su Zengfu, 62, is the founder and chairman of Supor, a company with 3,800 employees that sold $120 million of pots and rice cookers last year.
"America is strong because its private corporations are strong," Mr. Su said, "and China is inevitably headed in the same direction."