let me tell you about Sweden

Yes indeed: let me tell you.

So goes a commentary at Southern Weekend, translated at Black and White Cat. Meanwhile, over at Jamestown’s China Brief:

The retired vice-president of the People's University, Xie Tao, created a stir in the spring when he noted in a party journal that "the CCP's only way out is through [embracing] democratic socialism" of the West European variety. "Only constitutional democracy can fundamentally solve the ruling party's problems of corruption and graft," he wrote in the respected journal Yanhuang Chunqiu [Across the Ages]. "Only democratic socialism can save China." Xie cites Switzerland as a model for a largely egalitarian society with adequate welfare benefits as well as full protection of the rights of workers and farmers (Yanhuang Chunqiu, February 2007). After all, the central plank of the Hu-Wen administration's "putting people first" platform is precisely raising the socioeconomic standards of the country's disadvantaged classes, a goal that has remained illusory so far.

In a similar vein, Chairman Mao's one-time secretary Li Rui has openly called for the adoption of Scandinavian-style democratic socialism. Li, one of President Hu's early mentors, said he agreed with late patriarch Deng Xiaoping that most party members were not even sure what socialism meant. "Yet we can be sure of one thing," Li wrote recently. "Socialism cannot do without democracy; and it cannot do without rule of law"

The Switzerland thing is the clue here. “Socialism” means whatever the people who say it want it to mean. The wider point is that the Western European left is the model you use to talk about democracy these days in China. It’s useful from a Beijingology point of view because it provides backhanded confirmation of the Hu/Wen regime’s general economic and social objectives.

Back in the Jiang era, the CPC was a “Blue China” party, that is to say the party of the Eastern seaboard, the coastal cities, the new rich and special zones. Hu Jintao was a product of “Yellow China” – the interior provinces, the Communist Youth League, the “san nong”, the great interior urban fiefdoms like Wuhan and Chengdu, the government orientation of Beijing rather than the business orientation of Shanghai. His premier Wen Jiabao is a Blue China man with a background in 1980’s era political and economic liberalism and formerly a close aide of Zhao Ziyang. Since the Premier in China is responsible for economic policy it was unclear at first whether “Blue” or “Yellow” was dominant under Hu. A couple of years ago, the policy was “guard against the Right and oppose the Left.” Now it seems that things may have shifted a little more in a Yellow China direction.

Back in Blue China days, the US was extolled as an object of learning as a means of trying to pull back China’s hyper-capitalism from collapsing into the simple notion that every man should be able to keep what he could seize. Likewise the Scandinavian focus of recent critiques is aimed, in my view, to stop the current government’s more egalitarian orientation succumbing completely to its inherent tendencies towards authoritarian populism and nationalism.

Me, I’m just fine with Scandinavian models as I’m sure many people are in China. But the main point is that locals who want more freedom are working on the Communist Party they currently have.