Posted on: Tuesday, December 30, 2003

EDITORIAL
China: the ultimate political hypocrisy

By now, Americans tolerate — even expect — an almost craven level of political expediency from elected leaders and candidates from both parties, as their policy positions, seemingly untethered from ideals or principle, shift in the wind.

We're asked to believe that a person who will say anything to get elected, or re-elected, has our best interests at heart. Of course, for the politicians, it's all about power; leaving the rest of us to worry about a dangerous growth in apathy as we increasingly let them get away with it.

The result for Americans may be history recycled, as wealth is once again concentrated among a privileged few, and money again rules politics in a new Gilded Age.

Bad as that sounds, it's much worse in China, where the rich are also getting much richer — but in a society that until very recently claimed to be utterly classless.

The ultimate political hypocrisy, we'd suggest, is the constitutional amendment proposed by the Chinese Communist Party last week, guaranteeing the right to private property.

Of course, capitalism has been making a comeback in China ever since Deng Xiaoping asserted that virtue and wealth were no longer mutually exclusive: "Poverty is not socialism," he said. "To be rich is glorious."

But a rapidly growing disparity between rich and poor isn't socialism, either; nor is it the "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" formula of the Communist Manifesto.

The word communism comes from the Latin word communis, which means common or belonging to all. In Mao Zedong's day, they shot thousands of landlords to make it that way.

Now it's communism that is dead in China. So why is the Communist Party the only legal political party in China?

That's hypocrisy.