August 7, 2008
China’s Leaders Are Resilient in Face of Change
By JIM YARDLEY
BEIJING — As Beijing was starting construction on its main Olympic stadiums four years ago, China’s vice
president and leading political fixer, Zeng Qinghong, warned the 70 million members of the ruling
Communist Party that the party itself could use some reconstruction.
Mr. Zeng argued that the “painful lessons” from the collapse of other Communist parties in the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe could not be ignored. He said China’s cadres needed to “wake up” and realize that “a
party’s status as a party in power does not necessarily last as long as the party does.”
Mr. Zeng, who is now retired, was alluding to the pressures of economic liberalization, political stagnation
and globalization that many analysts have argued would ultimately topple one-party rule in China. The
Olympics also posed a pressure point as some analysts wondered whether the expectations and
international scrutiny brought by the Games might help crack open another authoritarian political system —
as happened in Seoul in 1988.
But if the Olympics have presented unmistakable challenges and crises, the Communist Party has proved
resilient. Public appetite for reform has not waned, but the short-term byproduct of the Olympics has been
a surge in Chinese patriotism that bolstered the party against international criticism after its crackdown on
Tibetan protesters in March and the controversy over the international Olympic torch relay.
Economic and social change is so rapid in China that the Communist Party is sometimes depicted as an
overwhelmed caretaker. But in the seven years since Beijing was awarded the Games, the party has adapted
and navigated its way forward, loosening its grip on elements of society even as it crushes or co-opts threats
to its hold on political power.
The party has absorbed entrepreneurs, urban professionals and university students into an elite class that is
invested in the political status quo, if not necessarily enthralled with it. Private ca