China rewriting basic laws

For the first time since China's 1949 communist revolution, the country's Constitution will "protect the legitimate rights and interests of private enterprises," under one amendment that is virtually certain to be passed next month.

Reform-minded Chinese leaders are calling the proposed changes a great step toward jettisoning the country's revolutionary past - an era marked by violent class struggle and radical, egalitarian economics.

Yet news that the national legislature is likely to soon pass the amendments is triggering a wave of calls for a far more extensive constitutional overhaul.

Government critics say they hope the revised Constitution will help set Beijing on a course that protects basic rights and moves China along the road toward democracy.

Most of the changes drafted by the Communist Party's Central Committee, however, focus on developing a market economy - rather than on developing a free marketplace of ideas.

Another states that "The People's Republic of China should implement the principle of ruling the country by law...."

These two amendments "are aimed at replacing the command economy, where individual rulers could control the system through dictates, with a rule-based market that guarantees equal competition for state-run and private companies," says Dong Fureng, a senior legislator in China's National People's Congress.

Following the Communists' victory 50 years ago, Chairman Mao Zedong launched a war on private property. Land, factories, and farms were all forcibly nationalized, while landlords and business owners were branded counterrevolutionaries and executed or jailed.

Everyone was vulnerable

During the violent Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, Mao branded millions of suspected critics as "class enemies" and unleashed his stormtroopers on everyone from judges to monks to the Chinese president.

Mao's destruction of the legal system, churches, and anyone who protested "transformed China into a nation of political serfs," says a former official who asked not to be identified.

"At that time, the Chinese constitution was a farce," says Cao Siyuan, an economist who helped draft China's first bankruptcy law a decade ago.

"If [the] president couldn't use the Constitution to protect himself, how much less could ordinary citizens rely on the law?" he asks.

In an unusually frank admission of the party's destructive past, party chief and President Jiang Zemin was quoted recently in the state press as saying "the blatant trampling of the Constitution during the turbulent Cultural Revolution will never be repeated."

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