It's Official: Yuppies Are China's New Role Models

by Antoaneta Bezlova

Marking Labor Day on May 1, China canonized private entrepreneurs as "model workers" -- an honor that in the past was reserved solely for state sector workers.

On that day, the All China Federation of Trade Unions awarded Labor Medals to four private businessmen, and declared another 17 entrepreneurs in the northwestern province of Shaanxi "model workers."

"It is a breakthrough," federation president Li Qisheng was quoted as saying by the state Xinhua News agency.

Indeed, the move shows that the Communist Party is going ahead with plans to enlist business leaders as party members.

President Jiang Zemin formally opened the doors of the party to private entrepreneurs in July last year, acknowledging the increasing role that 1.5 million private firms are playing in supporting the economy and absorbing workers laid off from ailing state companies.

Jiang's theory of the "Three Representatives" -- which holds that the party must represent the foremost production forces, the most advanced culture and the broad interests of the masses -- aims to broaden the base of the party by transforming it into a "party of the whole people."

One of the Shaanxi model workers, the head of the Dongsheng Group pharmaceutical conglomerate Guo Jiaxue, told Xinhua: "It shows that as a new social rank, our strong desire for social honor and political kudos has been recognized by the state."

As the Communist Party tries to position itself as representing a broader spectrum of society -- rather than just the proletariat -- it is being forced to compromise with some of the core maxims of communist ideology.

In a major turnabout since the days of early Communist China when Chairman Mao Zedong extolled the masses to struggle against their class enemies, the party these days has abandoned the notion of "class struggle."

A new official study made public in December unveiled a new class model of China -- with the country having 10 classes instead of the orthodox three communist classes of workers, farmers and intellectuals.

Conducted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and supervised by the academy chief Li Tieying, a member of the powerful party Politburo, the study openly admitted that class theories developed by Karl Marx and Mao Zedong for bygone eras were no longer applicable to China's fast developing society.

Lu Xueyi, a sociologist at the academy, says the theories of Mao Zedong and Karl Marx emphasized the struggle between the classes in guiding the revolution.

According to Mao, the enemies of the communists were the landlord class and the comprador class as well as the bourgeoisie -- or the people with money and power.

"In modern China the focus is not longer on class confrontation but on developing the economy," argues Lu. "We see the formation of a middle class in China and the old class models can't illustrate this new, more complicated stratification of the society."

The new study, which took three years to complete, concludes that China now has a social structure with 10 classes. While Mao had grouped people into three classes according to their political and household backgrounds, the new study identified these 10 classes based on people's economic and cultural resources and their party membership.

At the top of China's contemporary social stratum is a class comprising 2.1 percent of the population -- senior party and government officials. At the bottom are the urban unemployed and seasonal laborers, which account for 3.1 percent of the population.

The study found out that while the size of peasant class has shrunk from 67 percent to 44 in the last two decades, farmers continue to have little income and are poorly educated. Significantly, the survey recognized private entrepreneurs and small businessmen as new classes whose sizes are growing.

More unexpectedly, the study concluded that in many places the communist party was better represented among the private entrepreneurs and urban professionals than among workers and peasants who previously were its main supporters.

Analysts see the study as an attempt by the party to stop identifying itself only with the poor and socially deprived, and to become a representative of the rich and powerful, or those whom Mao Zedong saw as "enemies."

This ideological contortion drew a rare apology from Premier Zhu Rongji this spring. In his state-of-the-nation address at the opening of the China's annual parliamentary session in March, Zhu admitted the party has failed to address the social grievances of its main supporters -- the workers and the peasantry.

In his speech marking the Communist Party' s 80th anniversary last year, President Jiang explained the decision to admit businessmen into the party and said it was done out of the need to "expand our popular support and increase our social influence."

And while the appeal of party membership for private entrepreneurs is growing, the urban jobless scoff at the idea of Communist Party somehow improving their downtrodden life.

"We no longer love each other," said Liu Wei, a laid-off state worker-turned-cab driver. "The Communist Party courts those who have money and pay high taxes."