在上海最繁华的商业街的中心，在一片高档餐厅与一块巨幅古驰(Gucci)广告之间，矗立着一幢古旧的小石楼，中国共产党最受人景仰的场所之一就在这幢楼里。
在外面的街上，一名贩卖拨浪鼓的小贩表示不知道这是什么楼。然而，90年前的这个月，新成立的中国共产党的13名成员就是在这幢楼里举行了第一次全国代表大会。
正当这名小贩要回答对中共及其长达60年的统治有什么看法时，“新天地”——一座高档购物中心——的一名保安把他赶走了。“共产党很伟大，很伟大。好，我这就走，这就走。”慌忙走开的小贩回头喊道。
中共在1921年成立时，代表的正是像他这样的民众。但今天，人们普遍认为它代表着权贵阶层的既得利益——这类人在新天地吃一顿饭的钱，比这名小贩一整年挣的钱还多。
在成立90周年的里程碑时刻，中共发现自己正处于一个紧要关头：明年将迎来十年一次的领导层换届；中国收入不平等程度已达世界最高水平；30年来对稳固其地位起到重大作用的经济增长模式开始势衰力竭，而关于今后如何确保自身的长久存在，党内缺乏共识。
中共有8000多万党员，是世界最大的政治组织。尽管该党坚称其仍忠于马列主义毛泽东思想，但把它形容为世界最大的“商会”或许更加适宜。
《中国共产党章程》开篇第一句是“中国共产党是中国工人阶级的先锋队”。但时至今日，在中共全体党员中，“工人”所占的比例不到9%，而政府官员、商界人士、专业人士、大学毕业生和军人等所占的比例在70%以上。
在苏联解体、国际共产主义衰落之后，中共凭借其自我革新和顺应时代潮流的能力，得以长久屹立不倒。通过实施经济改革和拥抱市场，中共推动中国成为新兴超级大国和全球第二大经济体，并使数亿人摆脱了赤贫。然而，由于缺乏实施政治改革的切实努力，中共口头拥护的主义与国家支持权贵资本主义的现实脱节得越来越厉害。
原官方新闻社记者、《墓碑——中国六十年代大饥荒纪实》一书的作者杨继绳表示，在过去的30年里，中国“经济发展迅速，但政治发展滞后”。“事实上，如今很多人都有仇官和仇富心理。”《墓碑》一书对1958年灾难性的“大跃进”进行了探讨。
尽管国际社会把中国视作一个更自信、更强大的新兴大国，但今天中共对自身是否有能力继续掌权这个问题，却表现得比近些年来的任何时候都更不自信。上周五面向6000名主要干部发表讲话时，中国国家主席、中共中央总书记胡锦涛称赞“中国共产党不愧为伟大、光荣、正确的马克思主义政党”，表示“90年来，我们取得的一切成就，是一代一代中国共产党人同人民一道顽强拼搏、接续奋斗的结果”。
但他也警告“精神懈怠的危险，能力不足的危险，脱离群众的危险，消极腐败的危险，更加尖锐地摆在全党面前”。
他在讲话中用中共传统理论向民众解释其思想。尽管胡锦涛发出了严重警告，但他开出的复兴处方却是相互矛盾的政策。他既号召“同志们”拥护马列主义毛泽东思想，又要推动“社会主义市场经济”和“社会主义民主”。
加州克莱蒙特-麦肯纳学院(Claremont McKenna College)政治学教授裴敏欣表示，当代中共信奉的实际上是一种“权力思想”，维持自身统治成为压倒一切的目标，也是其行动的主要出发点。
在中国，已有许多人指出，在中共发起的庆祝建党90周年（官方设定的建党纪念日是7月1日）的浩大宣传活动中，存在着一种固有的讽刺意味。所有的电影、歌咏比赛、电视节目、广告牌和讲话都在高度称颂党的创始人以及他们发动的反对集权式“封建”统治的革命——在一个不允许反对党存在、政府一旦发现严重异见苗头便强力镇压的威权国家搞这种纪念活动，可谓怪事。
在上海的中共一大会址纪念馆，一大代表们的照片提醒我们，中共的最终取胜在当时看来是多么的不可能。一大在1921年举行，会期一周，参加会议的代表共有13人。其中，5人一两年后退党，4人在大约10年内牺牲或病逝，还有1人因加入托派而被开除党籍。
只有毛泽东和另一位代表活了下来并且继续为共产主义事业而奋斗。在他的追随者们从国民党手中夺下了全国大部分地区后，毛泽东在1949年闯进了北京，宣告成立中华人民共和国。
毛泽东想要根除资本主义，把中国建成工人的天堂，可他的努力导致了大跃进和后来的文化大革命等灾难。大跃进是一场失败的经济改造，饿死了多达4500万人；文化大革命则是一次清洗运动，把整个国家带入了十年动乱。
在毛泽东于1976年逝世后，奉行务实主义的邓小平最终成为了中国的最高领导人。他带领中国走上了市场改革和经济复兴之路。1989年天安门事件之后，邓小平在加快经济改革的同时收紧了对政治的控制，确立了一项存续至今的社会契约——只要不质疑党对权力的垄断，人民群众就可以自由致富，在生活中也不会受到政府的太多干涉。
邓小平的继任者江泽民在本世纪初推进了邓的政策，允许企业主和资本家入党。2003年，在胡锦涛上台后（这是中共历史上第一次有序的权力交接），中共承诺将采取一种更加温和、绿色和公正的发展方式。但是，中国的许多人认为这届政府的特点是空洞的言辞和薄弱的统治。
“中国的领导人一代比一代弱：江泽民比邓小平弱，胡锦涛比江泽民弱，下一代领导人甚至会比胡锦涛弱，”一位倡导民主的前杂志编辑李大同表示。他指出，眼下中共的合法性主要源于其保持经济快速增长的能力。
但是，甚至党内的许多人都相信，中国将不可避免的迎来经济放缓，与此同时，新兴城市中产阶级又在日益要求获得更大的代表权，这让中共面临着一场生存危机。
在中国筹备明年的领导层换届（预计胡锦涛将把权力移交给明显的继任者习近平）之际，有细微迹象表明：在中共未来必须走何种路线以保证生存的问题上，执政精英们已产生深深的分歧。
领导层内一个相对弱小的派系认为，邓小平确立的那项隐性社会契约已失去了效用；为避免出现严重的社会动荡，必须允许中国民众表达他们的政治意愿。
在上周五的讲话中，胡锦涛共有35次提到“民主”。但从讲话的其它部分来看，我们显然可以看出：真正的政治改革还未提上日程，而且中共已认识到了什么才是确保其生存的首要因素。
“要坚持发挥党总揽全局、协调各方的领导核心作用，”胡锦涛表示，“以经济建设为中心是兴国之要，是我们党、我们国家兴旺发达、长治久安的根本要求。”
译者/何黎
http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001039419
In the heart of Shanghai’s glitziest shopping complex, nestled between high-end restaurants and a giant advertisement for Gucci, stands a small, old, stone building containing one of the most revered sites of the Communist party of China.
On the street outside, a hawker selling toy rattles says he has no idea what the building is. This is, however, the house where 13 members of the fledgling party held its first national congress, 90 years ago this month.
Just as he is about to answer a question on what he thinks of the Communist party and its six decades of rule, the vendor is shooed away by a security guard employed by the Xintiandi – literally “new heaven on earth” – luxury shopping complex. “The Communist party is great, it’s great. OK, I’m leaving, I’m leaving,” the hawker yells over his shoulder as he scurries off.
The party was established in 1921 in the name of people like him. But today it is widely seen as representing the entrenched interests of the wealthy elite – the kind of people who spend more on a single meal in Xintiandi than this pedlar would make in an entire year.
As it passes this month’s milestone, the party finds itself at a critical juncture, with a once-in-a-decade leadership transition scheduled for next year, some of the worst income inequality in the world and no consensus on what it must do to ensure its long-term survival as the growth model that has served it so well for three decades begins to run out of steam.
With more than 80m members, it is the world’s largest political organisation. In spite of its insistence that it remains true to its Marxist-Leninist, Maoist heritage, though, it is perhaps better described as the world’s largest chamber of commerce.
The first sentence of the manifesto of the CPC states that the party “is the vanguard of the Chinese working class”. Yet today, fewer than 9 per cent of its members are classified as “workers” while more than 70 per cent are recruited from the ranks of government officials, businessmen, professionals, college graduates and the military.
The ability to reinvent itself and adapt to changing times has ensured the party’s survival long after the demise of the Soviet Union and the shrivelling of global communism. Its economic reforms and embrace of the market have helped make China a rising superpower and the world’s second largest economy – and lifted hundreds of millions out of dire poverty. But in the absence of any serious attempts at political reform, the gap continues to grow between what the party says it stands for and the reality of state-backed crony capitalism.
In the last three decades, “the economy developed fast but political development has lagged behind”, says Yang Jisheng, a former government journalist and author of Tombstone, an investigation into the calamitous Great Leap Forward of 1958. “The fact is that many people today foster hatred for government officials and hatred for the rich.”
Despite the global perception of a more assertive, powerful and rising China, the party appears less confident in its ability to maintain its grip on power now than at any time in recent years. In a speech to 6,000 of the party’s nomenklatura on Friday, Hu Jintao, China’s president and CPC general secretary, lauded his “great, glorious and correct Marxist political party” and credited “all our achievements over the past 90 years to the tenacious struggles waged by Chinese Communists and the people of several generations”.
But he also warned that “the whole party is confronted with growing danger of lacking in drive, incompetence, divorce from the people, lacking in initiative, and corruption”.
His speech was peppered with the theoretical contortions that the party relies on to explain its ideology to the masses. And his dire warnings notwithstanding, his prescription for revival was a confusion of contradictory policies as he called on his comrades to uphold Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought while promoting the “socialist market economy” and “socialist democracy”.
Minxin Pei, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California, describes the modern party’s true stance as an “ideology of power” in which maintaining its own rule has become the overwhelming objective and main justification for its actions.
Many in China have pointed out the irony inherent in the enormous propaganda campaign launched by the party to celebrate its 90th birthday, which officially fell on July 1. Films, singing competitions, television shows, billboards and speeches have all lionised the party’s founders and the revolution they launched against authoritarian “feudal” rule – bizarre things to celebrate in an authoritarian state where opposition parties are banned and the government reacts with overwhelming force to the first hint of serious dissent.
At the museum in Shanghai, photographs of those original delegates to the party congress provide a reminder of just how unlikely its eventual victory was. Of the 13 who attended the week-long meeting in 1921, five had quit the party a year or two later, four had been martyred or died of illness within a decade or so and one had been expelled for joining the Trotskyists.
Only Mao and one other attendee were still alive and committed to the Communist cause when, his loyalists having won most of the country over from the nationalists, Mao stormed into Beijing in 1949 and declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
His attempt to wipe out capitalism and create a worker’s paradise led to disasters such as the Great Leap Forward, a failed economic overhaul in which as many as 45m people died of starvation, and the subsequent Cultural Revolution, a purge that threw the country into turmoil for a decade.
After his death in 1976, the pragmatic Deng Xiaoping eventually assumed the role of paramount leader and set the country on a path of market reforms and economic revival. In the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, Deng accelerated economic reforms while tightening political control, establishing a social contract that exists to this day – people are free to grow rich and live their lives without great interference from the state as long as they do not question the party’s monopoly on power.
Deng’s successor, Jiang Zemin, took that policy further by allowing entrepreneurs and capitalists to join the party in the early part of the last decade. When Hu Jintao’s government took over in 2003, in the party’s first-ever orderly transition of power, it promised a gentler, greener, more equitable style. But many in China see this administration as characterised by empty rhetoric and weak rule.
“Each generation has been weaker than the last: Jiang was weaker than Deng, Hu is weaker than Jiang and the next generation of leaders will be even weaker than Hu,” says Li Datong, a former magazine editor and advocate of democracy. Mr Li points out that the party’s legitimacy now stems mainly from its ability to maintain rapid economic growth.
But even many within the party believe it is facing an existential crisis as it prepares for an inevitable eventual economic slowdown, at a time when demands for greater representation for the new urban middle class are growing.
As the country prepares for next year’s leadership transition, in which Mr Hu is expected to hand the reins to Xi Jinping, his heir apparent, hints have emerged of deep fissures among the ruling elite over what direction the party must take to ensure its survival.
A small and relatively weak faction within the leadership believes that the implicit contract put in place by Deng has reached the end of its usefulness and that to avoid serious social upheaval, the Chinese people must be allowed to express their political will.
In his speech on Friday, Mr Hu mentioned the word democracy 32 times. But it was clear from the rest of his words that real political reform remained off the agenda and that the party recognises what is the main key to its survival.
“We should ensure that the party plays its roles as the core of leadership in exercising overall responsibilities and co-ordinating the efforts of all sides,” Mr Hu said. “Pursuing economic development as our central task is essential for reinvigorating China and achieving prosperity and enduring political stability of our party and country.”
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