Mr. Hu, who is also the Communist Party chief, used a major address to the party, government and military elite in Beijing on Monday to promote a gradualist vision of political and economic change, according to the text of his remarks published Tuesday. He embraced greater “political participation” by ordinary people but ruled out steps toward Western-style democracy.
“The reform of our nation’s political system must maintain a correct political direction, must unrelentingly keep pace with economic and social development and must endeavor to adjust to the active political participation of our nation’s people,” Mr. Hu said.
Such changes should “advance the self-perfection in the development of the socialist political system,” while preserving the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power, he said.
“Insist on the party’s leadership, governance by the people and ruling the nation by laws,” he said.
The members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, top central government and provincial leaders, and senior military and security officials attended Mr. Hu’s address, at the party’s Central Party School in Beijing, making it one of his most important speeches since he became China’s leader in 2002.
The event was closed to Chinese and foreign journalists, but the published text of his speech broke little new ground. He emphasized his well-worn ideological formulas of promoting a “harmonious society” and “scientific development.”
Those catchphrases have become associated in recent years with a program by Mr. Hu and China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, to reduce the gap between China’s wealthy elite and a vast majority of its working population, which has benefited far less from the country’s long streak of rapid economic growth. China has one of the most unequal distributions of wealth in the developing world, with an especially wide gap in living standards between urban and rural residents.
The two leaders have also sought to reduce the economy’s growing dependence on industries that are energy intensive and pollute heavily, which has made China’s air and water among the dirtiest in the world and threatened the country’s ecological viability.
By many measures those problems have worsened in recent years, but Mr. Hu did not advocate new policies to address them. Instead, at least in his published remarks, he reiterated an ideological framework that seemed intended to inform policy making by lower-level officials. The ruling party will convene this fall for a national congress, held once every five years, during which it decides on major leadership positions.
Before the congress, which involves intensive, behind-the-scenes jockeying for power at all levels of the party, Mr. Hu has campaigned against corruption. He has also permitted a few trusted elite thinkers to debate measures for political change in party journals.
In published essays, several retired senior officials and leading scholars have advocated more democracy in Chinese political life.
The term democracy is widely used in Chinese political discourse to suggest public consultation or popular participation in decision making. Mr. Hu made clear that he did not envision an overhaul of authoritarian rule.
He said that “socialist democracy” and “grass-roots democracy” were long-term goals of the party, and that it should make “active and safe” efforts to develop them. He also emphasized that such changes must proceed in an orderly way, without diminishing the party’s “leading role.”
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