A Sharp Debate Erupts in China Over Ideologies

By JOSEPH KAHN
Published: March 12, 2006

BEIJING, March 11 - For the first time in perhaps a decade, the National People's Congress, the Communist Party-run legislature now convened in its annual two-week session, is consumed with an ideological debate over socialism and capitalism that many assumed had been buried by China's long streak of fast economic growth.

The controversy has forced the government to shelve a draft law to protect property rights that had been expected to win pro forma passage and highlighted the resurgent influence of a small but vocal group of socialist-leaning scholars and policy advisers. These old-style leftist thinkers have used China's rising income gap and increasing social unrest to raise doubts about what they see as the country's headlong pursuit of private wealth and market-driven economic development.

The roots of the current debate can be traced to a biting critique of the property rights law that circulated on the Internet last summer. The critique's author, Gong Xiantian, a professor at Beijing University Law School, accused the legal experts who wrote the draft of "copying capitalist civil law like slaves," and offering equal protection to "a rich man's car and a beggar man's stick." Most of all, he protested that the proposed law did not state that "socialist property is inviolable," a once sacred legal concept in China.

This photo released Tuesday March 7, 2006 by the IFREMER (French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea) shows a new crustacean, called 'Kiwi hirsuta'. The eyeless shellfish, about 15cm long was discovered in March 2005 during a diving mission led by American researcher Robert Vrijenhoek, of the MBARI Institut, Cal., in hydrothermal vents of the Pacific Antartic Ridge, south of Easter Island. (AP Photo/A Fifis; IFREMER)

The New School

Presents

a
Writers-at-Large

Symposium:

"Writers of the Storm: Fake News, and Public Decency, in the Age of Terror"

Writers-at-Large, a California-based writers' advocacy group, and The New School, are delighted to bring you this "Writers of the Storm" forum which will address, among other things, a free press under fire, censorship, what the concept of decency means, who gets to decide that, and why, as well as whether that decision diminishes the power of the pen, the dignity of writers, as well as the importance of diversity of opinion.

Keynote: Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, David Cay Johnston. The panel will be moderated by playwright, and KPFK radio's Terrence McNally, and feature panelists Danny Goldberg, CEO of Air America; Arthur Kopit, Paul Robeson, Jr., Anne Waldman; Bob Hershon; and Phil Rockstroh; hosted by poet, and founder, of Writers-at-Large: Jayne Lyn Stahl.

Tuesday, March 28th at 7 p.m., $20

At: Theresa Lang Center, The New School, 55 West 13th Street, second floor (between 5th and 6th Avenues)

To purchase tickets, call box office: (212) 229-5488

Co-sponsored by Writers-at-Large and The New School, with special thanks to Mike Farrell, Death Penalty Focus, Media Alliance, and other friends of Writers-at-Large, as well as the following individuals, and groups, for their support: Stanley Sheinbaum; F. Henning Bauer, M.D.; Tom Bishop, Florence Lacaze Gould Professor of French Literature, N.Y.U.; San Francisco Film Society; Mediabistro.com; The Gershwin Hotel; the Allen Ginsberg Trust; the Fountain Theatre; and the National Coalition Against Censorship.