REVIEW ON THE IDEA OF 'THREE REPRESENTS' AND IT'S PARTICULAR LAUNCHING AT JIANG ZEMIN'S TRAVEL TO SOUTHEAST CHINA IN 2000.

REVIEW ON THE IDEA OF 'THREE REPRESENTS' AND IT'S PARTICULAR LAUNCHING AT JIANG ZEMIN'S TRAVEL TO SOUTHEAST CHINA IN 2000.

By, Pedro Lara de Arruda.

If the year of 1976 (or 1978) marked the opening of China to the capitalist world market with the emergence of Deng Xiaoping – the leader who designed the transformation of the Asian giant and changed the tenets of communist ideology to a pragmatic (post-political/depoliticized) thought that looked at national enrichment, certainly the speech we review here (addressed by Jiang Zemin in February 2000 during a trip to Southern China), and the subsequent idea it launched in the heart of the Chinese Communist Party (which becomes clear if light of the key importance that the idea of Three Represents gained at the 16th Party Committee, in 2002), would seal the definitive championing of the capitalist nature at the core of the Chinese political basis.

Succeeding Deng Xiaoping at the leadership of the Communist Party, Chairman Jiang Zemin is considered to have opened the so called 'third generation of Chinese Communist leaders' and the current speech is, in this context, a mark of such transition.

The ideological conviction which would orient this third generation of Chinese leaders – still influential in present days – would be summarized by the expression 'Three Represens', which is the title of the speech we analyse here.

The novelty of this thinking was that the Communist Party of China declared itself ready to open its doors, welcoming among its members not only the traditional representations of peasants and the working masses, but also the new social classes that were emerging in the context of Chinese economic modernization. These new classes were: Businessmen; intellectuals - that Deng Xiaoping has rehabilitated and considered an integral part of Chinese society; as well as technicians and scientists which, in recent decades, have become the protagonists of the new Chinese scenery.
According to Jiang Zemin statements in the aforementioned speech, those would be the only ways for China to continue developing and growing 'properly and safely', and, at the same time, to provide a broader and stronger base to the Party.

Based on this theory, the party is said to have the duty of representing "the requirements of development of advanced productive forces, the guidelines for more advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the vast majority of the population". According to some analysts, the terms used in this speech were telling a very specific political orientation.

The reference to "more advanced culture" stressed the policy of openness in order to appropriate technology and more advanced knowledge of international partners. As for the "most advanced productive forces", it would justify the use of the term economic reforms that led to reform of state enterprises, with the closing of those presenting deficit and, therefore the indirect benefit of the private sector companies.

Those Tree Represents are also portrayed as a cross-line police of a self-conscious capitalist Party looking for economic production (“represents advanced social productive forces”), cultural development (“represents the progressive course of China's advanced culture”) and political consensus (Represents the fundamental interests of the majority). And here it must be stressed that the so called notions of development, culture and consensus are all restricted to what Badiou calls the transcendental reality of capitalism, which is limited to liberal economic axioms, hegemonic cultural values and alienated passive consensus through parliamentary-capitalism.

With the application of this theory, the Communist Party of China, which was facing a major crisis of credibility with their own party members and with the people, and at that moment was desperately seeking for a new identity and new forms of support, managed to gain more strength and secured its ability to continue leading the Chinese society.