The Communist Party of China (CPC) is seeking to decentralize intraparty power.

Democracy within the CPC is being extended at the grassroots level in an attempt to break what Deng Xiaoping called "arbitrary rule by individuals."

Power decentralization is a thorny issue for the 83-year-old CPC, now with nearly 70 million members. It has been looking for practical democratic ways to hand the power back to common members. Party committees from Beijing to Shenzhen -- China's first economic reform pilot area -- are jointly conducting the political experiment.

Pioneering counties abolished the standing committees steered by a few top leaders, usually one secretary and five deputy secretaries. The power was returned to all members of the Party committee elected by the county's Party congress.

According to the CPC charter, local Party congresses and Party committees, elected by congress delegates, are the Party's top governing bodies at local levels. The Party committee is obligated to report its work to the Party congress, which elects the committee.

There are problems, however. Party congresses at all levels traditionally convene every five years, and they are not a permanent body. This leads to a shift in power to the standing committee, usually composed of 11 members at the county level.

The group of one secretary and five vice secretaries is actually the decision maker within the 11-member group. Following the principle of "the minority is subordinate to the majority", the group of six will always win a vote even if the other five members were united in opposition. The number of members in a Party standing committee is deliberately odd in order to avoid tied ballots.

Deng Xiaoping quoted harsh lessons learned from the chaotic 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution by saying that over-centralization of power led to truly arbitrary rule by individuals wearing the disguise of collective leadership.

All the ongoing experiments have been conducted with a view toward breaking the traditional framework in which power is likely to be monopolized by a few leaders. Luotian County, in central China's Hubei Province, kicked off the landmark reform at the end of the last year, replacing its 11-member standing committee with a broader 15-member committee elected by the county's Party congress.

That congress also convenes annually. During the rest of the year, the 15-member group is authorized, through secret ballots, to decide major policies of the county and to appoint or dismiss chief officials.

Some counties went even further. For example in Lingshan Township, Pingchang County of southwest China's Sichuan Province, all Party members voted in a historic direct election to pick the secretary of the Party committee. Appointments to this position used to come from a higher-level Party member or by a smaller group of top members of the same-level, in a closed-door selection.

In Yucheng District, Ya'an City, Sichuan Province, power-sharing efforts are under way. The district's Party congress and the Party committee are in charge of making policy, while the standing committee is responsible for implementation and decisions on day-to-day operations. A supervision committee was set up within the congress to oversee the Party committee and the Party committee's commission for discipline inspection.

Zhang Jinming, director of the organization department of the CPC Ya'an City Committee, said the decentralization returned power to the Party committee and the congress, and hence "back to all Party members."

The CPC Beijing Municipal Committee made public one week ago a document concerning the implementation of the CPC's first-ever intraparty supervision regulations, the drafting of which was announced in February. According to the document, the secretary/deputy secretaries "work group" will no longer serve as the top policy-making body and it will have no power to make decisions on major issues as it did in the past.

The CPC, founded in 1921, now has 3.5 million grassroots organizations nationwide. All its systems, including elections, took shape during the pre-1949 revolutionary period and were consolidated in the years prior to the reform and opening drive initiated in the late 1970s.

Some of the rules no longer meet the needs of today's situation. Some are insufficient to strengthen the ties between the Party and the people and are not conducive to cementing the Party's ruling base.

According to the CPC's milestone intraparty supervision regulations, even the all-powerful Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee is required to report its work to the annual plenary session of the CPC Central Committee, an unprecedented move to put the top leadership under supervision.

In his report delivered at the 16th CPC National Congress in 2002, Jiang Zemin hailed intraparty democracy as the "life of the Party." He stressed expansion of pilot projects for Party congresses with regular annual conferences, or standing congresses, in more cities and counties. This essentially would empower congress delegates to supervise all the time.

Following that milestone national congress, experiments with standing Party congresses mushroomed in Hubei and Sichuan provinces, in south China's Guangdong Province and the east's Zhejiang Province.

The reform has broken, to some extent, the traditional power structure within the Party. Cai Dekun, secretary of the CPC Luotian County Committee, said he had to learn to work harder and improve his methods to "avoid being held responsible for misplay by the Party committee or the Party congress."

A survey by the research office of the Organization Department of the CPC Central Committee noted, "the experiments of standing congresses have proved efficient in promoting democratic and scientific policy-making, and also helping to build an effective and extensive supervision mechanism."

(Xinhua News Agency July 2, 2004)