(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-01-03 07:25

Besides the Olympic Games, the other outstanding event high on the list of priorities for 2008 is the 30th anniversary of reform and opening up, for which President Hu Jintao has promised "celebrations in a big way".

The Games itself is a bonus for three decades of reform and opening up.

If successfully hosting the world's most prestigious sports gala may help fulfill our national dream of greatness, cool-headed retrospection over the past 30 years will considerably straighten our learning curve, and make our next steps easier.

President Hu, who is also the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC), in his report to the Party's 17th National Congress attributed all the country's major achievements over the past three decades to reform and opening up. He took a further step forward in a more recent speech to the newly elected members and alternate members of the CPC Central Committee, expounding the 10 merits of the formula he enumerated in the report.

In what the domestic media describes as "10 integrations", Hu said the strategy has brought us where we are mainly because it incorporated some conflicting needs once thought hard to reconcile, or simply incompatible. This is very much to the point.

When socialism and market economy carry opposite ideological stickers, for instance, who could have imagined that one day people would take a "socialist market economy" for granted?

The country has benefited a lot from the CPC's recent willingness to find the middle ground between the extremes. Through sophisticated balancing moves between efficiency and fairness, as well as between self-reliance and participation in the process of globalization, the CPC has honed its own governance capabilities and thereby earned additional legitimacy for its leadership.

The most fundamental reason for the success of reform and opening up, however, is the CPC leadership's critical review of its own ideological assets. It took enormous guts to modify what was imbedded deeply and held dearly at the heart of the Party's orthodoxies.

When we commemorate the 30 years of progress, we cherish special respect for the Party elders, including Deng Xiaoping and his contemporaries, who saw the need for change, and appealed for "emancipation of the mind".

While liberating the CPC from the ideological cage of its own making, that proposal deserves credit for the Party's historic break from its doctrinaire past.

(China Daily 01/03/2008 page8)