NEW DELHI: The CPM has committed a sacrilege. The party has said that China is rife with growing inequalities, unemployment, regional imbalances and above all corruption.
Stating that what is happening in China are “trends alien to socialism”, the party has called for “socialism with Indian characterstics”.
This dramatic change in perception, which could be called the “mother of all U -turns”, has appeared in the latest ideological document prepared by the CPM to tune the party’s ideological line in sync with changing global and Indian context.
The ideological resolution – being reworked for the first time since 1992 – is to be placed in the party congress to be held in April.
Stopping short of calling China a “capitalist country”, the CPM ideological document says that there is a huge income gap between rich and poor. “China has more billionaires today than any other country other than the US,” it says.
According to the CPM, the average group income of the highest 10 per cent has gone up 22 times higher than that of the lowest 10 per cent since 2002. “The last 18 years saw over 13-fold increase in the urban-rural income gap in absolute terms. In the 10 years from 1997, a period which saw the remarkable economic boom, the share of workers’ wages in national income fell from 53 per cent to 40 per cent of the GDP,” says the ideological resolution.
The Chinese disciplinary and supervisory authorities have investigated as many as 1,19,000 corruption cases in 2010 and the CPM feels that increasing instances of corruption is due to economic policies being followed by China.
“Growing corruption, growing inequalities... these are trends alien to socialism,” CPM PB member Sitaram Yechury said while answering questions on the party’s Chinese line.
The CPM has also found fault with the Chinese Communist Party’s decision to admit capitalists into the party.
It feels that there is something wrong in dropping the concept of imperialism from the understanding of the Communist Party of China.