No subversive mistakes

President Xi Jinping told the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit in the Indonesian resort of Bali on October 7 that China, as a big country, should never make any subversive mistakes over fundamental issues. "In case of making such a mistake, it can't be redeemed or made up," Xi said.

Xin Ming, another professor with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, said "fundamental issues" included political system reform, while "subversive mistakes" included the old and rigid closed-door policy and any attempt to abandon socialism and take an erroneous path.

"China's future political system reform is set to stick to the bottom-line thinking, which means the CPC will continuously press ahead with the reform while keeping a correct political direction, " he said.

The CPC has been learning lessons of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its communist party.

One of the major lessons, Xin said, was that the leadership of the Soviet Union Communist Party had confused the fundamental systems with the general and concrete political systems. At first, they had refused any reform because they believed their systems were perfect. At the end, they mistook the shortcomings of the general and concrete systems as the flaw of the socialist system itself, which they believed should be scrapped and started all over again.

"The Soviet Union had made subversive mistakes one after another, from one extreme to the other extreme, over the fundamental issues. As a result, the reform ended up with changing direction, and collapse of the Soviet Union Communist Party was inevitable," Xin said.

China's political system reform should uphold the Party's role as the core of leadership in directing the overall situation and coordinating the efforts of all quarters. Its goal is not to weaken or abandon the Party's leadership. It should aim at improving the art of the Party's leadership and strengthening the Party's governance capability, the analysts said.