ONE OF THE nicest spots in Guangzhou is a leafy neighbourhood oasis in the city's northeast. While most of Guangzhou's car-clogged roads are laid out at regimented right angles to each other, this neighbourhood's quiet, tree-lined streets and lovers' lanes loop and twist under a canopy of foliage. Off them are row after row of villas, many with spacious gardens.
Some of the villas date to the early 1950s, when it was not yet clear that Chairman Mao would vilify 'capitalists' of every stripe and commit the country to one lunatic economic experiment after another. Guangzhou officials reckoned swell homes might entice back wealthy overseas Chinese to invest in their motherland. Hence the neighbourhood's name - Overseas Chinese New Village .
The establishment of Overseas Chinese New Village may very well have been the first instance in the history of the People's Republic of China that the Communist Party toyed with the idea of being nice to rich businessmen. It was not to be the last.
Similar intentions were apparently on the minds of senior party cadres over the weekend, during the third plenum of the 16th Party Congress. According to mainland media, the plenum reiterated that 'non-state firms will enjoy the same treatment as other enterprises in fund-raising, investment, land use, tax and foreign trade'.
The plenum also apparently approved a constitutional amendment that would enshrine former president Jiang Zemin's 'Three Represents' theory - a convoluted bit of ideological sophistry designed to legitimise the contributions of capitalists (aka 'advanced productive forces') in a still nominally communist country.
All well and good. But how to reconcile such assurances with the fear and loathing that accompanies each new list of China's richest businessmen and women?
