China's outgoing President Hu Jintao is angling to promote one of his closest allies to the military's decision-making body, sources said, in a move that would allow him to maintain an influence over Beijing's most potent instrument of power.
Three sources with ties to the top leadership said Hu hopes to cut all of his direct links to the top echelons of power by early 2013, on the understanding that his protégé, Vice Premier Li Keqiang, is made a vice chairman of the military commission at the party's five-yearly congress later this year.
Hu wants a clean handover of the party leadership, the presidency and the top military post to his anointed successor, Xi Jinping, over the next seven months, to avoid a repeat of the past internal rancor when a transition of power took place, sources say.
They point to the example of his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, who clung onto the top job at the Communist Party's Central Military Commission for two years after stepping down as party chief and president, a move seen as unpopular with party cadres and the public.
Hu, as president, is the current military commission chairman and, like Jiang, could choose to stay on as its chief for another couple of years beyond his handover of the presidency to Xi in March 2013.
In what is seen as the ultimate bulwark of power, the commission oversees the 2.3-million strong People's Liberation Army (PLA) as well as the People's Armed Police which enforces domestic security.
Hu has not made public his plans for retirement but, unlike in the West where former presidents and prime ministers tend to fade from the public eye, Chinese leaders seek to maintain influence to avoid possible adverse political repercussions down the road.
The government generally does not comment on elite politics and personnel changes before the official announcement.
As a senior member of the commission, Li, who is also set to be named as the next premier in March 2013, would be expected to help protect Hu's legacy in the area of military affairs, which has included a more moderate approach towards Taiwan and to territorial disputes in the South China Sea and East China Sea.
"Hu hopes to go down in history as the first leader (since 1949) to step down when his term ends instead of being reluctant to go," a businessman with leadership ties said.
As well as helping to preserve Hu's legacy, analysts say Li's promotion will ensure there is no political retribution against Hu or his family by rivals who remain in power once he is gone.
But bargaining over the next leadership line-up is not over, and there is still room for change and surprises.
"CHECK AND BALANCE"
Some political analysts interpreted Hu's plan to promote Li as a move to bolster civilian oversight over the PLA - the world's biggest armed force.
But other analysts saw it as an attempt to dent Xi's political influence.
"It'll be a check and balance on Xi," a Chinese analyst said of the push to install Li, asking not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the issue.
Xi, 59, has been vice chairman of the military commission for two years and has military experience under his belt when he worked for then defense minister Geng Biao from 1979 to 1982.
Xi, like Hu, is a pragmatist seen as being keen to seize on opportunities from crises to perpetuate Communist rule and strengthen his own position, analysts say.
Though Xi is acceptable to both the Hu camp and the rival Shanghai Gang faction, the incoming premier, Li, is much closer politically to the outgoing president and belongs to Hu's own faction of the party, the Communist Youth League.
As vice chairman of the military commission, Li would oversee the 660,000-strong paramilitary People's Armed Police which acts against unrest, guards government compounds and foreign embassies and mobilizes during natural disasters.
The People's Armed Police is under the direct jurisdiction of the military commission and the State Council, or cabinet.
If Li held the positions of both premier and commission vice chairman, he would be in a stronger position to react to domestic emergencies than outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao.
Without a seat on the commission, and no say in military affairs, Wen had difficulty mobilizing the People's Armed Police to help with rescue work after the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province which killed about 87,600 people.
"This will change if Li Keqiang becomes vice chairman of the military commission," a third source with leadership ties said.
Two People's Liberation Army generals are expected to also be named vice chairman of the commission, the sources added.
Reuters
China's Long History of Defying the Doomsayers
Losing legitimacy might not mean the end of the Communist Party. Past Chinese governments have survived worse.
 |
| Shanghai police crowd the site of a planned protest meant to model the Arab Spring. (AP) |
Thirty-six years after "Great Helmsman" Mao Zedong died of a heart attack, leaving his country briefly rudderless during a time of crisis and uncertainty, the Chinese ship of state is still sailing. But is it still seaworthy? Observers are energetically debating whether the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party, which has endured so much, can endure.
After all, the government today bases its legitimacy on economic growth, which may well be slowing. We can't predict the future, but we can examine the past, and Chinese history suggests that, even if the Communist Party does face a legitimacy crisis, it would not be out of character for it to survive this particular storm.
The China-watchers who insist the country faces a crippling legitimacy crisis include, perhaps most famously, Gordon G. Chang, author of
The Coming Collapse of China, as well as political scientist
Minxin Pei. As they see it, there are simply too many contradictions inherent in the Chinese model for it to survive.
Henry Kissinger and
When China Rules the World author Martin Jacques, by contrast, have argued that, for better or worse, the Party is in good shape. And Beijing-based philosopher Daniel A. Bell, praising the China model in the
New York Times op-ed pages and elsewhere, is even more optimistic. He portrays the Chinese model as steady and efficient, guided by Confucian values. Such boosters typically concede that China's government could use some sprucing up -- a reform here and there -- but maintain that it's basically sound, and in better shape than many others.
So who's right? In a sense, they both are. As specialists in modern Chinese history, we see ample precedent to suggest that, despite the Communist Party's ongoing struggle to maintain legitimacy, it could remain in secure power for the foreseeable future at the least.
In the 18th century, a British diplomat named Lord George Macartney visited China. It was a time when, like now, foreigners were torn between admiring and denigrating the country's system. Macartney likened China to a first-class fighting ship -- for a country not really defined by its navy, China seems to attract an oddly high frequency of nautical metaphors -- that had seen better days.
The hard work of "able and vigilant officers," he said, had managed to help the awesomely enormous vessel "keep afloat." But it was impossible that it would remain seaworthy long, he predicted, as its timbers had rotted and the channels ahead were too treacherous. "She may perhaps not sink outright; she may drift some time as a wreck, and will then be dashed to pieces on the shore; but she can never be rebuilt on the old bottom," he wrote, adding that he would hardly be surprised if that end should come during his own lifetime.
Lord Macartney, best known for his failed 1790s effort to establish full diplomatic relations between Britain and the Qing Dynasty, never saw the Chinese decline he'd anticipated. He died in 1806; the Qing dynasty, which stretched back to 1644, survived another century, until 1912.
Macartney's failed prediction offers a fascinating and illuminating perspective on today's similar predictions of doom. After all, he wasn't actually wrong about the challenges facing the ethnically Manchu emperors of the Qing Dynasty. His remarkably insightful observations anticipated the spread of political corruption and the potential for rebellion from non-Manchus, who chafed under the yoke of "Tartar" rulers. It's true that the Qing dynasty fell, but only after outliving not just Macartney but generations of his heirs.
Astoundingly, China's challenges, and those facing the Qing dynasty and threatening its legitimacy, became even graver after Macartney's prediction. The stunning succession of crises included a series of internal rebellions, ranging from small-scale insurrections to vast religious risings.
The Taiping Uprising, which coincided with the American Civil War but had an exponentially higher death toll (roughly 20 million killed, compared to the Civil War's 750 thousand), cost so much to suppress that it nearly bankrupted the Qing. The dynasty also survived two crushing military defeats at the hands of foreign soldiers and gunships, first in the Opium War (1839-1842) and then the Arrow War (1856-1860).
The wars devastated, among other things, a legitimacy claim that the Qing and previous Chinese empires had used for centuries: that the occupant of the Dragon Throne possessed a divine mandate to govern a polity that was, in every way that mattered, the most powerful on earth.
The Qing case is a reminder that some Chinese governments have been able to endure, for generations at a time, deepening corruption, weakened legitimacy, and major challenges at home and abroad. And yet, of course, mere endurance is not proof of legitimacy.
China struggled to maintain both legitimacy and stability during one particularly difficult stretch from the early 1930s to the late 1940s. Then, as now, China was run by a tightly disciplined authoritarian organization, the Nationalist Party of Chiang Kai-shek, that was widely viewed as corrupt and nepotistic.
Then, too, outside critics complained that the party's then-leaders shared little in common with the ideology of their previous head. Today, the capitalist "communists" are contrasted with actual-communist Mao; then, Chiang looked weak and lacking in vision next to his revered revolutionary predecessor Sun Yat-sen.
Chiang's regime, hoping to counter the perception that all they cared about was holding onto power, appealed to Confucian values of order -- just as post-Mao Communist Party leaders have. They also stressed the need for a strong central government. If the Nationalists fell, the argument went, China would be cast back into the chaos of the warlord era that had preceded Chiang's rise. A divided country would also be susceptible to becoming a "lost country," the term used to describe the fate of colonized lands such as India.
This legitimizing idea, which presented the Nationalists not so much as a group to be admired as a bulwark against horrific possible futures, might look a little familiar today. Chinese leaders have repeated similar arguments, notably in their purging populist party member Bo Xilai, which they called essential to keep China from spiraling back into the madness of the Cultural Revolution. Earlier, the government cited the implosions of first Yugoslavia and later Iraq to argue that the fall of authoritarianism leads not to stability and freedom but to international bullying, a violent settling of old scores, and disunity.
Yes, Chiang's Nationalist Party fell in 1949, ousted by the Communist Party that still rules today. The foreign observers who claimed in 1937 or 1947 that the Nationalist Party was bereft of legitimacy and about to fall turned out to be correct, but they could easily have been wrong.
Discredited and embattled though that government may have been, had history gone just a little bit differently, the Nationalists might well have held power longer. Counter-factual histories are impossibly speculative, of course.
Yet it would not take too much stretching to imagine that, had the Nationalist Party's White Terror campaigns of the late 1920s and early 1930s succeeded in their grim mission to "exterminate" Communists, Chiang might have held on at least through the 1950s. Not because his party was popular, but because it was accepted by the country's citizenry as the only group that might bring stability after decades of civil and international warfare.
There's probably no way to know whether, in the end, history will judge China's current leaders as more like the long-enduring Qing Emperors or the doomed Nationalists of the mid-to-late 1940s. Either is possible. For now, China's Communist Party has disproven observers who have predicted its imminent demise for years. Surprisingly adaptable and self-consciously diagnostic, the regime seems keenly aware of the precedents of history, both in China and internationally.
The Qing dynasty, as the Communist Party seems to see it, was too weak in the face of foreign pressure and failed to suppress disgruntled sectarian networks, including the anti-Manchu sworn brotherhoods (or "secret societies") that participated in the 1911 Revolution. Four decades later, the Nationalists failed to quash their political opposition. As for the Leninist states of Central and Eastern Europe whose falls Beijing so assiduously studies, they never managed to raise living standards as they'd promised.
The history-minded, stability-obsessed Communist Party's hold on power thus seems less mysterious when viewed in this historical context. And some of its actions, such as the paranoid and draconian 1999 crackdown on Falun Gong, seem less surprising.
Still, not all of the CCP's efforts have been so defensive in nature. The Party has also made some positive changes, such as loosening controls on private life, helping boost living standards, and raising China's global influence, all of which have likely made it easier for Chinese citizens to tolerate or even support the Party's rule.
The Party is talented at adapting incrementally, changing course a bit at a time. This can work for a while, even a long while, but that doesn't mean it can go on indefinitely. Both of the CCP's two most recent predecessors, struggling to maintain their legitimacy, eventually attempted their own complete reinvention.
In the early 1900s, the Qing dynasty, in a failed bid to outrun the forces of revolution from within, abolished the Confucian examinations that legitimized it for more than two centuries and tried to reinvent itself as a constitutional monarchy. Taiwan, under Nationalist control from the late 1940s on, began its transformation into a thriving democracy under the watch of Chiang Kai-shek's son. Today, a Party president rules Taiwan not as a dictator but as an elected official.
China's military is presently powerful enough and its diplomacy stable enough that the Communist Party faces no realistic threats from outside. Internally, its control over society is effective enough that, while unrest and discontent may be widespread, there are neither well-organized opposition parties nor rebellious armies that might seriously challenge the central government.
For now, the Communist Party finds itself in a position that would be enviable to the officials of the late Qing. It could, if it wished, reinvent itself with a new legitimizing narrative, or even open the way to a new multiparty political structure as the Nationalists did in Taiwan, likely without fear of being overthrown in the process.
If it does not make such changes, however, then it seems likely that the corruption and internal dissent of today will continue to mount. If that happens, then it is likely only a matter of time until that dissent and corruption reach a critical mass necessary to end the regime. But, as the world learned from the late Lord Macartney's failed prediction, those processes can take many generations longer than we might expect. Even if the Communist Party's legitimacy does weaken enough for the party to fall, it might not be in any of our lifetimes.
The Atlantic
China’s coming leadership change met with a shrug
BEIJING — With China facing a worsening economy, the
biggest political crisis in two decades and growing public anger and domestic unrest, what do people here say about the seismic change about to take place in country’s top leadership?
“Wu suo wei.” It doesn’t matter.
You hear this from old men exercising in the park, from young professionals heading home from work, and even, in hushed tones, from lower-ranking members of the Communist Party itself.
On one level, they’re probably right. The leadership change is unlikely to have an immediate effect on the majority of China’s 1.3 billion people. Neither will the masses have any say in the
party’s mysterious selection of the nine-member standing committee of the Communist Party that rules China.
The process is so cloaked in secrecy that no one knows for sure who’s in the running besides the top two officials set to replace the current president, Hu Jintao, and Premier Wen Jiabao. Even the date of the Party Congress at which they will be announced remains unknown — with estimates ranging from September to November.
On another level, however, the
leadership change will affect everything and everyone, and in many ways already has. Preparations for the 18th Party Congress have forced most of the government into gridlock for the past year, as though the entire system were holding its breath in anticipation. Major reforms and new laws have been stymied. No real solutions have been prescribed for the economy’s systemic problems even amid a worrying slowdown. And the country’s entire security apparatus has been mobilized, slowly tightening its chokehold on dissidents, journalists, grass-roots organizers and bloggers as the high-stakes meeting has drawn closer.
Apathy and concern
And so whole swaths of Beijing teeter daily between utter apathy and an intense concern that borders on paranoia.
On the paranoia side are the authorities, who have been churning out reams of pro-party copy in state-run media, running endless security drills and generally girding up for the once-in-a-decade event. The country’s thousand-some police chiefs have been summoned to Beijing for lectures. Fire inspectors have already gone through the Party Congress venues from top to bottom — twice. Authorities have been scouring the internet and municipalities for the smallest sign of unrest and heading them off — at times with force but also, surprisingly, sometimes with concessions to those protesting.
Many of the most coercive actions — like chasing rural petitioners appealing to the government for help and other troublemakers out of the capital — tend to begin closer to critical events, so it’s unclear just how this year’s security crackdown will compare with those seen during previous leadership transitions. But not since the 2008 Olympics, residents say, has security seemed so tight.
Military leaders have issued a flurry of statements assuring their loyalty to the yet-unnamed leaders. Equally desperate to show loyalty, even lowly toll station operators in Jiangsu Province have pledged on government Web sites to ease local traffic lines as a tribute to the coming Party meeting.
But among those outside government, talk of the transition is rare. Questions about the upcoming Party Congress are greeted with suspicion.
“You must forgive them, this is not something normal people talk about,” explained one low-wage worker after his co-workers answered one such question with silence at a cafeteria a few blocks west of the Party Congress venue in Beijing’s central Chao Yang district. “This is something for others to think about.”
“Why keep up with it? One leader or another, they are all the same,” said another middle-age man on lunch break. Speaking anonymously for fear of government trouble, the man, a driver-for-hire, said, “I’ll know the Party Congress has started when I see police crowding the roads, and I’ll know it’s done when the roads are clear again.”
Nurtured indifference
The indifference is something the government has at times nurtured. For years, the party — looking to preserve its lock on power — has pushed the idea that an uneventful, smooth transition was not only expected, but inevitable.
And while American children are taught basic civics classes and the importance of elections from grade school, the real method by which China’s top leaders are chosen is unknown to anyone but the leaders themselves. Many experts, in fact, believe the new line-up has already been decided at a meeting of party elites at a luxury costal resort in early August.
Similarly, while almost every aspect of American candidates’ lives has been thoroughly explored in the course of the U.S. presidential campaign, most Chinese know little about China’s leading contenders beyond their official hagiographies.
“The truth is, even if you knew such details about such individuals, it matters much less in the Chinese system,” explained Huang Weiding, former deputy editor of an influential magazine published by the Communist Party’s Central Committee. When
Xi Jinping — the man expected to
become China’s president and top leader — gives his first few speeches after taking the reins, his words will not be entirely his own, having been carefully vetted by his fellow members on the standing committee.
“To achieve a top position in the party, your own personality disappears from the public,” Huang said.
Because of that, it is difficult to know what, if any, change Xi and China’s other new leaders will bring.
“We are walking down a road filled with serious problems,” said one 82-year-old retired party member exercising on a recent day at a downtown park. “So of course the direction of the country is important and depends on the upcoming meeting. But these are not things for ordinary citizens to know, so what’s there to talk about?”
Washington Post
