China, where the dull lead the
dynamic By Kent Ewing
HONG KONG - China's week-long exercise in
stultifying political theater - also known as the
Communist Party's 17th National Congress - came to
a close on Monday with the introduction of the new
leadership team headed by President Hu Jintao for
the next five years.
While there were no
real surprises, there are four new faces on the
party's all-powerful Politburo standing committee:
Shanghai party chief Xi Jinping, 54; and Liaoning
party secretary Li Keqiang, 52; party organization
chief He Guoqiang, 64, who was also
chosen to lead the party's
internal corruption watchdog; and Minister of
Public Security Zhou Yongkang, 65, who is likely
to oversee the country's law enforcement.
The newcomers will be joining five
veterans on the nine-member Politburo standing
committee: President Hu, 64; chairman of the
National People's Congress Wang Bangguo, 66;
Premier Wen Jiabao, 65; chairman of the Chinese
People's Consultative Conference Jia Qinglin, 67;
and propaganda chief Li Changchun, 63.
Hu
was re-elected as party general secretary and
chairman of the Central Military Commission.
One committee seat became vacant with the
death of Vice Premier Huang Ju in June, and three
other aging committee members - law enforcement
chief Luo Gan, 72, Vice President Zeng Qinghong,
68, and the previous head of the party's graft
watchdog, Wu Guanzheng, 69 - stepped aside to make
way for a new generation of leaders.
Since
three of the new members - Xi, He and Zhou - all
have connections one way or another with former
president Jiang Zemin, analysts will be quick to
point out that Hu has not achieved decisive
control of the power core and that the matter of
his successor will necessarily be a point of
negotiation.
Hu's choice is said to be Li
Keqiang. But Xi, one of the so-called
"princelings", is also very much in the race. To
win the race, each has to prove himself with his
performance in the next five years. And additional
candidates may emerge as Chinese politics play out
before the next party conference in 2012.
This suggests that with the passage of
"strongman" Deng Xiaoping, gone was the era for
the supreme leader to hand-pick his successor.
In a move aimed at signifying a new
openness, the Politburo standing committee was
presented to the Chinese public (and to the world)
at a press conference. But it was a decidedly
stiff affair - just like the congress that
preceded it - and it could not mask the opaque,
behind-the-scenes power-brokering that produced
this final result.
On Sunday, in what was
hailed as a new commitment to "intra-party
democracy", the congress' 2,200-plus delegates
voted on a list of candidates eligible to sit on
the party's central committee, electing 204
members and 167 alternates.
More than half
the members - 105 - are newly elected, and many of
those come from the Communist Party Youth League,
Hu's power base. Party leaders said this year's
list granted delegates a greater degree of choice
than in the past, but the list was not released.
In its first plenary session on Monday
morning, the newly formed central committee
elected the 25-member Politburo and its standing
committee.
The Chinese people could be
forgiven for greeting the illustrious new
leadership team with an indifferent shrug, but
they must also be breathing a sigh of relief.
Now that the Politburo standing committee
has been set, the nation can finally tear off the
straitjacket of pomp and protocol that it has been
wrapped in for the past seven days and go back to
being the most exciting country in the world.
Indeed, perhaps the most important lesson
of this congress is the increasing disconnect that
it has shown between the deliberate dullness and
scripted predictability of the country's
politicians and the sometimes alarming dynamism of
its economic and social life. This is a nation
crowding in on the first tier of world powers, yet
its politicians continue to bumble along as if
they are lost in a time warp.
As an
exercise in directing the 2,200-plus delegates who
attended all the mind-numbing meetings in
Beijing's Great Hall of the People to stick to
their innocuous script, the congress was a great
success. But that is also what made it an abject
failure. Lock-step, Stalinist-like gatherings of
this nature should be a thing of the past in
modern China, but the party is simply too steeped
in historical paranoia to loosen its hold on
power.
That's too bad because it is clear
that the Chinese people are ready for a change.
Most of them paid no attention to the soporific
goings-on in the Great Hall this past week - and
who can blame them? They are far too busy doing
the real work that has led to China's remarkable
economic rise and new place on the world stage,
and they deserve far better political
representation than this insipid masquerade of
political correctness and forced unity.
Party congresses, held once every five
years, work like this: everything that can be seen
or heard is carefully choreographed and
unrelentingly dull. The real drama - the selection
of the new leadership team - has already played
out before the congress begins and is mysteriously
finalized behind closed doors and under cover of
the tedium on the surface of the conference.
Thus, while rubber-stamp delegates fell
over themselves this past week to support the
president's call for a "harmonious society" and
freely quoted from Hu's theory of "scientific
development", the country's coterie of elite
leaders gathered out of view to decide China's
future. It is in these small meetings that real
and vigorous debate takes place and truly
momentous decisions are made. The mammoth
showpiece of the congress only serves to make
legitimate these privately brokered deals.
Pity the media, which must endure the
prolonged yawnfest to receive news of who will be
running the country for the next five years. This
year, Vice President Zeng provided the only
dramatic twist. According to the pre-congress
script, Zeng, regarded as the second-most powerful
leader in China, was to step down from the
Politburo standing committee in a deal that would
allow him to select two of his closest allies - He
and Zhou - as new committee members. Xi could also
replace himself to represent the "princelings" at
the top.
Then something interesting
happened. The day before the congress was to
begin, Zeng was elected as its secretary general -
a prestigious position that would traditionally
dictate that the vice president remain on the
Politburo standing committee. After all, Hu served
as secretary general for both the 15th and 16th
party congresses, becoming head of the party at
the close of the last congress. But all the
reading of tea leaves over Zeng's election turned
into much ado about very little, as in the end he
followed the script and stepped aside to make way
for a fifth generation of leaders. He will stay on
as vice president until the National People's
Congress approves the new state leadership team in
March.
Much will be made of the apparent
split between Jiang and Hu allies among the new
Politburo standing committee members.
Li
Keqiang is clearly a Hu protege and the
president's choice as his successor, but He and
Zhou are loyal to Zeng, who served as Jiang's
chief hatchet man during his presidency. Xi,
recently appointed party secretary in Shanghai in
the wake of the US$474 million pension scandal
that felled his predecessor, Chen Liangyu, is a
so-called "princeling" whose father was a
reformist member of the Politburo under Deng
Xiaoping. Xi, too, is seen as being closer to
Jiang than to Hu.
The kingmaker of the
congress may turn out to be Zeng, who also played
a key role in the transition from a Jiang to a Hu
presidency and was once considered Hu's chief
rival.
The battle for succession will
continue over the next five years, and Hu will not
necessarily make the call. At this point, insiders
see Xi as the future president and Li as premier.
Some commentators perceive Hu's inability
to pack the standing committee with his allies as
a big defeat for the president, but they are
living even more in the past than the organizers
of this year's congress. Gone are the days of the
strongman and the cult of personality in China.
True, press conference and technological
innovations aside, this congress was a throwback
to the days of Deng and Mao Zedong, but Hu's power
is not.
No one man calls the shots in
China anymore. It is a group effort, with all the
attendant political jockeying and horse trading
that go with governing the world's most populous
country - which is also, increasingly, a political
and military power to be reckoned with.
China is an exciting and challenging
nation to govern. It just does not look that way
during party congresses.
Kent
Ewing is a teacher and writer at Hong Kong
International School. He can be reached at
kewing@hkis.edu.hk.
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