SUN WUKONG China's leadership plays musical chairs
By Wu Zhong, China Editor
HONG KONG - After endorsing its top leadership, the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) is now reshuffling provincial leaders as part of its preparations for a
new State Council, or cabinet, in March.
The present State Council headed by Premier Wen Jiabao, who is expected to
remain in his post, will complete its five-year term next spring and the
National People's Congress (NPC) will rubber-stamp the formation of the new
cabinet nominated by the CCP's Central Committee. Top officials of the State
Council include the premier, four vice premiers, five state councilors, the
secretary
general, and the ministers in charge of various central government departments.
Huang Ju, the Executive Vice Premier, or first vice premier, died of cancer on
June 2. His spot is likely to be filled by Li Keqiang, 52, currently ranking No
7 on the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee. A protege of President Hu
Jintao, Li is widely speculated to be Wen's successor - or even Hu's - in the
"fifth generation" of CCP leadership in 2012.
The other three existing vice premiers are Wu Yi, Zeng Peiyan and Hui Liangyu.
Of the three, Hui Liangyu, 63, is likely to stay and continue overseeing the
country’s agriculture.
Both Wu Yi, know as China's "iron lady", and Zeng Peiyan will have to retire in
March because of their age - both are 69. According to the CCP's unwritten rule
for compulsory retirement, officials of their rank must retire after the age of
68.
Both Wu and Zeng were Politburo members until the 17th Party Congress in
October. Hence their successors must be new Politburo members. According to
another unwritten rule of the CCP, a candidate for vice premier must have
worked as a provincial leader, so their successors are likely to be selected
from provincial leaders who are also Politburo members.
Therefore, from the on-going reshuffle of provincial leaders, it is possible to
get a rough idea who will be nominated by the CCP to succeed Wu and Zeng. The
front-runners are Zhang Dejiang and Wang Qishan, both members of the current
Politburo.
On December 1, the CCP announced its decision to remove Zhang as party chief of
Guangdong province. He was replaced by Wang Yang, 52, a Wen protege, who was
then party chief of Chongqing Municipality and who was elected as a Politburo
member at the Party Congress in October.
To fill the vacancy left by Wang, the CCP named the then Minister of Commerce,
Bo Xilai, also a new Politburo member, as Chongqing’s party chief. At about the
same time, Chen Deming, then deputy director of the National Development and
Reform Commission (NDRC), was appointed as vice minister of commerce. Chen,
currently a ministerial official, is thus likely to be endorsed as the new
minister of commerce by the NPC in March, replacing Bo.
The Beijing Municipal People's Congress meanwhile approved the resignation of
Wang Qishan as Beijing mayor, naming Guo Jinlong, then party chief of Anhui
province and said to be a protege of Hu, as acting Beijing mayor.
In this "musical chairs" game, Zhang Dejiang and Wang Qishan have yet to be
assigned new posts, which is revealing. It is almost certain that they are vice
premiers in waiting.
Zhang Dejiang, 61, is a native of Liaoning province in northeast China whose
father was a People's Liberation Army general. During the Cultural Revolution,
like many of his generation, the young Zhang was sent to a village in northeast
Jilin province for "re-education" in 1968. Two years later, he worked as a
minor official in Jilin's Wangqing County government. After studying the Korean
language at Yanbian University for three years, he began to work as a party
cadre at the university in 1975. Three years later, he was sent to study
economics in North Korea's Kim Il-song Comprehensive University. In 1980 he
returned to become a vice president of Yanbian University, paving the way for
his future political career.
Yanbian is a place where many ethnic Koreans live. Perhaps because of this,
some Hong Kong media reports once said Zhang was an ethnic Korean. But his
official biography states that he is Han, like the majority of Chinese.
From 1986 to 1990, Zhang was vice minister of civil affairs and party chief of
the ministry. He worked again in Jilin province for eight years, ending his
period there as provincial party chief, before being appointed as party chief
of the east-coast province of Zhejiang in 1998. Under his rule, privately run
small and medium-sized enterprises developed to boost the local economy,
enabling Zhejiang to become one of the country's richest provinces.
In 2002, Zhang was moved to become Guangdong party chief and that year at the
16th Party Congress was elected as a Politburo member, entering the power core
of the CCP.
Guangdong officials and general public have mixed feelings about Zhang's
five-year rule.
The southern province is continuing its high-speed economic growth of the past
five years, a period when it is said Zhang protected corrupt Guangdong
officials, fearing that harsh crackdowns on corruption could hurt the economy.
He reportedly promised Beijing that Guangdong would "clean its own house",
begging that the central government not intervene by sending its own anti-graft
busters to the province, while at the same time warning his officials to behave
themselves. True or not, no large official corruption case was exposed in
Guangdong in the period.
Zhang was also criticized for trying to cover up the outbreak of the severe
acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic in early 2003. People were also
critical of Zhang's hardline stance on protests. In 2005, police cracked down
on protests by villagers in Taishi village in Guangzhou's Panyu district who
demanded leaders of the village committee step down due to alleged corruption.
In the same year, police opened fire, killing at least three people, in
protests by villagers of Dongzhou township in Shanwei city against what they
claimed were unfair land requisitions.
In July 2003, Yu Huafeng, general manager of Southern Metropolis News, an
outspoken daily based in Guangzhou, was put under house arrest, and another
executive of the newspaper Cheng Yizhong was arrested by police. Both were
charged with corruption. In the following months, more journalists and
executives of the daily were questioned or detained and the headquarters
searched.
In March, 2004, Yu was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment, changed three months
later to eight years. Cheng was released without prosecution. It was generally
suspected that it was the Southern Metropolis New's daring exposure of the SARS
epidemic that angered the authorities. It was also said that some senior
Guangdong party members wrote to Zhang demanding tolerance for the journalists
so that Yu and Cheng received "lenient" treatment.
But Zhang was apparently a quick learner. During the NPC annual session in
March this year, he publicly pledged that "the media must be treated kindly".
Since then, Guangdong media seems to have had more freedom in their news
coverage. For example, two newspapers in the province recently broke a taboo by
reporting about Wu Yi's retirement and Xi Jinping's appointment to head the
central leading group coordinating Hong Kong and Macau affairs before the
changes were officially announced. [See:
'Secrets' may push press to come of age, Asia Times Online, Dec 5,
2007].
Compared with Zhang, Wang Qishan is a less controversial figure.
Wang, 59, is a native of Shanxi province. Like Zhang, Wang was "re-educated",
though in a village in Shaanxi province, in 1969. Two years later he was
recruited to work with the Shaanxi Provincial Museum. He studied history in
Northwestern University in Xi'an, provincial capital of Shaanxi, in 1973 -1976.
After graduation, he returned to work with the museum and three years later was
moved to the Institute of Modern History under the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences as an interim researcher.
In 1982, Wang began to work with the CCP's agricultural policy research office
and the State Council's rural development center. In 1988, he was appointed as
general manager of China Agricultural Development and Trust Investment
Corporation and one year later became vice governor of China Construction Bank.
It was generally thought that Wang's fast rise during the period had much to do
with his father-in-law, Yao Yilin, who was executive vice premier in 1979-1993
overseeing economic development. Even so, Wang invariably strives to avoid
giving the impression that he relied on his family ties for his ascent through
the ranks and is seldom seen in public with his wife Yao Mingshan (few people
in China would even know her name).
Whatever the family connections, Wang stoodout for his capability and expertise
in banking, winning praise from the no-nonsense Zhu Rongji, who replaced Wang's
father-in-law, Yao Yilin, as vice premier overseeing the economy in March 1993.
In June that year, Wang was appointed vice governor of the People's Bank of
China (PBoC), the central bank, of which Zhu was concurrently governor. Wang
was therefore seen as a protege of and aide to Zhu.
One year later, when Zhu started restructuring the banking industry, Wang was
appointed governor of the China Construction Bank and later concurrently board
chairman of both China Investment Bank and China International Capital
Corporation Ltd, a joint venture investment bank between China Construction
Bank and Morgan Stanley and others.
As a gauge of the extent to which he had won Zhu's trust, Wang was sent to
clean up the mess when Guangdong International Trust and Investment Corp
(Gitic) and Guangdong Investment, two investment arms of the Guangdong
government listed in Hong Kong, ran into financial trouble during the 1997 Asia
financial crisis.
At the end of 1997, Wang was appointed executive vice governor of Guangdong
with a special task to tackle the crisis. Borrowing experience of foreign
countries, Wang decided to let Gitic go under, with debts of about US$2.54
billion, and restructure Guangdong Investment. This was the first time China
had let a government investment arm declare bankruptcy.
Many foreign banks had given huge loans to Gitic because they believed
Guangdong government would be responsible for paying them back. Wang flatly
asked them to have a "hair cut", or to share the losses. He said that since the
bankers had decided to lend, they should somehow share the debtors' losses.
"You sue us if you want. It is up to you where you would file your lawsuits. In
China, definitely you will not win. If you want to sue us in overseas courts,
we will keep you company to the end," he said.
Wang eventually made foreign creditors accept his proposed bankruptcy
arrangement for Gitic. In this campaign Wang won the nickname of "little Zhu
Rongji" in Guangdong and the reputation as a capable crisis trouble-shooter
among the officialdom.
In later 2000, Wang was called back to Beijing to head the State Council's
Office of Restructuring the Economic System, to help Zhu's economic reforms. In
late 2002, when the Office of Restructuring the Economic System was canceled as
Zhu streamlined the government, Wang was named party chief of the island
province of Hainan. Five months later, he was called back to Beijing again,
this time to become mayor of the capital, replacing Meng Xuenong who was sacked
for his role in attempting to coverup the SARS epidemic.
While regarded as one of the "princelings" because of his father-in-law, Wang
carefully seeks a balance among all factions and his reputation among Beijing
residents is generally good.
The latest rumor in Beijing has it that Wang may also concurrently take the
post of PBoC governor to personally oversee monetary policy. If this is true,
this shows Beijing is attaching greater importance to macro-economic control of
its monetary policy. The current PBoC governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, publicly
admitted last week that the "strength" of the macro-economic controls for the
past five years was not enough to achieve its goal. This indicates he may
become a scapegoat to take the blame as the country's economy threatens to
overheat and will leave the central bank.
Beijing may hope that Wang's expertise will help to safeguard the country's
financial security as China further opens its financial markets, as promised in
the third round of Sino-US Strategic Economic Dialogue in Beijing last week.
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