Hu tightens grip over Shanghai
faction By Willy Lam
Since dumping former Shanghai party
secretary Chen Liangyu in late 2006, President Hu
Jintao has tightened his control over the east
China metropolis - as well as the so-called
Shanghai faction in the tangled politics within
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At stake is
more than the resolution of the longstanding
slugfest between the two major CCP cliques - the
Shanghai boys under ex-president Jiang Zemin
versus the Communist Youth League (CYL) faction
under Hu. In Hu's calculus, reining in Shanghai's
notorious centrifugalism will go a long way toward
establishing the party-and-state headquarters'
authority over the nation's "warlords", a
reference to recalcitrant regional cadres who refuse
to
heed Beijing's edicts.
This is despite
that many outside the CYL cabal are disturbed by
the fact that Hu has planted his underlings in
more than half of China's 31 provinces and
directly administered cities. Hu, also CCP general
secretary and chairman of its Central Military
Commission (CMC), has entrusted the job of taming
Shanghai to Politburo member Yu Zhengsheng, who
took over from "Fifth-Generation" rising star Xi
Jinping as party boss of the super-rich city three
months ago.
Hu and Yu are political allies
despite that the latter never served in the CYL.
Like Hu, the 62-year-old Yu was a protege of late
patriarch Deng Xiaoping. Yu once worked for
Kanghua Corporation, one of China's first
"Western-style enterprises" that was set up by
Deng's son, Deng Pufeng, in the early 1980s.
Political sources close to the Hu faction
note that one of Yu's key missions is to dismantle
Shanghai's "city-state within a state" status,
which the mega city achieved with the blessing of
Jiang, a former Shanghai party chief. Firstly, Yu
must ensure that Shanghai will not contravene or
water down Beijing's directives. Perhaps more
significantly, Yu is gradually ending the age-old
practice of "Shanghai people running Shanghai",
which meant that top slots in the Shanghai party
and government apparatus will be reserved for
"native sons".
It is indeed a time-honored
tradition for Beijing to install "carpetbaggers"
to run a particular province, autonomous region,
or major city. In 1998, then-president Jiang Zemin
named a northerner, Li Changchun, party secretary
of the southern province of Guangdong in 1998 with
the explicit purpose of ending the tradition of
"Guangdong people running Guangdong"
(yuerenzhiyue). This special arrangement
for Guangdong was granted by late patriarch Deng
in return for the contributions made by Marshal Ye
Jianying to ending the Gang of Four's reign of
terror.
Shortly after taking office, Yu
pronounced his now-famous "Ten Commandments", or
what local officials must do to avoid running
afoul of the law and morality - and the
instructions from the Zhongnanhai party-and-state
headquarters. Speaking at a meeting called by the
Shanghai Municipal Commission on Disciplinary
Inspection, Yu said officials must pledge "not to
go against political discipline, to stop 'doing
things as one likes', and to remain at a high
level of unity with central authorities". On
another occasion, Yu vowed that the metropolis
would be "at the service of the entire nation".
Pointing to how Shanghai's dramatic growth the
past decade was predicated on support from all
parts of China, the party boss said, "Shanghai has
the responsibility to serve the entire nation, and
to make the requisite contributions to the
economic and social developments of the entire
nation."
At the same time, Yu has imposed
tighter disciplinary regulations on local
officials. For example, mid- to high-level
officials have to declare their assets. While
these policies may not be popular among Shanghai
officials, they have acquiesced in Yu's leadership
partly due to the well-known fact that the new
Shanghai leader has the full backing of the Hu-Wen
team.
Disgraced Shanghai party boss Chen
had alienated the leadership under Hu and Premier
Wen Jiabao by repeatedly failing to toe the
central line. In early 2004, Wen unveiled with
great fanfare a series of "macro-level control and
adjustment" policies aimed at cooling down
overproduction and overheating, especially in
sectors such as properties, steel and raw
materials. Shanghai, however, refused to go along.
Even worse, many of the glamorous
real-estate and infrastructure projects in the
metropolis were anchored on corrupt and "insider"
deals between municipal officials and their
business cronies. Both before and after Chen's
arrest in September 2006, two dozen-odd of
Shanghai officials and businessmen have been
investigated - and in some cases detained - for
illegally using the municipality's pension and
social-welfare funds to bankroll property
acquisition and other ventures.
Equally
importantly, Yu, together with the CCP
Organization Department - which is headed by
long-time Hu protege Li Yuanchao - has begun to
chip away at the tradition of "Shanghai people
running Shanghai" (wurenzhiwu) by
installing more Beijing "carpetbaggers" to senior
municipal positions.
One of Deng's most
memorable dictums is that leaderships at both the
central and regional levels must come from "the
five lakes and the four seas" (wuhusihai),
meaning they had to come from different factional
and geographical backgrounds. Last month, Tu
Guangshao and Ai Baojun, two Sixth-Generation
cadres - those born in the 1960s - who hail from
Hubei and Liaoning provinces respectively, were
named vice mayors. Tu, 48, a former vice chairman
of the Beijing-based State Securities Regulatory
Commission, is a fast-rising technocrat who is
expected to shepherd Shanghai toward its goal of
becoming a major financial center of the
Asia-Pacific Region.
Ai, 47, is a
specialist in the steel industry with experience
in Shanghai's giant Baogang Steel Mill. The
US-trained Ai is expected to be in charge of
industry and infrastructure in the mega city.
Political circles in Shanghai are also rife with
speculation that Mayor Han Zheng would soon be
posted elsewhere after Yu had acquired a better
handle on municipal affairs. This is in spite of
the fact that on assuming office late last year,
Yu had tried to boost morale among Shanghai
officials by saying that Han, who had spent his
entire career in the metropolis, would stay on to
help him run the city.
Since the CCP swept
to power in 1949, Shanghai has been administered
mostly by politicians who were either born in the
metropolis and neighboring cities - or who have
spent a good chunk of their career there. The
Shanghai-based Gang of Four, led by Mao's wife
Jiang Qing, managed to not only dominate local
politics but also install Shanghai cadres in
senior posts in Beijing. The Shanghai faction had
their heyday from 1990 to 2002, when former
Shanghai party secretary Jiang Zemin was CCP
general secretary and president. Jiang was even
able to pack the Politburo Standing Committee with
Shanghai faction affiliates such as Wu Bangguo,
Zeng Qinghong, and Huang Ju - all former party
secretaries - on his retirement from the top party
post in 2002.
Since Jiang's retirement
from the CMC chairmanship in September 2004,
however, most Shanghai faction heavyweights have
either retired or crossed over to the Hu-Wen camp.
It is a mark of Hu's "magnanimity", as well as his
cautious observation of the CPP tradition of "not
beating up a dog which is already down in the
water", that most of the tainted Shanghai faction
affiliates - as well as their kinsfolk - will
likely escape punishment. It is perhaps due to
such Byzantine considerations that Chen's case has
still not been heard in a court of law.
Similarly, the large number of Shanghai
officials who had profited from their association
with former Shanghai real-estate billionaire Zhou
Zhengyi - who was in late December sentenced to a
16-year jail term for market manipulation and
corruption-related practices - will not be
penalized.
Zhou was allegedly a business
partner of the sons of two Shanghai faction
stalwarts; while the latter have never been
charged, they have dropped out of the media
limelight since Zhou's shenanigans were first
exposed in 2003. It is understood that in return
for Hu not going after the cronies and relatives
of selected Shanghai faction heavyweights, the
latter have agreed to unreservedly profess their
loyalty to his new reign.
Some observers
believe that Hu does not want to alienate the
Shanghai faction too much because he seems to be
following in the empire-building footsteps of
ex-president Jiang by vastly expanding the clout
of the CYL faction. In the run-up to and after the
17th CCP Congress last October, Hu and the CCP
Organization Department had appointed Hu's allies
to senior slots in cities and provinces including
Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Sichuan, Guizhou,
Shaanxi and Shanxi.
Moreover, several of
the new leaders of strategic regions, such as the
party secretaries of Guangdong and Sichuan - Wang
Yang and Liu Qibao, respectively - had barely
served in their former posts for two years or so.
This has given the impression to observers that Hu
has put the aggrandizement of his own clique above
the efficient deployment of talent.
At a
time when central initiatives are sourly needed to
cope with urgent problems such as runaway
inflation, many in China are perhaps willing to
back the Hu-Wen team's emphasis on the fail-safe
implementation of Beijing's edicts. On the
inauguration of his second cabinet in March, Wen
is expected to call on localities to sacrifice
parochial interests to guarantee the attainment of
national goals to bring about a soft landing in
the economy and to restore the country's badly
damaged ecological system.
Recentralization of powers is a major
reason behind the imminent formation of a number
of "super-ministries" in fields including energy,
finance, agriculture, transportation and the
environment. In the absence of genuine political
reform, however, the party-and-state apparatus
lacks institutional means to ensure an equitable
balance of power between the center and the
localities.
After all, the Hu-Wen team has
to use the "anti-corruption card" to get rid of
unwieldy warlords such as Shanghai's Chen.
Moreover, Hu might even lose his moral high ground
if the large number of CYL faction members he has
installed in regional administrations were unable
to pass muster in being both "red and expert"
(youhongyouzhuan); that is, loyal to
Beijing in addition to doing their jobs well in
the eyes of the paramount leader.
Willy Wo-Lap Lam is a senior
fellow at The Jamestown Foundation. He has worked
in senior editorial positions in international
media including Asiaweek newsmagazine, South China
Morning Post and the Asia-Pacific Headquarters of
CNN. He is the author of five books on China,
including the recently published Chinese
Politics in the Hu Jintao Era: New Leaders, New
Challenges.
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