Its seems an immutable fact of Chinese life, as true for those outside the country as those inside, that the new leadership should remain as opaque as the old one was
It seems an immutable fact of Chinese life, as true for those outside the country as those inside, that the new leadership should remain as opaque as the old one was. Xi Jinping's arrival onto the stage this week![ext]()
added a few shafts of light.
We now know that his predecessor Hu Jintao is going to stand down from his military post, so that Mr Xi will lead the party, the government and the military. We also learned that two prominent voices for political reform, Wang Yang, the party secretary of the richest province Guangdong, and Li Yuanchao, who called for inter-party democracy, did not make it onto the standing committee of the politburo. The committee itself was pared back from nine to seven members. But by the same token, most of the grey bunch are in their mid-sixties and may not last for the full decade. So this could be a transitional leadership which bears the imprint of Jiang Zemin, who was Hu Jintao's predecessor, rather than Mr Xi himself. We know that Mr Xi mentioned the words party 20 times, people 19 times, responsibility 10 times and problems three times. That is not, in the current jargon of foreign policy analysts, much of a takeaway.
Mr Xi has made strenuous efforts to keep his thoughts to himself. If he got to the top by being the least threatening figure to a variety of rival interest groups, there is a good bet he will keep it that way until he has the power to strike. For all the emphasis in his speech on the new leadership's responsibility to the people, there is nothing either in his history or in the current make-up of the collective leadership to assume that a new Gorbachev is in the making. Rather the opposite. Gorbachev was a lesson for the Chinese leadership in how not to reform. Keeping control is the order of the day, not losing it as Gorbachev did. But nor can reform be regarded as an afterthought, an addendum on the main agenda of keeping the growth figures up. It is central to the stability of the state. And it is intrinsically political.
Take the problem of mid-level government in China. It has been described as China Inc, in that it is genuinely difficult to tell the difference between a public servant with private interests, and private entrepreneur with public interests. These bureaucrats have become so tainted that for them the public interest – let alone the rights of groups or individuals – has disappeared altogether. Demanding that the state make way for the rise of the middle class is in these circumstances rather like drilling a hole in the Three Gorges Dam. Re-establishing the legitimacy of government, and doing this in a stable and evolutionary way, will be Mr Xi's central challenge. Reported by guardian.co.uk 5 hours ago.
It seems an immutable fact of Chinese life, as true for those outside the country as those inside, that the new leadership should remain as opaque as the old one was. Xi Jinping's arrival onto the stage this week
added a few shafts of light.We now know that his predecessor Hu Jintao is going to stand down from his military post, so that Mr Xi will lead the party, the government and the military. We also learned that two prominent voices for political reform, Wang Yang, the party secretary of the richest province Guangdong, and Li Yuanchao, who called for inter-party democracy, did not make it onto the standing committee of the politburo. The committee itself was pared back from nine to seven members. But by the same token, most of the grey bunch are in their mid-sixties and may not last for the full decade. So this could be a transitional leadership which bears the imprint of Jiang Zemin, who was Hu Jintao's predecessor, rather than Mr Xi himself. We know that Mr Xi mentioned the words party 20 times, people 19 times, responsibility 10 times and problems three times. That is not, in the current jargon of foreign policy analysts, much of a takeaway.
Mr Xi has made strenuous efforts to keep his thoughts to himself. If he got to the top by being the least threatening figure to a variety of rival interest groups, there is a good bet he will keep it that way until he has the power to strike. For all the emphasis in his speech on the new leadership's responsibility to the people, there is nothing either in his history or in the current make-up of the collective leadership to assume that a new Gorbachev is in the making. Rather the opposite. Gorbachev was a lesson for the Chinese leadership in how not to reform. Keeping control is the order of the day, not losing it as Gorbachev did. But nor can reform be regarded as an afterthought, an addendum on the main agenda of keeping the growth figures up. It is central to the stability of the state. And it is intrinsically political.
Take the problem of mid-level government in China. It has been described as China Inc, in that it is genuinely difficult to tell the difference between a public servant with private interests, and private entrepreneur with public interests. These bureaucrats have become so tainted that for them the public interest – let alone the rights of groups or individuals – has disappeared altogether. Demanding that the state make way for the rise of the middle class is in these circumstances rather like drilling a hole in the Three Gorges Dam. Re-establishing the legitimacy of government, and doing this in a stable and evolutionary way, will be Mr Xi's central challenge. Reported by guardian.co.uk 5 hours ago.