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Political Struggle Continues in China



Published on Wednesday, September 20, 2000

WILLY WO LAP LAM

Jiang surviving on shaky ground

Jiang Zemin's political foes are taking
advantage of the seemingly endless series
of corruption scandals to undermine the
president's position. And there is
evidence that the weakened party
leadership has become less able to deal
with crises ranging from rural riots to
pro-independence movements in Xinjiang.

As courts in five coastal cities began
hearings last week on the
multi-billion-yuan Xiamen smuggling and
corruption case, the question uppermost on
people's minds is how damaging this and
similar incidents will be to Mr Jiang and
his administration.

Apart from Fujian, big-time graft cases,
or those involving more than one billion
yuan and cadres with ranks of department
head or above, have also been discovered
in provinces including Guangdong, Guangxi,
Hebei, Yunnan and Shandong. And
allegations are flying fast that Mr Jiang
and some of his Politburo colleagues have
offered protection to cronies and former
underlings reportedly implicated in monkey
business.

Superficially, Mr Jiang is taking things
in his stride. His publicists have cited
the high-profile executions of rotten
apples, such as former National People's
Congress (NPC) vice-chairman Cheng Kejie
and former Jiangxi vice-governor Hu
Changqing, as proof the party would not
spare "big tigers". The propaganda
machinery has pointed to the record number
of cases being investigated as evidence of
the efficacy of the anti-graft machinery.

Yet non-Jiang-affiliated cadres across the
political spectrum are using the scandals
to lay into the president. Leftists, or
ultra-conservatives, have since early
summer been circulating yet another
"10,000-character petition", a reference
to neo-Maoist tracts lambasting the
leadership for going down the capitalist
road. The circular said corruption was the
inevitable result of Beijing abandoning
orthodox socialism and allowing private
and foreign capital to flourish. The
leftists are calling for a political
struggle to rid the party of the "tail of
capitalism".

Alarmed, Mr Jiang has asked his aides to
rein in the leftists. Beijing and
provincial papers have run commentaries on
the imperative of following Deng
Xiaoping's dictum that "economics is the
core of party work", meaning there should
be no return to a Maoist class war.

Meanwhile, members of the party's
quasi-rightist, or moderate, wing are
faulting Mr Jiang for cliquism and a
dictatorial work style. These cadres have
claimed that the president's obsession
with power, one of whose manifestations is
supporting tainted Jiang Faction members,
has exacerbated the corruption scourge and
damaged the party.

The past fortnight has seen relatively
liberal members of the leadership raising
not-so-subtle alarms about the sorry state
of the party. "The relationship between
the masses and the leadership is that
between masters and servants," said
Politburo member Li Ruihuan while touring
Shandong province last week. Among the
very few cadres who almost never mention
Mr Jiang's name in public speeches, Mr Li
is considered an entrenched Jiang foe.

"The masses are the basis of our
existence," the national media quoted Mr
Li as telling local officials. "If we part
ways with the masses, we shall accomplish
nothing - and we shall have nothing left."
Mr Li warned: "Problems do exist in the
relationship between the party and the
masses, and that between officials and the
masses. This should give rise to the
highest level of concern."

Likewise, liberal Politburo member Tian
Jiyun was quoted in the official media as
urging the party to do more to "satisfy
the material and cultural needs of the
masses". "We must further increase our
sense of crisis and urgency," he said
while touring Zhejiang province last week.
"We must correctly handle the relationship
between reform, development and
stability."

Party observers say Mr Jiang is vulnerable
because he is seen as not being tough
enough with officials alleged to have been
linked with graft cases. These include
Politburo member Jia Qinglin, a former
party boss of Fujian, and Cheng Weiguo, a
former Hebei party secretary. Then there
is the question of moral responsibility.
As another Jiang foe, the disgraced former
Beijing party boss Chen Xitong said in
self-defence shortly before his conviction
in 1998: "If you say I am responsible for
corruption in Beijing, who is responsible
for corruption in the entire party?"

Moreover, Mr Jiang's apparent failure to
go after his cronies has alienated him
from two key supporters in the Politburo
Standing Committee: Premier Zhu Rongji and
NPC chief Li Peng. Mr Zhu, who was
instrumental in cracking the Xiamen case,
was reportedly angry that investigators
were not allowed to go the distance. And
Mr Li is unhappy that while his former
ally Mr Cheng was brought to book, Mr
Jiang's associates have apparently evaded
the dragnet.

"Jiang is still undisputed number one in
the party and country, and no other
politician dares to take on the president
directly," said a retired party cadre in
Beijing. However, he added, Mr Jiang's
enemies on the left and right are using as
a pretext his failure to curb corruption
to force him to give up all his positions,
including the chairmanship of the Central
Military Commission (CMC), by 2003.

Diplomatic analysts said Mr Jiang's
unexpected announcement - in the course of
small talk with members of the Chinese
community in New York City earlier this
month - that he would retire from his
party and state positions in 2002 and
2003, respectively, was an effort to
pre-empt his critics. The analysts said by
volunteering to step down from these
positions, he was hoping to retain enough
support to remain as CMC chief until 2007.

While it is unlikely that Mr Jiang's
political fortunes may be dealt a fatal
blow, it seems obvious that the party's
declining legitimacy - what Li Ruihuan
called "malaise in ties between cadres and
the masses" - has affected its ability to
handle mounting socio-political ills. The
most obvious example is the recent rash of
labour unrest and peasant incidents that
have hit provinces from Heilongjiang to
Jiangxi.

It is true that Mr Jiang has devoted extra
resources, including expanding the
paramilitary People's Armed Police, to
deal with the disturbances. Yet as
demonstrated by the recent explosion in
Xinjiang and peasant riots in Jiangxi,
Beijing is unable to go beyond what
critics call a Band Aid style of crisis
management: responding passively to
unexpected occurrences but failing to come
up with lasting solutions.

In the wake of rural disturbances during
the past month, Mr Jiang asked the
vice-premier in charge of agriculture, Wen
Jiabao, to hold a series of emergency
meetings. At a tele-conference last week,
Mr Wen told rural cadres that "lowering
the burden on farmers is our top
priority". The vice-premier also announced
eight measures to forbid grassroots
officials from slapping tax and other
contributions on peasants.

However, the problem of excessive levies
on farmers, which is partly caused by
corruption, began to worsen significantly
as early as the mid-1990s. Both Mr Jiang
and Mr Wen have delivered dozens of
speeches on the subject. Instead of making
another high-sounding public appeal, the
leadership should bear in mind a warning
reportedly given by Li Ruihuan last year
on the dangers of going against the
masses: "Water can keep a vessel afloat -
but also overturn it."

Willy Wo-lap Lam (willy@xxxxxxxx) is a
Post associate editor.





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