China's Internal Politics: Domestic Threats (2008 PDF)

3 Domestic Threats T O UN...

3 Domestic Threats T O UNDERSTAND THE ANXIETIES of China’s leaders, it helps to re- member that in 1989 the Communist dynasty almost ended in its fortieth year. For more than six weeks, millions of students dem- onstrated for democracy in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and 132 other cities in every Chinese province.1 The Communist Party leadership split over how to deal with the demonstrations. And the People’s Republic just barely survived. At the center of the drama was Zhao Ziyang, the architect of China’s post-1978 economic reforms and the general secretary of the Communist Party at the time. Zhao was the son of a landowner who had been killed by the Communists during land reform in the 1940s. As the leader of Sichuan Province in the 1970s he had sought to alleviate rural poverty by allowing Copyright © 2008. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. peasants to break down large-scale agricultural collectives into small group or even family farming, experiments that later became the model for the nationwide reforms. The grateful peasants of Sichuan made up a punning rhyme: “Yao chi liang, zhao Ziyang” (If you want to eat, look for Ziyang). This thoughtful, low-key leader was the antithesis of Mao Zedong’s rabble- rousing style. He had navigated the reforms through the communist bu- reaucracy by hammering out compromises among the vested interests, not by charisma. Still, the conservative wing of the Party had been trying to con- vince preeminent leader Deng Xiaoping to oust him for more than a year. The sudden death of Zhao’s predecessor, Hu Yaobang, a popular leader with a reputation as a reform advocate who two years earlier had been forced from office by the conservatives, galvanized thousands of Beijing college students to march to Tiananmen Square, carrying memorial wreaths and chanting “Down with dictatorship!” and “Long live democracy and science!” Zhao Ziyang recommended taking a gentle approach to the students by holding dialogues to persuade them that the CCP was serious about Shirk, Susan L.. China : How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=1344831. Created from monash on 2024-07-21 06:28:28.  36 china: fragile superpower eliminating corruption and expanding democracy. But when he left town for a long-planned foreign trip, his rival Premier Li Peng engineered a Politburo meeting followed by an informal meeting with retired Party leaders in Deng Xiaoping’s living room to muster support for a tough approach. In Zhao’s absence, the other leaders including Deng decided to characterize the protests in an editorial in the People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao) as “a well-planned plot... to confuse the people and throw the country into turmoil.”2 When Zhao returned to Beijing, he sought to protect the students— and his own political skin—by proposing to meet their demands “through democracy and law.” Hearing mixed signals from the leadership, students, joined now by urban residents, were emboldened to keep demonstrating. The students started a hunger strike in Tiananmen, and Beijing citizens flocked to the square to show their support. People’s Daily journalists, for the first time ever, ignored the censors and reported what was actually happening. The Politburo Standing Committee split on a motion to declare mar- tial law and call in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). But another rump meeting in Deng Xiaoping’s living room—Zhao didn’t attend—overruled that decision, summoned the military, and blamed the “turmoil” on Zhao and on some ill-defined conspiracy backed by “hostile foreign forces.” On the brink of political oblivion, Zhao went to Tiananmen in the middle of the night to apologize to the students and plead with them to end their hunger strike. “We have come too late,” he said tearfully. A few days later Zhao Ziyang was fired, replaced by Shanghai Communist Party secretary Jiang Zemin, and put under house arrest.3 Copyright © 2008. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. As the Chinese troops entered the city, Beijing citizens from all walks of life blocked their progress by surrounding the military vehicles. Grand- mothers scolded young soldiers as “bad boys.”4 Protestors throughout the country demonstrated against martial law, Li Peng, and even Deng Xiaoping himself. Eight retired generals wrote a letter to Deng Xiaoping asking him to pull out the troops and lift martial law. The PLA sent an open letter to the public supporting the protestors’ demands to “punish official profiteering, oppose corruption, and promote the construction of socialist democracy and rule of law.”5 Despite foreign speculation about mutinying troops and armed clashes among military units, in the end only one senior army commander refused to obey Deng Xiaoping’s orders to forcibly disperse the protestors. (Deng had called up units from all over the country to make sure the entire military stood behind the action.) The PLA tanks rolled into the center of Beijing and killed hundreds, or possibly thousands, of students, supporters, and bystanders on the night of June 4, 1989. Crackdowns followed in other cities. Shirk, Susan L.. China : How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=1344831. Created from monash on 2024-07-21 06:28:28.  Domestic Threats 37 Copyright © 2008. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Statue of Goddess of Democracy (modeled after the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor) towers above prodemocracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, May 30, 1989. (Toshio Sakai/AFP/Getty Images) Shirk, Susan L.. China : How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=1344831. Created from monash on 2024-07-21 06:28:28.  38 china: fragile superpower For Zhao Ziyang and the students, Tiananmen was a personal tragedy. For the Communist Party leaders it was “a life-and-death turning point for the future of our Party and state.”6 The People’s Republic was almost up- rooted by the split in the leadership and massive nationwide protests, and remained standing only because the People’s Liberation Army stayed loyal. From that day onward, Chinese leaders have lived with the fear that another Tiananmen might bring down the Communist dynasty. The lead- ers themselves never talk publicly about Tiananmen or allow the media to mention it. The CCP keeps under close supervision the mothers of the victims who have tried to organize a campaign for their children’s vindi- cation. When Zhao Ziyang died in 2005, the current leaders revealed their persistent insecurity by suppressing news of the event and restricting the funeral to a small private gathering. The Lessons of Tiananmen The trauma of Tiananmen left China’s communist leaders hanging by a tenuous thread. Just months after the crackdown, the Berlin Wall was torn down, a popular uprising overthrew the Romanian communist dicta- tor Nicolai Ceausescu, and communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslova- kia, Hungary, and Bulgaria were toppled in rapid succession. The Soviet Union itself, the strongest communist power the world had ever seen, collapsed in 1991. Would China be next? Deng Xiaoping urged his pan- icked successors to remain calm and not overreact, but the anxiety sur- rounding the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai was palpable. Copyright © 2008. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. In Tiananmen’s aftermath, Deng Xiaoping did a postmortem. “Of all China’s problems, the one that trumps everything is the need for stability. We have to jump on anything that might bring instability.... And we can’t care what foreigners say.... We will use severe measures to stamp out the first signs of turmoil as soon as they appear. This will show that we won’t put up with foreign interference and will protect our national sovereignty.”7 Deng’s successors have worried obsessively that they might meet the same fate as their Soviet and Eastern European comrades. During 2005, Hu Jintao told universities and think-tanks to update the political lessons of Tiananmen by analyzing the “color revolutions” that brought down authoritarian regimes in countries like Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005). (“Color revolutions” are so named for the nonviolent revolutions taking a color or flower as their symbol that have toppled authoritarian regimes in the post-Communist societies of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.) In the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the leaders must be worrying that Chinese students might ex- Shirk, Susan L.. China : How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=1344831. Created from monash on 2024-07-21 06:28:28.  Domestic Threats 39 ploit the opportunity to launch large-scale protests just as students did before the 1968 games in Mexico City and the 1988 games in Seoul. As Deng advised, the Chinese Communist Party today puts political stability ahead of everything else. And although never publicly articulat- ing it, the Party has come up with a formula for stability: Avoid public leadership splits Prevent large-scale social unrest Keep the military on the side of the Party The three dicta are interconnected. If the leadership group remains cohesive despite the competition that inevitably arises within it, then the Communist Party and the security police can keep social unrest from spreading out of control and the regime will survive. Unless people re- ceive some signal of “permission” from the top, protests are likely to fizzle out before they grow politically threatening. But if the divisions among the top leaders come into the open as they did in 1989, people will take to the streets with little fear of punishment.8 And if the military splits too, or abandons the incumbent leaders, the entire regime could collapse. In all three dimensions, China’s current leaders have reason to be worried. Lesson 1: Avoid Public Leadership Splits Inside the black box Understanding how Chinese politics work involves a lot of guesswork. To Copyright © 2008. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. maintain their façade of unanimity, the Chinese Communist Party and the government keep their internal deliberations secret. They allow their own citizens to see only dimly into the black box. It was big news recently when the Chinese media were permitted to report that the CCP Polit- buro held a meeting and what topics it discussed.9 No Mainland newspa- per or Web site dares publish leaks about what was actually said at the meetings. When Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, e-mailed abroad the in- structions from the Propaganda Department discussed at a meeting of his newspaper, he was sent to jail for ten years for leaking state secrets.10 Zhao Yan, a Chinese employee of the Shanghai bureau of the New York Times accused of leaking state secrets because he obtained information from anonymous sources that Jiang Zemin planned to retire from his post as head of the Central Military Commission in September 2004, was held without trial for two years and then convicted of fraud and sentenced to three years of jail time.11 Shirk, Susan L.. China : How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=1344831. Created from monash on 2024-07-21 06:28:28.  40 china: fragile superpower China’s top leaders are the nine members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party.12 The number one leader, Hu Jintao, like Jiang Zemin before him, actually wears three hats—general secretary of the CCP, president of China, and chairman of the Central Military Commission—but the Party position is the real source of his power. The Communist Party runs the country like a vast political machine, with the general secretary as Party boss. Although the Party delegates to the government much of the work of making and implementing policy, the Party appoints and promotes all government officials and military of- ficers, almost all of whom are Party members. Control over personnel appointments creates patronage that Party officials extend to subordinates in exchange for their loyalty. Playing to the selectorate Communist Party leaders like Jiang and Hu don’t have to stand for popu- lar election, but neither are they absolute dictators. They have to win the support of the “selectorate,” the group of people within the Party who have effective power to choose the leaders.13 The Chinese selectorate, ac- cording to the Party constitution, consists of the CCP Central Commit- tee, a body of approximately two hundred officials that meets twice a year and is in turn chosen by the two-thousand-member Party Congress that meets every five years. The membership of the Central Committee con- sists of central government and Party officials, provincial officials, and military officers who have been appointed to their jobs by the top leaders. The Central Committee, in turn, elects the top leaders—namely the Po- litburo, the Politburo Standing Committee, and the general secretary. Copyright © 2008. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. (The election is by secret ballot with nominations made by the incum- bent leaders.) The lines of authority between the leaders and the Central Committee go both ways, in a relationship I call “reciprocal accountabil- ity.”14 The officials who are members of the Central Committee are ac- countable to the Party leaders who appoint them. But at the same time the Party leaders are accountable to the officials in the Central Commit- tee who elect them. Although top-down power is greater than bottom-up power, power flows in both directions, much like the relationship between the pope and the College of Cardinals in the Catholic Church. How does a leader win and keep the support of the selectorate? Fac- tional allegiances built by patronage are part of the equation. But nowa- days factional loyalties are more fluid than in the past. Officials cultivate ties with a number of higher-ups instead of committing to one. Hu Jintao is a good example. He was a protégé of both Deng Xiaoping and the con- servative Party elder, Song Ping. Shirk, Susan L.. China : How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=1344831. Created from monash on 2024-07-21 06:28:28.  Copyright © 2008. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Created from monash on 2024-07-21 06:28:28. Shirk, Susan L.. China : How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=1344831. Figure 3.1 China’s Central Government Organization Chart Communist Party Government General Secretary PBSC (5–9 members) President National People’s PB (20–25 members) Premier Congress (Legislature) State Council (Cabinet) Domestic Threats Party Departments Central Military (Propaganda, Organization, Commission Liaison, United Front, etc.) Central Committee (175–210 Ministries Provinces full members and 110–150 alternate members) Note: Strong Authority Weaker Authority PB: Political Bureau PBSC: Political Bureau Standing Committee 41  42 china: fragile superpower As Chinese society has modernized and diversified, bureaucratic and regional interests increasingly have come into play in the political pro- cess.15 Membership in the Central Committee is now determined by job- slot, so that every central department is represented and almost every province has two representatives. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) constitutes one of the largest blocs in the Central Committee. Govern- ment departments and provinces compete actively with one another for policies that will help them grow their economies. Party leaders play to the provinces and to departmental interests as a way of building support for themselves.16 The control cartel Certain departments have disproportionate clout within the Communist Party because they are the linchpins of its control over society: the CCP Organization Department (controls personnel appointments), the CCP Propaganda Department (controls content of the media and culture), and the Ministries of State Security and Public Security (the internal police). Along with the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Armed Police, the paramilitary internal security force spun off from the PLA, they con- stitute a “control cartel” with exceptional political independence and le- verage over the top leaders.17 A Chinese journalist said, “The CCP has two powers, the gun and the pen, and it must control both.” The propaganda apparatus has always been the preserve of the most ideologically conservative elements in the CCP. Propaganda officials are so powerful they can veto their bosses from taking public positions they disagree with. They blocked Mao (in 1966) and Deng (in 1992) from pub- Copyright © 2008. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. lishing their ideas (in Mao’s case, the article was written by a close associ- ate) in People’s Daily and forced the leaders to find outlets outside Beijing instead. As a member of the U.S. team negotiating with China its acces- sion to the World Trade Organization in 1999, I observed firsthand the power of propaganda officials to interdict the access of foreign movies and television shows to Chinese audiences even though other sectors were opening up. Under Hu Jintao, the propaganda cops have intensified their control over the mass media and the Internet. The control cartel generally takes a tough line on Japan, Taiwan, and the United States. According to one Chinese participant, in 2001 when an American spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet collided off the coast of the Chinese island of Hainan and the PLA forced the American crew down and held them on the island, it was the security officials and the military who argued for holding the crew and trying them in Chinese courts in- stead of releasing them. Shirk, Susan L.. China : How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=1344831. Created from monash on 2024-07-21 06:28:28.  Domestic Threats 43 Weak voices for international cooperation The Chinese system lacks effective checks and balances to keep its lead- ers from lashing out internationally to bolster themselves domestically. During 2002 through 2004 I interviewed officials and journalists in some of China’s most globalized regions, Guangdong, Shanghai, and Shandong, searching for signs that provinces play as active a role in making foreign policy as they do in economic policymaking. The interests of provincial officials, as one Guangzhou journalist put it, “center on economic growth to get tax revenue, create jobs, and keep stability.” Whenever domestic unrest or international tension makes foreign investors uneasy, local offi- cials invite them for tea and try to reassure them. Yet, except for narrowly framed issues, like making it easier for Guangdong businesspeople to travel back and forth to Hong Kong, provinces never get into the act of making foreign policy. Nor do they necessarily favor a softer line. An informal poll of provincial officials enrolled in a short-term course at the Central Party School in 2001 found that they expressed surprisingly hard-line views on relations with Japan and the United States. (One possible explanation was offered by a scholar who said that the local officials “free ride on hard- line nationalism” because it helps them get promoted but is “completely disconnected from their local economic interests.”) Given the clout of provincial officials in domestic policymaking, it will be important to track how their foreign policy preferences and influence evolve as their local economies become increasingly tied into global trade and investment. Private business is the other group that has a strong stake in maintain- ing international economic ties and avoiding military conflict. A senior official responsible for Taiwan policy told me that a group of private busi- Copyright © 2008. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. ness executives met with him and urged him to start a dialogue with Tai- wan because their businesses were being held back by the uncertainty in the Strait. But private entrepreneurs do not yet have an institutional po- litical voice. Jiang Zemin made a big push to allow private business people to join the Communist Party—changing the social base of the CCP would have broad ramifications for both domestic and foreign policy. But so far, only one private businessperson serves as an alternate member of the CCP Central Committee. A retired PLA general confided to me that he wor- ries about the lack of a political counterweight to the nationalist public, military, and intelligence agencies that might push China’s leaders into military action. Making foreign policy Foreign policymaking is more centralized and hidden from view than the making of domestic policy. Unlike domestic policy, which produces clear Shirk, Susan L.. China : How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=1344831. Created from monash on 2024-07-21 06:28:28.  44 china: fragile superpower winners and losers, foreign policy doesn’t matter as much to particular interest groups. The routine foreign policy decisions that receive little media publicity are made by the professionals in the Foreign Ministry who, like diplomats everywhere, seek to improve relations with other coun- tries. But the politicians in the Standing Committee of the Politburo take charge of policies toward the United States, Japan, and Taiwan because they consider them “sensitive.” In other words, they are domestic hot- button issues to which the public pays a lot of attention. Under Jiang Zemin, two high-level interagency groups of ministers simi- lar to the U.S. National Security Council—the Foreign Affairs Leading Small Group and the Taiwan Affairs Leading Small Group—became the locus for decision making.18 Hu Jintao continues this practice, leading and regu- larly meeting with both groups. Since the late 1990s, some policy advisors have been trying to create a U.S.-style National Security Council that could act more promptly in a crisis, but the leaders in the Politburo Standing Committee refuse to delegate their authority over sensitive issues. Public opinion carries much more weight than it did in the past. Any sign of popular disaffection that could imperil stability will count against the current leaders and raise the risk of leadership splits. Traditionally, the leaders got their information about public views from an elaborate system of internal intelligence gathering through bureaucratic channels, which, not surprisingly, usually told officials what they wanted to hear and therefore didn’t entirely believe. In recent years senior officials have put more credence in the informa- tion they gather by monitoring the Internet and the market-oriented mass media. Of course, the people who post opinions on the Internet usually Copyright © 2008. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. have more extreme attitudes than those who sit safely on the sidelines. And tabloid journalism sensationalizes to excite audiences. These biases are not necessarily a problem for the Party leaders, however. Democra- cies pay attention to the average voters who determine the outcome of elections. But autocracies care more about the vocal extremists who are the most likely to take to the streets and mobilize others to follow them. Jiang Zemin’s surprising success Returning to the Tiananmen crisis that traumatized Chinese politics, imagine how Jiang Zemin felt, suddenly plucked from relative obscurity as Communist Party secretary of Shanghai to become China’s national leader in 1989. The future of CCP rule looked dim. The demonstrations throughout China had come close to toppling the regime. Jiang knew he was nobody’s first choice to succeed Deng Xiaoping. No one expected Jiang Zemin to last more than a few years because the engineer politician was nothing special—he had neither outstanding Shirk, Susan L.. China : How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=1344831. Created from monash on 2024-07-21 06:28:28.  Domestic Threats 45 abilities nor the personal charisma of a Mao or Deng. China watchers pre- dicted that like Hua Guofeng, the nonentity whom Mao Zedong chose as his successor after he had purged all his previous choices, Jiang would not survive long after the death of his patron. In unscripted situations, Jiang had an unfortunate tendency to show off, as I observed when accompanying Jiang on his 1997 visit to the United States and sitting in on meetings be- tween senior American officials and Jiang in China. He would go off on long riffs about Chinese and Western history and culture that were not even tangentially related to the subject at hand, in an apparent effort to display his erudition and avoid serious discussion. One Chinese expert who saw Jiang at close range said, “Jiang is not only a very insecure person, like Nixon, but he also has a lot of vanity.” A college student described Jiang as “a narcis- sist.” Several policy advisors described Jiang as “emotional” and complained that his policy preferences “zigged and zagged” and “changed overnight” depending on the “people and events that influenced him.” They drew a contrast with Deng Xiaoping, who maintained a “steady strategic perspec- tive” even when “June 4, 1989, and the fall of the Soviet Union completely turned upside down our understanding of world history.” One person went so far as to characterize Jiang as “psychologically unstable.” President Clinton, from his very first meeting with President Jiang, was unimpressed, but he told his staff it was easy to underestimate the Chinese leader.19 Jiang surprised the skeptics. He used his appointment powers to build his authority beyond anyone’s expectations. As general secretary of the Communist Party he had the final say on the selection of government ministers, provincial governors, and military officers. Over time, more and more people owed their jobs to him. Copyright © 2008. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. No one emerged as a challenger within the Standing Committee of the Politburo. Fortunately for Jiang, Zhu Rongji, the brilliant, blunt pre- mier who is credited with China’s economic restructuring during the 1990s, and who cut a more dynamic figure with the public, suppressed his own ambitions and deferred to Jiang so as to reassure him that he wasn’t after Jiang’s job. Jiang cleverly eliminated his major rival Qiao Shi in 1997 by introducing an unwritten retirement-at-seventy rule for Politburo-level officials. Jiang, then seventy-one, exempted himself as the preeminent leader. (According to some Chinese political experts, the retirement age for Politburo officials actually was lowered to sixty-eight in 2002 when Stand- ing Committee member Li Ruihuan was required to step down at that age.) Li Peng, who in 1998 moved from the premiership to the chairmanship of China’s quasi legislature, the National People’s Congress, had been suffi- ciently discredited by his prominent role in the Tiananmen crackdown that he was not a serious rival to Jiang, although he was able to throw a monkey wrench in the works from time to time. Li Peng led the attack when Zhu Shirk, Susan L.. China : How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=1344831. Created from monash on 2024-07-21 06:28:28.  46 china: fragile superpower Rongji returned from his 1999 visit to the United States without a final agreement on China’s accession to the World Trade Organization. Deng Xiaoping, like Mao, had ruled through the force of his stature as a founding father of the People’s Republic. None of Deng’s successors have had the same personal sway. Jiang was never more than first among equals in the CCP oligarchy, not a politically comfortable spot to be in. The Politburo and Central Committee blocked several nominations Jiang made of his close associates from Shanghai to national office to make sure he didn’t become too strong. Deng robbed him of the right to choose his own successor by anointing Hu Jintao, another cautious engineer- politician, a decade ahead of time. (Still in his forties, Hu leapfrogged to become a member of the Politburo Standing Committee in 1992 and then became vice president and vice-chairman of the Central Military Com- mission in 1998.) “Deng could ignore his advisors. And Mao could ignore the entire Politburo Standing Committee. But now there is no strong man,” said one Chinese professor. Hu Jintao takes few risks Today’s CCP leaders are more or less interchangeable—cautious, color- less organization men of late middle age without any special talents or Copyright © 2008. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. A visitor walks past portraits of four generations of China’s leaders: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao (left to right) at a Shanghai exhibition commemorating the Chinese Communist Party’s eighty-second birthday, June 26, 2003. (Liu Jin/AFP/Getty Images) Shirk, Susan L.. China : How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=1344831. Created from monash on 2024-07-21 06:28:28.  Domestic Threats 47 followings. As one policy advisor said with a cynical air, “Nowadays any- one can be a leader. All the Politburo Standing Committee members are the same. Anyone can sit in the chair.” As leader-in-waiting, Hu Jintao knew the job was his unless he made a big mistake. Like an American judge with aspirations to serve on the Supreme Court, he avoided contro- versy by hiding his individual views so well that the officials who inter- acted with him couldn’t tell what they were. The most they could say about him was that he was able to memorize facts and talking points very quickly. The most significant achievement of Hu’s previous career had been to clamp down on religious and political activity in Tibet at the end of 1988 when he served in that restive region as Party secretary, which helped solidify his standing with the military and the control cartel. My observations of Hu in meetings with Americans were that he was more straightforward in his style than Jiang Zemin but that he stuck closely to his script and expressed no thoughts of his own. Even today, after four years in power, Hu holds his cards close to his chest. People in China still aren’t sure what Hu stands for. After assuming leadership in fall 2002, Hu’s first actions impressed people as courageous and innovative. During the 2003 SARS epidemic Hu fired the health minister and the mayor of Beijing for the initial cover- up that had allowed the disease to spread from South China throughout the country and kill 647 people. After a Chinese submarine disaster killed all seventy sailors on board in May 2003, he fired the head of the PLA Navy and several other naval officers.20 But since then, Hu has reverted to business as usual. He shies away from political reform and is tightening controls over the press and the Copyright © 2008. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Internet. At an important Central Committee meeting in September 2004, Hu reportedly gave an old-style ideological fire-and-brimstone speech at- tacking the spread of “bourgeois liberalization” by “hostile foreign and domestic forces” and charging political reform advocates with “creating turmoil” (a loaded phrase harkening back to Tiananmen).21 “Enemy forces inevitably take public opinion to be their point of attack,” Hu reportedly warned. “The Soviet Union disintegrated under the assault of their West- ernization and bourgeois liberalization.”22 Following the meeting, CCP officials expressed worries that “some people are exploiting the Internet to attack the government and... the Communist Party.”23 And they made a big push to strengthen political controls over Internet content and the ideological education of youth.24 To make sure Party members are loyal to him and won’t shift their alle- giance to one of the potential rivals who surround him in the Standing Committee, Hu Jintao reverted to old-fashioned, Mao-style methods with Shirk, Susan L.. China : How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=1344831. Created from monash on 2024-07-21 06:28:28.  48 china: fragile superpower counterproductive results. In 2005, he launched an ideological campaign within the Party (aimed at “maintaining the advanced nature of the CCP”) that for four months required all CCP members in offices, schools, and work units to spend Thursday afternoons and all day Saturday studying Party history and the speeches of the current leaders and criticizing one another and themselves for their political failings.25 One academic said, “This campaign is rapidly eroding the popularity of Hu and Wen. We’re just wasting our talents when we could be doing something worthwhile.” In a stunning illustration of how the market economy has overtaken com- munism, Party members were able to purchase generic self-criticisms from commercial Web sites capitalizing on the campaign, which in turn neces- sitated a new rule that required self-criticisms in handwritten form. A former provincial Party chief explained Hu’s instinct to tighten up. “The Party’s authority is gradually declining, and as a result, Hu is less confident and more insecure than the leaders before him. When a leader feels insecure, he tightens controls.”26 Newspaper photos of Hu surrounded by adoring young- sters and articles praising him in lavish language are reminiscent of a Mao- style personality cult, which is unlikely to stir much public enthusiasm.27 Preventing open splits As a group, the CCP leaders appear to have learned the lesson of Tiananmen. If they don’t hang together, they could hang separately, as the Western saying goes. Yet each individual politician has moments of temptation, when an interest in acquiring more power for himself might lead him to exploit a crisis situation and reach out beyond the elite selectorate to mobilize a Copyright © 2008. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. mass following, as Zhao Ziyang tried to do during the Tiananmen crisis. Large protests increase the risk of a split by showing leaders that a follow- ing is already in place and forcing them to take a stand on the protests. Social unrest actually can create schisms at the top. The danger is not a matter of the particular personalities in the Party oligarchy at any one time, but is built into the structure of communist systems. Changes in the mass media heighten the risk of the public being drawn into elite disagreements. Leadership splits telegraphed to the public over the Internet in other authoritarian regimes have triggered revolutionary upheavals. And while defections from the public consensus are still rela- tively rare in China, they are likely to increase. Seventeen high-level lead- ers, led by ideological hard-liner Deng Liqun, posted on the Internet a polemic against Jiang Zemin’s July 1, 2001, speech that advocated the ad- mission of private capitalists into Communist Party membership.28 In 2006, a group of retired officials known for their liberal leanings released on the Internet their open letter protesting the closing of a newspaper. This hardly Shirk, Susan L.. China : How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=1344831. Created from monash on 2024-07-21 06:28:28.  Domestic Threats 49 President Hu Jintao, in military uniform, is surrounded by adoring youngsters in Copyright © 2008. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Beijing, May 29, 2005. (Wang Jianmin/Xinhua) represents an epidemic of elite protest, but rather perhaps the germs of overt leadership dissent on the rise. President Jiang was skilled at preventing splits by forcing other leaders to share with him the responsibility for controversial decisions. He put Hu Jintao, his designated successor, out in front during the crises created by the U.S. accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the collision between the U.S. spy plane and the Chinese fighter jet in 2001 (an act of cowardice on Jiang’s part in the eyes of many of the students I’ve talked to). Reportedly, he also summoned more than two thousand CCP officials to a special meeting at which he required each of the members of the Politburo Standing Committee to stand up and testify that they endorsed the necessity of the campaign to eradicate the Falun Gong, the spiritual group that had organized a large sit-in around the Shirk, Susan L.. China : How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=1344831. Created from monash on 2024-07-21 06:28:28.  50 china: fragile superpower leadership compound in April 1999, as well as the military crackdown on the Tiananmen demonstrators ten years earlier.29 Jiang made Premier Zhu Rongji take the heat when President Clinton declined to finalize the deal for China’s accession to the World Trade Organization during Zhu’s visit to the United States in April 1999. As the American official traveling with Zhu on the Chinese plane I had the painful duty of witnessing Zhu’s humiliation at close hand. Beginning with Deng Xiaoping, CCP leaders have tried to reduce the risk of destabilizing leadership splits by introducing fixed terms of office, term limits, and a mandatory retirement age to regularize leadership com- petition. When Jiang Zemin, having reached the age of seventy-seven, retired as CCP general secretary (2002) and president (2003), it was the first time that a leader of a large communist country had ever handed down power to a successor without putting up a fight or dying. Jiang’s close associate, Zeng Qinghong, praised him for “the replacement of the old by the new generation in the central leadership collective in such a stable and orderly matter.... From the history of the international com- munist movement, we can see that it is not easy to resolve this issue well.”30 As the price of retirement, Jiang obtained promotions for several offi- cials associated with him into the Politburo Standing Committee. As of 2006, six of the nine PBSC members are viewed as “Jiang’s men.”31 Jiang also managed to hang on to his job as head of the Central Military Com- mission because it did not require retirement at 70. But without the insti- tutional authority of the top Party post, Jiang’s influence began to evaporate, and two years later in September 2004, he retired completely. During the two years when Jiang and Hu shared power, subordinate officials were Copyright © 2008. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. uneasy. Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing, on a visit to the United States, when asked a question about “China after Jiang,” quipped “Not yet.” The last time China had two different voices coming from the leadership they caused the near disaster of the 1989 demonstrations. Anxious to prevent any threats to stability, senior and retired leaders reportedly convinced Jiang that the best way to preserve his legacy was to retire completely.32 Hu Jintao, not taking anything for granted, praised Jiang’s “noble charac- ter, sterling integrity, and broad-mindedness.”33 The oligarchs do everything they can to prevent divisions among them- selves. The practice followed by Jiang Zemin and now by Hu Jintao, of hav- ing the top leader hold three key positions—general secretary of the CCP, president of the PRC, and chairman of the Central Military Commission— is designed to prevent destructive cleavages among the leaders. The rule that requires Politburo approval for any high-level corruption case helps keep elite contests for power within bounds. Party documents stress the importance of “a firm central leading body” in which individuals subordi- Shirk, Susan L.. China : How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=1344831. Created from monash on 2024-07-21 06:28:28.  Domestic Threats 51 nate themselves to the whole to guarantee that the Party maintains its authority over society.34 Nevertheless, this unity is hard to maintain in the face of the dramatic changes under way in Chinese society, the inevita- bility of competition among top leaders, and the lower penalties for po- litical defection.35 Divisions at the top On the surface, relations within the CCP’s inner circle appear smooth. There is no daylight between the public positions taken by Hu and those of the premier, Wen Jiabao, a competent but pale replica of his mentor Zhu Rongji. Neither is there any evidence of a concerted challenge to Hu by the Standing Committee members who in the past were person- ally associated with Jiang Zemin, including his former right-hand man, Zeng Qinghong. No rival has emerged as the focal point of an opposition. Jiang himself is rarely seen, and reportedly spends most of his time in Shanghai. A Beijing professor insisted that Hu, like Jiang before him, was able to establish his authority by virtue of his formal powers as CCP gen- eral secretary. “Once you have that position and use it to do things, then you are in a solid position.” Yet ominous developments hint that divisions in the Party may be lurk- ing beneath the surface. After two decades of policy consensus in support of market reform, Marxist critics of Western economics and market prac- tices have launched a fierce onslaught against the reforms, blaming them for inequality, social unrest, and corruption. The critiques appear to have some official sponsorship. The broadside by the prominent elderly econo- mist Liu Guoguang against Western-trained economists who deny the Copyright © 2008. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved. value of Marxism appeared on the Strong Nation Forum site of the People’s Daily.36 The new Left, consisting of younger intellectuals many of whom learned their Marxism in American universities, has criticized Chinese foreign policy as too accommodating. Objections to the draft law on pri- vate property for favoring the rich and violating China’s constitution as a socialist nation were strong enough to cause the National People’s Con- gress, China’s quasi-legislature, to table the bill. Hu Jintao called for a major effort to learn and develop Marxist theory.37 Some authoritative articles in CCP publications in June 2006 defended the market reforms, while others emphasized that they must be consistent with socialist val- ues.38 As noted earlier, an anticorruption drive is reaching into the highest level of the Party elite. Beijing’s cognoscenti read these tea leaves as indi- cations that the oligarchs in the Standing Committee of the Politburo may be pulling in opposite directions. The dominant theory is that Hu Jintao has tacked to the Left (which is concentrated largely in the control cartel) in order to defend himself from a challenge from the leaders formerly Shirk, Susan L.. China : How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=1344831. Created from monash on 2024-07-21 06:28:28.  52 china: fragile superpower associated with Jiang Zemin, even though no one can point to any visible evidence of this challenge. The alternative theory is that someone in the Standing Committee has unleashed the leftist critics to challenge Hu. Either way, a split in the leadership puts the entire regime at risk. One policy advisor described the situation, “China can have a serious political crisis only if there is a conflict within the center, among the leaders. Now