Chinese President Jiang Zemin (江澤民) handed over the post of general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee to Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) at the 16th Party Congress that ended last weekend. When Jiang took over the party's highest position in the wake of Tiananmen Square incident in June 1989, few thought he would last or wield much power.
To the surprise of most China watchers, however, ever since 1995, and especially since the death of the senior leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) in 1997, Jiang has emerged as China's unrivaled leader and wielded an impressive amount of power. How did he do it?
First, Jiang enjoyed a bit of good luck. Deng, who handpicked Jiang in 1989, lived long enough to give his protege a helping hand.
Unlike Deng, who led and governed mostly by personal influence, Jiang has held the top leadership positions in the party, in the PLA as chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) since 1989 and in the government as the head of state since 1993. Jiang has wielded power through these posts and skillfully consolidated and enhanced his leadership authority.
As president, Jiang has been highly active in foreign affairs; he has used many state visits and summit meetings with foreign leaders to enhance his visibility and prestige at home.
And as head of China's foreign affairs Work Group, he has reserved for himself the power to shape China's major foreign policy decisions, thereby eclipsing the influence of other leaders such as Li Peng (李鵬), chairman of the National People's Congress, and Premier Zhu Rongji (朱鎔基).
Jiang has picked and chosen hundreds of senior PLA officers for promotion to key leadership posts in the past decade; consequently, most of China's top PLA leaders are indebted to Jiang for their career rise.
China is on the threshold of a major leadership change, with the 16th National Congress having elected a new Central Committee, which in turn elected a new Politburo and the Politburo Standing Committee, the leadership nucleus.
Half of the 21 incumbent Politburo members and most of the seven Politburo Standing Committee members, including Jiang, Zhu and Li Peng have left.
Hu, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee since 1992 and vice chairman of the CMC, is the new CCP general secretary. Hu will also succeed Jiang as China's next head of state at the National People's Congress session in March next year.
Jiang is stepping down from the leadership posts but he is not retiring from politics. He has stayed on as chairman of the CMC, emulating the example set by his mentor Deng.
His theory of the so-called "three represents," which says the party now represents not only the working class but also the basic interests of the people, including the entrepreneurs and other elites, has been inserted into the party charter, alongside Deng's theory and Mao Zedong (
Hu will be in office, but not in power because Jiang has packed the Politburo and its Standing Committee with his own supporters and Hu is only a first among the equals and must submit to the rules of collective leadership.
Whether or not Hu will last will depend on how he exercises leadership, for there are other leaders are waiting in the wings to challenge and replace him.
One most powerful rival is Zeng Qinghong (
Parris Chang, professor emeritus of political science at Pennsylvania State University, is president of the Taiwan Institute for Political, Economic and Strategic Studies.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
RSS