China has reshuffled its military top brass in a move analysts said yesterday was probably aimed at ensuring President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) remains commander-in-chief of the military after a 10-yearly leadership change.
At a top Chinese Communist Party meeting on Sunday, Hu oversaw the promotion of generals Fan Changlong (范長龍) and Xu Qiliang (許其亮) as vice chairmen of the powerful 12-member Central Military Commission (CMC), Xinhua news agency said.
Hu, the CMC chairman, is set to step down as head of the ruling party at a congress starting this week and will retire as national president in March next year as part of the leadership change.
Photo: Reuters
However, Willy Lam (林和立), a China politics expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said: “Hu Jintao would want to serve another five years [as CMC chief], particularly given the fact that he has to watch over his political proteges ... and protect his political legacy.”
“As long as he is the CMC chief, he will still be the power behind the throne,” Lam said.
According to Lu Siqing (盧四清) head of the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, which seeks to advance political reform in China, both promoted generals have close ties to Hu.
Xu is the first air force general to become a vice chairman of the committee, and his ascension also reflects the importance China places on quickly developing its air capability.
China’s 2.3 million-strong military forces include nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles and a recently commissioned second-hand aircraft carrier purchased from Ukraine.
The two incoming CMC vice chairmen will be tasked with pushing forward the modernization of the military and overseeing the increasingly powerful arsenal.
Unlike most modern states the military is directly run by the ruling party, not by the government, an arrangement that stems from the revolution that brought the party to power in 1949.
Mao Zedong (毛澤東) — who said that “power comes from the barrel of the gun” — used the People’s Liberation Army not only to advance revolution, but also to protect the party’s political power, Lam said.
Hu took over control of the party from former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) in 2002 but, as part of China’s opaque and secretive political process, only succeeded him as CMC chairman in 2004.
There was also a possibility that Hu would only retain the CMC chairmanship for an extra two years, Lam said, long enough to let him influence the naming of the future heir to Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping (習近平), his own successor as party head and president.
He could also protect his protege, Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang (李克強), who is set to take the place of outgoing Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶), and seek to place other key allies in top posts at the 19th Party Congress in 2017, Lam said.
Xi was effectively chosen as China’s next core leader in 2007 in a selection process heavily influenced by Jiang, who had already stepped down.
In a statement, Lu said: “Hu Jintao will seek to continue on as chairman of the Central Military Commission for another five years until 2017.”
“This is due to worries over Xi Jinping among a lot of people in the higher levels of the military,” he said.
Xi was named a CMC vice chairman in 2010 in a rocky approval process that reportedly took more than a year to complete.
“If Hu Jintao retains his seat for another year or so, this certainly maintains the previous political practice,” Kenneth Jarrett, a China-based director for the APCO Worldwide consultancy, told reporters.
“But I would say it’s not good for China in the sense that you have a divided leadership, where you have Hu Jintao who will have the allegiance of the military at the very top even though he has given up all of his other positions,” he said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS