Archive for ‘10 year leadership change’

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06/11/2012

* Understanding China’s 18th Communist Party Congress

Reuters: “China’s ruling Communist Party opens its 18th Congress on Thursday, a complicated political coronation that will install the country’s fifth generation of leaders.

Here is how the process works and some pointers to what is at stake in this congress.

AGENDA

– The five-yearly congress elects about 370 full and alternate members of the party’s elite Central Committee in a session lasting about one week, drawing from a pre-selected pool of candidates expected to be only slightly larger than 370.

– The new Central Committee’s first session, held the day after the congress ends, then selects some two dozen members of the decision-making Politburo, again drawing from a list of candidates already selected by the party’s leadership over months of political jockeying.

– The new Politburo Standing Committee, the party’s top echelon of power which currently has nine members, will then be unveiled after the one-day Central Committee plenum ends. It is widely expected to be shrunk to seven, facilitating decision-making needed to push through key reforms.

– A series of other appointments will also be made over the congress period, and in some cases before it. These include provincial party chiefs and governors and heads of some state-owned enterprises.

– Vice President Xi Jinping is set to take over as party general secretary from President Hu Jintao at the end of the congress. Xi then takes over as head of state in March at the annual full meeting of parliament.

One uncertainty is whether Hu will also give up his job as military chief. His predecessor, Jiang Zemin, stayed on in that role for two years after stepping down as party chief.

POLICIES

– Hu will give a keynote report to the opening session of the congress, appraising the meeting of the party’s work over the past five years and mapping out challenges ahead for the next five years. Details of the speech remain a closely guarded secret ahead of time.

– The catchphrase in state media and among academics ahead of the congress has been “reform”. China experts say that unless the new leadership pushes through stalled reforms, the nation risks economic malaise, deepening unrest and ultimately even a crisis that could shake the party’s grip on power.

– Advocates of reform are pressing Xi to cut back the privileges of state-owned firms, make it easier for rural migrants to settle permanently in cities, fix a fiscal system that encourages local governments to live off land expropriations and, above all, tether the powers of a state that they say risks suffocating growth and fanning discontent.

– There may also perhaps be cautious efforts to answer calls for more political reforms, though nobody seriously expects a move towards full democracy.

The party may introduce experimental measures to broaden inner-party democracy – in other words, encouraging greater debate within the party – but stability remains a top concern and one-party rule will be safeguarded.”

via Factbox: Understanding China’s 18th Communist Party Congress | Reuters.

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06/11/2012

* China leaders consider internal democratic reform

Even if it seems to be somewhat internal, such a move would be the first step towards openness and transparency.  And who knows where that might lead.

Reuters: “China’s outgoing leader and his likely successor are pushing the ruling Communist Party to adopt a more democratic process this month for choosing a new leadership, sources said, in an attempt to boost its flagging legitimacy in the eyes of the public.

A man walks past a logo of the Communist Party of China (CPC) at a media center for the upcoming18th National Congress of the CPC, which starts Thursday, in Beijing November 5, 2012. REUTERS-Jason Lee

The extent of the reform would be unprecedented in communist China where elections for the highest tiers of the party, held every five years, have been mainly exercises in rubber-stamping candidates already agreed upon by party power-brokers.

The Communist Party, which has held unbroken power since 1949, is struggling to maintain its popular legitimacy in the face of rising inequality, corruption and environmental degradation, even as the economy continues to bound ahead.

President Hu Jintao and his heir, Xi Jinping, have proposed that the party’s 18th Congress, which opens on Thursday, should hold elections for the elite Politburo where for the first time there would be more candidates than available seats, said three sources with ties to the party leadership.

The Politburo, currently 24 members, is the second-highest level of power in China from which the highest decision-making body, the Politburo Standing Committee, is chosen.

They are chosen by the roughly 200 full members of the Central Committee which is in turn chosen by the more than 2,000 delegates at this week’s Congress.

Under their proposal, there would be up to 20 percent more candidates than seats in the new Politburo in an election to be held next week, the sources said. It was unclear if competitive voting would also be extended to the Standing Committee.

“Hu wants expanding intra-party democracy to be one of his legacies,” one source said, requesting anonymity to avoid repercussions for discussing secretive elite politics.

“It would also be good for Xi’s image,” the source added.

Xi is considered certain to replace Hu as party chief at the congress, with Li Keqiang, currently a vice premier, tipped to become his deputy in the once-in-a-decade transition to a new administration. Xi would then take over as president, and Li as premier, at the annual full session of parliament in March.

China experts said a more competitive election for the Politburo would mark a historic reform that could lead to surprises in the formation of Xi’s administration, with wider implications for further political reform.

“This is a very, very important development,” said Cheng Li, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

“It would provide a new source of legitimacy. It would not just be dark-box manipulation … The party’s legitimacy is so low that they must do something to uplift the public’s confidence.”

However, Li and other experts remained skeptical that the proposal would be adopted, given that it could still be vetoed by party elders or conservatives.

via Exclusive: China leaders consider internal democratic reform | Reuters.

Posted in 10 year leadership change, China alert, Democracy, Good news, Politics, Reform, Transparency | 1 Comment »

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03/11/2012

* From lawyer to leader, Li Keqiang will be best-educated leader yet

For 20 years, the top Chinese leaders were mostly engineers (or scientists).  The president-to-be is Xi Jinping is a chemical engineer by training; and the Premier-to-be Li Keqiang holds postgraduate degrees in law and economics. We shall soon see who are the other members of the central committee of the Politburo and what are their backgrounds. But I am certain engineers will not be in the majority. If I am correct, then as nothing significant in China happens by accident, the shift from engineers to a wider set of backgrounds probably means a shift from concentrating on infrastructure and engineering-oriented enterprises to wider investments and concerns.

South China Morning Post: “The next premier is likely to be the best educated since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, with Vice-Premier Li Keqiang , who holds postgraduate degrees in law and economics from prestigious Peking University, due to succeed Premier Wen Jiabao in March.

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At university, Li studied the ideas of leading British judges and mixed with democracy advocates, leading some to hope his premiership will herald significant political change in the world’s last major communist-ruled nation.

Li is the first senior central government leader to hold a PhD in economics and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in law, all earned at a university that was a hotspot of dissent, and his liberal studies background contrasts strongly with the engineering backgrounds of those who have run China recently.

A member of the first group of students admitted to university after late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping ordered the resumption of the university entrance exam in 1977, following the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, Li studied law under Professor Gong Xiangrui , an expert on Western constitutional law who had studied in Britain in the 1930s. Li followed that with a PhD in economics under Li Yining , the mainland’s market reform guru.

Kerry Brown, head of the Asia programme at the Chatham House think tank in London, said Li was the first lawyer to become a member of the party’s supreme Politburo Standing Committee and he would be the first lawyer to become premier.

“He typifies the new leaders inasmuch as he is not a technocrat, has a PhD from Peking University and had a long period of training in the provinces before elevation to executive vice-premier in 2008,” Brown said.

Li is one of the few top leaders fluent in English, surprising observers during a visit to Hong Kong last year when he broke with protocol and addressed an event at the University of Hong Kong in English. His wife, Cheng Hong, is a linguistics professor and an expert on American literature who has translated several modern American works into Chinese.

Brown praised Li for having an engaging public manner, something he said was shown in Li’s visit to Hong Kong last year.

“He is not afraid of using English in public, though the heavy treatment of protesters and journalists at the time caused much criticism,” Brown said.

Most of China’s leaders over the past couple of decades have been engineers-turned-bureaucrats, trained in an education system heavily influenced by the Soviet Union.

But 57-year-old Li, like many of his contemporaries, brings a markedly different mindset to the problems facing the nation.

via From lawyer to leader, Li Keqiang will be best-educated leader yet | South China Morning Post.

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/2012/02/18/chinese-leadership-are-mostly-engineers/

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29/09/2012

* China at critical time as CPC congress approaches

The article below is amazingly frank and open to be published by any official Chinese organ. It mentions the Cultural Revolution in negative terms, and it refers to “uninhibited and widespread abuse of power and corruption among government officials”. The article has obviously been vetted by senior officials before its release. If this level of frankness and openness continues, then true reform cannot be far behind. But, of course, as the article states at the end ” … the country’s new leaders, as what they say and do may signal the beginning of great changes in China …”

Xinhua: “There may be no better time than today to observe how China will change in the future, as the Communist Party of China (CPC) is gearing up for a key meeting that will see a once-in-a-decade leadership transition in the world’s most populous nation.

In a year of global elections, the world is closely scrutinizing the CPC 18th National Congress, to be convened on Nov. 8, and waiting to see how it will stand up to challenges facing the country and the CPC, as well as how it will influence the world at large.

After more than three decades of rapid growth thanks to the reform and opening-up drive, China has ushered in an important era of transition in which the country must transform its economy and make it more sustainable.

No matter how one views the event, the CPC’s 18th National Congress comes at a critical time for China, as the leadership it selects and the decisions it makes will have a profound impact on the world’s second-largest economy, and more importantly, on its people.

The Chinese have experienced many such critical moments in the past century, during which time incredible changes occurred in the country and the CPC itself.

One apparent distinction is that the CPC has grown incredibly large, with the number of members exploding from about 50 when the Party was founded in 1921 to more than 82 million on the eve of the CPC 18th National Congress, a number equivalent to the entire population of Germany.

Since it became the ruling party in 1949, the CPC has suffered twists and turns, such as the self-inflicted Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, but managed to restore China’s economic strength in the global arena through reform and the introduction of a market economy.

Over the past decade, China has become the world’s fastest growing economy, with an average annual growth of 10.7 percent from 2003 to 2011, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics. China took up about 10 percent of the world’s gross domestic product while contributing more than one-fifth of global growth last year.

Yet unprecedented challenges are still ahead for the CPC, even though its top leadership has defined the current transition period as a time that is full of strategic opportunities to build China into a prosperous society by 2020.

The CPC 18th National Congress comes at a time when the economy is facing mounting downward pressure after three decades of almost two-digit growth.

The era of ultra-high economic growth will soon be fading in China, where policymakers will have to get used to an economy that expands by about 8 percent annually, according to a study conducted by a research team from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think tank.

But the most pressing issue for the Chinese public is the uninhibited and widespread abuse of power and corruption among government officials and businessmen. A series of systematic and structural problems that have impeded the healthy development of the Chinese economy and society have yet to be resolved.

Addressing problems that concern the people’s vital interests and giving more respect to the will of the people in making policies will continue to be a challenge for the CPC.

Challenges have also appeared from outside, as the external environment has never been as complicated as it is now.

Due to the deepening of the sovereign debt crisis and massive economic restructuring that occurred after the global financial crisis, developed economies may sink into long-term recession, thus creating new uncertainties and posing increasing risks for emerging economies like China.

While maintaining the continuity of its policies, China must also adjust its relations with major powers, developing countries and neighboring countries according to the latest changes in the global situation. Any change in China will inevitably affect the rest of the world in an era of economic globalization.

All of these problems and challenges will have to be addressed when the CPC’s 18th National Congress is convened.

Hopefully, the CPC will draw lessons from its past successes and failures and establish a future direction for the country through resolutions on ideology-building, political routes and personnel management.

When the congress opens, people inside and outside China should closely watch the country’s new leaders, as what they say and do may signal the beginning of great changes in China and the rest of the world.”

via China at critical time as CPC congress approaches – Xinhua | English.news.cn.

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