settled arrangements

I'm already bored with Xi Jinping. So lets take a look at the man pencilled in as China's president after him.

The gravamen here is that Hu Chunhua, 'little Hu', is both a personal protege of Hu Jintao and a leading member of his faction: so it's his turn after Xi and whatever it is that goes under the name of the Pirncelings. The flag of the CYL faction under Xi will be carried on by Li Keqiang, the premier. Li succeeds Wen Jiabao, who wasn't exactly a Shanghai gang member, but was broadly closer to then President Jiang Zemin's people than he was to HJT's faction. So what we seem to have here is a kind of two party system in formation, operating within the Communist Party.

This shouldn't be confused with actual politics. Down in Guangdong Wang Yang, the great hope of the reformers and Party rightists, is a loyal CYL man, ie a 'populist', more commonly associated with the interior provinces. Bo Xilai was an actual princeling, and so an offspring of the 'elitist' interest usually associated with the coastal provinces. It's arguable that his pseudo Maoism was a product of personal privilege, giving him the flexibility to assume whatever ideological identity that might be best suited to drive his career forwards: he was no Maoist when he was running the Ministry of Commerce. Wang, determined to rise from a humbler background, adopts a situational identity, adapting his policies to what he believes to be the prevailing conditions in his area of operation. These may or may not reflect his actual beliefs, assuming he has any.

Politics is present in the wider scene. It's noticeable that Bo Xilai's fans remain vocal, despite the fact that the Party has come down very heavily on him: you wouldn't have had people sticking up for Lin Biao in 1971, Deng Xiaoping in 1976 or Zhao Ziyang in 1989. China now has a tolerated Left, operating both within and without the Party, where it joins a long-established tolerated Right, whose views are best exemplified over here. More generally, the CPC in general doesn't really have politics any more and sometimes seems to be positioning itself as a 'party of natural government' between political 'extremes', in other words self-identifying as a centrist formation.

So, a two party system in embryo and a hardening classic political binary. I don't see any sign of these things actually coming together, but both are developments in formal political life under the Hu Jintao administration. I've always advised going very long on China democracy wagers, but maybe it'll happen before I die.

Despite having a reputation as more of a moderate and a reformer, Hu Chunhua re-jailed Inner Mongolia's most notable Mongol dissident, Hada, almost as soon as he completed a 15-year sentence for separatism in late 2010.

Or maybe not.

Comments

[Nick L]

I once witnessed a debate between a Rightist Chinese professor and a New Left professor during the Q&A session of an academic seminar. There was a real crackle of tension in the room, with the Rightist guy offering up arguments the sort of arguments beloved by apologists for Pinochet et al and the New Left guy making egalitarian, democratic claims from a position that seemed a long way from standard Anglophone liberal democratic ideology. They seemed much further apart in their political commitments and beliefs than any two given academics/journos/policy wonks here.

[jamie]

The Right and Left in China really seem to hate each other to the point where they'd be glad to have the Party do an old fashioned purge of the other lot. It's a real shame.