world's largest corporation appoints new main board

OK, here's a decent explainer on the new CPC standing committee. As predicted in some quarters, the numbers went down from nine to seven. It's not clear which policy briefs were dropped from the top echelon yet. When it is, that'll be a good early steer on the new boys' orientation. 

Wang Yang, great hope of the reformers, failed to make the cut. That may be because he's considered too liberal as the article states, or because he's a factional ally of the outgoing leader, and Xi wants his ain' folk around him (aside from Li Keqiang, the premier and No2, who is the top CYL representatuve in the new lineup).

The big news is that Hu Jintao has also stepped down from his role heading the Central Military Commission, which he was widely expected to hold for at least a couple of years. The move was flagged up a couple of days ago specifically as Hu's own initiative, and part of a wider plan to stop retired leaders from interfering with the decisions of their successors. If so, this breaks with the pattern established in Deng Xiaoping's time and pursued both formally and informally since then. It's also an indicator that, despite the various problems, mass incidents etc facing the Party, Hu thinks that it can go on in power without the benefit of the wisdom of its accumulated coffin dodgers. Alternatively, he mnay have been shown the door after getting on the wrong end of a factional struggle, or the decision may reflect Xi's closeness to the PLA.

Comments

[nick s]

Any thoughts on Jiang Zemin showing up (non-dead) for the Big Shit Cake, and whether his presence was meant to cement the emergence of the princelings?

[jamie]

I remember when the line on Jiang was that he was a stopgap ruler and general lickspittle appointed by Deng to stabilise things after Tiananmen: Jonathan Fenby was still coming out with this a few years back. Anyway, once he was gone a new era of reform was supposed to dawn under the charismatic, forceful and yet secretly democratic rule of Hu Jintao. Jiang was also thought of as a bit of a buffoon, on the evidence of his behaviour in public.

It’s certainly true that Hu slowly but steadily crushed Jiang’s faction over the years 2002-7, but that was the Shanghai Gang, not the Princelings. Anyway, he was supposed to have died around this time, according to rumours that persisted until they suddenly exploded last year, at which point the government was accused of hushing up his death.

Now he’s risen from the dead and is the grey eminence of the Princelings who have put paid to Hu’s desire to go on wielding power behind the scenes in the manner Jiang just did, which leaves aside the fact that all this was pretty much slated to happen back in 2007, when the Xi/Li slate was first announced. So far as I can see, the Congress has pretty much gone to plan, which is why I tend to think that stepping down from the CMC was Hu’s own initiative.

Leaving aside the whole are-the-Princelings-a-faction issue, I think Jiang just gets called up to fill in for unknown unknowns in any given analysis of China’s leadership. So maybe he is a kind of stopgap.