about that meeting

OK, a bit of inside the Beijing beltway stuff. Reuters has a story that China is considering delaying October’s Party Congress, basically because of the fallout from the Bo Xilai affair. Big news, if true.

What we can say at this point is that there are clearly people lobbying for this, and apparently choosing to do it through Reuters. It may also be that the decision has already been taken and the world is being slowly prepped for when it is announced.

Chinese political scientist Liu Junning said a delay would signal that the downfall of Bo, once seen as a strong candidate for the standing committee, had forced the party to take time out to deal with the political fallout.

"If the party congress were delayed, it's to (decide) how to deal with the legacy of Bo Xilai," Liu said.

"It's like dinner being put off because cooking was abruptly disrupted and (the party) had to attend to other matters. Now it's back to cooking," Liu added.

That would indicate Bo had indeed been penciled in for a PSC seat. His downfall should not in itself necessitate a delay, because it wouldn’t alter the Standing Committee arithmetic, which is understood to be five ‘princelings/elitists’ against four ‘CYL/populists’. Unless, that is, the CYL people have decided that the Bo affair shows that the princelings (for want of a better word: I really don’t like that as a factional definition) need reining in and that the PSC arithmetic should change in their favour.

It’s difficult to say what the outcome of that would be in policy terms, but its net effect would be to weaken the position of Xi Jinping, the incoming president and a princeling, both in general terms and specifically in relation to the incoming premier, Li Keqiang, a CYL man. It also looks good for Wang Yang down in Guangdong, who has, in a modest sort of way, been actively running for a PSC position.

Comments

[Alex]

inside the Beijing beltway

Inside the Third Ring Road surely?

One thing that interests me about the faction-ology of this is that Bo is sometimes described as being a protege of Jiang Zemin, and he's basically the daddy of the Shanghai gang/neoliberals/elitists. So he had ties to both camps - which could paradoxically mean they were united in wanting rid of him. If you can't be king, being an important baron is pretty cool...until you get a strong king, in which case you get to shut up and pay taxes.

[jamie]

Yeah, about right. As I said before, Princelings operate independently or in their own guanxi cloud. What you seem to have is one strong faction, the CYL populists, and one bunch of people who aren't really a faction but have to exist as such nominally to make the system work. And that in itself can be a destabilizing influence.

[Keir]

The Technical Group of Chinese politics?

[Malcs]

There's an article over here indicating that we've entered the denial phase of the story. There's an interesting point made towards the end about the terminal effect on officials' promotion hopes that delay would have, given the CCP's compulsory retirement scheme. So much depends on a massive Red conveyor belt.