The Hindu : New team to carry on Jiang legacy

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Nov 16, 2002

International

International

New team to carry on Jiang legacy

By P. S. Suryanarayana

BEIJING Nov. 15. By high noon on a cold and windy Friday, harsh weather even by Beijing's acute standards of early winter, the new political establishment here exuded a spring-season optimism to press forward along a course that was set by Jiang Zemin, the leader who had stepped down, only a day earlier, as the General Secretary of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC).

For the CPC's new General Secretary, Hu Jintao, and his colleagues in the party's rejuvenated Central Committee, Mr. Jiang's sustainable relevance is a matter of both political correctness and civilisational courtesy. Not surprisingly, Mr. Jiang was today re-elected by the CPC's new Central Committee as Chairman of the party's powerful Central Military Commission. Mr. Jiang has shed all other portfolios except that of China's President, a tenure post that will run its full course by March next year, and the concurrent position as Chairman of the national-level Central Military Commission.

The political coexistence between Mr. Hu's new team and China's President is traceable to the equation between the two leaders and the political compulsion to draw upon Mr. Jiang's expertise in managing the country's sensitive military matters. Thursday's strategic surgery of the political kind within the CPC was, therefore, followed by a prescription of post-operative care in this fashion. While this might have helped smoothen China's latest political transition, Mr. Hu and the CPC's new Political Bureau have yet to portray his image within the party with a definitive touch.

Informed sources point out that Mr. Hu stood at the head of a line-up of new members of the Standing Committee of the CPC `s Politburo in a political cameo in front of Chinese and foreign journalists here today. This contrasts strongly with the manner in which Mr. Jiang had occupied the "core position'' in a similar political cameo when he presented his team to the outside world several years ago, it is said.

In the end, even as the CPC today reordered its political priorities, it became clear that the Western predictions of a power struggle, or at least a possible factional wrangling, were ill-conceived from the beginning. The comments by some key delegates after the conclusion of the CPC's latest national congress indicate that Mr. Hu's team would like to navigate with the help of the party's old ideological compass as also Mr. Jiang's theory about the party's multi-dimensional representative character.

If Mr. Jiang was, in the end, disappointed that the party did not associate his name with his theory which was now enshrined in the CPC constitution through an amendment, he did not betray any traces of such emotions.

The near-adulatory appreciation that he received for stepping down from the party's high perch at this time was to be seen to be believed.

As for the party's perceived move towards a `liberalised' future under the socialist banner, neither Guy Kawasaki's humorous notion of a capitalist manifesto nor the separate idea of "red capitalists'' will suit the CPC as it seeks to watch its own steps.

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