Jeremy Page
The Wall Street Journal
September 6, 2012
Former President Jiang Zemin was widely thought to be on his deathbed in July 2011 after he was rushed to a military hospital in Beijing with severe heart problems, according to people with connections to the Communist Party leadership.
But he appears to have made a remarkable recovery. In April, Mr. Jiang met the chief executive of Starbucks, Howard Schultz. He wrote a preface to a history book published in July, and telephoned officials in his hometown of Yangzhou after an earthquake there in August.More importantly, party insiders say Mr. Jiang, now 86 years old, played a key role in deliberations over the past few months about how to deal with Bo Xilai, the ousted party official whose wife was convicted last month of murdering British businessman Neil Heywood.
Mr. Jiang isn’t the only elder statesman to re-enter the political fray. Three others have published books this year, including 87-year-old Qiao Shi, a former rival of Mr. Jiang who is also thought to have played a part in discussions on the Bo scandal, according to the party insiders.
The re-emergence of party “elders” on the political scene highlights a problem for the next generation of leaders due to take over this fall, according to party members, diplomats and political analysts.The party hasn’t yet said how it will handle Mr. Bo; Mr. Jiang, who had close ties to Mr. Bo’s father, Bo Yibo, is thought to have advocated more lenient treatment for Mr Bo, while Mr. Qiao was among those seeking tougher sanctions, these insiders say.
As top Chinese leaders step down earlier—based on an unofficial retirement age of 68 introduced in 2002—many of them are around longer after leaving office and using their unofficial powers and contacts to play a more active, and visible, role in political discourse.
The result is an increasingly ungainly decision-making system that makes it harder to achieve consensus on the economic and political reforms needed to balance rapid growth and social stability, analysts say. Policy-making has been paralyzed for much of this year as retired and departing leaders scheme to ensure promotion of protégés who can preserve their political influence and protect their family interests for the next decade.
Elders have been particularly active as interest groups have realigned themselves following the dismissal of Mr. Bo—once a candidate for elevation to the top leadership in the fall—from his party posts in April.
“I do know that President Jiang has been involved” in settling the Bo Xilai issue, said Robert Lawrence Kuhn, a corporate adviser and author of a biography of Mr. Jiang, whom he saw most recently in 2011. “He’s still active and some of the incoming leaders are people he directly supports.” said Mr. Kuhn, who stays in touch with Jiang family members and other sources in Beijing
Mr. Jiang, who was party chief from 1989 to 2002, is one of 12 former members of the Politburo Standing Committee who are still alive and regularly consulted on key party decisions on policy and personnel, according to party insiders and political analysts.
Most of them are thought to have attended an unofficial annual leadership conclave over the summer in the seaside resort of Beidaihe, and the 12 are expected to play a formal role as members of the “presidium” that organizes the party meeting this fall to select China’s next leaders, those people say.
After the meeting, the 12 will be joined by an additional seven of the nine current Standing Committee members, including party chief Hu Jintao. That means the rivalry between the two main factions in the party—one with Mr. Jiang’s allies and protégés, the other Mr. Hu’s—is likely to endure, and possibly intensify, as the two former party chiefs compete for influence over the incoming leadership, analysts say.
The top-heavy system also threatens to undermine efforts to institutionalize the succession process that was launched—ironically, by Mr. Jiang—in the early 1990s to try to limit political meddling by the elders who dominated decision-making through the 1980s.
“The Bo Xilai affair makes it clear once again that leaders may retire but they continue to have influence, especially on personnel matters,” wrote Joseph Fewsmith, a professor at Boston University and an expert on Chinese politics, in a recent paper.
“Incidents thought buried in the past and individuals thought inactive can continue to have a bearing on the resolution of elite conflict and the rebalancing of the elite,” he wrote.
Retired leaders used to enjoy extensive formal powers as members of the Central Advisory Commission, established in 1982. But the commission often overruled the Standing Committee and caused fierce disputes within the party elite. It was scrapped in 1992 and a retirement age of 70 for the Standing Committee was introduced in 1997, and then lowered by two years in 2002.
Today, retired leaders have few formal duties. Yet they remain part of the party hierarchy and are always listed in order of ranking in state media, with Mr. Jiang first, followed by former Premier Li Peng, and former parliament chief Wan Li in third place.
They are still entitled to read many of the party documents that they had access to when in office, according to party insiders and experts on elite Chinese politics. They are also consulted informally on key decisions that could affect their own interests, or the broader future of the party.
Vice President Xi Jinping, who is expected to take China’s top job in the fall, may in fact owe his position to intervention from the elders, who in early 2007 argued in favor of promoting him over Mr. Hu’s chosen successor, Li Keqiang, analysts and party insiders say.
Mr. Hu suffered another blow last week, analysts say, with the announcement that one of his closest advisers, Ling Jihua, had been removed as head of the General Office, which organizes meetings, document flow and other logistics for Party leaders, and appointed as chief of the less powerful United Front Work Department, which handles relations with nonparty entities.
The influence of the elders may also help to explain why the party leadership has struggled to reach a political consensus on how to deal with Mr. Bo, analysts say.
Mr. Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao are thought to have led a group favoring harsher treatment for Mr. Bo because of his maverick policies in Chongqing, which included a Maoist revival movement.
Messrs. Hu and Wen enjoy the support of Song Ping, who at 95 is the second oldest of the former Standing Committee members, as well as Li Ruihuan, another elder with whom they share a background in the Communist Youth League.
But that group ran into another one affiliated mainly with Mr. Jiang, who had nurtured the career of Bo Xilai in exchange for the support of his father—ensuring his appointment first as mayor of the northeastern city of Dalian in 1993, and then as governor of northeastern Liaoning province in 2001.
Mr. Jiang almost certainly argued against a broader investigation into Mr. Bo’s past and business interests because that could have incriminated either Mr. Jiang himself or the many allies whom he helped to install in the new leadership when he retired, the analysts said.
Mr. Qiao, on the other hand, favored a fuller investigation of Mr. Bo’s alleged power abuses, according to several party insiders. That is in part because Bo Yibo helped Mr. Jiang oust Mr. Qiao from the Standing Committee in 1997 by lowering an unofficial retirement age to 70 for all leaders—except Mr. Jiang himself.
Mr. Qiao, considered a relative moderate, has long advocated strengthening the rule of law and published a book in June that focused on his efforts between 1985 and 1998 to strengthen the legal system and the national parliament—a move that some analysts saw as an attempt to highlight the weakening of those institutions over the last decade.
“One very important reason why the Cultural Revolution took place and lasted 10 years was that we had not paid enough attention to building democracy and the legal system,” he says in a 1997 interview featured in the book.
In a speech from the same year, also in the book, he says: “The history of our party stresses that no organization, no individual has the right to transcend the constitution and the law.”
