Shaping the future of China at a challenging time

Pallavi Aiyar
The Hindu, 15 October

The directions and policies worked out by the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China will be of great interest to the whole world. The leaders elected to the new Politburo will determine the country’s political and economic course at a momentous time.

The leadership of the world’s most populous country will gather today behind closed doors at the Great Hall of the People on the western flank of Tiananmen Square to begin a week-long meeting. This gathering — the most consequential of its kind in half a decade — will be the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, arguably the world’s single most powerful political party.

Towards the end of the meet, the new top-level leadership of China represented by those who are either able to retain their places in, or find themselves newly elevated to, the influential Political Bureau of the party will emerge on to the stage from behind a curtain. While President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao are assured a place on stage for a second five-year term, speculation over the composition of the rest of the Politburo is what has veteran China-watchers at home and abroad caught up in a frenzy of tea leaf reading.

The group of men (there are few women in the top echelons of political power in China) that will be dramatically revealed at the end of the week will also be the ones to determine the political and economic course that China will take in the next half-decade and beyond. The actions and decisions of these leaders will exert a profound influence not only on the lives of 1.3 billion Chinese but increasingly beyond national borders, on the wider world. Attention will particularly be focussed on those individuals who are likely to replace the current “fourth generation” of politicians when their term comes to an end in 2012, at the 18th National Party Congress.

The congress will also be a test for how far the current President Hu Jintao is able to re-staff the Politburo with his own supporters. Analysts say that for the last five years Mr. Hu’s room for manoeuvre has been cramped by the presence of a group in the politburo loyal to his predecessor, Jiang Zemin. Unlike Mr. Jiang, Mr. Hu has made a more just society rather than untrammelled economic growth the rhetorical cornerstone of his administration. However, despite developing an agenda that clearly differentiated him from the previous leadership, the consensus among experts is that the President’s hands have been tied when it came to actual implementation of his ideas.

Whether or not Mr. Hu will at last be able to shake off the shadow of his powerful predecessor will also determine his chances of success at pushing through his own chosen candidate to take over as leader of the party and country after 2012. If Mr. Hu is able to achieve this, it will be the first time a future leader of the CCP will be chosen by someone who is not a veteran of the Long March of the 1930s. Mr. Hu himself had the blessings of Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s economic reforms and paramount leader of the country in the 1980s and early 1990s. However, Mr. Hu like Jiang Zemin before him lacks the political capital and stature of former leaders like Mr. Deng or Mao Zedong. His ability to anoint a leader of his choice is thus constrained.

Over the last five years, Mr. Hu has had to develop a style of governing based on consensus-building and compromise among what analysts say is a far more divided and fractious power elite than appears on the outside. Unlike in previous times, the choice of this new generation of leaders is thus far from a foregone conclusion. There are real choices to be made and much will depend on what those choices are.

Currently there are a number of senior party officials in their late 40s and early 50s. Each of them has a reasonable chance of taking his place among the fifth generation leadership. Analysts in China have divided them broadly into two groups: the ‘elitists’ and the ‘popularists.’ The former are, in the main, party ‘princelings’ or those with strong familial links to the party. These include the Shanghai party secretary, Xi Jinping, and the current Trade Minister, Bo Xilai, whose fathers were well-known party leaders.

The careers of the majority in the ‘elitist’ camp have been spent in the booming eastern coastal regions of China or in the central government in Beijing. They are, on the whole, comfortable with the western world and tend to speak fluent English.

The ‘popularist’ camp, on the other hand, which is the group Mr. Hu reportedly favours, is represented by people like Li Keqiang, the party secretary of Liaoning province, and Wang Yang, the Mayor of Chongqing municipality. These are men who have spent their careers away from the prosperous seaboard, in the less developed, western regions of China and have worked their way up party organisations like the communist youth league. The two groups thus represent distinct socio-political and geographic constituencies.

Both Mr. Xi and Mr. Li are widely expected to be promoted to the all-powerful nine-member standing committee of the politburo, with Mr. Xi outranking Mr. Li by a wafer thin margin. Which group is ultimately victorious in the quest for leadership will be critical in determining China’s future. The country is currently at a crossroads. In the coming years, the CPC will have to confront a series of formidable, seemingly paradoxical, challenges.

The contours of these challenges have already become clear during Mr. Hu’s first term in office. They include developing a more inclusive and just society by sharing the fruits of economic growth more equitably and narrowing the widening chasm between the urban rich and rural poor on the one hand and the wealthy coastal areas and underdeveloped interior provinces on the other.

Mr. Hu has thus already identified what he calls the development of a “harmonious society” as necessary for the social stability that is key to continued party rule. However, Beijing is also aware that any substantial slowdown in economic growth could hurt party legitimacy as well.

Another issue that the leadership must grapple with is the imperative of healing the serious environmental degradation China has suffered as a result of the vast scale and rapid pace of its industrialisation. Drawing up a cost and balance sheet between the benefits and legitimacy derived from delivering growth and the environmental fallout will not be easy.

Also unresolved is the particularly complex question of political reform. The CPC has declared that it is its intention to build “democracy with Chinese characteristics.” In other words, it will be the leadership’s quest to attempt a reconciliation of continued one-party rule with greater democratic participation. The two main planks of this project are a gradual increase in intra-party democracy and the development of the rule of law. The idea is that citizens will be given legal rather than political rights, so that although multi-party democracy remains firmly off the agenda, the average Chinese will eventually be able to use the courts as a means to protect their rights.

None of these challenges is straightforward. Some of them, notably the issue of one-party democracy, involve an experiment that is unique in world history. Moreover, the country’s domestic complexities need to be redressed against the backdrop of an increased Chinese presence and influence in world affairs. China is already the world’s fourth largest economy and is set to become the world’s largest trading entity within a few years. Global economic growth is thus steadily more dependent on China’s performance.

Beijing’s actions have also emerged as a significant influence on multilateral efforts to address a range of concerns from the nuclear issue in North Korea to the recent protests and subsequent crackdown in Myanmar. The stance that China’s new leadership takes towards issues of a global and regional nature will be critical in determining their eventual outcome.

When the final line-up of the Politburo is announced later this week, a group of truly global leaders will be revealed. In their educational and family backgrounds, ideological leanings, past achievements and personalities will lie the clues to how China is likely to evolve at this critical juncture in the country’s history. The strategic and diplomatic establishment in India would do well to take cognisance of this fact.