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Analysts See Tension Among
China's Leaders
JOSEPH KAHN
July 1, 2003
BEIJING, June 29 - A conflict between supporters of
President Hu Jintao and his predecessor, Jiang Zemin,
has exposed the tensions within China's top leadership
and made it harder for a new generation of officials
to put their stamp on politics, party officials,
journalists and analysts here say.
Mr. Jiang, who is 76, has retained enormous political
muscle by keeping allies in key positions and staying
on as chairman of the Central Military Commission
despite handing his main portfolios to Mr. Hu over the
past eight months.
Officials of the Communist Party and scholars who
track leadership affairs report growing tensions
between him and supporters of Mr. Hu, the 60-year-old
president and party leader, who has solidified his
stature, among reformers, at least, with his strong
handling of the SARS outbreak after initial failings.
The tensions have made it harder for Mr. Hu to
navigate between unusually blunt calls for political
change from liberal intellectuals and fears of
instability expressed by people considered close to
Mr. Jiang, the party officials and analysts say.
Supporters of Mr. Jiang, the former party chief and
president, may also resent that Mr. Hu has moved to
take control of the agenda early in his tenure. Mr. Hu
may have crossed a sensitive political line when he
dismissed people handpicked for their jobs by Mr.
Jiang, the officials and analysts say.
Mr. Jiang seemed to challenge one of Mr. Hu's most
important decisions in late May when he invited Zhang
Wenkang, the former health minister who was fired for
mishandling SARS, to a private meeting in Beijing,
several party officials said.
The meeting, which was not publicized, rattled some
supporters of Mr. Hu who felt that Mr. Zhang had
correctly been held responsible for lying about the
spread of SARS in March and early April.
Editors and journalists say officials considered loyal
to Mr. Jiang have sought to reverse a trend toward
openness in the government-controlled press and
restricted coverage of sensitive topics, including
SARS and a corruption scandal in Mr. Jiang's power
base of Shanghai.
Mr. Hu is cautious in public and deferential, even
obsequious, to Mr. Jiang. But some analysts say he
quietly asserted himself behind the scenes when he
convened a meeting of the party's ruling Politburo to
discuss changes to the Chinese military after the Iraq
war. Mr. Jiang no longer has a seat on the Politburo
and is seen as reluctant to have that body actively
overseeing the armed forces.
The sensitivity of the jockeying was intensified when
four party elders wrote to Mr. Jiang and the party's
central leadership urging that Mr. Jiang resign as
military chief to allow Mr. Hu to consolidate power.
The letter, described by two party officials with ties
to the four retired leaders, may have had the effect
of redoubling efforts by Mr. Jiang and his supporters
to keep Mr. Hu in check, those people said.
"People's hopes are riding on Hu, especially after
SARS," said a senior editor of an important party
newspaper who has followed the political volatility. "But
Jiang is still more powerful, and the conflict between
them is becoming more evident."
Struggles for political advantage can be exaggerated
in China. Mr. Jiang and Mr. Hu are regarded as masters
of the party's political machinery who dislike direct
confrontation. To date they have not openly disagreed
on anything.
Indeed, the official New China News Agency has taken
the unusual step of announcing that the first major
speech Mr. Hu will deliver as party general secretary
on Tuesday, the 82nd anniversary of the Chinese
Communist Party's founding, will focus on carrying out
the theory of the Three Represents.
The theory, formulated by Mr. Jiang, is notably vague.
But it has been used to demonstrate that the party now
speaks for a wider spectrum of people in modern China,
including private business executives.
Analysts are speculating about whether Mr. Hu will use
the occasion to lay out any new theories or practices.
But most agree that as one editor put it, "He won't do
anything to offend old Jiang."
Yet party members and government officials often have
loyalty to the individuals to whom they owe their jobs,
and during transitions the competition among those
subgroups, like those loyal to Mr. Jiang and to Mr.
Hu, can be pointed.
With China undergoing its most extensive leadership
change since the death of Mao in 1976, it remains
possible that jockeying for power can delay policy
making or even destabilize the government.
One area that appears unusually unstable is control of
the official media, on which central leaders rely to
set the political tone nationwide.
Mr. Hu and another member of the Politburo's powerful
standing committee, Li Changchun, have supported plans
to de-emphasize the media's traditional focus on the
routine meetings and speeches of top leaders and
provide greater leeway for reporting on economic,
social and health issues.
The new leadership team has also spoken about allowing
more foreign investment in the media and reducing the
number of outlets directly supported by the party.
But another important official, Liu Yunshan, the
director of the party's Propaganda Department and a
close ally of Mr. Jiang, favors keeping tighter
controls. Journalists and editors said Mr. Liu had
warned top editors at a recent meeting that foreign
enemies of China were exploiting divisive topics to
undermine the government, citing recent remarks by Mr.
Jiang to that effect.
Mr. Liu has led a campaign to restrict coverage of
sensitive issues. At least two newspapers have been
shut down at least temporarily. Influential magazines
including Sanlian, Caijing, News Week and Strategy &
Management have been censured or threatened with
closing for exceeding the limits of official tolerance.
One subject that has now been largely banned is the
ongoing investigation into a scandal surrounding the
rise of a Shanghai tycoon named Zhou Zhengyi, who
built a property empire on government bank loans
during the 1990's.
During that decade Mr. Jiang and his closest
supporters steered government support to Shanghai on a
large scale. Mr. Jiang is viewed as wanting to keep
the investigation of Mr. Zhou low-profile so it does
not impugn high-ranking officials like Huang Ju, the
former Shanghai party chief who is now a member of the
Politburo standing committee.
In April Mr. Zhang, a military doctor who had been
picked as health minister by Mr. Jiang, became a
prominent symbol of Mr. Hu's willingness to hold
officials accountable for mistakes. Few people
questioned that Mr. Zhang had covered up the spread of
SARS, contributing to its rapid spread and forcing an
embarrassing about-face for party leaders.
In inviting Mr. Zhang to meet with him, Mr. Jiang
signaled that he intended to defend his supporters and
that he disapproved of Mr. Hu's handling of SARS,
party officials said.
His intervention would appear to explain the erratic
way that Gao Qiang, a deputy health minister who
became the main spokesman for SARS policy, described
the political fallout of the disease during separate
televised news conferences.
In mid-April, Mr. Gao announced the dismissal of Mr.
Zhang and another senior official and condemned their
mistakes. Then in late May, shortly after Mr. Jiang
was said to have met with Mr. Zhang, Mr. Gao reversed
himself and strongly defended Mr. Zhang. At a third
news conference in mid-June, Mr. Gao reverted to his
original line, saying Mr. Zhang had made serious
errors that justified his firing.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
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