With Deng on his deathbed, Jiang is pulling his own strings –and shedding light on China’s mysterious process of transferring power. Once dismissed as a political lightweight, the 68-year-old former Shanghai mayor has pushed aside cagey rivals and elevated members of his so-called Shanghai faction. Jiang is poised to become China’s next paramount leader – despite his lack of revolutionary credentials and a reputation as a pliant bureaucrat. Already he is China’s top diplomat, confidently attending international forums like last week’s VE Day celebrations in Moscow. Jiang has also grown more hard-line, straying from a Dengist policy he once promised to uphold–and thereby showing that he, not Deng, now calls the shots. “Jiang is gaining power and influence,” says a Beijing intellectual. “That’s all part of the transition–and indeed it may signal the end.”
The Xinhua critique typifies Jiang’s conservatism. While Deng’s record is by no means a progressive one (he purged two previous “chosen successors” for championing political reforms), he did tell the Chinese that “to get rich is glorious” and then tolerated the changes that money wrought. That, say critics, gave tacit approval to corruption on a massive scale, particularly among “princelings”–the sons and daughters of high officials. Jiang, in contrast, has ascetic sensibilities. He sees tidy and straitlaced Singapore as the China of tomorrow: taking his lead from that city-state, Jiang has organized a “study group” of prominent social scientists to revive Confucianism–which espouses absolute loyalty to father and emperor–as a new state ideology.
By enforcing a more traditional moral standard, Jiang has become China’s Mr. Clean. In February his graft-busters netted a powerful father-son business team that headed one of the nation’s largest state enterprises, striking a blow to Deng-era nepotism. Last month Jiang cut down Beijing’s hard-line Communist Party boss Chen Xi-tong, who was forced to quit after a deputy mayor suspected of corruption committed suicide. Instrumental in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Chen until recently enjoyed Deng’s protection. Today dozens of city officials are either in jail or under investigation in a widening crackdown; Jiang has begun to rebuild the party’s Beijing headquarters-a move echoing Deng’s rise to power in 1978. “Basically,” says a party member, “Jiang is telling his opponents, ‘Don’t make trouble’.”
Jiang has also quietly worked to brake-or even reverse-capitalist-inspired market reforms endorsed by party leaders at a plenum in 1993. In hindsight, the event looks more like a last hurrah for Dengism than a declaration of China’s future. Today grain rationing has returned to 29 cities; price caps govern key commodities like sugar and cotton, and the reins are tightening on securities markets. Some 140,000 state enterprises – about half of them money losers-have been saved from the auction block or bankruptcy.
Jiang’s shifts seem calculated to win new friends as well as weaken potential competitors. His retreat from market reforms has endeared him to state workers, government bureaucrats and party ideologues–all traditionally loyal to hard-line Prime Minister Li Peng. The antigraft blitz resonates well with the public and plays to the frustrations of the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp parliament led by Jiang’s toughest rival, Qiao Shi. Jiang has also courted the military, a key constituency, appointing 19 generals in the People’s Liberation Army, and naming an ally to head the People’s Armed Police.
Jiang has already angered groups central to Deng’s coalition: entrepreneurs, intellectuals and outspoken provincial leaders. Chinese sources say several of Deng’s children worry that they’ve become targets in the anti-corruption crusade-fears amplified by Jiang’s recent refusal to meet with them. Brushing off Deng’s market reforms could prove perilous, too, not the least to foreign investors. Jiang may yet pay a price for turning on his patron-a scenario that smacks of Confucian justice.
