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from Ian Bremmer:
What do we know about China’s new leadership?
As China obsessives know, it is tough to read tea leaves when the water is as opaque as that surrounding China’s Politburo. In the wake of the Chinese leadership transition, we’re left to sift through the news in search of answers. There is plenty we do not know about the process or what its outcome will bring, but when it comes to underlying themes we can understand, it is possible to make some predictions.
Start with solidarity. In the most telling example of Chinese political unity, the Politburo, the elite political body that makes all of China’s major decisions, went from nine people to seven to consolidate control of the political process. The Communist Party is now more unified than before and is less likely to tolerate dissent from within. The stability of the Communist Party is paramount. All else will fall in line.
Note what happens to those who don’t. If the Bo Xilai incident demonstrated anything, it’s that, in China, nails that stick up will be hammered down. There is no room for leaders who stray from the party platform.
Need more evidence that power is being consolidated? Hu Jintao recently surrendered his military position sooner than expected so Xi Jinping, the incoming president, could have more control. Li Keqiang, Xi’s incoming deputy, got the nod to run the economy rather than Wang Qishan ‑ the most senior and noted market reformer of the lot. Three of five of the remaining standing committee members seem to be protégés of former President Jiang Zemin, a sign that the leadership is looking to past success as much as to the future. Again, it’s about consolidation—the easiest way to prevent another Bo is to limit the number of possible Bos.
from Ian Bremmer:
Rocking the vote may not rock the boat
This week -- chads willing -- Americans will finally put an end to four years’ worth of electoral Sturm und Drang. Only then can the country begin to ask the question that matters much more than who will win: Will anything change? On foreign policy, it’s increasingly clear that the answer is, for the most part, no.
Likewise, this week -- politburo willing -- the Chinese will finally put an end to a year of bureaucratic angst. The powers that be hope that once a new president is installed, the Communist Party can put months of scandal behind it (Bo Xilai’s trial and Wen Jiabao’s family fortune, to name just a couple) and start to answer the question they’re most eager to put to bed: Will anything change in a new regime? On foreign policy, it’s increasingly clear that the answer is -- you guessed it -- for the most part, no.
from Global Investing:
On the rocky road to change in China
One thing investors in China thought they could rely on was a steady, if unelected, hand.
Now Chongqing’s political head Bo Xilai has fallen, and in pretty spectacular fashion too. His wife has been accused of murdering a British businessman and his brother had to step down from the board of Everbright Bank. There are rumours the handover of power in the Politburo scheduled for this autumn, when seven out of nine of Chinese leaders are going to retire, could be delayed as the intrigue unfolds.
from Thinking Global:
China’s political intrigue ventures west
Imagine that an American intelligence agency organizes an “exercise,” as one occasionally does, on how to manage an unwanted but inescapable Washington role in a Chinese leadership struggle. Throw in the following scene-setting facts:
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With the Chinese Communist Party confronting a decisive leadership transition, a provincial police chief takes refuge in a U.S. consulate and spills the beans on a corruption and murder story swirling around Bo Xilai, whose populist, Maoist campaign threatens the establishment.
Just a week before the visit to Washington of Vice-President Xi Jianping, who is in line to become paramount leader this autumn, President Obama takes sides. Although Bo’s forces are circling the consulate, the U.S. releases the police chief to Beijing’s leaders.
With that crisis solved and Chinese leaders indebted to Obama, a blind human rights activist dramatically escapes house arrest and takes refuge in the U.S. embassy in Beijing. With Secretary Hillary Clinton arriving for a high-level Sino-U.S. summit, both sides enter crisis management mode.
It’s no wonder that the intellectual salons of Washington have grown a bit bored with the ongoing U.S. election campaign and have shifted their interest instead to Chinese domestic politics. The reasons are obvious: The details are juicier, the drama is more immediate and the historic stakes are considerably more significant.
from Compass:
China’s war of the oligarchs
The death of an Englishman in Chongqing has acquired all the intrigue of a John le Carré novel with none of its charms. Despite the occasionally romantic descriptions of the disgraced leader Bo Xilai as a charismatic man of the people challenging the prerogatives of Beijing’s bureaucratic leadership, this is a story without heroes, in which no one’s hands are clean. For all the elements of murder, mystery and missing fortunes occupying the Western press, in China today the focus of the country’s political and economic leaders is on the cascading power struggle that is in progress and what it holds for the future management of the world’s second-largest economy.
A year of leadership change that should have been defined by a smooth, almost seamless transition is instead shaping up to be a turning point in the direction – and ownership – of the political economy of China. Two years of plotting, positioning and maneuvering on the part of tens of thousands of party officials have been thrown into disarray by Bo’s fall, with few now confident of where their allies and masters will find themselves at the conclusion of this upheaval. Combine this with the unresolved elite debate about the cause of China’s economic miracle – the process of reform and liberalization, on the one hand; or, on the other, the still-powerful grip of the state on the means of production – and what you have are all the elements of a perfect storm for the Chinese Communist Party.
