China and the Pivotal 18th Party Congress: Problems and Prospects

Transcription

1 China and the Pivotal 18th Party Congress: Problems and Prospects Thursday, October 18, 2012 Washington, D.C. Welcome/Moderator: Douglas H. Paal, Vice President for Studies, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Speakers: Alice L. Miller, Research Fellow, Hoover Institution at Stanford University Joseph Fewsmith, Department of International Relations, Boston University Transcript by Federal News Service Washington, D.C.

2 DOUGLAS PAAL: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. My name is Doug Paal. I m vice president for studies here. I think I know just about all of you. It s (chuckles) so it s a multiple reintroduction. I m so glad you made it in this morning. It s a little earlier hour than normal, and I know it was an imposition on you, but thank you for getting here. [00:00:24] Normally I try to get introductions out of the way as fast as possible. I say, you ve got it on a piece of paper in front of you the salient facts about our speakers. But I want to say a little bit more this morning, because these people are different. (Laughter.) They are if you re in a think tank in Washington, you usually want to put your own people on the stage and show how we ve got a unique and uniquely insightful point of view here at Carnegie, Brookings, at whatever it is, and we have our own people here, and they re going to tell you how to how to approach the China market or the Chinese political future or U.S.-China relations, any of these things. Here at Carnegie, we ve been trying to fill a position on Chinese domestic politics for about three years. And we ve found that the world is full of theorists, speculators, number of beancounters. But people who can really wrestle with the politics and the facts of the situation who are ground-based analysts are very few. And today I had to go pretty far to get them. (Laughter.) And we had the additional challenge of a Chinese calendar that wasn t too clear. (Chuckles.) We didn t know whether we would be convening today before the party congress or after the party congress in Beijing. Turns out it s before the party congress. And I think that actually will showcase our two speakers skills all the more, because it s easy to sort of say, here s what we learned from the events you ve all read about in the newspapers already. It s quite a different thing to say, here s what years of sedulous work and understanding and getting the facts straight, dealing with what s knowable and not, what s in the vapors or on the front page of The New York Times. So having given these two speakers a modest introduction, I m very pleased to give the floor now first to Joe Fewsmith and then subsequently to Alice Miller. Thank you. [00:02:29] JOSEPH FEWSMITH: Thank you very much, Doug. It s a pleasure to be here. Obviously you ve seen that Doug has set us up so that in two weeks when the congress happens (laughter) you will still remember what we said and say, Fewsmith got it wrong and so forth. (Chuckles.) So I would rather talk after the congress (chuckles) when it s harder to make mistakes. As Doug suggested when he when he asked me to come down here, he said, well his prediction, which turned out to be accurate, was that the congress probably would not have happened by this time. And I said, well, if it hasn t happened by this time, China s probably got more problems than I realized. (Laughter.) And we were both right. It hasn t happened, and China has a lot of problems. And it s my job, I guess, this morning to elucidate at least the broad outlines of the problems that I see coming together at this point and that whatever leadership group that they put together at the congress is going to have to deal with. And basically I see here a fairly I don t unique is a terrible word to use in China because it s unique every year, but nevertheless an important conversion of societal issues and

3 leadership issues, specifically the rising problem, if you will, of societal discontent and the so-called new left, which, if you ll excuse me, I ll use in a very broad, undifferentiated way, and leadership issues, which strike me as unusually serious at this particular time. [00:04:11] So let me start with the societal issues, which I think are most obviously reflected in the rise of mass incidents. And I m not going to quibble over the number of mass incidents there are in a year. The numbers are highly speculative. But I think that everybody really agrees that there are more of them, that there are more people participating in them, and that they are increasingly serious and violent, and that such incidents seem to reflect a greater fracturing of society, the growing gap income, a sense of unfairness. But first and foremost, they reflect the contradiction, to use a good Maoist term, between local officials and the interests of the people. And to put it in simple terms, there is a fundamental contradiction between being loyal to your boss above and serving the people, to use another Maoist trope. And that has been exacerbated in recent years by absolutely enormous temptation for corruption. And that temptation seems to have been rarely resisted. So the result has been ill-feeling, to use the moderate term, hatred, to use a stronger term, of local officials and of the rich in general. And I think there s been an erosion of legitimacy. That s something really difficult to measure, so I won t do it. But it does it s palpable, and I think it s something that accumulates over time and then becomes a serious problem. It s into these broad sentiments that the left in China has tapped. And I want to remind everybody that Bo Xilai was hardly the first person to express these sentiments. The so-called new left started as a very small intellectual movement in the early 1990s, 92, 93, in that period when a number of it started with literary critics. Anybody study literature? Don t you wish you had the same impact in American society? (Laughter.) [00:06:40] At any case, it started as a small intellectual movement, and it grew wings. There s neostatism on the one hand, and there s populist nationalism on the other. And different people go in different directions, which makes the term new left a very broad, encompassing term. And, of course, the United States played its role, always coming to the rescue of the Chinese Communist Party. We there was the Yinhe incident that some of you will remember, the Milky Way incident, which fostered nationalism, the Taiwan Straits crisis of 1995, 96. And that really bolstered popular nationalism in China. It was the one time when I think the Chinese people writ large, if you can, believed that the United States was not critical just of the government but of the rise of China in general, which presented new themes for the popular literature. The new leadership of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao seemed to embrace at least some of the tenets of this new left agenda at the time and agreed that China s problems were not simply one of economic growth. The thesis before that had been that China simply could outgrow these problems: nothing couldn t be solved if the economy grew large enough and fast enough. And the third plenum of 2003 was, I believe, the first plenum that stressed that China s problems were both a matter of economic growth and social stability.

4 And that the good side of that was that it led to an expansion of health care, pensions, social security, education. The welfare state has at least begun to grow in China. But of course the other side of that was that the new left agenda of a different approach to addressing these issues could also grow. And let me just mention a couple of the milestones in this: , the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences sponsored a critique of neoliberalism. That s you. The following year, Larry Lang criticized MBOs, management buyouts and as insider deals. And part of his criticism was absolutely correct. But the other part was that he was against any sort of privatization of the stateowned economy. And some of you might remember in 05 they were debating the new property rights law when Beijing law professor Gong Xiantian launched a virulent attack on it and forced the NPC to delay the passage of that law for a year. All that was before Bo Xilai was exiled to Chongqing and began to embrace some of these issues. [00:09:43] OK. So that societal problem that has built up over more than a decade. And what I one of my points there is that because of this history, I doubt that whatever happens to Bo Xilai in the coming months or years, I don t think that we ve heard the end of this leftist agenda, that it s a real social and political force that will stay around. The second problem is the unity, or the lack thereof, of the senior leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Deng Xiaoping, we have to give the man great credit. He arranged for Jiang Zemin to take over and lead the country for 13 years, and to be succeeded by Hu Jintao. He thus bought China two decades of political stability. This is pretty good for a dead man. (Laughter.) At any case but I think at this point the shadow of the great man has finally receded and Chinese elite politics has hotted up, as the British would say. Things are it s as you get farther and farther away from the revolution and the strong hand of people like Deng Xiaoping, it becomes much more difficult to sort out who should move up in the system and who should not. How do you really compare the achievements of Zhang Gaoli in Tianjin, Yu Zhengsheng in Shanghai, Bo Xilai in Chongqing, et cetera et cetera? It becomes much more difficult to do those sorts of things. And hence, I see some of the rules that have bound elite politics together over the last couple of decades as loosening and weakening. I think that there are ways of resolving this issue. One, as I suggest, is continued adherence to rules. Another would be to factionalism. Some form of voting. And to just plain old extralegal maneuvering. And I think that we ve seen some evidence of all four trends. [00:11:54] Let me just focus a little bit on the rules of this system. I think we ve become accustomed in recent years of thinking that there are pretty good rules within which the system operates, and I think that that s true to a certain extent. For instance, the party congress, we now know, will start on November the 8 th. This is the latest the congress has been held in the reform era. But the point is that it is being held. Even in the wake of the Tiananmen crackdown, there the congresses, the plenums were still held on time, which suggests that no matter what the problems are within the

5 party there is a determination that the institutions will go on and you ll have congresses in regular order. That s a huge improvement over the pre-reform era. The other benchmark of institutionalization has been retirement. And as you know, they ve done a great deal on retirement, and those rules seem to be pretty well in place. But I do have some quibbles with it. The requirement that Politburo members retire at the age of 70 was announced by Jiang Zemin in It just happened that his chief rival at the time, Qiao Shi, was 70. Now, this did raise a problem for Jiang Zemin because he also was 70. But as is well known, Bo Yibo, the father of Bo Xilai, stood up and said, but Jiang, you have taken power in a time of crisis; you must stay on. Oh, well, if you insist. (Laughter.) [00:13:36] So the retirement of age was then lowered again to 68 in 2002, when another, if you will, adversary, Li Ruihuan, just happened to be 68. So it has been used there against two rivals. And it hasn t really been tested and it won t be tested this time because nobody is 68, which would have been a nice test of that rule. But the rule that Bo Yibo played in 1997, supporting Jiang Zemin against Qiao Shi, is a reminder that retirement doesn t necessarily mean going away. Indeed, I think it s very difficult to retire in China if only because your subordinates keep coming to you and saying, would you please extend your support for me? Nali, nali. I ll be glad to. At any case, so you know, we ve seen, I think, an unusual amount of involvement. It s very murky, it s very rumor-based, but it seems that there is some fire beneath that smoke, that those who are retired have been playing an unusually great role in the alignments this year. Qiao Shi seems to have been playing a role, in part because he struck back at the son of the father who got him in 2002, and not to mention Jiang Zemin. Jiang Zemin himself has shown up a number of times; we thought that he was dead about 18 months ago, and he s turned out to be quite alive. And we should all call up his doctor. (Laughter.) And obviously a very good one. At any case, we ve seen other elders Wu Yi, Zhu Rongji, Li Ruihuan, et cetera, all seem to have been putting an oar in the water at one time or another. So the institutional boundary between retired and not retired seems to be unusually blurry these days. I don t think it s as bad as it was when the so-called Eight Immortals reigned supreme, but it suggests that we re having problems with institutionalization. [00:15:53] But even if we accept the idea that there are rules with institutional boundaries that are basically strong, if occasionally, maybe more routinely, violated in one way or another, what about the rules for promotion? I think China s made a lot of progress in this area, but I would argue that the rules are more obscure than we normally think of them. What s surprising from an institutional point of view is that being appointed to the as an alternate member of the Central Committee hardly guarantees you a job being promoted onto the as full membership of the Central Committee. In the 16 th Party Congress 10 years ago, only about 30 of that list were promoted and about over 50 that were not on that list were helicoptered right into the Central Committee. You don t have to go from a if you will, a fubuji level to the alternate level to the full member of the

6 Central Committee. In fact, more people who were not members of the alternate list were promoted to the Central Committee than were of the alternate list. And you see the same pattern at the 17 th Party Congress five years ago. There were about 70 that were helicoptered directly onto the Central Committee and under 50, I believe, that were promoted from alternates. So that is a really critical step in getting people onto the Central Committee, and it gives a lot of room for competition and, obviously, for the factionalism and so forth that comes with that. [00:17:40] In the more rarified air of the Politburo, the rules of promotion are still not clear. I think we tend to think of members of the Standing Committee, that group of seven to nine people at the top of the system we ll get back to the number in a second that are promoted from the Politburo full members of the Politburo. But that s not always true. You ll recall this guy by the name of Zhu Rongji. He was not a member of the Politburo, he was a member of the Central Committee, and he was helicoptered in to being a member of the Standing Committee and to the premiership. There was also a youngster who was promoted at the same time; his name in the same fashion and his name of course was Hu Jintao. And more recently, in we saw Xi Jinping being promoted from the Central Committee to the Standing Committee, skipping the intermediate step of Politburo membership, which is not bad for a guy that was ranked 187 on the alternate list out of 187, in At any case, I m not anticipating any of these helicopters at this particular congress because there seem to be a surfeit of people on the Politburo eligible for promotion. But there s a lot of talk it s been unusually persistent this year of reducing the Standing Committee from nine members to seven. You might say, well, this is good; they re going back to the old, more rules-based system that, from 1949 until 2002, the Standing Committee I hope I m right on this, Alice; if I m not Alice will correct me (laughter) has varied from five to seven five to seven, yeah. And it was in 2002 when it was expanded to nine. You can argue that this was to promote the six people that were eligible for promotion or you could argue that Jiang Zemin wanted to pack it, to watch Hu Jintao. Given the history of the last few years, I vote for the latter interpretation. At any case, why reduce the Standing Committee to seven? There are now 15 full members of the Politburo not the Standing Committee not including Bo Xilai; that would have been number 16 six of whom, if the age-based rules hold, will retire for reasons of age, which leaves nine eligible to be promoted. If you promote seven of them, that leaves two off the list. I would guess that that would include Liu Yandong only for gender reasons. Xi Jinping does not have a binder full of women. (Laughter.) Chinese politics is still sexist. So, you know, you pass it around and you say, who draws the short straw? It s probably easier to leave four off the list than it is two off the list; it spreads the pain a little bit more evenly but the I think the real issue, and Alice may disagree with me on this, is, what do you with Wang Yang? [00:20:50] It s really unusual; I don t I can t recall a time when we have focused so much on one figure who may or may not be promoted to a Standing Committee position. He has emerged as the anti-bo Xilai, the father of the Guangdong model, and I think that if you look at the politics of the situation, you know, the if there s not going to be a Chongqing model, I ll be goddamned if there s

7 going to be a Guangdong model, and so there are the people who supported Bo Xilai and there are not a few of them are really intent that Wang Yang not get on the Standing Committee. Now, if you don t put Wang Yang on the Standing Committee, though, it s going to make Hu Qili Hu Qili I d love for Hu Qili Hu Jintao very lonely in his retirement. You know, he will be promoting, presumably, Li Keqiang and Li Yuanchao, two people that have been close to him. That s two out of presumably seven on the Standing Committee. That would give him very little influence in his retirement. Putting Wang Yang on the committee would at least make it three to four, but with some divisions in the others, that would still be, perhaps, an important group. I don t think that everything in China goes according to faction, much less Communist Youth League vs. so-called Princelings the Princelings have numerous divisions with them, and so forth, but it s not it s not impossible that these sorts of factionalism matters do, in fact, matter. [00:22:43] In any case, let me return to my original point, which that these two problems of societal issues and leadership unity are coming together at this time, and of course, that s where the whole Bo Xilai issue comes. He s the guy that unites these two issues, speaking for disaffected elements in society and also challenging the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party on the rules of promotion. The idea of campaigning publicly for office is well, it hasn t happened; it s against the rules as we ve come to know them, and I think that he was contending my interpretation for not only a Standing Committee position, but for one of the very top jobs. He was not going to you were not going to promote him to the Standing Committee and put him in the CPPCC. That was not something that was going to happen; it was one of the top two jobs, and those were already occupied (laughs) and that s what was so unusual about the Bo Xilai case. Now, it would be nice if the case were simply a matter nice of murder (laughter) that, you know that, you know, this guy was complicit in, covered up, whatever will be the charge whenever he is actually taken to court, and that everybody said, oh, my God, we dodged a bullet on that one. But it s interesting it s not the conversation in Beijing. Nobody talks about the murder; everybody talks about the politics of it. It s all the Chongqing model; Bo Xilai is a neo-populist leader, and so the politics of this are certainly much broader, deeper than the charge of murder, which seems to me to be broad and deep enough as it is but, in other words, these this breaking down, if you will loosening of the rules governing elite promotion unity and the societal issues seem to me to be coming together. [00:25:02] And from that follows my hypothesis that the new leadership needs to, in some broad sense, address the issues that Bo Xilai raised, that the if they are going to pursue a policy of marketization, you know, reform and opening up as we ve come to know it over the last 30 years, that they need to have a more forceful response to the charges of the new left that it s just a power elite that s dominating things. And the problem with responding more forcefully to the charges of the new left is, quite frankly, the shadow of Tiananmen. It made it much more difficult to talk of reform ideas. As you begin to talk of reform ideas, it becomes so easy to say, but you re following a policy of Westernization. You don t you re weakening the party Western-style democratization, and that means that it s much more difficult for this new leadership to articulate an agenda. I

8 certainly hope to be proven wrong on these things. Also, the sorts of divisions that I ve been talking about, I think, makes it much more difficult to talk about. Just in terms of economic reform, the good thing seems to be that there is a maybe a new determination to follow marketized reform agendas fighting back against the tendency towards the state-owned enterprises that we ve seen in the last several years, but that raises all these problems that, in a sense, I ve been talking about, which is, these are you know, these state-owned enterprises now are very, very powerful interest groups, and to so to claw back room from them is, I think, going to be very difficult. [00:27:04] Now, the good side and my final point is that the Bo Xilai case, I think, provides an opportunity for political reform, although, as I say, articulating that will be difficult. I think that there is still a lot that they could do within the terms of their own system in terms of political reform things like expanding the role of the local people s congresses, opening up the budgets, having more specialized budgetary committees in the you know, public hearings, things that would make local leadership a little bit more accountable would be good, but I will have to confess that my reading of the efforts in political reform over from about the mid-1990s until about 2005, give or take a little bit, was that they embarked on this path and they backed off of it. That, confronted with the challenges that continued political reform presented, they decided to go with the hierarchical system that created the problems in the first place. To me, that was a bad decision; they wasted a decade, and now they re going to have to pay the piper. On that optimistic note MR. PAAL: Thank you very thank you very, very much you ve given I m really impressed; you can use names like Wang Yang in a public forum in Washington and not have to put a footnote to say who it is, and the audience all seems to know who you re talking about. So this is a pretty a pretty sophisticated crowd. With that, I turn it over to you, Alice. ALICE MILLER: Thanks, Doug, and thanks very much for including me in this panel. Let me just start off by saying that I started watching Communist Party congresses in China in 1969 when I was a graduate student, so this is my 10th party congress trying to figure out what the hell s going on, and I must say, thinking about it two or three years ago what was coming up I thought, oh no, not another damn party congress. This is going to be boring. And as always, it never turns out to be that way, and so it s probably a reflection of my own mental attitude. Joe, I think, has given us a very good portrait of the broader trends, crosscurrences and so forth that are under way in Beijing and outside of Beijing that bear on what s the leadership s about. [00:29:37] What I ll try to offer you is three or four questions, perhaps, that will give us some interesting answers about how the leadership at the top operates, the decision-making processes and so forth, what sort of changes might we expect at that level. And so I m hoping it s a complement to the very good talk that Joe s just given us.

9 I agree with Joe that the road to this party congress has been rough. And the party congress date, the 8th of November, is not late; it s just relatively late. And just one small quibble both Joe and I are seeking truth from facts, people (laughter) that the as my memory is, is that the 16th congress opened on the 8th of November. MR. FEWSMITH: No, that s it s the latest it s tied for the latest is what I mean. MS. MILLER: Oh, OK, thank you. (Laughter.) And so if it s a week, it ll close on the 15th. And we ll see the first plenum on the 16th, which will give us the new leadership. But again, it s a contentious year. And the relative lateness they re often in October; that s kind of the conventional time. It has been, in the reform period, as early as September; the 12th congress was in September. Anyway, it is relatively late. [00:30:51] And I think there are several indications, in fact, that the road to the congress, to prepare for it, has been bumpy. And it includes contention over the Bo Xilai affair. I think Joe is right; this is a significant event, although I myself tend to play it down somewhat more than the way it s treated in the Western and Hong Kong press. And I ll and I ll come back to that in a minute. But other symptoms of a contentious process on the road to the party congress include, first of all, that the array of 31 provincial party congresses that elect the delegates to go to the national congress in Beijing was late. It was supposed to end in June; it ended in July. And some of those provincial party congresses had some rather interesting or peculiar transitions for example, in Guizhou. And we can talk about that if you re interested. Also, every party congress year since 1992, the general secretary delivers a speech at the Central Party School that foreshadows the broad themes, the ideological themes that frame the party congress report that he ll present later at the party congress. This time, Hu s speech was a month later than the latest of the previous ones. It was in July 23 July, as I remember. And so this suggests that they can t agree simply on the drafting of the congress report an effort that usually takes a year, goes through several rounds of drafts and comments and criticism down through provincial and municipal levels and throughout the national-level bureaucracy in the party. [00:32:29] Another step is the odd and apparently inconclusive meeting at Beidaihe. This was a peculiar meeting simply because it wasn t the full Politburo. The regional people, including Comrade Wang Yang and Yu Zhengsheng in Shanghai, didn t attend. They continued to show up almost every day or every other day in their home cities. And so that, together with the fact that they didn t announce the party congress date, and the date of the seventh plenum that ll meet probably a week before the congress came more than a month after the Beidaihe meeting all of this suggests they came out of there with not very much agreement. Another peculiar thing was the unusual shift in the position of General Office director. This is one of the most extremely sensitive positions under the Central Committee, and it s a critical element in a general secretary s power to have his guy in that post. Hu Jintao got his guy, Ling Jihua,

10 in that post only in the wake of the of the 17th congress in 07. And so it was a critical element in Hu s consolidation of power back then. [00:33:38] This time we ve got the unusual shift in which Ling Jihua was moved laterally into the position of United Front Work Department director. And Li Zhanshu, who had just been elected re-elected as party secretary in Guizhou, is appointed but to replace him. And a lot of people suggest that Li Zhanshu is Xi Jinping s guy. That seems to rest solely on a on the inference and it s a pretty weak inference that they both served in Hubei back in the late 70s or early 80s. And there isn t any other demonstrable link between the two guys. And so, you know, this is a peculiar event just simply because of the nature of the change and because it s a hard read in terms of who is this guy, and why is this taking place. The Bo Xilai affair I agree, it s very contentious. And I can imagine that it was contentious figuring out what to do with him. But my own sense is, is that it looks a lot like the way they managed the removal of Chen Xitong in 1995 and the removal of Chen Liangyu in Shanghai in 2006, They made a point of resolving the party status of Bo Xilai, as they did Chen Xitong and Chen Liangyu in their respective removals. And the legal prosecutions usually take more than a year to resolve. So I m assuming that s what fate awaits Comrade Bo Xilai. He s not a comrade anymore, I guess, because he s been expelled from the party. But that and there s a rough correspondence, I agree, that any leadership purge that involves, you know, sex and murder and corruption is going to be a great one and attract a lot of attention. But many of the same elements were attached in the bill of indictment against Chen Liangyu in Shanghai. He had mistresses, and he had, you know, villas and so forth; so did Chen Xitong. I agree that the political irritation with Bo Xilai s campaigning for power and all that sort of thing is a major irritant. And I ve been arguing for a while he s a very unlikely candidate for the Standing Committee of the Politburo, simply because of that irritating work style. He s a grandstander, and he always has been, since he was in Dalian. The removal of Chen Xitong was he was the head of a bastion of conservative politics in I used to read Beijing Ribao in those days, and it was just striking how far conservative it was in those days. Chen Liangyu supposedly talked back to Wen Jiabao in his efforts to assert some central authority over finances and economic issues and so forth. And so they were both political irritants, although I readily agree that the scale of Bo Xilai s offenses was greater. [00:36:41] Anyway and then finally, there has been a striking slowdown, at least in the Xinhua reporting, on Politburo meetings. One of the interesting things about the Hu period is that they were regularly reporting Politburo meetings. It s not clear whether that s all the Politburo meetings, but about once a month we d get a Xinhua report on a Politburo meeting. Over the past year a little more than that, 15 months they ve reported a much slower pace. I think this year there have only been three, and we re now in the 10th month. So why that is I don t know. But it is a symptom of a process that s somehow in trouble. The broader questions that I would pose in looking at the outcome of the upcoming party congress first of all have to do with the decision-making process. And I agree with many of the judgments that Joe s offered on the factional and personalistic characteristics of who s going to advance and who s related to whom and so forth. Nobody s better at that, I think, than Joe, which

11 is one of the great reasons that I m happy he contributes to the wonderful publication I edit at the Hoover Institution (laughter) the China Leadership Monitor. But I think alongside that, there is a logic to the way the Politburo Standing Committee has been staffed and structured that raises the basic question of what will it mean if they do change the number of people on the Standing Committee, and how will that system work? If you look at the across the Hu Jintao period, the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee has been structured in a way in which each member is responsible for a major policy sector. And so presumably, in Politburo Standing Committee meetings, each person speaks for that policy sector with regard to whatever the broader issues that they take on and deliberate about. And also, in turn, that leader supervises the leading small group that coordinates policy and supervises policy on behalf of the broader Politburo. [00:38:55] And so this is a structure under which, for example, Hu Jintao speaks to military affairs and foreign policy, Wen Jiabao to legislative affairs I m sorry, Wu Bangguo to legislative affairs and so forth. Wen Jiabao runs the State Council, the administration of governance. He s backed up on the economy by Li Keqiang as the executive vice premier and so forth Zhou Yongkang on internal security. And you can figure all of this out. They don t announce it; you can just figure it out by who gives the keynote speeches at the relevant conferences, who shows up on particular kinds of occasions and so forth. There s a clear division of labor in the Politburo Standing Committee, and nine policy packages are reflected in this nine-member structure. This system emerged at the beginning of the Hu period, and it s constant across the Hu period, despite the changes in personnel at the th Party Congress. And so I think it s not accidental, it s deliberate. And there is a, therefore, a structural logic, a policy logic, to the expansion of the Politburo alongside the reasons that Joe cites from factual and personalistic instances. It s also if you wallow in party records back a ways a structure that traces its roots back to 1956, when the Politburo Standing Committee was restored for the first time since 1928 or no, 45. Anyway, in that period they began to build this kind of structure in the policy process at the top. That was the one that Deng Xiaoping presided over down through 1965 in the Secretariat, a six-man standing committee. It was abolished in the Cultural Revolution, restored under Deng Xiaoping in again, with a six-member Politburo Standing Committee revised in 87, in the wake of Hu Yaobang s purported abuses of the Secretariat at the expense of the authority of the Standing Committee, and then revised again in 1992 under Jiang Zemin. And so the Hu Yaobang Standing Committee is just the latest revision. And apparently, they shifted each time a general secretary emerges, in light of whatever problems they may see in the structure. Under the structure, the leadership supposedly makes decisions on the basis of consensusbuilding. This is an oligarchy, a collective leadership. And by design, it is, by all accounts I ve heard, including one Politburo member talk about it, a situation in which members of the Politburo don t vote to decide issues. They decide on the basis of consensus, and they use voting to decide how close they are to consensus. And so it s in the words of one guy, it s not a voting machine. It is a system that tries to establish a consensus on the basis of policy. [00:42:00]

12 All of this suggests that all the stories about the Standing Committee being reduced the most popular number is seven must have some sort of implications for dissatisfaction for the way this nine-member system has worked. And so the point that I would ask or suggest is, is that the changes will tell us something about their own critique, their own evaluation of the shortcomings of the process and how they intend to adjust it. Now, this could be achieved, if it really is seven. And I have I m agnostic on this; I don t have any idea. For all I know, they ll crunch it down to two, all right but I d be surprised, but, you know, who knows? This could be achieved by eliminating policy seats that are in the present structure or by combining seats. The most frequently-mentioned seats for elimination are propaganda and internal security. I find this puzzling, if, in fact as Joe argues persuasively that if the leadership is worried about an increasingly restive and increasingly wired society, that the party would downgrade the leadership would downgrade the two seats that are the party s two principal tools: persuasion through propaganda and coercion. And so you re going to, you know, downgrade these? Whatever. Could be. Therefore, you know, it may work out that way. [00:43:39] The other aspect of this structure has been that the particular structure that s emerged under Hu Jintao has implications for the other top leadership posts, and that is the broader Politburo and the Secretariat. And as these different variations in Politburo Standing Committee structure and number and role and so forth have changed, it says something about the relationship of the Standing Committee to the broader Politburo and to the Secretariat. In the Hu period, what s emerged is this that the broader Politburo meets only occasionally and seems to be largely a body that ratifies initiatives and decisions taken by the Standing Committee. And that s pretty much it. The leading small groups, which used to be in the good old days, in the earlier Reform Era largely attached to the Secretariat now seems to be largely confined to the party apparatus, and I m sorry, confined to and directed by the Politburo Standing Committee itself, and so it s an unusual centralization of roles. And the Secretariat, therefore, has been basically downgraded in that sense. [00:44:50] So if, indeed, the Politburo Standing Committee is reduced or changed in some way under Xi Jinping, it s going to tell us something interesting about how the party sees the problems that the leadership has wrestled with and how it wants to address these. What sort of shortcomings might these be? Well, to me, the most compelling one is that there seems to be a trend in policy stagnation, an inability to arrive at decisions collectively within the Standing Committee that I think shows up in a number of different ways. In the first term under Hu Jintao, the system seems to have worked, and all of the major departures ideologically-framed departures that have emerged under the Hu Wen Jiabao leadership emerged in the first term; that is to say, people-centered policies were enunciated immediately after Hu Jintao took power, the scientific development concept emerged in 2003, the socialist harmonious society concept emerged first in 04, ratified in 06, the new socialist countryside in 2005, although foreshadowed earlier all of these were the great departures that emerged only in the first term. In the second term, we haven t seen anything, nothing. And so this is a rather strong indicator that the top leadership collective simply hasn t been effective at establishing a consensus about what to do, facing the kinds of challenges that they do.

13 And there are challenges, and instead of clear efforts to try to address them, instead, we get a sense of stagnation and drift. These include things like the creeping dominance of the state sector over other sectors, the what is it the guo jin min tui phenomenon, the apparent failures in policy coordination in foreign affairs there are probably several reasons for that, including an underelaborated foreign policy and national security structure but it also, I think, signals an inability of the Standing Committee to provide clear direction. Third, Wen Jiabao s persistent complaints about the inability to get political reform off the ground, to the point that it s hurting economic reform he s been harping on this for a long time. And then all the rising social tensions that Joe mentions and a lack of clear response from the top leadership on how to deal with these. [00:47:31] I would add that the rise in social tensions and mass incidents and so forth this time is even more difficult to manage, simply because of the rise of the social media, which weren t around very much back in 07 and weren t there at all previously. So there are new means to circulate rumors and speculations and complaints and all the bitching and moaning that people will do, especially in a party congress campaign year, which this is. And so it s striking to me how immobile the leadership seems to have been in the last few years, in comparison with the first term under Hu Jintao. So whatever the leadership decides to do under General Secretary Xi Jinping, it s going to tell us something almost immediately about how they see these problems and what they re proposing to do to resolve them. [00:48:37] A second question I would offer you all is simply, what is all what might be Xi Jinping s policy agenda? What could we look for? It is a piece of conventional wisdom that we won t see Xi Jinping s policy agenda until he consolidates power. That s likely to take a few years, maybe even into his second term beginning in I d argue that s that was certainly true for Jiang Zemin. We didn t really begin to see him begin to push in directions since until 1994, 1995, when the Elders key Elders, conservative Elders Li Xiannian, Hu Qiaomu, Chen Yun died off Deng Xiaoping, I always credit him as a great man, as Joe does, for having the political wisdom to die after all the more conservative members of the reform coalition that emerged in the late 70s. Anyway, also in 94, Jiang pulled up people from Shanghai to consolidate his support, and he eliminated people like Chen Xitong in 1995, the bastion of conservatism in the capital itself. And so that commonplace wisdom about how long it takes for a new general secretary to assert himself is true in the case of Jiang Zemin. But I suggest Jiang was a weak in a weak position when he started. He was an emergency general secretary in the context of Zhao Ziyang s removal in 89. I think a better precedent is Hu Jintao. And so when you look back at the beginning of whose tenure, what impresses me is that, right out of the gate, he and Wen Jiabao were pressing the ideas that became characteristic of the broader framework, ideologically and politically, that distinguish them from Jiang Zemin. These are the people-centered policies that Hu enunciated in his dramatic trip to Xibaipo in was it November, December, and followed up rather quickly. In less than a year, the scientific development concept idea emerges and so forth. And so what impressed me was how fast Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao were out pushing new ideas that were at least implicitly contradictory or critical of the direction of things under Jiang Zemin. So I think it s quite reasonable to expect that

14 we may see policy departures emerge immediately under Xi Jinping. What they may be, I have no idea. Xi just doesn t have any incentive to air these things now. [00:51:11] But I would expect that they will be largely in the domestic arena. I don t expect to see big changes in foreign policy. My long-time view has been that change in top party leader doesn t change the orientation in foreign policy. Just generally it I can t think of an instance when it did. So I d look for them in the domestic arena. I d also look for the intimations of them in the work report of the congress itself. And I went back and looked at the 16 th Party Congress report again and noticed that there are little kind of foreshadowings of the direction that Hu Jintao was going to push things once he took over in And that s not surprising. The political report of the party congress is a negotiated document in which, in that case, Jiang Zemin presided over but Hu Jintao actually presided over the drafting teams, at least if the accounts that I saw were correct. So if you were to kind of indulge in a careful reading of the party congress report, we may be able to immediately figure out what some of those departures may be. A third question or issue maybe it s a second one, I guess one, two, three yes, third one is, what will be Xi Jinping s stature as presented in the public media? And one of the interesting things about the Hu Jintao era has been a clear and deliberate effort to downplay the stature of the general secretary. By contrast, back in the 90s, when Jiang Zemin was around, he was routinely described as the core leader of the third-generation leadership. This was a theme that was introduced by Deng Xiaoping in June 1989, I think to shore up what had been a weak and emerging emergency candidate to become the general secretary. But the striking thing was that in 2002, that description of Hu Jintao as the core leader of the 4 th generation leadership collective was never appeared. There have been a couple accidental apparent references to it, but the rule has been they don t talk about Hu Jintao as a core leader. They don t even use the term 4 th generation anymore. The media in the West does do, but the Chinese media don t. And so this has always seemed to me to be one more of those little steps to try to enforce collective leadership, consensus-driven decision making, to just simply reduce the statute of the general secretary not his power necessarily, but at least his stature. [00:53:48] And so the question is, how will they treat Xi Jinping? And if they re worried or troubled by the inability to establish consensus in the existing Politburo Standing Committee structure, it s conceivable they may try to enhance the hand of the general secretary in running the Politburo Standing Committee. I doubt they ll come out and say that we re giving the general secretary new powers. They won t do that. But one of the ways they might tip it is just to revert to these kinds of special trappings of standing for the general secretary. Will they call Xi the core leader of a fifth generation or some other device to simply emphasize that this is a guy who is stronger implicitly than what has been there before? So I think there is a question that fits together with a broader restructuring of the Politburo Standing Committee. Finally, let me just offer a couple of comments about changes in the military leadership. And in particular, my view is, who will stay on as central military commission general chairman. And I disagree a little bit with Comrade Paal here, who I read recently argued that he wouldn t because of the disparity of having two centers and all that critique. And I grant there s a logic here, but I am adamant in my position, because I m old and cranky, but also because precedent argues for

15 it. You know, precedent can be abandoned, but there s pretty solid precedent. The pattern in 02 through 04 by which Jiang Zemin passed on his top post in the party, state and military in a staggered fashion, replicated the pattern of Deng Xiaoping s retirements in 87 through 90. It also replicates the staggered pattern of the elevation of Hu Jintao in 92 then 98 to 99 and the pattern of staggered positions given to Xi Jinping in 2007, 2008 and And so it s the argument here is simply that these patterns have an intent. That intent may be disrupted by politicking and so forth. I wouldn t want to suggest otherwise, but it seems to me that at least that s the expectation. I don t think some of the stories that we hear about the you know, the brouhaha over the Diaoyutai/Senkakus is a powerful argument for Hu Jintao staying on. I don t think they decide these things simply on that kind of a logic, although perhaps there s some contribution. So for me, precedence is that s what s going to happen. I ll probably be wrong, because after all, this is my 10 th party congress and why start getting things right on your 10 th one? [00:56:51] Finally, the other appointments on the CMC are going to be interesting simply because the scale of retirements on the CMC mean that there are only three professional military guys who have you know, who serve now on the CMC, and therefore are certain to hold positions in the next CMC. These are Chang Wanquan who s the head of the GAD, the -- Xu Qiliang, the head commander of the air force, and Wu Shengli, commander of the navy. The implication of that is, if they appoint, as they normally have done, two professional military guys as vice chairman of the CMC, one on a political commissar-type role, the other in a commander-type role, it s likely that one of those guys is going to be either a navy or an air force guy. That s unprecedented, at least in the reform period. And so the implication of this is that the kind of dominating deadlock the ground force commanders have had in the CMC is going to be broken this time. They may bypass it by unusual promotions or something, but I m not sure how they re going to get around it. I think the logic of it follows from the 2004 decision to appoint the commanders of the three specialized services, the 2 nd Artillery Strategic Forces, the navy and the air force simply to suit the trend in defense doctrines towards joint warfare, and so there is a logic to finally taking this step of elevating somebody who s not a ground force commander to that significant level in the CMC. So those are the questions I m really interested in, and we ll see what happens. Thank you. MR. PAAL: Well, thank you, Alice. That was a both presentations were terrific looks at the systemic and institutional challenges and the big policy framework challenges that the Chinese leadership and Chinese people face going forward. We tend, in Washington, to talk a lot about personalities and really dwell on personalities, and I m sure much of the coverage will be Xi Jinping this, Xi Jinping that. I think you ve received this morning from our two speakers a really good look at the underlying challenges and constraints that that personality and the others who rise in this coming leadership will have to wrestle with. [00:59:26] You started, Alice, to talk about foreign policy in the sense that you didn t think there was going to be much change. But and I m prepared to accept that, but let me ask the first question before we open the floor to the audience. Are there any implications for the United States in the way this plays itself out, whether in a resumption of economic reform? Is that is that hanging in the air, or is there a political reform that would that could improve the overall political atmosphere for U.S.-China relations?