China Prepares For The Next Generation Of Leaders

December 9, 2009

Martin McCauley writes: I assure you, foreign intelligence services monitor very closely all the promotions that take place in the Communist Party of China (CPC). Everyone wants to know who is going tobe in charge of the country in the next few years.

It was no different with the recent reshuffle of the CPC’s first secretaries that was made public recently. Six of the 31 provincial Party bosses have been replaced or moved upwards. Two of the promotions are potentially very significant: Hu Chunhua, first Party secretary in Hebei province, moves to become boss of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous region, and Sun Zhencai, Minister of Agriculture, became Party leader of Jilin province.

Significantly, Hu Chunhua was formerly head of the Communist Youth League (CYL). This links him closely to the current President and General Secretary of the CPC, Hu Jintao. Mr Hu is considered something of a patron of party officials who have emerged from the CYL. Hu Chunhua spent almost 17 years in Tibet and rose to become second Party secretary there.

Sun Zhencai has a PhD in agriculture and was appointed Minister of Agriculture in 2006. He thus became the youngest minister in the government at the age of 43 years. Before that he was head of a district of Beijing and secretary general of the Beijing city committee. In sense his career resembles in some ways that of former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was also one of the youngest Communist Party leaders and was running agriculture in the then Politburo.

This is the first time that Chinese Party officials in their 40s have been promoted so fast. As a result they become leading members of the sixth generation of leaders – those between 42 and 49 years of age. As provincial Party secretaries, they are now the top members of the sixth generation group. Hu and Sun represent different factions in the leadership. Hu, with his CYL background, belongs to President Hu’s faction. Sun, on the other hand, has been highly praised by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao for his competence. This links him to the ‘princeling’ faction, the offspring of former top leaders. Its patron is Vice-President Xi Jinling who is expected to become President and Party leader at the 18th Party Congress in 2012. However Sun is not a princeling.

President Hu has been systematically moving former CYL cadres up the Party and government ladder. He is, in fact, following in the shoes of Deng Xiaoping who cleared out Maoist cadres and replaced them with reform-minded ones. Hu has until 2012 to consolidate his position. By appointing his own cadres he hopes to remain influential after he is obliged to step down in 2012. Some commentators are even speculating that Hu and Sun are the leaders who will take over in 2022 after Xi Jinping steps down. The President and Party leader can only remain in office ten years. This is a result of the voluntarist policies of Mao Zedong who was President for life and who wreaked such havoc with cadres.

Another noticeable trend is to move Party secretaries around. This is an attempt to combat the rising problem of corruption. Deng Xiaoping proposed that Party cadres should come from ‘five lakes and four seas’, a poetic way of saying that they should gain experience of various regions. Needless to say this was to prevent them going ‘native’ or identifying with the aspirations of the locals. Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms widened the gulf between the centre and the provinces. This was because the provinces were exhorted to grow economically as fast as possible. The more successful they became the
less they needed direction from Beijing.

Corruption among Party and government cadres is growing and moving cadres around is an attempt to combat it. However, the new comrade may quickly adopt the corrupt practices of his new region. It is difficult to see how moving cadres will resolve the problem. Beijing’s concern about corruption is that the richer provincial élites become, the less likely they are to heed Beijing’s directives.

The new promotions include Sun Chunlan. She is the first female provincial secretary for 20 years. She was previously Party secretary of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. Who knows, we might be seeing the elevation of Chinese Margaret Thatcher.

– End –

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