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China after Jiang: Two Stengths and Five Unresolved Issues
By Jacques de Lisle*
The author assesses prospects in China, "a rising and regional power, not an established great power," in the wake of a changing of the guard that may well have lasting consequences. This look at Whither China? raises interesting and important questions. –Ed.
Wiang Zemin's resignation as chair of China's key military body completes the retirement from top offices of China's first post-revolutionary generation leader. Following his passing the state presidency and Party General Secretary post to Hu Jintao during the preceding two years, this latest step has ended formally and, possibly, functionally the era of Jiang Zemin.
This phase in PRC history had its origins in the Tiananmen Incident of 1989, which helicoptered Jiang to the status of Deng Xiaoping's heir apparent, as the previous designated successor, Party chief Zhao Ziyang, fell for being too soft on the popular movement that the regime violently suppressed, and as Premier Li Peng, forever tainted by his close association with the crackdown, was passed over. The Jiang era began in earnest in the middle 1990s as an ailing Deng withdrew from political life, following his last dramatic intervention to reinvigorate the post-Mao drive for economic reform, development and opening to the outside world.
As Jiang officially exits the political stage, Hu and other leaders of the so-called "fourth generation" are heirs to two strengths and five unresolved questions.
Two Stengths: Economy and Security
Since the humiliating nineteenth-century beginning of China's interaction with the richer and stronger nations of the West and Japan, Chinese elite reformers have sought the keys to national wealth and power. To an unprecedented extent, the PRC on the cusp of the post-Jiang period enjoys both.
On the economic side, the policies of market-oriented reform and opening to the outside world that Deng Xiaoping and his allies launched at the dawn of the post-Mao era have produced a level of development, sustained growth, and economic engagement with the outside world that few could have imagined a quarter-century ago. In many respects and by many measures, some of the most stunning accomplishments are products of the Jiang years. The roots of the Jiang era lay in arguably the most serious economic reversal of the reform decades—the short-lived but Significant post-Tiananmen retrenchment of economic reform and souring of foreign investors' zeal. The following, transitional period brought Deng's 1992 southern tour and the launching of a new wave of reform and opening, but it took some time for the effects of that initiative to play out, and the same period also saw the necessary but growth-slowing austerity policies orchestrated by Premier Zhu Rongji.
Although there have been detours and setbacks, the years after the middle 1990s—the core Jiang era—brought, even by reform-era Chinese standards, sustained rates of high growth with relatively tame inflation, and sectoral transformation to higher tech and higher value-added industries and services. Markets have spread from products and materials to labor and on to capital. There has been a burgeoning of truly private enterprises, share-issuing hybrid firms organized under the mid-1990s company law, and partly or wholly foreign-owned ventures taking a growing variety of legal forms.
As the rising presence of foreign firms and capital suggests, the Jiang years have bequeathed a legacy of greatly expanded and rapidly growing international economic ties. China's trade and inbound investment have soared during the later 1990s and 2000s. On the investment side, China has retained a nearly unrivaled share of the increasing global pool of foreign investment and allowed it to flow to a wider range of economic sectors. On the trade side, China's export sector has become so formidable that international purchasers routinely refer to the "China price" as a standard that their suppliers must meet, and the Chinese share of world textile markets is poised to spike as the quotas once permitted by the Multifiber Agreement expire. China's appetite for raw materials and other inputs has grown so voracious that it now has significant impact on global commodities markets. The Jiang years also brought success in China's long quest to enter the central institution of the international trade regime, the WTO / GATT.
On the security side, China at the end of the Jiang's tenure is in a better position that it has been at any time since the middle kingdom's encounter with the West began. The Jiang era began in a moment of seeming peril. The collapse of the Soviet empire raised the specter of similar developments in the PRC. The U.S. and other foreign reaction to Tiananmen brought troubling setbacks for Beijing's foreign relations. As Jiang passes the reins to Hu and Hu's generation, prospects seem far brighter. In retrospect, the USSR's demise weakened a long-threatening neighbor and opened new opportunities for Chinese-led or co-led collaboration (such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization). The short-lived and limited foreign reaction to Tiananmen—which failed to produce even a temporary suspension of most-favored nation trading privileges with the U.S.—ultimately underscored the strength of reform- era China's relationships with the major powers.
At the twilight of the Jiang years, Beijing's relations with Washington are routinely described as perhaps the best they have ever been. Friction over perceived American agendas to transform China's political system has abated. The U.S.'s focus on international terrorism and radical Islam has assuaged Chinese concerns that the PRC might emerge as the U.S.'s central post-Cold War security concern. Washington's quest for Beijing's cooperation on terror issues and in addressing the North Korean nuclear program provided further foundations for good relations. Potential flashpoints such as the EP-3 reconnaissance plane incident and perennial difficulties over Taiwan have done much less to roil relations than reasonably could have been expected during the late Jiang period.
Jiang-era defense modernization programs, underwritten by China's long economic boom and the government's enhanced capacity to extract revenue, have made the People's Liberation Army far more formidable. This has brought universal recognition that the military balance across the Taiwan Strait is shifting inexorably in the mainland's favor, and increasing concern that the U.S. may need to adjust its calculus of intervention in the event of a cross-Strait conflict.
The security and economic circumstances that Jiang passes on to his successors are, to be sure, not free from difficulties. For a regime that has staked its legitimacy on providing rapidly rising prosperity, the task of maintaining the requisite high growth rate is a daunting one, and in some respects increasingly so. Some of the most difficult elements of the economic reform agenda remain to be completed, including the transformation of remaining traditional state-owned enterprises, banking reform, creation of a social safety net, and managing the opening to foreign competition in key financial and industrial sectors. Today, the leadership faces one of the reform-era's more difficult rounds of engineering a soft-landing of an overheated economy.
China is still a rising and regional power, not an established great power. The PRC remains far from being rivaling or challenging the sole superpower, or securely deter American intervention in the Taiwan Strait, or effectively constrain U.S. policy toward sensitive regions along China's borders, including Central Asia and North Korea.
In addition to such broad matters of incomplete—although remarkable—success in economics and national security, the challenges that Jiang leaves to his successors include more discrete unresolved issues.
Problems at the Periphery: Hong Kong and Taiwan
At the dawn of the post-Jiang era, the leadership in Beijing faces serious difficulties in the key "lost" (and, in one case, recovered) territories along its periphery. The crucial moment in Jiang's ascent coincided with a singularly dark moment in Beijing's quest to reunify Hong Kong without damaging the future Special Administrative Region's economic dynamism and the political confidence needed to sustain it. The 1989 Tiananmen Incident that brought Jiang the status of heir apparent to Deng also began a several-year crisis of confidence in Beijing's future stewardship and protracted conflicts over democratization, preservation of the rule of law and pursuit of political reform in Hong Kong.
With Deng recently dead and his successor's leadership unchallenged, Jiang presided triumphantly over the 1997 reversion in an atmosphere of renewed optimism or, at least, relative complacency about the former colony's future. Jiang's successors inherit a significantly bleaker situation in the S.A.R. The Asian Financial Crisis, SARS, the meteoric rise of rival Shanghai and other developments have shaken economic confidence, seemingly lastingly.
In 2003 and 2004, attempts to introduce illiberal anti- sedition and security legislation (interpreting and implementing an article of the PRC-adopted Basic Law that serves as Hong Kong's constitution) and PRC interpretations of the Basic Law's electoral provisions to put off the date of fully democratic elections for the S.A.R.'s legislature and chief executive brought hundreds of thousands of residents to the streets of the supposedly apolitical city. Resentment and anger at Beijing and its hand-picked leader in Hong Kong reached levels not seen in years. They persist in the aftermath of legislative elections in which "pro-Beijing" candidates fared quite well, but only after a campaign rife with charges that Beijing and its allies engaged in intimidation and scandal-mongering, including the arrest of one "pro-democracy" candidate for having sex with a prostitute in the mainland and alleged threats of violence against an outspoken phone-in show host.
One of Jiang's great hopes as leader, according to many accounts, was to be for Taiwan what Deng Xiaoping had been for Hong Kong—the Chinese leader who secured the reversion of a wrongfully separated Chinese territory. Jiang closely associated himself with his "Eight Point" proposal offering a framework for incorporating Taiwan under a variant of the "one country, two systems" model that had been adopted for Hong Kong based on an idea Deng had first proposed for Taiwan.
Yet, the Jiang era witnessed a stark decline in the prospects for near-term unification. Jiang's ascent toward the political apex in the PRC coincided with the emergence of democracy and the rise of separatist sentiments in Taiwan during the late 1980s and early 1990s. President Chiang Ching-kuo legalized the "pro-independence" party. Chiang's successor, Lee Teng-hui, took additional steps down the path of democracy and claims to state-like status. Taiwanese presidential candidates who favored continuing and extending those trends survived Jiang-era attempts to dissuade the island's voters, through PRC missile tests in 1996 and Chinese Premier Zhu's finger-wagging warning in 2000.
As Jiang descends from the political stage, his successors face a Taiwan in which the sitting president is the leader of a party routinely characterized as "pro-independence" and the former president heads a party that is more ardently so.
The leadership in Beijing must cope with Taiwanese counterparts who officially characterize cross-Strait relations as akin to those between two states (in Lee Teng- hui's phrase) and describe Taiwan as a sovereign nation (as recently reelected President Chen Shui-bian puts it). Prospects for talks on the "one China principle" terms acceptable to the PRC have grown exceedingly dim for the foreseeable future. Despite modest success in bringing U.S. pressure to bear on Chen, the only "red line" Jiang's successors have left is one that insists Taiwan not formally declare independent statehood.
The post-Jiang leadership faces delicate and difficult choices if its policy toward peripheral China is to consist of anything more than the rather risky strategies of muddling through and delaying political change in Hong Kong, and waiting for economic integration and shifting military balances to reverse Taiwan's decade-plus slide toward more full-fledged claims to sovereign state status.
Questions at the Core: Addressing Inequality, Revisiting Tiananmen
Post-Jiang China's leaders also must grapple with a pair of hard and unmade choices on the home front, one rooted in economics and the other more purely political. A striking feature of the successful rapid-growth strategy of the Jiang years was a high tolerance for inequality. The Mao era's relative equality of relative poverty gave way to yawning interregional and intraregional gaps that accelerated markedly under Jiang's rule. Deng's successor retained and extended the "coastal strategy" of the early reform era that saw Guangdong, Shanghai (whence hailed Jiang and many of his elite supporters) and other eastern and southeastern regions absorb vast inflows of foreign investment and race far ahead of inland China. The same period witnessed a sharp upsurge in the flow of low-skill hinterland residents to the booming seaboard in quest of jobs. The so-called "floating population" of illegal and usually poor migrants surpasses the population of all but a few countries and comprises a new urban underclass in China. The Jiang years also brought a rise in protests by workers laid off or left unpaid by rust-belt state-owned industries, and by farmers complaining of high and illegitimate taxes and fees, falling government services and flattening incomes.
The Jiang-era leadership did little to address these issues, offering half-hearted exhortations for investment to "go West," and taking only modest steps to establish a social security system and root out cadre misbehavior. Tellingly, Jiang's greatest ideological legacy is the "three represents"—a doctrine that lionizes and welcomes into the Party the entrepreneurs and capitalists who emerged as China's new rich and super-rich under Jiang's watch.
Jiang's successors must decide how far to stray from this path. The populist tone of the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao leadership's early pronouncements, the new leaders' experience in backward areas far removed from glittering Shanghai, and numerous analysts' assessments of rising risks of social unrest have led to expectations that the post-Jiang period will bring a different approach. But, despite much talk of addressing the needs of those left behind in China's reforms and the need to focus on social and human, as well as economic, development, the prospects for dramatic change are at best uncertain. They seemingly remain hemmed in by the political imperative to sustain the high growth rates that inegalitarian policies have produced and by political opposition from supporters of Jiang-era approaches.
Refusal to revise the verdict on the 1989 Tiananmen Incident was symbolic and symptomatic of the limits to political reform during Jiang Zemin's rule. With his own rise to the top amid the fall-out from June 4th, and his status as heir to the paramount leader who bears ultimate responsibility for the violent crackdown, Jiang would have had to have been bold indeed to act on calls to revisit the official condemnation of the democracy movement and confirmation of the correctness of suppressing it. Repression of the China Democracy Party, Falun Gong and other groups during Jiang's rule showed the continued rejection of organized political opposition. Recurrent but largely ineffective anti-corruption drives, relatively empty talk of intra-Party democracy, an ambiguous record of village elections, and the pursuit of a "rule by law" that did not extend to the political sphere reflected the limits to officially sanctioned political reform.
Here too, China's leaders at the beginning of the post-Jiang must decide how much to break with the recent past. Less personally tied to Tiananmen, Jiang's successors are in a better position to revisit the official line and move beyond the long shadow it casts over more open politics (and the Party's stature) in the PRC. On the other hand, the immediate prospects for reversing the verdict seem dim, in light of the chilly response that greeted the call to reopen the question from SARS hero Dr. Jiang Yanyong (who blew the whistle on the attempt to cover-up the disease's outbreak in Beijing). The broader post-Jiang agenda of political reform seems far from settled as well, with elite concerns about the regime's frayed legitimacy reportedly underpinning calls for caution, and for more radically liberalizing change from above. The contours of the political and constitutional reforms that Hu and those around him have touted remain hazy at best. Here too, much may turn on the elusive factor of the lingering influence of Jiang or the durable power of his proteges.
Opacity and Institutionalization
As all this suggests, much of the uncertainty in how China's post-Jiang leaders will handle their inherited challenges stems from the lack of clear answers to key questions of whether and how completely the post-Jiang era has begun, and where and how deeply Hu and other members of the fourth generation disagree with their predecessors over policy. Careful and informed observers differ significantly over whether Jiang has ceded much real power, whether his followers who pack the Politburo are able and willing to check Hu and Wen, whether Hu and his supporters or Jiang's own ill health may have forced the former leader to the sidelines. Reasonable and knowledgeable analysts divide over how much Hu and his backers, on one side, and Jiang or his acolytes, on the other, diverge on such issues as whether to emphasize relations with the U.S. or secondary powers, to take a somewhat softer or harder line with Taiwan, to adopt possibly growth-threatening measures to address economic inequality, and so on.
Such uncertainty—and the speculation it invites—remind us that politics and policy processes at the most elite levels in China remain opaque as the PRC formally ends the period of Jiang Zemin's rule. Such opacity hides the extent of institutionalization at the summit of Chinese politics, and very likely reflects its limitations. Does Hu Jintao's ascension to the trinity of top offices make him Jiang's de facto successor as well as de jure heir? Will Hu's acquisition of formal posts prove to be only somewhat more meaningful than the ill-fated Hua Guofeng's having done the same during the brief post-Mao interregnum? Will the absence from key official positions fail to exclude Jiang—or others—from informal influence that echoes, albeit faintly, the personal authority exercised by Deng (who held no significant office for much of his term as paramount leader) or Mao (who eschewed the top state post and whose Party and army posts reflected, but did not confer, his immense power)?
That these questions cannot be answered confidently not only complicates assessments of where the post-Jiang era is likely to lead or whether it has even arrived. More importantly, it suggests that China's nominally post-Jiang leaders may lack the political strength they will need for the difficult choices ahead.
October 10, 2004
Endnotes
Note *: Jacques deLisle is director of FPRI's Asia Program and professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. He is co-editor of the forthcoming book "China under the Fourth Generation Leadership." Back