Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Friday, September 23, 2011

Crowd at the top

After Mao and Deng, the Politburo guys decided there should be a fixed retirement age and term limits for the top people. Now they have to contend with the politics of succession within the Politburo.

And, it seems, they have a new power group to accommodate: retired leaders. The Chinese leadership has long been older than that in most countries, and the retired leaders don't fade into the woodwork. Instead they seem to hang out in Beijing and try to influence what their successors are doing.

Not fade away

A REMARKABLE recent improvement in the way China’s murky politics is conducted is mostly to do with the succession process at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party. In decades past, vanquished political foes tended to end up purged, imprisoned or dead. The victors, meanwhile, hung on to power long into their dotage. Now the holders of many high party and state posts face age limits on service, while those at the very top of the heap, notably the president and prime minister, are restricted to two five-year terms. To outsiders, the process of choosing party successors remains as opaquely Byzantine as ever. But it is undoubtedly more orderly—and less brutal—than it used to be.

Yet China must now reckon with a potentially destabilising consequence of this new, improved process. It is that the cohort of retired leaders is burgeoning. And before they go to meet their Marx, most are keen both to continue exerting political influence and to go on protecting the (business or less often political) interests of family members, along with their vast networks of protégés…

When former leaders have kept a hand in things, they have usually done so from behind the scenes…

But this month saw a rare public return to the fray. Mr Zhu, who… had a reputation as a blunt, honest reformer… has now released a multi-volume collection of speeches and letters from his years in power… Among these were his contention that a government full of yes-men ill serves the needs of the people. Chinese leaders, he also railed, should devote less time to lavish banquets and pointless meetings, and more time to solving problems…

Cheng Li of the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, says he is surprised that Mr Zhu is now being so forthright, but predicts that public interventions by former leaders—“old-man politics”—could well increase. Not only is the number of ex-leaders growing. A rise in factional politics and greater differences of opinion among a new (and weaker) generation of leaders might also undermine unity at the centre. China’s old men will no doubt want to say something about it all.

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Labels: China, leadership, politics