Chinese aristocrats?
Many of the factions within the Communist Party in China are led by sons and grandsons of revolutionary heroes and leaders. Do they make up a Communist aristocracy?
This bit of analysis is another example of how during a time of transition, journalists write about details that normally get ignored. When something like the Communist Party Congress and leadership transition take place, teachers can "harvest" valuable supplements to the teaching materials they already have.
China’s Aristocratic Class Wields Its Influence to Shape Politics
The rise of so-called princelings… will reach a capstone this week, when Xi Jinping, himself the son of a Communist Party pioneer, is to be unveiled as China’s top leader… Mr. Xi is likely to be joined by at least two other princelings on the seven-member Standing Committee.
Despite rising controversy over their prominent role in government and business… China’s princelings, who number in the hundreds, are emerging as an aristocratic class that has an increasingly important say in ruling the country.
While they feud and fight among themselves, many princelings have already made their mark in the established order, playing important roles in businesses, especially state-owned enterprises. Others are heavily involved in finance or lobbying, where personal connections are important…
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| Red Guards in Shenyang |
Many of the oldest among them — those now set to take power — share something else: an upbringing during some of China’s most difficult years. Many were children during the Great Leap Forward, when upward of 30 million people died of famine from 1958 to 1962, and teenagers during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, a period many spent as outcasts or in exile after their parents were attacked by Maoist radicals…
The princelings are distinct from the current top rulers of China, most of whom owe their allegiance to institutions in the Communist Party. Outgoing party general secretary, Hu Jintao, rose up through the Communist Youth League…
Princelings are far from a uniform bloc. Many grew up in Beijing’s “big yards” — the sprawling housing compounds of the ministries and Communist Party organizations that defined the capital in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Children of senior leaders studied together, played together and, during the Cultural Revolution, fought each other in Red Guard factions that resembled inner-city gangs…
“There are a certain number of princelings who are benefiting from the system,” said Zhang Lifan, a historian in Beijing and the son of a former minister. “So there are a number of them who don’t want any change.” Advocates of systemic reform like Mr. Zhang look askance at the rise of the princelings. In imperial days, when emperors and their relatives ruled the country, nepotism was prevalent. When the Communist Party took over, idealists hoped that it would guard against that. “But for some reason, we’re now back to nepotism,” Mr. Zhang said. “And the country is ruled by a few families.”
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Labels: China, cleavages, factions, leadership
New generation for reform as well
Several recent reports from China have emphasized how the power and wealth of several generations of an entrenched elite are putting a lid on political change in China.
Now, Michael Wines, writing in the
New York Times, offers a glimpse of a reformist branch of that entrenched elite.
This should not be surprising since the political battles in China (within the Communist Party, of course) since 1949 have been waged between factions with differing ideas about how to create China's future. Even during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, there were factions within the Party fighting for control of the Party and the country.
As China Talks of Change, Fear Rises on the Risks
A heavyweight crowd gathered last October for a banquet in Beijing’s tallest skyscraper. The son of Mao Zedong’s immediate successor was there, as was the daughter of the country’s No. 2 military official for nearly three decades, along with the half sister of China’s president-in-waiting, and many more…
Most surprising, though, was the reason for the meeting. A small coterie of children of China’s founding elites who favor deeper political and economic change had come to debate the need for a new direction under the next generation of Communist Party leaders… Many had met the previous August, and would meet again in February.
The private gatherings are a telling indicator of how even some in the elite are worried about the course the Communist Party is charting for China’s future. And to advocates of political change, they offer hope that influential party members support the idea that tomorrow’s China should give citizens more power to choose their leaders and seek redress for grievances, two longtime complaints about the current system.
But the problem is that even as the tiny band of political reformers is attracting more influential adherents, it is splintered into factions that cannot agree on what “reform” would be, much less how to achieve it. The fundamental shifts that are crucial to their demands — a legal system beyond Communist Party control as well as elections with real rules and real choices among candidates — are seen even among the most radical as distant dreams, at best part of a second phase of reform.
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| Bo Xilai |
In addition, the political winds are not blowing in their favor. The spectacular fall this spring of Bo Xilai, the Politburo member who openly espoused a populist philosophy at odds with elite leaders, offered an object lesson in the dangers of challenging the status quo…
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| Zhang Lifan |
“Compare now to 1989; in ’89, the reformers had the upper hand,” said Zhang Lifan, a historian formerly associated with the government’s Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, referring to the pro-democracy student protests that enjoyed the support of a number of important party leaders but were crushed in Tiananmen Square. “Twenty years later, the reformers have grown weaker. Now there are so many vested interests that they’ll be taken out if they touch anyone else’s interests.”…
“Neither the rulers nor the ruled are happy with the current situation,” said Mr. Zhang, the historian. “The prevailing belief is that change is coming soon, but the question is how. Change is either going to come from the top leadership, or from the grass-roots level.”…
If peaceful change is to occur, Zhou Zhixing, a media executive and former official at a Communist Party research organization, and many others say, it must begin inside the Communist Party; the lesson of Tiananmen Square is that the leadership will not tolerate threats to its control. Many speak of a transformation along the lines of that in Taiwan, where authoritarian rulers peacefully gave way to direct elections in 1996, and helped spawn today’s robust democracy…
Populists want to remake the party to reflect Mao’s early vision, redistributing billions in government riches to the people… But Mao-style populism is disdained by most current leaders…
A second Communist camp wants to open the party to internal competition, abandoning the leadership’s facade of unity and letting rival factions take their ideas to the wider party for approval. Over the long run, they say, transparency will spawn competing parties under a Communist umbrella — a sort of one-party democracy. But in a China where stability is the leadership’s obsessive concern, the notion of baring divisions at the pinnacle of power seems almost farcical…
But the sheer scope of the discord leads some who call for change to wonder whether they are less a movement than a debating society — intellectuals trading theories over plates of noodles in their apartments, the second red generation trading theories over lavish hotel banquets.
“Mao used to say that ‘revolution is not a dinner party,’ ” Mr. Yang, the editor at Yanhuang Chunqiu, said sardonically. “But right now, revolution is precisely a dinner party.”
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Labels: China, factions, politics, reform
