China Ex-President May Be Set to Yield Last Powerful Post
By JOSEPH KAHN
Published: September 7, 2004
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China Photos via Reuters Portraits of Hu Jintao, left, and Jiang Zemin on a wall in Beijing. Mr. Hu succeeded Mr. Jiang as president and Communist Party leader. |
BEIJING, Sept. 6 - Jiang Zemin, China's military chief and senior leader, has told Communist Party officials that he plans to resign, prompting an intense and so far inconclusive struggle for control of the armed forces, two people with leadership connections say.
Mr. Jiang's offer to relinquish authority as chairman of the Central Military Commission potentially gives Hu Jintao - who succeeded Mr. Jiang as head of the Communist Party and president of China in 2002 and is now vice chairman of the military commission - a chance to become the country's undisputed top leader, commanding the state, the army and the ruling party.
But people here who were informed about a bargaining session under way at a government compound in western Beijing said it remained unclear whether Mr. Jiang genuinely intended to step aside, or if he would do so on terms acceptable to Mr. Hu.
Chinese political battles are often waged by indirection, with senior officials rarely stating their bottom line and often relying on supporters to represent their interests. Thus, one official said, it is possible that Mr. Jiang, 78, has calculated that he will be called on to remain military chief or to hold another position of influence.
Still, Mr. Jiang's planned resignation, which he announced to a meeting of senior party officials late last week, is an indication that the horse-trading under way before the convening of a national party meeting this month is the most contentious since a partial transfer of power to younger leaders took place in 2002, the people who were told about the proceedings said.
If Mr. Hu, who is 62, were to gain control of the armed forces, he could potentially carry out an agenda that some analysts say is more open to change at home and possibly less truculent in managing local hot spots like Hong Kong and Taiwan.
China's party-controlled news media have not reported on the secretive meetings. People who described the proceedings on condition of anonymity probably have only a partial understanding of what happened and have received their information from other individuals who have a vested interest in the outcome.
There are signs, though, that the jockeying goes beyond the closed-door deliberations that precede any major party meeting. A party official said he had been notified that the formal agenda for the coming meeting of the party's 198-member Central Committee - a discussion of how to improve party governance - had been scrapped, an indication that it had been overtaken by the broader power struggle.
Last week, Zeng Qinghong, China's vice president and Mr. Jiang's top lieutenant, skipped the opening ceremonies of the Central Party School, where he was to have delivered the keynote address. People at the party school said emergency meetings had made it impossible for Mr. Zeng to attend.
Mr. Hu and Mr. Jiang have not publicly sparred over either domestic or foreign policy but are widely though to represent different schools of thinking on some major issues. Their struggle for influence is widely believed to have tipped China toward a harder line on several sensitive issues, including managing relations with Taiwan and political change in Hong Kong.
Chinese analysts say leadership divisions make it risky for senior officials to compromise on issues of sovereignty or security for fear that doing so would expose them to accusations that they were not adequately defending China's core interests.
If Mr. Jiang stepped aside, Mr. Hu might have leeway to build a consensus around new approaches to those two problems, though there is no clear indication that he would favor a decisive shift.
Mr. Jiang has long emphasized cordial working relations with the United States and suppressed domestic calls to challenge the world's leading power more assertively. Mr. Hu is thought to put slightly more emphasis on developing closer ties to Europe and China's immediate neighbors, but is not expected to pursue a markedly different policy toward Washington.
