Posted on 03/15/2003 6:34:41 AM PST by SlickWillard
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| Sat Mar 15, 2:36 AM ET |
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New Chinese President Hu Jintao, right, is congratulated by outgoing President Jiang Zemin (news - web sites) after Hu was named as his successor during a session of the National People's Congress in Beijing on Saturday March 15, 2003. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko) |
Things are going to get worse, too, before they get better. The “third generation” of Communist Chinese leaders is getting ready to leave the stage, and a “fourth generation” is waiting in the wings. This “fourth generation” — people like Jiang Zemin’s 58-year-old heir-apparent, Hu Jintao — came of age at or just before the beginning of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). The years after university graduation, when a person’s outlook is broadened by work experience and foreign travel, were all lost to them in those eleven years of madness. They are ignorant, insular and narrow-minded. They lost their Marxist ideology in the follies of the late Mao period and filled the vacuum with rabid nationalism. They have internalized all the stuff about “western imperialism” and “national humiliation”, without the softening experience of actually dealing with foreigners in their formative years, as older leaders did (with Americans during WW2, or with Russians in the early Maoist years). Jiang Zemin, Zhu Rongji and even the robotic Li Peng are cosmopolitan sophisticates compared with what we’ll be facing ten years from now.*
* There was a good analysis of this upcoming “fourth generation” in The China Quarterly for March 2000: “Jiang Zemin’s successors: The Rise of the Fourth Generation of Leaders in the PRC” by Li Cheng.
Night Thoughts
John Derbyshire
March 10, 2003
http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire031003.asp
China's Communist dictators care about one thing only: staying in power. To stay in power, they have to keep the economy moving forward. To do that, they have to maintain, and if possible increase, their exports to the U.S. The communist regime is entirely dependent on our willingness to buy Chinese goods. If we embargoed Chinese goods, many American firms would go out of business. The prices of many things would rise, though other third-world suppliers would soon fill the gaps. The effect on China, however, would be a thousand times more dramatic. Their economy would collapse.
Memo to Hu Jintao: If the U.S. loses a city to some terrorist group, via a weapon that would not have been made if you had helped us shut down the Kim Jong-il regime, or via a weapon you sold, or helped someone develop — if that happens, pal, it will be around 100 years before any American ever again buys any object stamped MADE IN CHINA.
China is still run by a guy who died 5 years ago.
And this isn't a transfer of power. Nor was it the first orderly transfer.
Answer: one.
Hu, 60, anointed long ago by the late Deng Xiaoping...
I haven't been looking at his stuff recently, thanks for posting them.
Gertz: China sold Iraq dual use chemicals
Despite French denials, U.S. intelligence and defense officials have confirmed that Iraq purchased from China a chemical used in making fuel for long-range missiles, with help from brokers in France and Syria.
No. Hu is the president of China.
That's what I'm sayin'! What is the name of the President of China!
....The country's second-ranking party man, Wu Bangguo, replaces Li Peng as head of the legislature.....
This is an important change. Li Peng is I believe, an old hard liner. He has been supersceded. That is good and positive news.
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