Bush prepares to meet a Chinese leadership in turmoil

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Bush’s stopover in Beijing later this month comes in the middle of a succession struggle. Chinese insistence on his coming now may be part and parcel of that fight. This would seem to preclude a personal relationship developing with President Jiang, the kind Bush thought he achieved with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. What Jiang will be doing a year from now is far from settled. And the heir apparent, Vice President Hu Jintao has been unapproachable for Americans.

Chinese propaganda says everything is settled: President Jiang Zemin will step down at the 16th Party Congress this fall. But Jiang has other plans. He would like to hang on to the Party’s military commission chairmanship, traditionally the driver’s seat. According to this scenario, Vice President Hu Jintao eases into the presidency but in the gerontocratic tradition, Jiang hangs on until he finally dodders away as his mentor, paramount ruler Deng Hsiaopeng did in his 90s.

Given Communist China’s history of violent successions, it could well play out unexpectedly. Jiang, for example, unlike the Second Generation leader Deng, is not military. And the People’s Liberation Army, bifurcated between high tech aspirations and a mob of untrained sloggers, is not Deng’s PLA.

That Jiang doesn’t hold all the cards became evident when he went public and then failed to deliver on a plan to bring the new Chinese mercantile rich into the Party. The Communist millionaires gambit was thrown back in his face by “Party elders”.

Jiang also could be playing one Fourth Generation acolyte against another. Zeng Qinghong, chief of staff during Jiang’s U.S. visit, could be candidate. Zeng is a quintessential Shanghailander but has no Party base. Hu, “sent down” to manual labor in China’s primitive west during the Cultural Revolution, gauleiter who put down the 1957-58 Tibetan demonstrations, clawed his way up through the Party youth organization. And Hu is attuned to that great bulk of Chinese who have not profited from the coastal cities boom. Their rural poverty will likely grow faster with Beijing’s promised markets opening under affiliation to the World Trade Organization.

Plopped into the middle of this is an anti-corruption campaign, always an intra-Party bloodbath. A growing bank scandal involves a close ally of Prime Minister Zhu. Crooked bank operations could jeopardize proposed overseas financing for the Bank of China and other state enterprises with which Shanghai sought a further elision into the international financial network. It could produce the foreign investment confidence crisis some have long expected in a China that still lacks fundamental guarantees and where most foreign investors are losing money.

Even if Jiang could talk seriously over this domestic cacophony, the Chinese might well hesitate to negotiate from weakness resulting from the 9/11 fallout. Putin, their erstwhile ally, abandoned their joint campaign against “global hegemonism” [the U.S.], quickly cashing in on Washington’s anti-terrorism alliance. Beijing worries about an American Central Asia military presence and the end of its ambitions to replace the Soviet Union to get at oil and gas reserves there. Chinese fear of the dispersal of the Al Qaeda from Afghanistan is apparently real – even though they used it as a pretext for new suppression in its westernmost province of Singkiang.

Most of all Beijing’s People’s Liberation Army journals express alarm at what they construe as Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi’s use of the anti-terrorism alliance as a pretext to void the “no war” U.S. Occupation-dictated Japanese constitution. Countering their own pretensions for Indian Ocean expansion, China now sees the Japanese Self-Defense naval forces deployed there in noncombatant support of the Americans, expanding with new satellite and other hi tech plans and more intimate cooperation in the Japan-U.S. Defense Alliance. And there appears to be a debate after Zhu’s recent India trip over whether to seek to counter the new Washington-New Delhi collaboration with commercial ties.

Beijing is also hobbled with its erratic North Korean protégé. China has walked a delicate line between continuing support to one of the only remaining Communist states in Pyongyang and benefits from South Korea as a trading partner [to do for North China what Hong Kong did for the South]. Bush’s naming North Korea in “the axis of evil” – and a recent spyship episode wherein Tokyo reacted firmly – aggravates this balance as South Korea’s lame-duck President Kim Dae Jung’s “sunshine policy” for accommodation with the North virtually collapses.

If all this were not enough, a conciliatory speech by China’s No. 3, Vice Premier Qian Qichen, accepting to deal with Taiwan President Chen’s pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party, has apparently split Beijing leadership.

All this seems to mean the U.S. president is likely to leave China with no more basis for a “constructive engagement” with Beijing than CIA Boss Tenet hinted was possible in his recent ambivalent report on U.S.-China relations to the Congress.