There is little definitive about the 16th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party just concluded behind the fans [and spittoons].

Jiang, attempting to imitate his [and HuÕs] mentor Deng Xiaoping, managed to hang on to the PartyÕs Military Affairs Commission while abandoning his other hats. But his term has not been announced, a signal the fight goes on.

It is 2002, not 1978 when Deng announced his Four Modernizations, inaugurating a full-blown retreat from the Marxist Leninist Maoist nightmareÕs economic catastrophes. Jiang had his Three Representatives [pace Nikita Khruschev who howled, Òwill our Chinese comrades stop using those damned numbered non-Marxian-Leninist slogans!Ó] But it takes more than the three leadersÕ portraits in the Hall of the People to seal a political bargain in the bloody CCP history.

While displayed equal to The Thought of Mao Tsetung and Deng XiaopingÕs analects, the 3 Reps were not incorporated into the constitution. That means entry for the Red Capitalists [poor Li Ka Shing, the peopleÕs billionaire!] will have to be stealthily instead of as a body [and a claque] for Jiang.

The new central committee [and apparently the forthcoming politburo] is also stacked ø not for Hu but with JiangÕs hangers-on even with expansion. JiangÕs ÒHuÓ, Zeng Qinghong, JiangÕs closets hanger-on, longtime head of the PartyÕs powerful Organizational Department, has also made it.

Hu, cultivating his aloof, cold, incorruptible Party hack role [except when he was murdering Tibetans or enthusiastically endorsing the slaughter of Tiananmen students and avoiding American diplomats and CIA contacts] will be free to continue a new-elevated solitude. But returning to the Military Commission [where Hu sits as vice chairman], there are more questions than answers: little is known about Gen.Cao Gangchun, the most exalted man in uniform replacing several geriatrics. It is not an accident, as the Communists would have said, that Cao has overseen the steady growth of China's ballistic missile arsenal. He represents the new hi-tech minority of the PLA; a lieutenant general in 1992 and a full general in 1998.

Jiang, a civilian unlike Deng can make no claims to a military past much less a member of The Long March, a sponsor of the PeopleÕs Liberation Army rescue from MaoÕs chaos during the Great Cultural Revolution, the musical-chairs of PLA units to finally subdue the Tiananmencrisis, yadayadyada, has been ÒbuyingÓ support among the military. Somebody, whether Jiang or Hu or both, will continue to have to buy the PLAÕs support ø especially if the effort to remove/reduce their dual purpose industrial empire, their control of customs, their industrial-espionage companies [who have partnered with U.S. and other Western companies], discharging their useless peasant-army cadres, yadayadayada, for the ÒmodernizationÓ the Chinese perceived that they had to have after the Gulf War, and now, Afghanistan.

Perhaps as important as the Jiang-Hu conflict, is who and what is to take the place of Prime Minister Zhu Rongji. The poor manÕs Chou Enlai, scion of old Mandarin, haughty, one of the few Communists who has a clue about market economics, believed relatively incorruptible [although some close relatives have been caught in the intra-Party corruption battles], and effective with a bureaucracy with whom he is extremely popular. Zhu pushed for the retirement of Jiang and has committed himself to do that next spring. He came into office promising a new broom. He did sweep up the near-danger-point inflation. But he has not made a dent in the three [there we go again] other problems he lined up ø eliminating the deficit, defunct, bankrupt state dinosaur enterprises, reforming a banking system on which they leech [with a possible 50 percent real default pattern], and unemployment, particularly the population explosion and the growing failure of the briefly prosperous agricultural-rural sector at the early Deng opening.

In other words, while Jiang and Hu fight it out, who is going to watch the store?

Maybe Vice President Cheney will be able to sort it all out for us when he takes up the China Mission next spring. [What happened to the idea that President Bush was going ? did it have something to do with his stuttering distinction between Òour friendsÓ, the South Koreans and the Japanese, and, ehrr, the Chinese, in solving the North Korean crisis?]

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@comcast.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.