BUT DO ANY OF THEM LIKE WHISKEY AND JAZZ?:

New China Hierarchy May Limit President’s Power ( JOSEPH KAHN, October 13, 2007, NY Times)

After intensive bargaining, China’s Communist Party has approved a new leadership lineup that denies President Hu Jintao the decisive consolidation of power that his supporters hoped would allow him to govern more assertively in his final five-year term as China’s top leader.

The party’s Central Committee agreed to elevate four senior officials to the ruling Politburo Standing Committee, but only one of them, Li Keqiang, the party secretary of Liaoning Province, clearly owed his rise in the hierarchy to Mr. Hu’s patronage, people told about the results of a Central Committee meeting said Friday.

Xi Jinping, the party boss of Shanghai, is also expected to join the Standing Committee. He would outrank Mr. Li and become the most likely successor to Mr. Hu as party chief, head of state and top military official in 2012, the people said.

Mr. Xi, whose father was a senior party official under Mao, is viewed as a compromise choice, acceptable to Mr. Hu but also to his now-retired predecessor as top leader, Jiang Zemin, who party officials say exercised broad sway over the reshuffling.

Will China's next leader be its Gorbachev?: The country's top political figures gather this week to choose a new President. Their decision will affect us all (Will Hutton, October 14, 2007, The Observer)

They are choosing the fifth generation of Communist party leaders after the 1949 revolution. These are no longer leaders legitimised by revolution or who have the same sense of communist mission. They are managers and administrators who want to make the system work. In the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev's readiness to question communism was intertwined with his membership of the Soviet Union's fifth generation of leaders. He did not champion perestroika and glasnost alone; much of the nomenklatura had decided that the Soviet economic and social model was dysfunctional, corrupt and endemically inefficient and had to change.

Will one of Hu Jintao's two 'Lis', as the frontrunners to succeed him, Li Keqiang and Li Yuanchao, are popularly known, feel the same way as they walk out in front of the cameras in the Great Hall of the People on Friday? Will one prove to be China's Gorbachev?

The 2,200 or so handpicked delegates are pulled in two directions. They are beneficiaries of enormous and rampant corruption; Minxin Pei, director of the China programme at Washington's Carnegie Institute, calculates that 10 per cent of the value of all land and investment deals is set aside to grease Communist party officials' hands. Corrupt payments stand at $86bn every year - and they are rising. Pei says this poses a lethal threat to the system because of growing popular revulsion; he is right and the leadership agrees with him. Doubtless Hu will speak out against corruption this week, yet again.

The trouble is that, despite his rhetoric, only three in 100 corrupt officials is caught, largely because the anti-corruption campaigns are run by officials who themselves are corrupt. Worse, nobody believes in the underlying moral purpose of communism; old habits, including the imperial system of concubinage, are returning with a vengeance. And this is generating a contrary pull. A growing proportion of the Chinese nomenklatura - like the Soviet Union's before them - knows that the system, for all its successes, is running out of time.

Four generations of imbecility is enough?

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 13, 2007 1:45 PM