In Other Words

China's new leadership

So former Chinese president and (now former) leader of their military, Jiang, has decided to step down and let current president and current leader of the Communist, Hu, party take over leadership of the army as well. I don’t know if any of you remember, but I talked about the rumours of this possibly happening a couple of weeks ago, discussing that as long as there was a power play going on between the supposedly more militaristic Jiang and allegedly more socialist Hu there was a serious risk of instability for the region.

This stemmed from Jiang’s unwillingness to step out of the lime light and let Hu take over fully, which could have resulted in violence on China’s neighbours, in order to show the upstart (Hu is younger then Jiang) how much power Jiang still wielded. Of course that is just speculation on my part, based on the few magazine and newspapers I’ve read on the topic over the last few days.

It seems, from the article, that Jiang has been soundly trounced in the internal party politics, as his deputy and side kick didn’t even win a seat in the military after Jiang stepped down. That seems to imply that Jiang seriously misjudged something and was punished for it.

The only thing I can think off that might garner such a reaction would be the Honky elections. Maybe Jiang warned about the dangers of an election in Honk Kong and how resistance there must be crushed and Hu said ‘let them do their thing’ and then when the election turned out pro China (to everybody’s surprise) Jiang’s had the mat pulled out from under him.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to get a better look into Chinese politics? For now, at least, let's hope that China will take a more long term aproach to their 'one China' policy.

posted by Symbol @ 20.9.04