Jiang Zemin, the former Chinese president who was said to have fallen gravely ill in July, appeared at a ceremony in Beijing on Sunday, fanning speculation about his health and the role he might play in power struggles accompanying the long-planned shift in the top leadership next year.
As China launched its 18th Communist Party congress on Thursday, a record number of Tibetans immolated themselves in a stark illustration of the internal tensions facing the country's new leadership.
Over a 48-hour period, at least five Tibetans were reported to have set themselves on fire in western China. Most of them were teenagers.
As many as 6,000 people demonstrated against the government Thursday afternoon in Tongren, a monastery town in Qinghai province, after two self-immolations — a 23-year-old woman on Wednesday and a young former monk on Thursday, exile groups reported.
My preliminary conclusion: conservative forces within the Party are still very powerful. According to the line marked out by the political report to the 18th National Congress, there is very little prospect that substantive moves will be made on political reform.
The world's other superpower is having its own “election” this week. And if all goes according to plan, on Nov. 14 nine (or seven) men (and possibly one woman) will stride across the stage in Beijing’s massive Great Hall of the People as the new members of the Politburo Standing Committee, China's most powerful decision-making body. They will wave, clap, and smile confidently, signaling to the world the inevitability of their leadership and hiding the messy reality of decades of infighting and moral compromise by which they climbed their way to the top. And their optimism will mask the reality of a China that is facing some of the most severe and daunting challenges in its modern history.
Capping 10 careful years at the helm of the Communist Party, China’s top leader is stepping into history with a series of rear-guard actions. The leader, Hu Jintao, 69, is scheduled to step down as the party’s general secretary next week, handing over much of his power to his designated successor, Xi Jinping. But over the past few months, he has made it clear that he has little interest in the bold changes to the status quo that many Chinese now see as long overdue.
China’s once-a-decade leadership change is currently underway in Beijing. The new leaders will take power at a crucial time for China, as it enters the third stage of its development since the revolution. How they deal with the challenges ahead will not just shape China, but Europe and the entire world. ECFR’s China programme has drawn together a unique collection of essays from leading Chinese intellectuals and thinkers, examining the choices that it faces with its economy, its political system and its global role. After Mao’s political revolution (‘China 1.0’) and Deng Xiaoping’s economic revolution (‘China 2.0’) we call this ‘China 3.0’. -Now that it is becoming more affluent, how does China deal with growing inequalities, rebalancing its economy and its increasing exposure to the global economy? -How does the Communist Party retain stability, with increasing friction within Chinese society and half a billion ‘netizens’ active on the web? -China can no longer keep a low profile on the world stage so also needs to decide how to use its power and deal with grievances with neighbours like Japan and South Korea.
In an era of great change and economic uncertainty around the world, one might expect a leadership transition at the top of one of the world’s rising powers to shine a light on that country’s prospective next leaders so the public might form an opinion of them and decide whether or not to express their distaste or support. Not so in China, where the Chinese Communist Party and its distinctive process of handing power from one group of men to another every ten years are cloaked in shadow.
Activists, journalists and a political cartoonist had their Twitter accounts hacked the opening day of China’s 18th Party Congress.
Economic history teaches us that China is likely to get stuck in the middle: neither a poor economy nor a rich one.
Outgoing President Hu Jintao warned that the Communist Party faces 'collapse' if it fails to clean up corruption.
