Samantha Hoffman
On Saturday, former Chinese Communist Party general secretary Hu Jintao was dramatically removed from the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, as the 20th party congress came to a close. Footage of the closing ceremony, recorded for the world’s media to see, showed two men escorting Hu from his seat as General Secretary Xi Jinping, directly next to him, looked on and offered no assistance.
State media outlet Xinhua claimed that Hu was escorted out because he ‘was not feeling well’. That might be true. But the scenes also might have depicted something more sinister. Hu appeared confused as he was pulled away and tried to sit back down. Other top party leaders appeared surprised too. Previous National People’s Congress chairman Li Zhanshu (a Xi ally who on Saturday, as expected, was left off the CCP Central Committee, a group of 205 top party officials, and is no longer on the Politburo Standing Committee) appeared to try to assist Hu.
But, Wang Huning, a top adviser and ally of Xi, then seemed to tug Li back. Maybe he was encouraging Li not to become involved; maybe he knew something that Li did not. We don’t know. So, analysts should consider all possibilities, including that Xi deliberately orchestrated the incident to publicly humiliate his visibly ageing predecessor.
The CCP, after all, is a brutal organisation. Surviving its politics and accumulating power within it require a person to be particularly cunning; otherwise, their chances of survival are low. And, importantly, a rise to power is never a guarantee of power.
Hu is a member of the network of political alliances known as the Tuanpai (团派), or the (Communist) ‘Youth League Faction’. It consists of members of the party who rose to power with Hu Yaobang as their backer. Xi is China’s first leader from the Red Guard generation. The Youth League faction is a group Xi has continually marginalised as he has sought to solidify his grip on power.
Wei Jingsheng is a US-based human rights activist and former political prisoner in China (from 1979 to 1997, under Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin; he was only briefly released for a few months in 1993). Wei was imprisoned for calling for democratic reform, after realising that the party inflicted famine on its own people, though prior to that he was himself a Red Guard. He personally knows more about power in the CCP than most Western commentators. He reacted on Twitter:
No comments:
Post a Comment