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Resistance to Jiang now emerging

To be able to stay in control of the political situation in China after stepping down from his post, the general-secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Jiang Zemin (江澤民), intends to imitate the US National Security Council system and has proposed the establishment of a Chinese National Security Council. It is reported that according to Jiang's thinking, the Chinese National Security Council will be a mechanism for planning and coordinating diplomatic and national security strategies, and he means to be its first chairman.

Under the American system, the National Security Council which consists of the president, vice president, secretary of state, secretary of defense, the head of the joint chiefs of staff, the director of the FBI and the national security advisor, is the US' highest decisionmaking body for national security policy. Informed people in Beijing say that the purpose of the National Security Council proposed by Jiang is, on the surface, to improve China's capacity for dealing with national security crises, but in reality it is an agency tailor-made for Jiang to stay in control of the political situation once he leaves the position of general-secretary. The agency is like a small Cabinet that can supersede the central government.

Informed people say that a recently published internal academic report strongly belittles the idea of a pre-eminent national security council. The report compares the power of national security councils and intelligence systems in various countries. The final conclusion is that the national security council may be established, but that its status should not exceed that of the ministries. The report is authored by a group of social scholars. Jiang suspects that the group is quietly being backed by Qiao Shi (喬石) and he has ordered an investigation into the background of the report.

On a range of issues, many of the Chinese Communist Party's internal research reports are more outspoken.

A recent report from the Nanjing Military Academy, which is seen as the think tank of the Strategy Department at the General Staff Headquarters of the People's Liberation Army, clearly and unequivocally opposes the Communist Party's use of armed force to solve the Taiwan question. The report states that China should perfect its own economy to use economic means to snare Taiwan and give up the idea of unification through military force. The report estimates that if war breaks out across the Taiwan strait, the US would only have to mobilize one percent of its military force to assist Taiwan, in which case China would definitely lose the war. It is said that the report already has incited discussion.

Wu Suli is a columnist for the Hong Kong-based Open Magazine.

Translated by Perry Svensson
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