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Jiang Zemin plans to relinquish full control, book says

Despite rampant speculation to the contrary, a new account of Beijing's secretive politics says that China's President Jiang Zemin (江澤民) has decided to give up all of his top posts, and that the country will have its first orderly political succession over the coming six months.

According to the account, which claims to draw on high-level insider documents and discussions, an intense campaign this year promoting Jiang's "theory" of a modernized communism embracing capitalists, interpreted by many analysts as an attempt by Jiang to cling to power, is intended to give him an honorable retirement and secure his legacy.

The account, by an anonymous Chinese author, is being published in the US. It has been scrutinized by a leading American expert on Chinese politics, Andrew J. Nathan of Columbia University, who calls it highly credible, though impossible to verify fully.

The unusually detailed account of maneuvers inside the "black box" of Beijing politics comes from a Chinese man who has lived for several years in the US and who says that well-placed insiders gave him the party's secret dossiers, evaluating dozens of candidates for leading positions.

He says he has maintained contact with his party sources during recent weeks as final preparations are made for the 16th Communist Party Congress on Nov. 8, and offers a precise and consistent view of the jostling at the top.

Under the pseudonym of Zong Hairen -- he fears reprisals against himself or his sources -- he has combined excerpts from the personnel reports with his account of insider maneuvers in a Chinese-language book called Disidai (第四代 , The Fourth Generation), to be published this fall by New York-based Mirror Books.

Trial balloon shot down

The report says that trial balloons this year suggesting that Jiang, 76, should retain one or more of his top offices failed to win the support of other senior leaders. It says Jiang will step down as Communist Party chief in November and as China's president next March, handing power to the 59-year-old heir apparent, Hu Jintao (胡錦濤).

The report asserts that Jiang's advisers have convinced him that in the interests of party unity and his own legacy he must also sign over to Hu his third title, chairman of the Central Military Commission. That transfer, the report says, is to take place during the meeting of parliament next March, and Jiang is unlikely to wield major informal power in the years that follow, contradicting a common view here that Jiang is angling to keep the military title to prolong his influence.

While the new account offers what some say is a credible account of recent politics, it is unlikely to convince all the experts, who have expressed widely varied interpretations of Jiang's intentions.

Just Wednesday, the Communist Party departments of organization and propaganda issued a major notice to all party units throughout the country, instructing members to carefully study a new book of Jiang's writings, the official New China News Agency reported.

This campaign may, as the anonymous book author suggests, be preparing the ground for Jiang's smooth retirement. But some experts here think it signifies Jiang's muscle and his intent to remain an assertive player.

The author provides startling and previously unreported details of the Machiavellian struggle for power in the period since 1989, when Jiang was installed as party leader after the trauma of the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown.

He asserts that for a time in 1992, Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), then China's de facto leader, discussed toppling Jiang and Prime Minister Li Peng (李鵬) for their failure to press China's economic opening, which Deng saw as vital.

According to that account, Deng even briefly bruited the notion of restoring Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽) to senior office. Zhao was deposed as party chief in 1989 because he showed too much sympathy for the democracy protests at Tiananmen Square.

The dismissals were sidetracked, the author says, by Jiang's masterly aide, Zeng Qinghong (曾慶紅), who helped Jiang jump belatedly onto the "reform" bandwagon and convinced Deng that a greater threat lay in the accumulating power of two related army generals, who were later purged. Zhao remains defiant and under house arrest today.

An English-language description of the "Zong" book and his version of political developments has been prepared by Nathan and by Bruce Gilley, a journalist and biographer of Jiang. Their version will be published this fall as China's New Rulers: The Inside Files, by The New York Review of Books Press. Excerpts are being published in forthcoming issues of The New York Review of Books.

In an interview, Nathan acknowledged that many assertions could not be independently verified. But he said that the anonymous writer's track record of informed articles and an earlier book, the rich and plausible detail of the new report and extensive discussions had convinced him and Gilley that the documents and the author's high-level access were genuine.

Nathan said he remained puzzled by the motives of the insiders who leaked the secret documents to the author. The materials -- describing the work records, climb to power and excerpts from internal speeches of Politburo candidates -- did not seem to convey any political agenda on the part of the leakers, who were taking a severe risk.

According to the author's account, the future membership of the Politburo standing committee was largely determined months ago or earlier. The standing committee, which runs the party and the country, now includes seven men, most of whom are to retire because they are older than 70.

Hu will rank first, followed by Li Ruihan (李瑞環), 68, who is also to become the head of parliament. Vice Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶), 60, will be named prime minister as well as a standing committee member. Others on the committee will include Vice Premier Wu Bangguo (吳邦國); Luo Gan (羅幹), the hard-line director of law and security, and Zeng, Jiang's protege.
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