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.