A day after President Jiang Zemin (江澤民) outlined his blueprint for China's future, Communist Party delegates sequestered themselves yesterday to tackle their most important task -- choosing the leaders who will guide the world's most populous country through coming decades of change.
More than 2,000 delegates from across China have descended on the capital for the party congress, a weeklong gathering held every five years. As the congress entered its second day, most delegates disappeared from public view as closed-door meetings began.
PHOTO: AP
The top issue: choosing new members of the party's Central Committee.
"Talks are under way now about personnel changes," said Tan Li, a delegate from the southwestern province of Sichuan. "It's going to take some time. It's not easy."
The committee, which now has 193 members, will in turn appoint the elite Politburo and its inner sanctum, the all-powerful Standing Committee. All but one of the seven current committee members are expected to retire.
The Central Committee will also anoint the successor of Jiang, who is expected to step down as party general secretary, China's most powerful job, at the end of this congress. He is also expected to resign as president in March after sealing his legacy -- inviting entrepreneurs to join the party.
Most of the few delegates who did appear outside conference rooms refused to answer questions from reporters. But some confirmed the intense negotiations by high-ranking party members in the inner chambers of the Great Hall of the People, an enormous building facing Beijing's central Tiananmen Square.
The party is expected to usher in a new generation of leaders, many in their 50s, to replace Jiang, 76, and his contemporaries. The wide favorite to replace him as both party secretary and president is the 59-year-old vice president, Hu Jintao (胡錦濤).
The leadership change will be the first orderly turnover of power in the history of the party, which took over China in 1949. Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) put his opponents on trial after Mao Zedong's (毛澤東) 1976 death, and Jiang rose in the chaotic aftermath of the bloody 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.
Hu and other younger leaders will likely stick to what the party calls "socialism with Chinese characteristics" -- a hybrid of central planning and private industry that has lifted living standards but left tens of millions unemployed.
Powerful regional players including Shanghai party secretary Huang Ju are expected to be brought into the central leadership. Jiang and other current leaders also appear to be trying to fill top slots with their supporters to retain influence.
In Washington, former US ambassador to China Winston Lord said Jiang would continue to pull strings behind the scenes after he retires and seek to maintain one of his crowning achievements -- friendly ties with the United States.
"Jiang Zemin sees as his legacy a good relationship with the United States," Lord told a seminar Friday at the Nixon Center, a private research group in Washington, DC, named for the former president who ended a US diplomatic freeze on mainland China in 1971.
In another sign of the intense dealmaking under way in the Great Hall, top provincial party officials were noticeably absent from public discussions held by a handful of regional delegations Saturday.
The discussions were all carefully scripted affairs at which delegates rhapsodized about Jiang's vision for China's and the party's future, laid out in an opening-day speech.
"Secretary General Jiang's report was a really great report," said Guangdong Governor Lu Ruihua. "This really answers a lot of our party's questions about who we are and where we are going."
Jiang told a cavernous meeting hall filled with 2,114 delegates that China aims to quadruple the size of its economy by 2020 by further privatizing state-owned companies and opening to international markets.
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
LANDSLIDES POSSIBLE: The agency advised the public to avoid visiting mountainous regions due to more expected aftershocks and rainfall from a series of weather fronts A series of earthquakes over the past few days were likely aftershocks of the April 3 earthquake in Hualien County, with further aftershocks to be expected for up to a year, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Based on the nation’s experience after the quake on Sept. 21, 1999, more aftershocks are possible over the next six months to a year, the agency said. A total of 103 earthquakes of magnitude 4 on the local magnitude scale or higher hit Hualien County from 5:08pm on Monday to 10:27am yesterday, with 27 of them exceeding magnitude 5. They included two, of magnitude
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique