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Chinese premier re-elected for five-year term

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) was re-elected yesterday for five more years as simmering unrest in Tibet threatened to badly tarnish his government's image just months before the Olympics.

Wen, 65, was the sole candidate for the job. Xinhua news agency, which reported from the National People's Congress (NPC), did not immediately give the number of votes cast in favor of Wen.

His re-election completes the top leadership line-up for the next half-decade, the legislature having given Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) another five-year term on Saturday.

Dealing with international public opinion will prove harder than putting down the dissent in Tibet, analysts said.

"It's going to be a very tough PR [public relations] challenge. But basically China is still in very firm control in Tibet," said Joseph Cheng (鄭宇碩), an expert on China at the City University of Hong Kong.

While the premier is nominally No. 3 in China's political system, the position is widely seen as the second-most important, following that of Chinese Communist Party secretary-general, an office currently held by Hu, 65.

Wen has been in charge of the management of the economy, which often presents formidable challenges, as China seeks to open up to the world at the same time as it dismantles the remnants of its past socialist system.

In recent months, Wen has led China's struggle to rein in inflation, now at its highest level in nearly 12 years, eroding many of the monetary gains ordinary Chinese have had from rapid economic growth.

Efforts to keep inflation in check have been moderately successful at best, suggesting Beijing is having a harder time controlling the economy than in the past when much of it was state-owned.

The NPC, widely regarded as a rubber-stamp body, also elected Xi Jinping (習近平), 54, as vice president on Saturday, setting him up to succeed Hu in five years.

Recent unrest in Tibet throws into high relief the missing piece in China's ambitious reform endeavor: the absence of political freedom, analysts say.

The problem"is that despite economic growth and improvement in social services and also some improvement in governance ... you still have problems," Cheng said. "The most serious lesson for the Chinese authorities is that in the end when the regime wants to control everything, there is a denial of basic rights for the people. There is no democracy, and so you still have tension."

Mao Shoulong (毛壽龍), a professor of public administration at Renmin University in Beijing, said he did not believe political reform would be top priority in the next five years.

"Basically, the leaders regard the current period as a strategic opportunity for China's economic and social development, so probably they would rather put aside political reform for the time being," he said.
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