Word: deng
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This toughness suggests a resurgence of intense nervousness, especially on the part of President Jiang Zemin, as China's leaders await the death of Deng Xiaoping. The 91-year-old patriarch, reportedly living in a military hospital, is said to have suffered several strokes and can barely speak. Deng has chosen Jiang as the man to follow him, but no one can supplant Deng as "paramount leader" until he dies, and his death will unleash a succession struggle. In the meantime, China is in a nerve-racking state of limbo, facing grave problems, such as rampant official corruption and widely...
China's leaders are terrified that Deng's ideology of free-market economics and communist governance has lost its legitimacy, and they have nothing plausible to offer as a substitute. "In broad terms, this is a society that has lost its footing,'' says Kenneth Lieberthal, a scholar at the University of Michigan. ''Society is now without a sure sense of what China is all about.'' With no better alternatives, leaders emphasize stability and nationalism. "The government is uncertain," explains Robert Sutter, a China expert at the Congressional Research Service, "and that leads them to reassert control as much as they...
...Despite Deng's imprimatur, Jiang's position is weak; by conducting these campaigns and the crackdown on dissidents, Jiang is proving to hard-liners in the Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army that he can control Chinese society. "Hard-liners are on the rise," notes Andrew Nathan, a political scientist at Columbia University. "They have more voice in the regime." Jiang needs their support if he is to succeed Deng, and the hard-liners have thought him too soft in the past...
...further effort to consolidate his position, Jiang last week took a well-publicized trip to impoverished villages in northwestern China, a region that has not benefited from Deng's economic reforms. He was filmed walking through fields and visiting the elderly in scenes reminiscent of Mao Zedong's propaganda, not Deng's. The message was that Jiang was not a mere successor to Deng but a leader in the mold of Mao, for whom many Chinese, especially those in the countryside, are increasingly nostalgic. Some experts say Jiang's willingness to distance himself from Deng and his policies implies that...
...with anything has many Western observers puzzled. "They've been able to get away with indefinitely detaining him without hearing too much international outcry. So why try him now? Perhaps internal politics demand that the leadership do something firm to appear strong they prepare for the upcoming struggle over Deng's succession...