”The emperor is dead long live the emperor
”The emperor is dead, long live the emperor.” As China awoke yesterday to the news that Deng Xiaoping had passed away, the only thing missing was a senior figure with enough stature to fill Mr Deng’s shoes. For the first time since its founding in 1949, the People’s Republic of China is without a credible “paramount leader”, and it is with no little unease that the world waits to see if China’s political system really has matured into some sort of collective leadership. President Jiang Zemin, the man who has ostensibly been in charge since Mr Deng was last seen in public three years ago, must be thinking that his mentor might have timed his death with a little more care. China is only two weeks into the new Year of the Ox, and for the superstitious any unfortunate event before tonight’s full moon represents a bad omen for the year. More practically for Mr Jiang, whose priority for the immediate future is maintaining social stability, is the fact that during the Chinese New Year period, up to 90 million floating workers are on the move as they travel back to work after the country’s most important public holiday.
Security will be extra tight over the next few weeks.
Mr Jiang and his colleagues had been gearing up for world attention to focus on China in 1997, but for rather different reasons. The annual gathering of China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress, will convene in Peking a week on Saturday; and this year’s meeting of the rubber-stamp body was supposed to be a celebration of the final countdown to Hong Kong’s return to the motherland. Instead, it will now be dominated by public tributes to Mr Deng, and a private scramble by top leaders to establish their leadership positions.China’s nationalistic run-up to the July 1 Hong Kong transition will be overshadowed by the uncertainty felt by the rest of the world over China’s political stability in the post-Deng era. It probably will not be until this autumn’s full Chinese Communist Party Congress, held only once every five years, that the shape of the new top leadership grouping starts to fall into place.
Even before Mr Deng’s departure, this was the congress that Mr Jiang hoped would put the seal on his status as Mr Deng’s official heir. Mr Jiang – who is also party chief and head of the army – will have to do some deft political manoeuvring as he seeks to keep the support of key personalities and the military. The Congress must establish, for instance, who will take over as prime minister when Li Peng finishes his second term in March 1998.If Mr Jiang emerges secure after the Congress, as most analysts at the moment believe he can, he will claim his diplomatic prize of the year – a summit meeting with President Clinton, probably in Washington. And if all goes according to plan, China’s year will wind up with the last of the already officially-designated “important events” of 1997, the diversion of the Yangtze River for the Three Gorges Dam project.China may be able to change the course of one of the world’s great waterways, but will it for the first time be able to secure a smooth succession of political power? When Chairman Mao died at the end of the Cultural Revolution’s 10-year devastation, it needed the army to propel Mr Deng to paramount leader status. “I think the situation now is totally different,” says a senior Western diplomat in Peking. “When Mao died we were at the end of an unprecedentedly negative decade, one of enormous chaos, huge suffering, political exhaustion It’s different now.