That was then. Today Jiang’s carefully orchestrated smile offensive is in ruins, as crippled as the spy plane on the tarmac in Hainan. Little Bush is being vilified on Chinese Web sites and in the press. The air collision was a windfall for the hard-liners in Beijing who, for the moment, may have the upper hand. Among the chief Chinese hawks are the officers of the People’s Liberation Army, many of whom view war with America as all but inevitable. “The Hainan incident will help nationalists in the party and the Army get more power,” predicts Sun Shihua of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. However the crisis is resolved, that delicate shift in Beijing could affect the future of both China and Sino-U.S. relations.
That’s especially true because a major succession of power is imminent in the Middle Kingdom. Most of China’s top leaders are slated for retirement soon, and each is trying to lace the new lineup with his own proteges. Jiang himself is scheduled to step down as party head and president in 2002 and 2003, respectively. In addition, five of China’s top seven leaders are expected to retire during the 16th Communist Party Congress next year. Jiang wants to install a baby-faced technocrat, Hu Jintao, as his successor. Parliament head Li Peng, a hard-liner, is lobbying for his own man, security czar Luo Gan, to secure a place in the new galaxy of rising stars. Beyond that a raft of lower-level promotions are being war-gamed and fought over, including the critical portfolio for handling China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. The congress “will be an extremely important event, as it will portend a large-scale transfer of authority to the next generation of Chinese leaders,” CIA Director George Tenet told Congress recently. “The political jockeying has already begun, and Chinese leaders will view every domestic- and foreign-policy decision they face through the prism of the succession contests.”
Many ambitious Chinese politicians seem to think the best way to get ahead is to take a hawkish line toward the United States. Chinese public opinion toward the United States is still raw from the bombing of the embassy in Belgrade in 1999. And Beijing officials have felt snubbed by the new American president, who publicly labeled China a “strategic competitor” rather than the strategic “partner” Bill Clinton had embraced. In that sense, Jiang’s early overtures to George W. Bush were a gamble: he risked looking weak–not just to his fellow Politburocrats, but to the increasingly nationalistic Chinese people, whose sentiments influence their party overlords to a striking degree.
But Jiang didn’t reach the top in Chinese politics by being naive. Last week, just as tensions began escalating, Jiang headed off on a two-week Latin American odyssey – leaving his protege Hu in charge. “If the successor does well in this crisis, Jiang can take credit,” says China expert David Finkelstein, of the CNA Corp., a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “If not, Jiang can get another one.” That can’t be comforting to Hu. “He is a cipher to everyone,” says a Western diplomat in Beijing. “He stands for nothing in particular.” One conspicuous gap in his resume: Hu’s lack of defense connections. He has “no military background, no credentials, no obvious contacts,” says Robert Karniol of Jane’s Defense Weekly. “And he will need PLA support.”
The PLA will likely use this crisis–as well as the succession battle–to make demands of its own. Officers are increasingly frustrated by their declining status as China becomes more modern and market-friendly. The PLA used to be China’s most glorious calling. But the late Deng Xiao- ping changed all that when he mandated “to get rich is glorious.” Now, even lowly translators have higher social standing–and greater financial rewards–than the PLA’s officers. Adding to this sense of injury, Beijing’s antigraft crack-down has begun to hit senior officers, further tainting the military’s reputation.
The PLA brass is also convinced the U.S. has launched an intelligence war against China. Beijing officials say that U.S. reconnaissance flights over their coast have increased significantly since the 1996 missile-firing crisis over Taiwan. PLA officers are upset about this, and no one more so than Gen. Xiong Guangkai, the ambitious head of miliary intelligence–the very unit that saw an American EP-3E fall into its lap last week. In a controversial comment, Xiong once warned a U.S. Sinologist that in the event of nuclear war, Americans “care more about L.A. than you do about Taipei.” And the PLA officer who defected to the United States in December, Col. Xu Junping, was thought to be close to Xiong.
Anger and frustration extend far beyond the military, however. Jingoistic harangues are reverberating across China. One prominent voice belongs to Wang Xiaodong, an influential writer and neoconservative from a movement known as the New Left. “Bush and the head of the U.S. Pacific Command should shut their stupid mouths, and open them again only to apologize,” he said last week. And Wang is one of the more reasonable critics.
Against this backdrop, Jiang’s tactic last week was the pre-emptive strike: to talk tough and prevent the hard-liners from hijacking policy. Jiang is probably “the most pro-U.S. Chinese leader in decades,” said Bill Overholt, a Hong Kong-based analyst with Nomura Securities. “He could easily be pilloried for his pro-U.S. stance.” All the same, Jiang has long-range objectives that haven’t changed–bonding with Bush, lobbying to thwart advanced U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, joining the World Trade Organization and bidding to host the Olympic Games in 2008. Jiang didn’t want to alienate the West irreversibly or allow tensions to get out of hand. So he and other moderates tried, gingerly, to contain or suppress public protests against America. A full-blown crisis would not be good for Jiang, or for his protege. Both men would like a smooth succession. As it is, Jiang intends to hang onto his key post as head of the party’s all-powerful Central Military Commission in order to help Hu ease into his role. But for Jiang to play this elder statesman’s role–the way his predecessor Deng Xiaoping did–he needs something like Deng’s ironclad authority. Jiang, says one Western diplomat, “doesn’t have that kind of clout.” If the effects of the Hainan crisis linger, we may soon find out just how much he has.
Within Taipei andandin Beijing
