Until Mao and Deng, the committee took its cues from one leader. Jiang, too, exerted an outsize influence on the body from 1987 to 2002, serving as general secretary and then later adding the presidency. Still, his power never matched Deng’s, says Orville Schell, director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations in New York. The top leaders moved toward their present
sbo model—what Schell calls leadership by committee—partly in reaction to the excesses of the Mao era. Nobody wanted another Cultural Revolution or Great Leap Forward. The committee also evolved because there weren’t leaders with the vision or ego to take charge, says Schell.
The Standing Committee, which Cabestan says usually meets once a week in the Zhongnanhai leadership compound just off Tiananmen Square, makes the ultimate decisions on all major policies, and the members must reach consensus. The committee has a record of effectiveness: rolling out a massive stimulus during the global financial crisis; building national infrastructure; combating severe acute respiratory syndrome and the religious sect Falun Gong; and more recently, deciding to allow and even encourage anti-Japanese protesters to take to the streets. With these initiatives, there were no clear losers inside the establishment. “What they are able to get done is more nuts and bolts. They can arrest people. They can build a railroad or an airport. But it’s the bigger things that are much harder,” says Schell. He’s referring to the wish list of many reformers, investors, and academics: a true crackdown on high-level corruption, serious limits on the state enterprises, and liberalization of finance so banks can make commercially based loans rather than funnel cheap credit to state enterprises. Also: gradual political reform to allow real opposition parties.
Just one member who strenuously objects to a course of action and rallies support from others can obstruct change. Critics on the Chinese Internet speculate that there were high-level political reasons why Gu Kailai, the wife of ousted Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai, was charged with and ultimately convicted of killing an Englishman, but not charged with corruption. That, netizens have surmised, would have called attention to the family members of other senior leaders who are thought to have enriched themselves.
Another reason change is hard: All
sbobet Standing Committee members have patrons whom they have in effect promised never to harm. With so many members owing their positions to Jiang—as many as five members of the next Standing Committee—they likely won’t be taking actions that Jiang doesn’t like. That could include trying to remove the offspring of prominent leaders, serving and retired, from high-level positions in business. Jiang’s son is a powerful executive in telecommunications, says Hu Xingdou, a professor of economics at Beijing Institute of Technology and a blogger. The retiring leader “wants people he can trust who are loyal to him. It’s a promise to maintain one’s legacy, where nothing will be said or done to disparage the previous leader and his family,” says Kuhn. “It is a sort of mentoring relationship.”
The Standing Committee has two major factions with different backgrounds, as well as sometimes differing priorities for China’s development, says Li at Brookings. Although members of each faction don’t always act together, they’re adept at shooting down policies they don’t support and that could hurt their group.
