MCLC: liberals look to Wang Yang

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: liberals look to Wang Yang
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (11/5/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/world/asia/liberals-in-china-look-to-guan
gdongs-party-chief.html

As China Awaits New Leadership, Liberals Look to a Provincial Party Chief
By ANDREW JACOBS 

GUANGZHOU, China — As the once-a-decade tussle over how to fill seats in
the Communist Party’s supreme ruling body enters its final days, many of
the nation’s beleaguered liberals are casting an anxious gaze southward to
Guangdong Province in the hope that the top official of this booming
export hub near Hong Kong might win a coveted spot in the central
leadership.

Although his prospects have dimmed in recent weeks, Wang Yang, the
provincial party boss who has cultivated a following by denouncing
“entrenched interests” and promoting individual happiness over party
perquisites, remains the reformist camp’s best candidate for
counterbalancing the slate of colorless technocrats and conservatives who
are likely to dominate the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee that
runs China.

But anxiety among Mr. Wang’s followers has been heightened by the
impending retirement of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, whose frequent
pronouncements on democracy endeared him to liberal dreamers, even if his
words proved to be largely empty talk during his 10 years in office.

“Wang Yang has become the main receptacle for the expectations and hopes
of China’s reformers,” said Xiao Bin, a public affairs professor at Sun
Yat-sen University here in Guangzhou, the provincial capital.

Even if he is something of a political chameleon, Mr. Wang has become a
torchbearer for advocates of free-market economics and quasi-enlightened
governance, much the way his former rival Bo Xilai, the fallen party chief
of Chongqing in southwest China, had been championed by the neo-leftists
who crave a return of Mao-style populism.

With Mr. Bo having been deposed in a salacious murder and adultery
scandal, Mr. Wang stands as one of the country’s few charismatic political
figures.

“There’s always a degree of maneuvering over who may or may not be
promoted to Standing Committee positions, but I can’t recall a time when
we’ve been so focused on the prospects of one person,” said Joseph
Fewsmith, an expert on Chinese politics at Boston University.

For a variety of reasons, the Standing Committee, currently run by nine
men, will probably be reduced to seven seats during the coming party
congress, which begins on Thursday. With two spots already occupied by Xi
Jinping and Li Keqiang, who are set to become president and prime minister
respectively, Communist Party power brokers, including retired President
Jiang Zemin, 86, are in the throes of a secretive political dance to
decide on the remaining handful of seats.

Even though he is considered unlikely to make it to the inner sanctum this
time, party insiders say that Mr. Wang, 57, will play an important role in
the next government, perhaps as a vice premier, and that he is an odds-on
favorite to ascend to the Standing Committee during the next round of
retirements in 2017.

A lifelong party stalwart and a current member of the 25-seat Politburo,
Mr. Wang would not be mistaken for a Western-style liberal. He does not
call for free elections, and he rarely strays far from the agenda set by
Beijing. But at a time when the party apparatus has embraced a
clenched-fist approach to news media censorship, rural unrest and demands
for social justice, Mr. Wang stands out for his paeans to political
liberalization and the virtues of American-style individualism.

“We should eradicate the wrong concept that happiness is a benevolent gift
from the party and the government,” he said this year.
Known for his cherubic smile and a refusal to follow the pack of party
elders who dye their graying hair jet black, Mr. Wang, the son of a
laborer, is fond of folksy sound bites that sometimes take aim at the
party elite. Since his appointment as Guangdong’s party chief in 2007, he
has called on provincial officials to publicly reveal their assets and
ordered government departments to communicate with the public via Sina
Weibo, China’s wildly popular microblog platform.

In June, after one of several recent visits to Singapore, he returned home
to extol the city-state’s soft-glove approach to authoritarian rule. “If
China doesn’t reform,” he said, “we will be slow boiled like frogs.”

When he was faced with an insurrection last year in the fishing village of
Wukan, Mr. Wang displayed a knack for coolheaded crisis management: he
called off the riot police, tossed out Wukan’s corrupt party officials and
allowed villagers to elect a new slate of leaders.

Mr. Wang is often mentioned in the same breath as Mr. Bo, who also managed
— at least for a while — to navigate the narrow space between party
establishment and political maverick. Their jousting took the form of a
debate over economic policy, expressed most notably in cryptic talk about
cake — as a metaphor for China’s wealth. Mr. Bo argued for cutting up the
cake and distributing it more equally; Mr. Wang insisted on first making
the cake bigger.

With their forceful personal styles and flair for self-promotion, both Mr.
Wang and Mr. Bo are controversial figures within a party that expects its
leaders to be wooden apparatchiks.

Mr. Wang’s office declined to make him available for an interview. But
party insiders who have followed his career, which includes his
unremarkable stint as the party boss of Chongqing, say his reformist
credentials are overblown. He has repeatedly tacked away from the
expectations of bolder change that he himself encouraged, and even
die-hard supporters admit that his vows to fight corruption, reduce the
power of vested interests and increase government transparency have had,
at best, mixed results.
“The thunder is loud, but the rain has been rather light,” said Mr. Xiao,
the academic, who nonetheless counts himself an admirer.

Some of Mr. Wang’s boldest ideas — like shifting Guangdong’s dependence on
cheap exports to innovative and environmentally friendly industries — came
to naught. Meanwhile, critics say, he has used an iron glove during the
past year in a cynical attempt to burnish his appeal to the leaders up
north who will decide his political future.

He initiated an aggressive anticorruption drive that resulted in scores of
arrests, and, more ominously, tightened censorship rules ahead of the
party congress. And his decision to solve the Wukan impasse through
peaceful means appears to have been a one-shot gesture, say activists who
point to a spate of recent protests over illegal land grabs that ended in
violence.

Political analysts suggest that Mr. Wang simply adapted to the more
liberal ethos of Guangdong, which is heavily influenced by Hong Kong, the
former British colony that enjoys a measure of self-rule. Long a magnet
for millions of rural migrants drawn to the region’s factories, Guangdong,
with its 100 million people, is a weather vane for the social and economic
pressures bearing down on China.

In the early 1980s, the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, and his allies
promoted China’s successful experiment with the free market here. And Mr.
Deng returned in 1992 to symbolically swat back the party conservatives
who threatened his reforms.

“People here are proud of Guangdong’s progressive streak,” said Ding Li, a
senior researcher at the Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences. “We are
also happy to be far away from Beijing — and the least controlled by it.”

In addition to a few pilot projects that reduced red tape and shrank an
unwieldy bureaucracy, Mr. Wang’s most notable accomplishment was to ease
the restrictions that hobble nongovernmental organizations in much of
China.

The changes have led to a flowering of local civil society groups, but the
reforms appear to have come with some caveats. In Shenzhen, labor rights
advocates say they have been dogged by local officials who object to their
work and who they say forced seven such groups out of their offices.

“His words sound sweet to the ears, but they are hollow,” Guo Feixiong,
46, a human rights advocate who recently emerged from a five-year prison
term, said of Mr. Wang.

If Mr. Wang does not make it onto the Standing Committee, some analysts
say, it will be an indication of the waning influence of departing
President Hu Jintao as well as Mr. Wen, who has been one of his most vocal
supporters.

Mr. Wang’s rise may well be hamstrung as well by his relative youth. If
elevated now, he could serve an unprecedented three five-year terms on the
Standing Committee, which, apparently in the minds of some party elders,
would allow him to amass too much power.

For the moment, members of China’s urban intelligentsia and the
disenfranchised farmers who see him as their champion have been left to
fret and speculate. Many, like Liu Zhengqing, 48, a rights lawyer in
Guangdong, are fully aware that Mr. Wang may simply be a political
pragmatist dressed as a liberal.

“I admit that Wang Yang isn’t a great reformer,” Mr. Liu said, “but
considering the other leaders out there, he is the best hope we have.”

Patrick Zuo contributed research.