Not fade away

A growing number of former leaders are speaking out

Sep 17th 2011 | BEIJING | from the print edition

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Blunt and honest, in a bookshop near you

A REMARKABLE recent improvement in the way China’s murky politics is conducted is mostly to do with the succession process at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party. In decades past, vanquished political foes tended to end up purged, imprisoned or dead. The victors, meanwhile, hung on to power long into their dotage. Now the holders of many high party and state posts face age limits on service, while those at the very top of the heap, notably the president and prime minister, are restricted to two five-year terms. To outsiders, the process of choosing party successors remains as opaquely Byzantine as ever. But it is undoubtedly more orderly—and less brutal—than it used to be.

Yet China must now reckon with a potentially destabilising consequence of this new, improved process. It is that the cohort of retired leaders is burgeoning. And before they go to meet their Marx, most are keen both to continue exerting political influence and to go on protecting the (business or less often political) interests of family members, along with their vast networks of protégés.

Next year the ten-year reign of President Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, will begin winding down. Jockeying to replace them is well under way. There is no guarantee that today’s widely touted front-runners, Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang respectively, will finish on top—nor indeed that the process will run as smoothly as it did last time round. But assuming that it does, Mr Hu and Mr Wen will join a growing crowd that includes not only their immediate predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji, but plenty of other old-timers. Among them are such political heavyweights as Zeng Qinghong, a former vice-president, and Li Peng, prime minister from 1987 to 1998.

When former leaders have kept a hand in things, they have usually done so from behind the scenes. Most maintain offices and large staffs. They get copies of official documents and are quietly consulted on important matters—not least on the promotion of future leaders.

But this month saw a rare public return to the fray. Mr Zhu, who is 82 and in much more robust health than Mr Jiang, retired as prime minister in 2003. In office, Mr Zhu had a reputation as a blunt, honest reformer. He has now released a multi-volume collection of speeches and letters from his years in power. China’s state-controlled press has given his work lots of attention, even highlighting some of the most pointed remarks made by a man famous for his short temper and sharp tongue. Among these were his contention that a government full of yes-men ill serves the needs of the people. Chinese leaders, he also railed, should devote less time to lavish banquets and pointless meetings, and more time to solving problems.

Mr Zhu attracted attention earlier this year with a speech at his alma mater, Tsinghua University, in which he offered unusually direct criticism of current policy. He appears dismayed that the market reforms that he pushed have slowed under Mr Hu and Mr Wen, while the state’s economic clout has only grown.

Cheng Li of the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, says he is surprised that Mr Zhu is now being so forthright, but predicts that public interventions by former leaders—“old-man politics”—could well increase. Not only is the number of ex-leaders growing. A rise in factional politics and greater differences of opinion among a new (and weaker) generation of leaders might also undermine unity at the centre. China’s old men will no doubt want to say something about it all