Hu’s Big Challenge: Local Provinces

Chinese Leadership Aims to Push
Central Policies in Divided Nation

By ANDREW BATSON and JASON LEOW
October 23, 2007

BEIJING — Chinese leader Hu Jintao has spent the last five years struggling to contain problems ranging from environmental degradation to corruption and food safety. Now, as he begins his second term as party chief, he has gathered around himself a new group of top officials charged with getting solutions into place across a huge and increasingly divided nation.

AP

People watched live from a Beijing street Monday as President Hu Jintao introduced new members of the Politburo Standing Committee.

Yesterday, Mr. Hu presented to the world a new lineup of the party’s top leadership — the Politburo and its decision-making standing committee — that is heavily weighted toward officials with hands-on local government experience. At the gathering, held once every five years, the party elite also ratified Mr. Hu’s broad platform of policies, one that heavily emphasizes domestic issues and the economy.

Yet many of the declared priorities of Mr. Hu’s administration — narrower income gaps, improved environmental protections and a stronger social safety net — have so far been thwarted by local governments more concerned with keeping business flowing at any price. Few local authorities have, for instance, proved willing to shut down polluting factories, or spend heavily on new health-care programs.

While China has risen to the world’s fourth-largest national economy from its sixth-largest during Mr. Hu’s first term, inequality has worsened. The average urban household now earns more than three times in a year what their rural counterparts make.

“We are keenly aware of our difficult tasks and grave responsibilities,” Mr. Hu said yesterday in brief remarks to reporters. “We will be firmly committed to development, which is the party’s top priority in governing and rejuvenating the country,” he said. He pledged a commitment to “putting people first” and making growth “comprehensive, balanced and sustainable,” a reference to concerns about environmental damage and inequality.

That is going to require the central government to strengthen its authority over local interests. Many of China’s provinces are equivalent in geographic expanse and population to European nations, and running them has always required the central government to allow a fair amount of flexibility. But Mr. Hu’s administration has increasingly displayed frustration with local officials’ reluctance to fully back its policies. Recently, his government tightened central control over some key areas, such as land sales and the environment, where local actions were producing popular unrest. More such changes are now likely to be in the works.

“On current trends, the central government will try to take back powers from local governments, rather than grant them more power,” says Chen Yufeng, a professor at Zhejiang Gongshang University. A particular challenge, Mr. Chen says, will be finding a better way to evaluate local-government officials, since the current system tends to reward those who generate fast economic growth, rather than those who have other priorities.

The party’s new leadership also reflects that concern with ensuring central policies are implemented at the local level: 18 of the 25 members of the new Politburo have experience running a provincial government, four more than in the previous Politburo. They are roughly split between those who have worked in the poorer inland or northeastern provinces and those who have spent time in the wealthier coastal areas.

The new lineup wasn’t decided by Mr. Hu alone, but is the result of months of bargaining behind closed doors by the entire party leadership. Yet it seems significant that two of the party’s rising stars are both provincial leaders who have distinguished themselves with local policies supporting Mr. Hu’s priorities.

Mr. Hu introduced two officials newly promoted to the Politburo Standing Committee — Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang — as “relatively young comrades.” They are the only members of the standing committee, the nerve center of political power in China, who are in their 50s: the other seven men are all in their 60s. That means they are the leaders now best placed to succeed Mr. Hu and other top leaders at the next party congress in 2012.

Mr. Xi, 54 years old, has spent the past two decades working in various capacities in wealthy areas on the coast, such as Zhejiang province, and for the past half year, Shanghai. He has developed a reputation as an effective and business-friendly administrator, but one who doesn’t neglect social issues.

“Xi Jinping doesn’t only focus on growth, but also on the quality of growth, and attaches importance to protecting people’s rights,” says Ge Licheng, an economist at the Zhejiang Academy of Social Sciences. Mr. Xi made that shift in thinking earlier than many other local government officials, he says.

Mr. Li, 52, has had less provincial experience, but his time spent running China’s relatively poorer regions fits into the top leadership’s focus on the worse-off. For nine years, Mr. Li was a party official in central Henan province and later Liaoning, a northeastern province that has long struggled to recover from the collapse of state-owned industry. He made a mark by, among other things, overseeing a program to provide permanent housing to more than one million laid-off workers, says Zhang Hongjun, a historian at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences.

Yet that emphasis on domestic problem-solving in the current leadership has made foreign policy a lower priority: The new Politburo has no official with experience in international relations aside from Mr. Hu himself, who handles them as China’s president. Some observers also have concerns about a lack of technical expertise at the highest level. While many of the new Politburo members are well-educated — several have graduate degrees — only one has experience in the financial system: Wang Qishan, a former banker who is mayor of Beijing.

And the Politburo still provides outsiders with few hints of its deliberations. The new standing committee members were presented yesterday to reporters gathered in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, one of the very few occasions when they appear in public together. As Mr. Hu introduced them, the eight men, all dressed in dark suits and all but one wearing red ties, stood stiffly on a podium covered in red cloth. No one aside from Mr. Hu spoke, and he didn’t take questions.

–Zhou Yang and Sue Feng contributed to this article.

Write to Andrew Batson at andrew.batson@wsj.com and Jason Leow at jason.leow@wsj.com

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