Outgoing leader begins farewell to power with speech to 2,200 delegates that sharply criticises official abuses. China‘s leader, Hu Jintao, has begun his farewell to power with a warning that corruption could kill the Communist party and a call to safeguard party control.
He has overseen a decade of maintaining the status quo and an annus horribilis for the leadership – complete with lurid tales of Ferrari crashes, family fortunes and even murder. The sense of both stasis and crisis has amplified calls for reform as a new generation takes charge of the world’s most populous nation.
But hopes of such changes were muted on Thursday as Hu delivered his report to more than 2,200 delegates, who had gathered under the glowing red star in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People for the 18th party congress.
Failing to tackle corruption “could prove fatal to the party and even cause the collapse of the party and the fall of the state”, he warned. “Leading officials … should both exercise strict self-discipline and strengthen education and supervision over their family and staff.”
No one was above the law and whoever erred should face “justice without mercy”, he added, in the sharpest warning he has delivered about the dangers of official abuses.
The scandal surrounding the politician Bo Xilai – now awaiting prosecution, following his wife’s conviction for murdering the British businessman Neil Heywood – and further revelations about leaders and their families have fed public cynicism. Meanwhile, economic, social, political and environmental problems have accumulated over years of unbalanced, breakneck growth in a state-dominated economy – and threaten to become still more evident as the pace of growth ebbs.
Yet while some have hoped that such problems might help to prompt political reforms, Hu told his party: “We have held high the great banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics and neither taken the old and rigid closed-door policy nor taken the wrong path of changing the banner [abandoning socialism].”
Later he spelled it out: “We will never copy a western political system.”
Zhang Jian, a political scientist at Peking University, said the report appeared to have sent “a very strong message to any expectations of reform: we are not going to change; we are going to stay where we are”.
Chen Ziming, an independent Beijing-based scholar, said: “It does not point to the future direction demanded both inside or outside the party. It basically continues the tune of the past.
“I did not expect any big breakthrough, but this time there is not even a small breakthrough.”
The report was never going to be a pioneering political document. Its function is to review the five years since the previous congress and lay out a general path ahead. It is not even a personal testament – the document is circulated widely within the party and produced over several months and numerous drafts. Consensus and continuity are key: the 2007 report underwent around 1,000 revisions.
The delegates will have been highly familiar with the content long before they arrived in the cavernous hall – though Xi Jinping, Hu’s heir apparent, nonetheless scribbled assiduously throughout. Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin, looked less enthralled, glancing at his watch and yawning during the 90-minute address, an edited version of the report.
Jiang had entered with Hu and sat beside him, highlighting the power he still wields. Though the new leaders are in theory appointed by the central committee, itself chosen by the congress delegates, they are in reality selected by the incumbents and party patriarchs.
China has been transformed during Hu’s tenure. In 2002 it was the world’s sixth largest economy; now it is the second. It is, for the first time, a predominantly urban nation, with just over half its 1.4 billion citizens living in cities. Its global influence is greater than ever.
Changes in the party have been more modest. Of the 39 figures at the front of the dais – the politburo, party patriarchs and leading military figures – only one, Liu Yandong, was a woman. The new standing committee, like every one before it, is expected to be entirely male.
Much of the report could have been lifted directly from 2007’s document, though there were nods to new developments.
“Social problems have increased markedly,” it warned and there was, perhaps, marginally more stress on the need to support the rural poorand integrate urban and rural development. There was also a possible hint at strengthening the role of the market. Environmental issues had a section to themselves for the first time.
In a reflection of broader social concerns, Hu stressed the need to improve civic morality and to “exalt the true, the good and the beautiful and reject the false, the evil and the ugly”.
China’s neighbours are less likely to welcome the commitment to “enhance our capacity for exploiting marine resources … resolutely safeguard China’s maritime rights and interests and build China into a maritime power”, given the territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas.
But overall the blandness was “a fitting finale to 10 years of Huism,” said Kerry Brown, professor of Chinese politics at the University of Sydney.
“When you think of the extraordinary events going on, and put it beside Obama’s victory speech, you realise we are dealing with an elite from another planet.”