Speaking of Change...

(The above picture was taken in early September in front of the National People's Congress. This was after an all-nigher in Hohai, followed by the brilliant idea to walk from there to Tiananmen Square to see the 6 AM flag-raising ceremony that happens there every morning.)


Man, talk about timing!

I decide to come out to China, and the one year - heck, even the one semester! - I choose to do it is when the 17th Party Congress convenes in Beijing, an occasion reserved for only once every five years. Call me nerdy, but as someone who sometimes feels like I can’t get enough of politics and government, this is a sweet deal.

Yesterday, after eight days of secretive party deliberations, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), also known as the government here, released the names of newest leadership core to lead China through 2012. The most important affected by this party vote (coming from the Central Committee) is the makeup of the Standing Committee of the Politburo. As I’ve most recently learned through news reports and class, the Standing Committee is for all practical purposes the governing and ruling body in China. Almost all power is concentrated in this nine person enclave, which currently includes President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, along with other decorated party leaders. Both the “election” process and structure of the governing bodies in Chinese government are interesting topics to explore in and of themselves, especially when compared to how things are run in the United States.

What I find most interesting at this point is the tie-in that this news has with my last post discussing the prevalence change holds in China. I came across a thought-provoking assessment of the “new” leadership in a New York Times news analysis found at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/world/asia/23china.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Among other things, what the article and the emergence of the new government leaders show is how change remains an ambiguous term. If you read the above article, you’ll see how the outcome of yesterday’s election results ties in to this claim. Hu Jintao appears, as he has stated before, to want to break more from the “grow now, save trees later” mentality of the Deng Xiaopeng era that favored decentralization and privatization. However, in many respects the membership of the Standing Committee, while it literally changed by a few seats, remains largely the same in terms of ideology.

While all of this is well and interesting to discuss, I want to again try to provide a more personal element to these latest developments in China’s political arena. I, for one, was curious to get a feel for how people in Beijing felt about the process and all the media attention it was grabbing (much like our presidential elections in the United States). It is true that the Chinese government has a hand in nearly all the media run here, so that skews the perspective already. What I found, though, in talking to people like my home stay dad and my language tutor, who is the same age as me and in school, is that a lot of people are largely unimpressed and otherwise uninterested in what happened on Monday. My dad said that while he found the process interesting, he personally felt the outcomes of the elections would have little to no effect on his daily life. His reason for watching the news coverage on TV was to stay informed and to satisfy what appears to be a modest interest in politics. My tutor was surprised that I even bothered to show her the headline of a newspaper that prominently displayed the names of the new government officials (really not that new though, as Hu Jintao is still president and everyone, including me, expected him to maintain his post). After further pressing the issue, I found out that she was aloof to most if not all of Chinese politics, and that she also thought that the 17th Party Congress was almost inconsequenetial in terms of how she and everyone else in China would continue to carry on with their lives. I will be the first to say that I would need to poll a much wider audience before making any valid conclusions, but I contend the sentiment expressed by those I talked to applies to many others in Beijing and other parts of China.

Political apathy is not specific to China alone, and we have more than a fair share in America. However, nobody votes here in China for the next president or prime minister, and I think that reality alone is enough to keep the intrigue out of the process. Everyone knew that barring some huge scandal or shakeup, Hu Jintao would remain president and Wen Jiabao as Prime Minister. The curiosity surrounding the election (or rather, selection) was more subtle, involving specific members of the Standing Committee – obviously important people, but more obscure in the eyes of the public in China. It’s true that my home stay dad could rattle off the names of most of the officials shown on TV during a press conference yesterday when I pointed at each oneand asked, “who’s that?” (I will refrain from making a lame alliteration joke involving “Hu” and “who”, wait… too late). He’s definitely the exception, though. I like to think of the announcement yesterday to be like if the makeup of the United States Supreme Court were all of the sudden to be decided by an internal process in which all nine justices were subject to replacement. It would be (and the process of judicial nomoination and confirmation is a huge deal for many in our country) a big change taking place, but I wouldn’t expect the majority of Americans to be able to name every justice when asked about it. I use this as an example of powerful government/judicial figures that still somehow remain obscure to most citizens, and not for any other comparative purposes (because I would otherwise argue that many in the U.S. feel like the Supreme Court makes decisions that determine some of the more important aspects of our lives, unlike the popular view in China that the central government is too far removed from issues of local/provincial importance).

Well, I’ll peter our here because this post is getting long and class starts in an hour. More later, I promise.