SinoInsight 1
State mouthpiece Xinhua published Jiang Zemin’s funeral committee list (江澤民同志治喪委員會名單) on Nov. 30, the day that Jiang’s death was officially announced. The list contained the names of 688 active and retired national leaders (205) and senior officials from the Party, the government, and the military. Xi Jinping was named as head of the “Jiang Zemin Funeral Committee.”
OUR TAKE
Based on our assessment, only 38 of the 204 (excluding Xi) active and retired national leaders and senior officials in the “Jiang Zemin Funeral Committee” clearly belong to the Xi camp. This is compared with at least 62 officials that clearly belong to the Jiang Zemin faction. The remainder of the 204 cadres are either Party elders or senior officials who rose up the ranks during the Jiang-Hu era; the latter group more or less owe their respective careers to the Jiang faction. The strong Jiang faction presence in the funeral committee reflects its outsized influence in the regime today and may be an important factor giving Xi Jinping pause in denouncing Jiang’s “incorrect political line.”
Meanwhile, Hu Jintao, who was escorted out of the closing ceremony of the 20th Party Congress (see here and here), was listed behind the members of the 19th and 20th Politburo and ahead of the other retired Politburo members. Hu’s listing suggests that he was not purged, contrary to what many analysts believe.
The order in which the various senior officials appeared in the “Jiang Zemin Funeral Committee” list offers insight into their political strength or status at the present time:
- Ma Xingrui, the Xinjiang Party secretary and a new Politburo member, was listed (number 13) just after PRC vice president Wang Qishan and ahead of all other members of the 19th and 20th Politburo. This is rather unusual and suggests that Ma could have a bright political future barring unforeseen circumstances.
- He Weidong, the second vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, was listed ahead of the more experienced Zhang Youxia, who had already served two terms as CMC vice chair. He Weidong, who was not even listed as a People’s Liberation Army delegate to the 20th Party Congress, received an exceptional promotion to become CMC vice chairman.
- New Politburo members Yin Li, Shi Taifeng, Liu Guozhong, Li Ganjie, and Li Shulei were all listed ahead of Li Hongzhong, who already served a term in the Politburo. This suggests that Liu Guozhong (former Shaanxi Party secretary) could be named as the first-ranked vice premier at the 2023 Two Sessions, while Li Hongzhong can only become the second-ranked vice premier at best. He Lifeng and Zhang Guoqing could become the third-ranked and fourth-ranked vice premiers respectively.
- Hu Chunhua was listed ahead of current Politburo members Yuan Jiajun and Huang Kunming. This suggests that he can at least be appointed as a vice chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference or a vice chairman of the National People’s Congress.
SinoInsight 2
Dec. 1
1. State mouthpiece Xinhua announced that a memorial service for Jiang Zemin would be held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing at 10:00 a.m. Beijing time on Dec. 6. The CCP Central Committee, State Council, Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and the Central Military Commission would attend the service, according to the “No. 2 Announcement” issued by the “Comrade Jiang Zemin Funeral Committee.”
The announcement added other mourning details before noting that there would be no ceremony for paying last respects to Jiang’s remains.
2. Yuan Hongbing, a prominent Australia-based Chinese dissident and jurist with channels to Party insiders, gave an interview with Dajiyuan (Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times) on the death of Jiang Zemin.
Yuan noted that while Jiang was highly regarded in his official obituary, Xi Jinping is still “full of hatred” towards his predecessor. He added that Xi had long wanted to publicly expose Jiang’s crimes and hinted at it in his 20th Party Congress work report by indirectly criticizing the Jiang era (including Hu Jintao’s tenure) and signaling that the regime and Party were brought to the brink of collapse. But Xi outwardly affirming Jiang after the latter’s death indicates that he is himself presently in a perilous position (“sitting at the mouth of a volcano”). “Xi no longer has the ability to publicly criticize Jiang according to his political will. At least that’s the situation for now,” Yuan said.
Yuan added that Xi will likely purge the Jiang clan next and do so quickly. “According to Party insiders, Jiang Zemin’s clan and his followers number in excess of 13,000 people and have been registered by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. Their (combined) wealth is estimated to reach that of China’s annual GDP,” he said.
Yuan Hongbing also said that the Chinese people have “already arrived at a verdict on Jiang Zemin’s governance by the later period of his time in office.” Jiang’s rule “brought Chinese society to the edge of moral collapse. … The whole of Chinese society has become morally nihilist due to the vast corruption and abuse of power that occurred under Jiang,” Yuan added.
Dec. 2
Xinhua published a 13,000-character expanded biography of Jiang Zemin titled, “Jiang Zemin’s Great and Brilliant Life” (江澤民偉大光輝的一生). The homepage lead article photo that Xinhua chose was that of Jiang as a university graduate.
The expanded biography said that Jiang was admitted to the electrical engineering department of Nanjing Central University in 1943 and “actively participated in progressive student anti-Japanese patriotic activities.” After the Second Sino-Japanese War, Jiang transferred to Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s department of electrical engineering and later joined the CCP in April 1946 as a “communist fighter.”
OUR TAKE
The latest official developments and information in connection with Jiang Zemin’s death appear to affirm our early analysis of Jiang’s passing and what it means for factional struggle in the CCP elite.
1. It is very unusual for the Xi leadership to not organize a ceremony for paying last respects to Jiang’s remains. Both Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping were accorded this honor. We see at least three possible reasons for why this is so.
First, the Xi leadership could be concerned that a prolonged funeral service may increase the risks of an outbreak among the Party elites gathered for the event. However, this should not be a huge issue given the convening of the 20th Party Congress in mid-October where even more delegates than the attendees of Jiang’s funeral service were held in an enclosed area for about a week.
Second, there could be something wrong with Jiang’s body that makes paying last respects difficult. However, whether or not this is the case cannot be seen from the brief glimpse of Jiang’s corpse in Shanghai before it was transported to Beijing from state media footage.
Third, Xi may not have wanted to give his late chief rival and the remnant Jiang faction any more airtime than absolutely necessary. Holding the ceremony to pay last respects to Jiang’s remains would grant Jiang Zemin, who was showy and loved to grab the limelight when he was alive, another chance to steal Xi’s thunder and undercut his “quan wei” (authority and prestige). Blocking the ceremony also signals to the remnants of the Jiang faction that Xi is even more solidly in charge and their late figurehead will not have his final “public appearance.” We believe that the factional struggle reason is the most likely of the three scenarios.
2. The Xi leadership’s choice of lead article photo for Jiang Zemin’s official expanded biography on Xinhua appears to be “you know what I mean” (你懂的) signaling. People familiar with Jiang’s early history would associate that photo with popular claims that Jiang is a “national traitor.”
Jiang Zemin has long insisted that he was adopted by his uncle Jiang Shangqing, an early CCP revolutionary martyr, to burnish his credentials as a communist of good revolutionary stock and a true patriot. However, Jiang’s account is highly unlikely given that elder sons in Chinese families almost never give away their first-born sons to be raised by relatives, and especially not to someone living a dangerous and unstable life like Jiang Shangqing. For instance, Jiang Shangqing had been arrested twice before he was 20 for revolutionary activities between 1928 and 1930, and would later die in 1939 from circumstances that are disputed (CCP propaganda said he died fighting the Japanese, but other accounts had him being killed by Kuomintang troops or armed landlords).
Jiang Zemin’s college education and research into his family by Chinese dissidents suggest that he was dishonest about his heritage. According to Lu Jiaping, a military veteran and amateur historian who published a series of articles critical of Jiang during the 2000s, Jiang’s biological father Jiang Shijun was a senior official of the anti-China propaganda organization of the Japanese army during the Japanese occupation of Jiangsu Province. After the establishment of the Wang Jingwei puppet government in November 1940, Jiang Shijun changed his name to Jiang Guanqian and served as deputy director of the propaganda department and chairman of the editorial committee, according to Lu’s research. Lu also claimed that a 17-year-old Jiang Zemin enrolled in Nanjing Central University (now Nanjing University) with the help of his biological father, joined an anti-communist organization, and even received special agent training by the Japanese.
Lu’s research of Jiang’s background was widely disseminated in Chinese-speaking circles on the mainland and abroad. The CCP never officially refuted his claims of Jiang being a “double traitor and two falsehoods” (二姦二假), that is, a traitor for collaborating with the Japanese along with his biological father and a traitor for working with Soviet intelligence and partitioning Chinese territory to Russia in the late 1990s, as well as a falsely claiming that he had joined the underground CCP during the Sino-Japanese war years and falsely claiming that he was the adopted son of Jiang Shangqing.
The CCP authorities eventually “disappeared” Lu Jiaping in September 2010. He was later sentenced to 10 years in prison and deprived of his political rights for two years on May 13, 2011 in a secret trial by the Beijing Intermediate People’s Court for “inviting subversion of state power.” After Xi Jinping took office, Lu was released on “medical parole” in February 2015.
Xinhua, which is currently headed by Xi loyalists, could have chosen any other photo of Jiang Zemin to serve as the cover photo of his expanded biography, including those from years in which the former Party boss was at the peak of his prestige. But the selection of the photo of Jiang as a college graduate instead spotlights a highly controversial and unflattering period of his life, and is almost certainly a deliberate move by the Xi camp to further factional struggle goals.
3. Official displays of displeasure towards Jiang Zemin by the Xi camp and Yuan Hongbing’s account of Xi Jinping’s view of Jiang suggest that Xi loathes his predecessor and has not arrived at any sort of permanent truce or compromise with the Jiang faction. Xi having to approve a glowing obituary of Jiang and serving as his steward in making funeral arrangements undercut Xi’s “quan wei” at a crucial time and will, if anything, motivate Xi to make up for the humiliation by stepping up efforts to “rectify” the regime of Jiang faction remnants and denounce Jiang’s legacy.
If Xi suspects the Jiang faction’s hand in recent social disturbances, including the “blank paper revolution,” then Beijing could move with force to clean up the remainder of the Jiang faction soon after the official mourning period is over. Intensifying factional struggle would in turn heighten political risks for both Xi and the CCP regime, raising the probability of political Black Swans emerging in the near future.
