An informative and astute piece of reporting in the NYT today by Joseph Kahn on the political struggles behind the high-profile corruption arrests in China.  He further develops the point, which I blogged on below, that the ultimate targets are likely to be very powerful Party leaders, most notably Huang Ju, linked to former President Jiang Zemin.  All of this is a means of consolidating the control of current President/Party General Secretary Hu Jintao over the sprawling political apparatus:

The high-level purge began on Sept. 25, when Chen Liangyu, the
Shanghai party leader and a Politburo member, was removed from his
office on corruption charges. Party security forces had already
detained high-ranking officials in Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Fujian
and Hunan. Mr. Chen is the most powerful person removed from office
since 1995, when the Beijing party leader was purged, also on
corruption charges, during a power struggle.

Several party
officials and well-informed political observers said they believed that
the investigation had not yet reached its climax. They say Mr. Zeng
hopes to dismiss two fellow members of the Politburo Standing
Committee, Jia Qinglin and Huang Ju, who are under pressure to take
“political responsibility” for corruption that has occurred in Beijing
and Shanghai, their respective areas of influence.

    The "Mr. Zeng" mentioned above is Zeng Qinghong, "China’s vice president and the day-to-day manager of Communist Party affairs."  For Chinese politics junkies it is quite interesting that Zeng is now the point man for Hu’s political move against Jiang Zemin loyalists.  A few years back, when Jiang formally ceded the positions of state President and Party General Secretary to Hu, he made sure that a number of his allies remained in key positions of power, and Zeng was widely seen as the most powerful and politically astute of the Jiang holdovers.  If anyone was likely to be Jiang’s cat’s paw to block Hu’s agenda, it was Zeng.  But now, apparently, Zeng has flipped.  It seems that he believes that his political fortunes no longer lie with his past patron, but with his future political benefactor.   And that is the kind of thing that makes politics interesting.

     But I digress.  What most interested me in the Kahn piece were these paragraphs:

Aside from frightening officials who have grown accustomed to
increasingly conspicuous corruption in recent years, the crackdown
could give Mr. Hu greater leeway to carry out his agenda for broader
welfare benefits and stronger pollution controls, which may prove
popular in China today.

Some critics fear that it may also
consolidate greater power in the hands of a leader who has consistently
sought to restrict the news media, censor the Web and punish peaceful
political dissent.

 Now I must admit: I was one of those people who had hoped that Hu would turn out to be more "liberal" – and by that I mean more open to systemic political liberalization to match the economic and social liberalization that has happened in recent years – than Jiang Zemin, who had flirted with some ideas of political reform but never followed through.   And it seems I was wrong.  Hu has been very staunch in pressing back against freedom of expression and has tolerated, perhaps even sponsored (its hard to know through the layers and layers of bureaucratic power), "a worsening crackdown on voices of dissent” (Yes, I  signed the letter).   In other words, the Bad Jiang/Good Hu analysis did not pan out.

     But there was a way in which Hu was positioning himself to be a Good Hu, even if he was not a political liberal.  He has, from the start, invoked a Mencian serve-the-people rhetoric and symbolism to suggest that he would use the power of the state to address the growing problems associated with economic and social inequality.  Premier Wen "same coat for ten years" Jiabao also presented himself as a man of the common people.  Not much has happened in the past two years – inequality and the injustices that arise from it continue to be terrible – but, as Kahn’s story suggests, maybe Hu does not yet have enough personal control over the power structure to really allow him to enact an egalitarian agenda.  That, at least is the potentially Good  Hu, even a nicely Green Hu.

    Set off against that is the Bad Hu, who is only interested in power and not justice. 

     Which will it be?  Good Hu or Bad Hu?  I like to consider myself an optimist in most things, but, after being wrong before, I can only suspend judgment.  And to bring a Confucian perspective into it: for Hu to be good, he has to actually perform goodness, not just promise it.  Words, by themselves, are not enough.  He has to decisively act against inequality and injustice.  Otherwise, he is simply a Bad Hu.

      One last thing: even if some very big fish are caught up in this current anti-corruption net, that, by itself, will not get the job done.  The actions thus far are moving from the top down.  The targets are high-ranking leaders in big cities, the top of the highly centralized political system.  The real problem, however, lies not at the top, but at the bottom of the system: the myriad small power-holders in provinces and townships and lesser cities.  The capillaries of power.  And the only way of addressing corruption and tyranny at that level is by empowering those who are now powerless before authority.  How can you identify and dislodge the corrupt judges and party secretaries and government officials at the lowest levels?  There are millions of them.  But there are millions more common people who know well who are the good and who are the bad among the power-holders.  Only by defining and defending their democratic rights will the fundamental problem of systemic corruption begin to be addressed.