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DAM-L Wall Street Journal "Key Chinese Hard-Liner Loses Influence" (fwd)



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Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 12:47:34 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: Wall Street Journal "Key Chinese Hard-Liner Loses Influence"
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Aug 30, 2000

The Wall Street Journal
"Key Chinese Hard-Liner Loses Influence"

by Matt Forney
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Beijing- Li Peng, one of china's most powerful politicians during the past decade, arrives in the U.S. this week lacking the influence he once enjoyed and buffeted by corruption investigations that implicate his associates.

Mr. Li has long been identified with hard-line policies- human rights organizations in New York say they plan to protest his arrival for a three-day United Nations conference of national parliament leaders.  Mr. Li signed the martial-law decree in 1989 that preceded the killing of antigovernment demonstrators in downtown Beijing, and since then has been a firm force against quick liberalization

He remains No. 2 in Chinas Communist Party, behind President Jiang Zemin. But in a country where patronage is among the surest signs of authority, Mr. Li has recently proved unable to block purges of people who rode his coattails to power.  Tightly controlled state newspapers have even begun reporting embarrassing scandals involving Mr. Li's associates.

Most damaging for Mr. Li has been the public demise of Cheng Kejie.  The two met in 1986, when Mr. Li, then acting premier, took a train tour of southern Guangzxi province, where Mr. Cheng was in charge of an important railway junction.  Impressed, Mr. Li steadily elevated the younger man, who eventually became head of the province.  After Mr. Li was forced to surrender his premiership and take his current job atop China's rubberstamp parliament in 1998, Mr. Cheng ascended to the capital as Mr. Li's vice chairman.  

But last April, police charged Mr. Cheng with taking $5 million in bribes and on July 31 he became the highest ranking official in more than half a century to receive the death penalty.  State media covered the case, and photos of Mr. Cheng receiving his sentence are the highlight of a museum exhibition on corruption on view in Beijing.  By contrast, when a corruption scandal tainted an associate of President Jiang last year, Beijing party chief Jia Qinglin, investigators were forced to back off.  

Mr.Li, who is 72 years old and due to retire in two years, is unlikely to face a purge himself.  For one thing, he enjoys support from strong if shrinking power bases- a coterie of aging Communists and officials overseeing industrial production.  More importantly his close association with the 1989 killings protects him from direct attack; his removal could encourage a more benign interpretation of the demonstration, which could in turn threaten the Communist Party's shaky legitimacy.  

Still other corruption cases stain Mr. Li's resume.  The powerful ministry that he ran in the early 1980s and the source of much of his support today- the Ministry of Water Resources- stands publicly accused by the auditor general of laundering $72 million into a Beijing luxury hotel and office complex using funds earmarked for victims of floods and drought.  The state-run Legal Daily newspaper decried "the ease at obtaining" so much cash and condemned "the scourge of institutional corruption."  Moreover, the ministry's former chief, Niu Maosheng, whom Mr. Li last year helped elevate to governor of Hebei province , is under investigation for corruption.  

Worse, investigators are starting to target Mr.Li's pet project, the enormous Three Gorges Dam, which will turn the upper Yangtze River into a lake and force the resettlement of more than a million people before it is completed in 2009.  The dam is the highest-profile project associated with Mr. Li, a former hydraulic engineer.  This year, Chinese media have highlighted corruption associated with the dam, including the death sentence for an official who embezzled money that should have resettled displaced people.  

Such coverage, which redounds to Mr. Li even though he no longer controls the project, reflects in part his inability to maneuver followers into influential propaganda positions.  For instance, the two most recent editors of the party's mouthpiece, the People's Daily, were considered sympathetic to Mr. Li's hard-line positions, if not to him personally.  The new top editor, Bai Keming, who won the post in July, is unambiguously linked President Jiang; Mr. Bai's father served as Mr. Jiang's boss in the Ministry of Machine Building during the 1960s and '70s.

Furthermore, the newest vice minister of propaganda, Wang Chen, who won his post in June, didn't support Mr. Li's crackdown in 1989.  During that unrest, when newsrooms divided between those who supported demonstrating students and others who favored Mr. Li's martial-law decree, Mr. Wang, then a newspaper editor, "took no position," says a reporter who worked for him at the Guangming Daily.  "Given his rank, taking no position was like supporting the demonstrators," says the reporter, who adds that since then Mr. Wang hasn't shown support for the party's critics.


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