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« on: June 01, 2008, 10:22:28 AM » |
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FT NEWS
Within hours of the deadly earthquake in Sichuan province on Monday, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao was on an aeroplane to the disaster site. Just as importantly, a television camera was also on board to capture images of Mr Wen and his aides, their sleeves rolled up, looking at maps and making decisions.
Since then, Mr Wen has been a constant presence in the Chinese media, the public face of a huge relief effort. He has been shown shouting orders to officials and shedding tears with grieving families. When rescuers were trying to save a child from a collapsed school in Dujiangyan, Mr Wen was on hand. "This is Grandpa Wen here", he said, wearing a scruffy pair of training shoes. "You should hang on and you will be saved."
Disasters reveal much about how a country works. After Monday's massive earthquake, China's can-do authoritarianism has swung into action. China's leaders do not stand for election, but that does not mean they can ignore public opinion as they did in the past.
Effective disaster relief is part of the unwritten pact that helps to sustain strong support for the Communist party, long after many western observers thought it would be swept away by the country's rapid economic modernisation. Mr Wen has taken this political imperative to a new level with his populist publicity drives. When snowstorms stranded millions of people just before the January Chinese new year holiday, Mr Wen apologised to passengers at Changsha station using a megaphone.
The Chinese authorities still try to keep close control ofdisaster coverage. But in a society becoming more complex and inquisitive, Mr Wen has brought a direct engagement with the victims. "This is new for a party leader to behave like this," says Sun Wenguang, a retired professor from Shandong University. "Party leaders are usually surrounded by a lot of officials and stay far away from ordinary people, but Wen has shown that a high-level party official can be very caring."
It was anything but a taste for publicity that secured the mild-mannered Mr Wen the job of premier in 2003. His swift rise up the Communist hierarchy resulted from being a skilled bureaucrat and legendary survivor of political infighting.
Mr Wen was born in 1942, in a rural area near Tianjin. The son of two teachers, he later studied geology in Beijing and in 1968 was posted to the government's geology bureau in Gansu, an arid and poor province in the north-west. Many able officials end up working their entire careers in such distant places and Mr Wen was there for 14 years. One solace there was meeting his wife, Zhang Peili, another geologist.
When Deng Xiaoping launched a campaign in the early 1980s to identify talented young administrators, Mr Wen was transferred to Beijing. Another young official, toiling unnoticed in Gansu at that time, also got his break under the same programme: Hu Jintao, China's president.
Mr Wen was swiftly promoted to positions at the heart of the Communist party bureaucracy, but his career almost ended in the 1989 student protests, when he was a close aide to Zhao Ziyang, the reformist party chief. With a power struggle raging among the top leadership, Mr Zhao visited Tiananmen Square and pleaded with student leaders to leave before a military crackdown. A famous photo shows Mr Wen standing behind him. When martial law was declared, Mr Zhao was ousted. He died in 2005 after spending the rest of his life under semi-house arrest. Yet Mr Wen survived, some believe because he was considered a loyal servant to his boss.
His elevation to premier prompted his wife to resign as a vice-chairman of the Chinese Jewellery Association. Yet his minders are said to remain worried that her jewellery links clash with his man-of-the-people image. According to a biography, his wife tries to get him to dress more smartly but he has often resisted. They have two children, a son who runs an IT company in Beijing and a daughter who works in financial services.
Although he sometimes looks stiff and unnatural talking to ordinary people and a few online comments have criticised Mr Wen for hogging attention, popular reaction has been extremely favourable. "I have been moved by what he has done this week," says Zhu Jialei, a 23-year-old office worker in Shanghai. "He has been to the most dangerous places, talking to people and encouraging them. He seems to have been wearing the same clothes for the past few days and he cannot have been getting much rest." The most popular items on Chinese video-sharing sites in recent days have been images of Mr Wen, often with titles such as "Premier Wen, you have moved China".
Such has been the surge in his popularity that Mr Wen is often compared to Zhou Enlai, the former premier and perhaps the most respected 20th-century leader within China. "Wen Jiabao is the Premier Zhou for a new age", announced one blog on Sohu.com, the China-based website. A reporter on Chinese state television even got them mixed up: as Mr Wen passed by on a visit this week, the journalist called out: "Premier Zhou."
Given the reverence for the former premier, Mr Wen might find the comparison flattering. Yet profiles of Mr Zhou written outside China have been less complimentary, seeing him as a weak leader whose main role was as an enabler for Mao Zedong.
Indeed, Mr Wen has been quietly criticised by some officials and scholars for lacking real impact on government. Critics say he lacks the personality to drive change through reluctant bureaucracies. His rural and welfare reforms have fallen short of the scale needed to reverse China's wealth gap, while the government has procrastinated on key economic decisions.
Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing-based analyst, says Mr Wen's more emotional tone is a res-ponse to his difficulties in pushing through his ideas. "The passions are genuine, but they should be seen as part of the political context. What we see now is a more frustrated Wen, a more thwarted person," he says.
There are some dangers for Mr Wen in being so publicly identified with the disaster response. Tough questions are being asked about why so many schools collapsed, for example, and the rising number left homeless. The good headlines will not prevent a backlash if the follow-up fails. As Mr Moses says: "How the government performs in the next month will be more important than what it has done so far."
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