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A television screen on a subway train in Shanghai showed Xi Jinping delivering a speech on Thursday. Mr. Xi was elevated to power in China.
BEIJING — To a degree, the new leaders of China named just days ago have backgrounds that are as uniform as the dark suits and red ties they wore at their coming-out ceremony.
The seven men on the Politburo Standing Committee have forged close relations to previous party leaders, either through their families or institutional networks. They have exhibited little in the way of vision or initiative during their careers. And most have been allies or protégés of Jiang Zemin, the octogenarian former party chief.
The Communist Party and its acolytes like to brag that the party promotion system is a meritocracy, producing leaders better suited to run a country than those who emerge from the cacophony of elections and partisan bickering in full-blown democracies. But critics, including a number of party insiders, say that China’s secretive selection process, rooted in personal networks, has actually created a meritocracy of mediocrity.
Those who do less in the way of bold policy during their political rise — and expend their energies instead hobnobbing with senior officials over rice wine at banquets or wooing them with vanity-stroking projects — appear to have a greater chance of reaching the ranks of the top 400 or so party officials, the ones with seats on the Central Committee, the Politburo or its standing committee. Instead of pure talent, political patronage and family connections are the critical factors in ascending to the top, according to recent academic studies and analyses of the backgrounds of the leaders.
There are growing doubts, even among party elites, over whether such a system brings out those best equipped to deal with the challenges facing this nation of 1.3 billion people, with its slowing economic growth, environmental degradation and rising social instability. A series of recent scandals and revelations that the families of top officials can hold billions of dollars’ worth of investments have also led to greater scrutiny over the role of patronage.
On Friday, at a seminar in Beijng, Li Rui, a retired official who once served as Mao Zedong’s secretary, said he had urged party leaders to embrace big changes to how they appoint and oversee officials, warning that otherwise there would be more damaging scandals like one that led to the fall this year of Bo Xilai, the once-powerful politician who had risen quickly through the party ranks, largely because his father was one of the party’s “Eight Immortals.”
“Our current model produced the Bo Xilai incident,” he said.
Cheng Li, a scholar of Chinese politics at the Brookings Institution, wrote in a paper published in September that the Chinese political system was one of “weak leaders, strong factions,” and that it suffered from “nepotism and patron-client ties in the selection of leaders.” Susan L. Shirk, a professor and former State Department official, said Thursday on ChinaFile, a Web publication from the Asia Society, that “patronage is the coin of the realm in Chinese elite politics.”
In the United States and other Western countries, some prominent political families have certainly wielded power through successive generations — think of the Kennedys or Bushes — but entrenched dynasties and the influence of elders are becoming particularly noteworthy in China. The increasing prevalence of the so-called princelings, those related by birth or marriage to earlier Communist Party luminaries, is one sure sign that family background plays a decisive role in ascending to power. Four of the new standing committee members, including Xi Jinping, come from the red aristocracy. One of them, Wang Qishan, who seems to prefer blue ties, married into it.
“Xi Jinping himself didn’t come to power because of outstanding political achievements,” said Pu Zhiqiang, a rights lawyer, who added that he believed the new leadership was “quite mediocre.”
Just as important as family connections and demonstrated party loyalty is the ability to cultivate China’s top leaders. Five members of the standing committee are considered allies of Jiang Zemin, the party chief who stepped down in 2002, and the others have ties to his successor and rival, Hu Jintao. At least one, Yu Zhengsheng, is also closely aligned with the family of Deng Xiaoping, the supreme leader who appointed both Mr. Jiang and Mr. Hu.
Mr. Jiang was the dominant force shaping the seven-member standing committee this year. Old loyalists were rewarded with seats, beating out several candidates — Wang Yang and Li Yuanchao among them — who were considered more talented or more charismatic.
