China to Let Retiring Officials Keep Perquisites

The Chinese Communist Party acknowledged Wednesday that the scores of elderly officials who are stepping down from leading party positions have been assured that they will be allowed to keep the salaries, houses, cars and other privileges they now have.

“As for their daily life, what they are enjoying now will not be changed,” Zhu Muzhi, a Communist Party spokesman, told reporters at a press conference on the opening day of a special party conference here.

Zhu is among the 64 members of the Communist Party Central Committee who Monday announced they will retire for reasons of age. He said these officials and the other elderly cadres resigning from leadership positions in the party’s central organs or at the provincial level will not only maintain their present living standards but will get “first consideration” for whatever new benefits are available.

The question of what privileges officials receive is a particularly sensitive one in China, a country in which, despite the changes of the last few years, there remains little private wealth. Where an individual lives, where he shops and how he moves from place to place are determined largely by the state.

So rarely does new housing become available in Peking these days that prominent young literary figures and even film stars can still be found here living in dormitories, waiting for more space to open up.

Favoritism Denied

At Wednesday’s press conference, Zhu, 69, who has worked for the Communist Party propaganda department and also holds the government post of minister of culture, rejected suggestions that high-ranking Communist Party officials seek special privileges for themselves and their relatives.

Zhu was asked whether 88-year-old Marshal Ye Jianying, China’s highest-ranking military leader, had insisted upon the recent appointment of his son, Ye Xuanping, as governor of Guangdong province before finally agreeing to step down from the Standing Committee of the party Politburo.

“We do not have such family relationships,” Zhu said. “The relationship we have is a party relationship and a working relationship.” He said all Communist Party officials in China were selected “on the basis of their own talents, not on the basis of whether they are VIPs.”

The Communist Party spokesman also reaffirmed Wednesday that Deng Xiaoping, who is 81, will retain his Communist Party positions. Apart from his acknowledged role as China’s senior political leader, Deng serves officially as chairman of the party Military Commission, chairman of the party’s Central Advisory Commission and one of the six members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo.

In an opening speech to the conference Wednesday entitled “Work Together for a Splendid Future,” Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, Deng’s top aide within the party, explained why Deng and a handful of other party leaders over the age of 80 are remaining on the job.

“It is . . . necessary for some comrades, though they, too, are advanced in years, to remain in the central leadership because the party still needs them for a period of time to stay on in charge of certain areas of national work,” Hu said.