At China’s Helm, Jiang Is Suddenly Alone

Finally, it was Jiang Zemin’s time to stand alone. Tense, emotional, stopping to dab tears from his eyes, Jiang, 70, China’s president and Communist Party leader and commander in chief of the world’s largest army, delivered the eulogy for “paramount leader” Deng Xiaoping on Tuesday in the Great Hall of the People.

That Jiang was chosen to head Deng’s funeral committee and deliver the farewell oration before the 10,000 assembled members of the Communist Party elite already meant something. It confirmed that the former Shanghai mayor was at least “first among equals” in the post-Deng political equation.

Moreover, Prime Minister Li Peng, one of his purported rivals in the post-Deng political succession, had only a few lines to speak at the memorial. They were mostly inaudible because Li did not stand close enough to the microphone. This caused irreverent titters among at least a few of the estimated 400 million people who watched the service on national television. “At least Jiang Zemin knows how to read from a prepared text,” quipped a Beijing accountant.

But as diplomats sifted through the 50-minute speech in search of elusive import, the most striking impression left by China’s final formal farewell to Deng was what might be called the sudden loneliness of Jiang Zemin. For the first time in the seven years since he was lifted from the obscurity of his provincial deck chair to sit at the captain’s table in the political order, Jiang no longer had his principal patron to prop him up.

Deng, his star-maker, was finally dead at age 92. Although Deng had not been healthy enough to participate actively in politics since at least 1993, his aura as a famed revolutionary still had great protective force while he remained alive, however enfeebled.

Where Deng was unassailable, protected by his role as one of the founders of Chinese communism, Jiang on Tuesday appeared suddenly vulnerable. This was instantly obvious to many who watched him sob into his handkerchief during the funeral oration.

“Now he can no longer go to Deng Xiaoping for help, or say that ‘Deng Xiaoping said this’ or ‘Deng Xiaoping said that,’ ” commented a Beijing-based diplomat.

“Now the other officials can finally argue with him,” said a mid-level military officer.

Of course, not everyone agreed with this assessment. “Between the 15th [Communist] Party Congress this fall and next spring there will be a reshuffling of leadership,” said a former Justice Ministry official who is now in private business. “I think Deng’s death is actually good for the transition. It removes restraints upon Jiang, since at times there had been friction between him and Deng.”

Meanwhile, most diplomats and analysts agreed that the entire mourning period--from Deng’s death last Wednesday to the steam engines lined up in the rail yards blowing their whistles to announce the memorial ceremony--had been almost perfectly choreographed by the Beijing regime. Credit for that will probably go to Jiang, who was chairman of the funeral committee.

“It went like clockwork,” said one admiring diplomat. Cynics commented that this was no great feat, because Deng’s long, slow decline gave the Chinese leadership almost seven years to prepare for this inevitable event.

Still, nothing was left to chance. Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the site of practically all of China’s key political protests in the last century, was cleared by police hours before the memorial. Television coverage of Deng’s private funeral and cremation Monday was comprehensive and perfect in detail for the mass audience, down to the close-up of the late senior leader’s daughter, Deng Nan, kissing the waxen cheek of her dead father.

At the events attended by China’s senior leaders, the same political protocol was strictly observed: First came President Jiang, then Premier Li, then National People’s Congress leader Qiao Shi, down to the members of the Politburo and so on in perfect descending order as though they had been lifted off the leadership charts at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

And the content of the funeral oration itself? Analysts and students of nuance in the Communist political rhetoric agreed there were only a few key moments.

According to an elderly, retired cadre who scrutinizes such language, the most important elements were that Jiang equated Deng’s historical stature with that of Chairman Mao Tse-tung; that he boldly and clearly described the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution as a “grave mistake”; and that he carefully managed his description of the 1989 incident in Tiananmen Square, where a military crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators left hundreds, perhaps thousands, dead.

Before his death, Deng had always been placed at a lower rung of the revolutionary ladder than Mao. Now, in Jiang’s speech, he was on a par.

Although Deng himself made it fashionable to criticize the political terrors of the Cultural Revolution, during which Deng was humiliated and exiled to the provinces, it had seldom before been so clearly characterized as a serious blunder.

“Of course, privately, we all said that,” said the retired cadre.

Finally, there was the careful way that Jiang treated the period of open political opposition that led to the Tiananmen Square crackdown. That Jiang brought up this incident, however obliquely, was not a big surprise. “You can’t just not mention anything about it,” said a diplomat, commenting on the eulogy as a historical document, written by committee, that recounts the events of a man’s life.

But the way in which the Tiananmen mention was phrased won admiration from the retired cadre, among others, who noted of Jiang: “His way of speaking of it was very subtle, very clever.”

Jiang termed the events leading up to the Tiananmen incident a “severe test” and said, “With political upheavals occurring both domestically and internationally at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, our party faced another major historical juncture.”

The retired cadre noted that Jiang “said it was something that happened in history. But he didn’t go into details because the details are controversial.” Jiang, for example, did not characterize the participants in the 1989 political demonstrations in any way. Nor, tellingly, did he implicate himself in the incident, instead laying responsibility on “Comrade Deng Xiaoping and other senior comrades . . . the party and the government.”

Some diplomats had hoped that Jiang would offer a “reassessment” of Tiananmen, a move that would rectify this shameful chapter in Chinese history. But after the speech, several said they were satisfied that he at least did not rule out the possibility of a healing reassessment in the future. “He definitely did not close the door,” said one diplomat.

Most diplomats and observers agreed that Jiang--China’s man of the hour--survived his first serious test by avoiding controversy and skillfully managing the difficult Deng mourning period. But how much momentum this will give him as he attempts to lead China remains to be seen, for, as in the complicated plots of the famous--and famously long--Peking Opera, said the former Justice Ministry official, “The good scenes are yet to come.”