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Interview with Geremie Barme, Director of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the ANU

Updated November 16, 2012 23:33:00

Geremie Barme, one of Australia's leading China experts examines the political changes that occurred in Beijing this week.

Source: Lateline | Duration: 16min 24sec

Topics: foreign-affairs, business-economics-and-finance, government-and-politics, china


EMMA ALBERICI, PRESENTER: The new generation of Chinese leaders have been paraded for the world. An unsurprising selection of 50 and 60-something-year-old men largely representative of the 200 or so families that have run the country for decades.

The challenges for Beijing's largely secret seven are immense, to continue growing the world's second biggest economy while balancing the need to reform with an obligation to keep the Communist Party elders satisfied.

There are some fascinating figures on the Standing Committee, including the incoming Premier Li Keqiang, fated by pro-democracy demonstrators who spent time in jail for their roles in the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square.

To shed some light on this curious cast of characters I was joined a short time ago from Canberra by one of Australia's leading China experts Geremie Barme, Director of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the ANU.

Geremie Barme, thanks so much for coming in to join us this evening.


EMMA ALBERICI: This new seven-member Standing Committee of the Politburo, it is dominated mainly by the children of senior party officials and proteges of former president Jiang Zemin. To what extent, then, are they expected to bring any real change to the country?

GEREMIE BARME: It's one of the great questions. Every time there's either a generational shift or a political leader change in China or movement at the top there's a discussion inevitably of the Gorbachev effect.

Will there be among them some particular individual who suddenly or due to circumstance, genius, personal possibility, happenstance, come out with a series of policies that will see China change in some fundamental way.

Analysts of China have been predicting this type of change for 25 years now. I don't do very well on the future but we do know from the past that you have to look for indications. At the moment there are no solid indications that there's going to be any great shift in political territory in China.

However, the way the Politburo has been set up, the fact that the party has made such a very formal statement about the dangers of systemic massive nationwide corruption does mean that it is very likely that even with this fairly conservative group of seven leaders we're going to see some movement.

If it is only ritualistic and symbolic, it is going to be fairly widespread related to dealing with corruption and some of the problems that the vast majority of Chinese people, every day people, really are concerned with and that is just the outrageous levels of misuse of power and corruption in the society and this is something where the party and the people are truly at one.

EMMA ALBERICI: Of course, the new president, Xi Jinping, in his sort of 20 minute speech that he made standing up there with his six fellow members, made reference to corruption, in fact vowed to tackle it. That does sound a bit rich coming from someone whose estimated personal wealth is said to be in the order of $1 billion.

GEREMIE BARME: This is based on the Bloomberg report from last year. The Bloomberg report about Xi Jinping's family's wealth never mentions Xi Jinping personally having wealth. He's regarded as a fairly straight shooting, up and down kind of person. This is the propaganda, it is the impressions one hears.

The fact that he has put in charge with his colleagues Wang Qishan, one of China's most important and influential financial and economic reform type figures, a person who really is at home on the world stage with a great reputation internationally, in charge of the very commission that must carry out this purge of corruption is not insignificant.

People are very regretful that Wang Qishan's not in charge of the economy and therefore we won't be seeing massive much needed changes perhaps in the state sector but you do have a person of great integrity in charge of a process that will, as I say, be aimed at both mollifying certain levels of the party and satisfying the masses.

But as you point out, here you have a Politburo and party system in which the nomenclature, that is the what I call the 200, 300 families which have intermarried for decades now, which have their hands in each other's pockets, which run all the major state controlled enterprises, which have connections and lineages down to the local levels in China, is actually running the show. A huge profound basic systemic contradiction.

EMMA ALBERICI: Are you suggesting that the Bloomberg report we were talking about, which also estimates that Wen Jiabao the outgoing Premier is worth something nudging $3 billion, are you suggesting it is unreliable.

GEREMIE BARME: People always talk about connections, that families are so important, that you're knowing each other's background, the family connections, the wives, children, blah, blah, blah, also important and suddenly when it comes to key leaders there's plausible deniability. I don't know my family has got $1.2 billion. Nothing to do with me.

These reports have tried to establish the types of money flows that are going around but the direct leaders who... Wen Jiabao and Xi Jinping are very much respected leaders. They're not directly tainted by these reports. However, one does have a system in China that's profoundly questioned by large numbers of people because so much is invisible or occluded.

The workings of power, the workings of money, the levers of international trade are not clear. As we know internationally responsible people dealing with the Chinese market dealing with China as a rising power, people who respect it who want to see China achieve the status it deserves as a major part of the humanity, would like to see a system that's a bit more transparent and readable.

EMMA ALBERICI: You mentioned, Li Keqiang as someone who is very significant, the incoming premier, and I want to get to him. First off I want to continue briefly with Mr Xi Jinping, the new president. I was interested to discover Xi Jinping is the son of a comrade of chairman Mao but when he was in his teens his father fell out with the chairman and was actually sent to prison. And then Xi Jinping himself was exiled to a poor community. What's the story of his comeback?

GEREMIE BARME: It is hard to find too many leaders in China today with family connections to former party hierarchy that have not fallen out with chairman Mao. Chairman Mao fell out with... if he didn't fall out with you ended up falling under a train or bus, to use our own analogy. It's not surprising that Xi Jinping's father had a falling out with Mao. Many many others did.

After all Mao carried out an internal purge of the party to make it more revolutionary. Xi Jinping is part of the generation, millions of people belong to this generation, who were during the Cultural Revolution, the '66, '76 period, sent down to the countryside to revolutionise their thinking. To get them out of the cities and out of trouble and not being a pest, but also to re-educate them by having personal experiences with the vast majority of agricultural workers China.

That's had and a whole two generations of people a profound impact on people like Xi Jinping who no matter how much we want to talk about China's global economic role Xi Jinping as an urbane international figure, a person who is comfortable in his skin, this is a person who has had a profound engagement like so many of his fellows with the granularity of Chinese reality - Chinese society and life in the countryside for better and worse. I can't tell. I don't know the guy.

It does give a political leader like that a type of background and understanding of Chinese realities or of the realities of the society in which he lives that virtually no western politician or economic figure can possibly compare to.

He has worked as a labourer in a small village. He worked at every level of government right through. He has really been trained to understand the inner workings of inland China as well as the workers of its wealthiest provinces. That's good and bad. He's not going to be the figure that the west or the world would like him to be.

One has to say why should he be? He's going to be a politician who is extremely... he's one of the only politicians in China we've seen in recent years, 2010, visited Mexico and actually spoke in normal Chinese, not cliches, not slogans, about his view of the things.

We don't, China's a stable country. We don't export revolution. We feed our people. We don't make trouble for you. What's the big deal? Leave us alone. It both shocked people because it was so frank, it was colloquial, these guys do not speak colloquial Chinese usually.

Hu Jintao, the outgoing president, speaks like a robot all the time. Xi Jinping gets up yesterday, he spoke in cliches but this was a real voice, this was a human being speaking to us. This is about someone who has lived at all these levels but functions as a concerned, engaged individual. This is something that we have to take some measure of comfort from.

EMMA ALBERICI: I heard what was said to be a popular joke in China which goes like this: Who is Xi Jinping? Why? He's the husband of Peng Liyuan. Tell us about his wife. Are we about to see the rise of the Chinese First Lady in a way we haven't seen before?

GEREMIE BARME: This will be fascinating just in terms of our cultural obsession with husband-wife teams and power. It will be interesting to see if she disappears, this is a lady of prominence in the army - I think she is - I don't know many... she's a general, a very popular singer. And earlier a beauty. She's not as young as she was but a very impressive figure.

She wears one of those extraordinary bouffant hairdos that military performers often wear. There has been a role already, let's not forget, in 2008 at the opening certainly of the Olympics in Beijing a little girl sang a key party song. Originally another girl was going to sing the song but because she was slightly fatter face and slightly crenulated teeth, she was withdrawn and they put in a prettier looking girl who then mimed the words from the less photogenic girl.

This is supposedly the work of Xi Jinping's wife - a cultural adviser. One should remember the last time that there was a truly cultural figure as a prominent wife in Chinese history was chairman Mao's wife Jiang Qing. In China they'll be making sure Xi Jinping's wife does not move on to the cultural stage too much. Because Jiang Qing is still a reviled figure who is also reviled for being a women. Women in Chinese politics is often treated in a way that would make our own discussion of misogyny crude and simple by comparison.

EMMA ALBERICI: Let's get on to Li Keqiang who you referred to earlier, he is the incoming premier. It would seem much of the expectation for reform seems to rest with him. He's got a doctorate in economics and variously described as a liberal. He has been a vocal advocate for the importance of a level playing field for private business. Do you expect him to bring those attitudes to this new job?

GEREMIE BARME: There's just too up hope that somebody like him will be what we call a liberal. What is a liberal in the context of China? It is somebody who does see the importance of gradual, wise, balanced consensual change. That's the only way they're going to be moving. To move any other way is irrational.

To hope to put on China a Hollywood-like-esque, hope that there's going to be some magical figure that will help transform a bureaucracy that's underpinned by 80 million party members, that has a nomenclature of acting figures intermarried families of 200 massive families and the huge business and corporate concerns of them and a powerful huge standing military, to put such hopes on poor old Li Keqiang I think is fanciful.

He will... him and the others, in particular the former mayor, will do their best to preserve the party, to main a stable government and allow China to continue its extraordinary growth. The debate in China in the last six month has been extraordinary debate and discussion about the future of the place and these leaders are all completely and utterly aware of the marketplace of ideas. How do we keep this economy developing while maintaining the party's control, yet, also gradually recognising the profound social transformation that's taking place in our country. Quite a balancing act.

EMMA ALBERICI: In fact he was the primary sponsor, this is Li Keqiang was the primary sponsor of a World Bank report issued in February that warned of a crisis if China failed to break the stranglehold of its giant state-run enterprises.

GEREMIE BARME: Indeed. That incredibly controversial report because there were Proto-Maoists or neo-Maoists, near radical leftists who want to see the state take over all the private enterprise. They formally protested against that report. An extraordinary struggle will go on and it is not a struggle that some crude power struggle between two or three people but a massive organic battle over these issues. They're profoundly difficult.

The state-owned enterprises these massive boheamists of the socialist era. Some of them are highly powerful and also highly productive and very influential global as wells as in China. They are the flagship of the so-called socialism with Chinese characteristics.

We won't see any dramatic changes, this is - the general pattern is Li Keqiang does not become Premier until next March. He's in the Politburo. The Politburo will have met in plenary session. It had its first session of the 18th Party Congress. It is not until the second, third or fourth plenary session some time down the line that you'll see real new policies and possibility for movement. It is like America, new election, people come in and they'll enact a whole new agenda. It is not the way it works.

EMMA ALBERICI: He'll be faced with another challenge on the issue of the state-run enterprises because of course Mr Li's brother is the deputy director at China's state tobacco monopoly organisation. Is it plausible to think that the man charged with domestic affairs in China including public health will clamp down on an industry in which his brother plays such a pivotal role?

GEREMIE BARME: Brother aside, it is also huge amounts of tax revenue. Can the state afford to start taxing tobacco more heavily? There's been dramatic changes because of the new smoking laws, you can't smoke in public or restaurants or certain places in public. That's a major change anyway and the health concerns are profound.

Taxation revenue is a real issue as well. These are debates and discussions that will go on and we know from what we gain from the... what's publicly accessible with all the lobby groups all the factions all the interest groups all making a claim but also the types of sophisticated and sensible scientific and other arguments that we would manage to muster in our own society will be canvassed and decisions will be made. I don't know what will come of it.

We all have a vested interest in China being a stable and more engaged country. You think of these seven guys. I must say they're all guys, you can't pretend they don't have the same hair dye job which is an unfortunate telltale sign of some insecurity. I don't dye my hair. I don't know why one would. They look serious and grim because they do face profound conflicts and truly massive issues.

EMMA ALBERICI: Geremie Barme, we thank you so much for making the time to come in tonight.