'People' may seize voice in China

As the Communist Party's congress begins in Beijing, the media are full of speculation — not about potential reforms but about power. The question: Who will succeed Hu Jintao as nominal leader of China if he steps down on turning 70 in 2010?

A scholar-official from the Ming or Qing dynasties would understand the situation exactly. Classical historiography calls succession the guoben, or root of the state: the designation of the prince who will succeed as emperor upon his father's death.

The scholar-officials knew that the passing of power from one emperor to another was the most perilous moment for a dynasty. The eventual abdication-at-gunpoint of the Qing in 1912 can be traced to the Empress Dowager's coup d'etat against the reforming Guangxu emperor in 1898, which gravely harmed dynastic legitimacy. (He was then confined in the Beijing palace complex, to die mysteriously in 1908, one day before the Empress Dowager.)

Hu has nominally held undivided power in China for barely a year (only since September 2004, when Jiang Zemin gave up his chairmanship of the Central Military Commission, and with that his hopes of ruling from offstage, like the Empress Dowager or Deng Xiaoping). Yet already the issue of succession is on the front pages. So has nothing changed since the Qing? Are the rulers of the People's Republic of China no more than "new emperors" embroiled in palace politics?

The answer is a resounding "no" in spite of the illuminating historical parallels. The reason? The imperial families of old ruled by the Tianming, or "mandate of Heaven," but that concept disappeared, replaced early in the 20th century by the concepts of "the people" as the source of legitimate rule and of "democracy" as the means of determining it. Nearly every ruler since the Qing abdication, even Mao Tse-tung, has paid eloquent lip service to these ideas, no matter how despotic he may have been in ambition or practice.

This entry of the "people" — the min — into the formulas of power has been slow to change reality, and in Beijing contention for office still resembles the Qing in practice far more than it does genuine democracy. But that situation is most likely unsustainable.