Before next week’s 18th Party Congress, former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) head Jiang Zemin’s office in the building of the Central Military Commission was closed down, according to the Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun, as quoted by the BBC on Nov. 1.
An informant in China’s military told Sankei Shimbun that after Jiang Zemin stepped down from the Military Committee in 2004, he retained the same spacious office in the building with several private secretaries. Jiang often visited the office, meeting with military in-service officers and commanders, exercising his influence over the military.
As the CCP’s new leadership succeeding Party head Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao prepared to take power, questions about the existence of Jiang’s office at the military commission began to mount.
The Sankei Shimbun paper said, during his 15-years in power, starting in 1989, Jiang had promoted 81 generals, building up his own splinter group in the military. However, in recent years Hu has purged the remnants of Jiang’s faction in the Party.
Only six of the current 38 generals are affiliated with Jiang’s faction and five of those are about to retire at the upcoming Party congress. The one remaining Jiang appointee will be Jiang’s former Secretary Jia Tingan, deputy director of the General Political Department.
The changes in military personnel in October guarantee that Hu Jintao’s faction has control over human resources and operational command, while the presumptive next head of the Party Xi Jinping has gained control over military engineering and weapons development, according to the paper.
Many sources say that Hu Jintao is very likely to serve two more years as chairman of the central military commission, after he steps down as general secretary of the Party at the congress.
Read the original Chinese article.
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Editor’s Note: When Chongqing’s former top cop, Wang Lijun, fled for his life to the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu on Feb. 6, he set in motion a political storm that has not subsided. The battle behind the scenes turns on what stance officials take toward the persecution of Falun Gong. The faction with bloody hands—the officials former CCP head Jiang Zemin promoted in order to carry out the persecution—is seeking to avoid accountability for their crimes and to continue the campaign. Other officials are refusing any longer to participate in the persecution. Events present a clear choice to the officials and citizens of China, as well as people around the world: either support or oppose the persecution of Falun Gong. History will record the choice each person makes.
Click www.ept.ms/ccp-crisis to read about the most recent developments in the ongoing crisis within the Chinese communist regime. In this special topic, we provide readers with the necessary context to understand the situation. Get the RSS feed. Who are the Major Players?
