From an article in the WSJ, 5 March 2024 …
China’s Premier Steps Deeper Into Xi’s Shadow |
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When Xi Jinping’s handpicked premier, Li Qiang, was anointed to the job a year ago, Li dutifully pledged to be an “executor” of the top leader’s decisions. In other words, there should be only one decision-maker in China.
Li is living up to his promise—and then some. And that spells even greater trouble for a struggling economy.
On Monday, just as Beijing was about to kick off its most public political event of the year, the spokesman for the National People’s Congress announced that Li
won’t hold a press briefing at the close of the annual legislative meeting this year, and perhaps for the rest of his five-year term.
The premier’s annual press conference at the end of the NPC has been a highly choreographed affair, with screened questions and scripted answers. Still, it had been the one public interaction between global media and a top Chinese leader, and a rare window for the public onto the leadership’s thinking, particularly
on the economy.
Li now becomes the first Chinese premier in three decades to not take journalists’ questions.
The NPC spokesman made it sound like the presser is no longer necessary even though it was more highly anticipated this year due to the
ongoing economic malaise. Still, the move is in keeping with how Xi has t
orn down the pillars of the Chinese governance model built during Deng Xiaoping’s reform-and-opening era.
Gone are the days when the premier, as the de facto head of the government, was given authority over economic policy while the party chief took charge of ideology and politics. The premiership is now becoming fully subordinate to the supreme leader.
That means an end to any hopes that the premier could somehow help course-correct Xi’s policies to rebuild confidence in an economy
mired in a mess largely of the leadership’s own making.
Uplifting narrative
Li’s work report to the legislature Tuesday again offered little relief to a public yearning for more decisive government help with issues ranging from an
unprecedented property crisis to dwindling job opportunities and reduced welfare.
In the speech, Li largely ignored the problems—all in line with Xi’s directive on strengthening “economic propaganda and public opinion guidance” to
promote an uplifting narrative on China’s economy.
The premier patted the government on the back for the 5.2% growth rate China achieved last year, even though for many Chinese it has felt more like a recession.
The
5%-or-so growth target Li announced for 2024 should also surprise no one. That goal in fact was decided when Xi laid out plans in 2020 to expand China’s wealth and double the size of the nation’s economy by 2035—plans that would require China’s economy to expand an average of about 5% annually over 15 years. Unless Xi has second thoughts about those plans, the growth target won’t change, regardless of the economic situation.
Chinese people have long felt particular
affection for their premiers – a tradition going back to the first premier of the People’s Republic, Zhou Enlai, who saved many lives during the tumultuous years of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.
Then there is Premier Zhu Rongji of the late 1990s and early 2000s, dubbed China’s “economic czar” for his decisiveness that led to a sweeping restructuring of the bloated state sector and more opportunities for private bosses and Western capital….
Even Li Qiang’s predecessor, the late Li Keqiang, widely seen as a weak No. 2 to Xi, showed occasional streaks of independence. In 2020, when the top leader was celebrating the government’s efforts in reducing poverty, the premier drew attention to the hundreds of millions of people still making just 1,000 yuan, or less than $140, a month at a press conference broadcast to the world.
The current premier under Xi just made all that a bygone era.
