Willy Wo-Lap Lam, a senior fellow at The Jamestown Foundation, published the following analysis on China Brief:
Since dumping former Shanghai party secretary Chen Liangyu in late 2006, President Hu Jintao has tightened his control over the east China metropolis – as well as the so-called Shanghai faction in the tangled politics within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
At stake is more than the resolution of the longstanding slugfest between the two major CCP cliques – the Shanghai boys under ex-president Jiang Zemin versus the Communist Youth League (CYL) faction under Hu. In Hu’s calculus, reining in Shanghai’s notorious centrifugalism will go a long way toward establishing the party-and-state headquarters’ authority over the nation’s “warlords”, a reference to recalcitrant regional cadres who refuse to heed Beijing’s edicts.
This is despite that many outside the CYL cabal are disturbed by the fact that Hu has planted his underlings in more than half of China’s 31 provinces and directly administered cities. Hu, also CCP general secretary and chairman of its Central Military Commission (CMC), has entrusted the job of taming Shanghai to Politburo member Yu Zhengsheng, who took over from “Fifth-Generation” rising star Xi Jinping as party boss of the super-rich city three months ago.
[Image source: Shanghaiist.com]
