John Garnaut at the Sydney Morning Herald looks at how the children of China’s Communist elite are now gaining power and the ability to speak about the ills they see in their Party. The report covers a meeting of the children of former leaders and one attendee, Ma Xiaoli, who spoke out there:
…As she heard other children of former leaders push back at what they saw as the party’s moral decay, its attack on civil society and its revival of destructive Cultural Revolution politics, she found that when she started talking she could not stop.
”The Communist Party is like a surgeon who has cancer,” Ms Ma told this almost unprecedented unofficial gathering of powerful families that took place in a conference room at the China World Trade Centre on October 6. ”It can’t remove the tumour by itself, it needs help from others, but without help it can’t survive for long.”
Ms Ma was able to dispense with discretion because of her father’s prestige as a leading revolutionary and because her family has long been intertwined with other elite families represented in that room, especially that of the anointed next president, Xi Jinping. The gathering was the starkest demonstration to date of how ”princelings” are networking and rallying to influence personnel and ideology ahead of Mr Xi replacing Hu Jintao at the helm of the Communist Party at it’s five-yearly congress a year from now.
Princelings are taking sides in the battleground of ideologies and interests but they are united, it seems, by a conviction that their party has lost its way.
Read more about China’s “princelings” via CDT.
