Susan Shirk Quoted in The Washington Post
In China, a sometimes opaque divide between power of party and state
01/16/2011
Andrew Higgins,
The Washington Post
HONG KONG - When Hu Jintao visits the United States on Tuesday, he'll have a regal entourage of aides, bodyguards and limousines. But the Chinese leader will leave behind in Beijing the most potent totem of his power: the title of general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.
He's not giving up his day job as head of the world's largest political organization, but during his four-day U.S. trip, he'll assume an alternative identity. He'll be greeted at the White House and a Chicago auto-parts factory as Mr. President, a made-for-export alias used mostly for encounters with foreigners.
The morphing of roles flows from the protocol of his mission. Hu travels to the United States to represent China as a nation, not just its ruling party. But the shift obscures the true nature, and also curious limitations, of Hu's authority - his stewardship of a sprawling party apparatus that stands above all formal institutions of government but is no longer a rigid monolith obedient to a single leader. It also helps explain why Washington often has so much trouble figuring out who is making decisions in Beijing and why.
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Susan Shirk is director of the University of California system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and Ho Miu Lam professor of China and Pacific Relations at IR/PS.
She founded in 1993 and continues to lead the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue (NEACD), an unofficial “track-two” forum for discussions of security issues among defense and foreign ministry officials and academics from the United States, Japan, China, Russia, and the Koreas.
