Susan Shirk Comments on China Prime Minister's Leadership
China’s Premier Seeks Reforms and Relevance
08/07/2011
Michael Wines, Jonathan Ansfield and Sharon LaFraniere,
The New York Times
China’s prime minister,Wen Jiabao, stood amid funerary wreaths in Wenzhou, near where ahigh-speed train accident claimed 40 lives late last month, and pledged an “open and transparent” government inquiry into the disaster. “The key,” he said, “is whether the people can get the truth.”
The next day, censors silenced the news media’s dogged reporting on railway negligence and corruption, then started censoring posts on microblogs that had stoked outrage over the crash.
By last week, the government inquiry itself was accused of being rigged, run by a panel that included the Railways Ministry’s second in command and loyalist experts.
Such indignities are not new. As Mr. Wen enters the twilight of a decade as China’s third-ranked leader, he appears to be struggling to remain relevant in a political system that covets his benevolent public image but has little use for his ideas.
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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.
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