Deng's Legacy: Beijing Power-Sharing

Deng Xiaoping's passing on Wednesday has focused worldwide attention on the historic changes he wrought in the world's most populous nation over two decades.

But no reform of Deng's may be more challenged in the months and perhaps years ahead than the collective leadership and diffused power he left behind.

By naming Jiang Zemin as successor seven years ago, he tried to prevent the kind of in-fighting and jailing or death of losers that marked nearly every previous changing of the guard in China's Communist Party.

And his success in setting an irreversible course toward a market economy and integrating China with the world has left his successors with little room to maneuver for power or to alter China's path.

Still, the world waits to see whether a struggle breaks out in Beijing. Many China watchers discount notions that competition for influence could cause national disintegration or upset crucial ties with the US, Japan, or other key nations.

"There are always dangers involved in Chinese transitions of power," says Ezra Vogel, a China scholar at Harvard University. "But the likelihood of doomsday in post-Deng China is small."

Diplomats in Beijing agree. "Our government doesn't foresee instability in China," says Igor Rogachev, Russian ambassador to China.

"As important as Deng has been, we believe that China will survive," says a Western diplomat.

On the surface, the top rulers of the secretive party appear united, at least in their goals of maintaining China's dynamic economic growth and its role as a rising world power.

Although inner-party machinations may be under way, Deng's transformation of China's economy has been so successful that ordinary citizens care little about politics.

"When Mao died [in 1976], most of the nation halted, pondered, and cried," said a white-collar worker in Beijing. "But few of us have time to reminisce about the wider meanings of Deng's life and death," he said. "We're too busy making money."

Any leadership power struggle would not be as important now as during the great ideological battles in China's past, says Huang Yasheng, a political science expert at the University of Michigan. "Most of the current contenders for power are cut from the same cloth, so the success of any individual will not greatly change China's fate."

Jiang Zemin, a former mayor of Shanghai, appears to have consolidated his rule, and now carries the triple titles of president, party general secretary, and commander in chief. Yet his long-time position as Deng's apparent heir has been accompanied by a sense of foreboding in China. Few so anointed have managed to hold onto the crown for long. The precedents are many:

* Liu Shaoqi, ranked second behind Mao in the party hierarchy in the 1960s, died in prison after being tortured by Mao's Red Guards during the violent, 1965-75 Cultural Revolution.

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