Jiang Zemin's legacy

Gone are the days of China's gerontocratic government with General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Jiang Zemin ushering in a new generation of leadership on Thursday at the closing of the party's 16th National Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

Jiang, 76, and other septuagenarian party chieftains, such as parliament chief Li Peng and Prime Minister Zu Rongji, stepped down from the party's powerful policy-making body, the Central Committee, allowing a younger generation of leadership under Vice President Hu Jintao, 59, to lead the world's most populous nation into a better future, economically as well as politically.

The smooth and orderly transfer of power, however, was not the most important thing that came out of the week-long CPC congress, as a regeneration of leadership is a natural process and Hu's ascendancy to power has long been anticipated. What became the milestone of the congress was the fact that it approved the amendment of the CPC charter by including Jiang's Sange Daibiao (Three Representations) theory in the party's ideology.

The theory calls for the CPC to "represent the development trend of China's advanced social productive forces (entrepreneurs), the orientation of advanced Chinese culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese population".

Jiang's concept for encouraging the active participation of Chinese entrepreneurs and businesspeople in the CPC, in fact, is not far off from the one proposed by the late Deng Xiaoping, China's paramount leader who introduced the country's open-door policy and market-oriented economy in the late 1970s, which resulted in a quanmin qieshang (everybody going into business) trend. Since then, China has adopted a free market economy while adhering to its style and characteristic of Communist and Marxist doctrines as the country's national guidelines.

Learning from the experience of the former Soviet Union, the Chinese leaders, obviously, were well aware of the fact that the Communist Party would have been blamed, if not ousted from power, if it failed to give security, safety and prosperity to the 1.2 billion Chinese. Besides, communism went bankrupt in many parts of the world because it could not stand up to global changes and free market competition.

China's style of socialist and communist rule favoring market economy, on the contrary, has yielded successful results. This explains why scores of businesspeople, managers and chairmen of the country's enterprises have been included in the CPC's top decision-making body, the 356-member Central Committee. For democratic nations, the participation of tycoons in a power play is a common thing, but for China, which once considered entrepreneurs and capitalists its sworn enemies, such a move is a great leap forward.

The move has become even more relevant now that years of China's booming economy and remarkable development, particularly in the big cities, has given birth to nouveaux riches and millions of highly educated people, who are used to living in an economically comfortable situation.

China's neighbors, including Indonesia, surely expect that the new Chinese leaders, who will officially assume their government post next March -- Hu is expected to replace Jiang as president while Vice Premier Wen Jiaobao, 60, will take the post left by Zu -- will follow in the footsteps of their predecessors in building a strong, prosperous and friendly China.

We fully realize that changes in a country's leadership are sometimes followed by changes in its foreign policy. Change, if Beijing must change, but we hope that the change does not rekindle the fear of another "Chinese threat", an issue that many of China's neighbors have buried and consider only a myth of the Cold War era.

In the final analysis, a more enhanced economic and political cooperation between China and its neighbors could certainly help ensure peace and stability in this part of the world.