By The Diplomat
Zhang Gaoli
Zhang Gaoli is currently the party secretary of Tianjin province, a post he has held since March 2007, and a member of the 16th and 17th Central Committees. He was born in 1946 in Jinjiang City, Fujian Province, and joined the party in 1973. He received a degree in statistics from Xiamen University in 1970, where he met his future wife and mother of his daughter.
Following graduation Zhang spent the next 15 years at the Guangdong Maoming Petroleum Company, ultimately becoming manager in 1984. The following year he became Director of the Guangdong Provincial Economic Commission, and was promoted to Deputy Governor of Guangdong Province in 1988. Prior to becoming party secretary of Tianjin, Zhang was the secretary and governor of Shandong province, where he championed administrative reforms to attract more foreign investment.
As Tianjin party secretary he has presided over the impressive growth of Binhai New Area, one of the special economic zones where the CCP experiments with reform. He has spoken out strongly in favor of deepening reforms, saying in a speech in August of last year that “Tianjin owes its development and change to reform and opening up. Tianjin must unswervingly rely on reform and opening up for its future development.” Still, many perceive Tianjin under Zhang as pursuing the same model of growth that many argue is unsustainable. As the Financial Times dryly summed up Zhang’s tenure in Tianjin, he “racked up huge debts and built scores of offices, homes, and highways that now stand eerily empty.”
Zhang is considered to be a protégé of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin, and was seen as one of the lower-level officials jockeying for a spot on the Politburo Standing Committee. Jiang’s much noted intervention in the leadership transition was almost certainly instrumental in propelling Zhang to the body.
From a foreign policy standpoint, Zhang has appeared to draw on his experience in the oil industry in leading Chinese delegations to the Middle East in November 2010 and September 2011, during which time he visited countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. In June of this year he also led a Chinese delegation to four countries in Latin America including Costa Rica, which Tianjin has an energy agreement with. He has been actively involved with numerous countries in South and Southeast Asia over the years, and appears to be well acquainted with Europe, having visited Ireland on his way to the Middle East, and met with a number of European leaders during the closing ceremony of the second China-Europe High-Level Political Parties Forum, which was held in Tianjin earlier in the year. Addressing the China-EU forum, Zhang called for “promoting pragmatic cooperation” between the two sides, and noted that “Europe is Tianjin's important partner for cooperation. We must… learn from and borrow the development experiences of European countries, expand exchanges and cooperation in various areas.”
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ch
China still has lots of problems, but it is getting better and better. All we Chinese have to do is to wait a bit longer.
Noel Worthy
Will they stop the Murder and and Live Forced Organ transplants?
John Chan
@Noel Worthy,
Can you name one nation in the world there is no crime including murder and illegal medical activity? Mind you the USA has the largest prison population in the world; sun reflection from the razor barbed wired prison camps dotted along the USA trans-state highway is quite a sight.
China is a democracy with Chinese characteristic not a utopia, but there are laws prohibit forced organ transplants and activities cause bodily harm, anybody carrying out forced organ transplant and murder is breaking laws, committing crimes and is punishable by laws; mind you the punishment in China is quite severe.
Asking Chinese leaders to stop crimes themselves is like asking Obama to stop murder and illegal organ transplant himself, it is just plain silly. You should urge the new Chinese leaders to pay more attention to those crimes instead.
Noel Worthy
John Chan, sir, I'm talking about and I'm sure you know who I'm talking about when I mention the Falun Gong and other prisoners of conscience who have been and still are Murdered for their organs. You must know about the PLAC'S 610 arm. Yes there are crime syndicates that are involved too(Arthur Borges in reply to you)but, I'm talking about a STATE here, a government that that is in the seat of power, not some criminal gang, but countries government that's doing the killing……a BIG difference to criminals, although some see the CCP as nothing but criminals!
In regard to the USA's prison population, yeah no problem with that stat, but do we really no how many are in China's jails? How many Black Jails are there? How many people detained in their own homes, if we did then that figure may be pass the USA.What about those detained in Psychiatric Hospitals as a means of imprisonment? Of course we will never know because Beijing denies such practices, however there are just too many of the normal Chinese citizens who have spoken out about their time in these "Black holes" to deny their existence. I wonder how many petitioners were detained during the recent 18th event?
So anyway, to my point, When Will The CCP Stop The Murder For Organs?
Arthur Borges
You have strange ideas about China, Noel. Mainland Chinese crime rates are low and most police officers are unarmed except for a cellphone with an app for the crime information database.
Organ harvesting from convicts sentenced to death? Yep it happened. They just changed the law to stop that though. What happens to organs of the executed in the West, though? France has no death penalty, but the law assumes you're an organ donor unless you make a proactive declaration that you don't want to donate but most Frenchmen don't know that donation is the default option and would grumble if they did. I guess it's the same in most EU countries. To be fair there is a worldwide shortage of organs and entire crime syndicates involved in kidnapping and murder for purposes of organ trafficking. China is prosecuting one sharp organ dealer who got a 12-year-old kid to surrender a kidney in exchange for iPad. The was really proud of himself when he got home but his parents went through the roof when they found out how he paid for it. Anyhow, the cops looked up the dealer and dragged him away.
Arthur Borges
It's always fun to read rhetoric about "endless politically jockeying" (it's over now, right?), tenuous purges (Gen. P wasn't purged, right?) or getting "brought back from exile" (like Nixon maybe?). Then there's Deng "towering" around (unknown inside the Beltway, right?)
But to throw in a few details, many of the seven have family living abroad, anywhere from Malaysia to the USA and I'd be surprised if even one of them does not have a son or daughter with at least a bachelor's degree from somewhere in Europe or North America. Under Mao, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping were essentially the only two who had really lived broad — Deng was even an internationally ranked bridge player, a pastime he continued in retirement. As for Zhou, he was entirely at ease in any company.
What is interesting about this set of leaders who govern collegially (!), is that there is a preponderance of social scientists and with good reason: What brings down the dynasties in Chinese history is grassroots revolt. It is very well to classify leaders as belonging to the Hu or Jiang social networks but, in either case, no unsubverted member of the leadership will lose sight of this fundamental historical fact.
If the IMF keeps going around telling most of its victims to cut social spending, it has been amusingly telling China to spend more on this line item, so OECD members should be happy that grassroots consumers can be predicted to need to save less but alas, history is what it is here and history has written into the local DNA that she is a laundry list of natural and manmade catastrophes, so keep saving up.
Expect no changes in Chinese policy about her territorial claims however. I understand Washington backtracked seriously over the Diaoyu/Senkaku thingie when Chinese buyers failed to turn up at the Fed auction of US Treasurys and the response was to send a high-level US team to Beijing to discuss it but, um, they never got to see the folks they had hoped to influence.
venze
We doubt the new leaders would implement whatever reforms that soon. Apparently, they want to maintain the status quo, at least for the first couple of years to consolidate their learning curves.
None of the 7 (reduced from 9) powerful members of the Standing Committee has been sufficiently exposed to the international arena, and practically none had been educated or given work experience overseas. They need to equip themselves adequately to deal with foreign affairs first. (btt1943, vzc1943)
Akhter47
What’s here to read!
Charles Hale
It would be very helpful if you were to publish the leaders' names in Hanzi as well as in pinyin.
Thanks and best wishes,
C. Hale
John Chan
The Chinese names of the 7 members of CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee are
习近平, 李克强, 张德江, 俞正声, 刘云山, 王岐山, 张高丽.