Leaders yearn for calm days in a stormy season
As waters continue to recede from critical levels along the lower reaches of the Yangtze and the river's latest flood crest flows safely out to sea, China's leaders should be able to look forward to a week of relative calm. But is it just the calm before the storm, both in China and overseas?
At the time of writing powerful Typhoon Rusa, which had been tracking towards East China and the already flood-swollen Yangtze River Delta, was predicted to turn north and hit South Korea instead.
Bad luck for Korea but good news for Beijing - and in more ways than one. Had Rusa continued on its earlier track and proven to be the straw that broke the back of East China's Yangtze River dykes, a considerable loss of life and severe economic damage would have been the result. It also would have constituted an ominous portent ahead of the 16th Party Congress, which has finally been scheduled for November 8.
Natural disasters and politics are closely intertwined in the minds of many superstitious Chinese. There's nothing quite like a huge earthquake to suggest to the masses that a political one is to follow - such as that which flattened Tangshan just five weeks before Mao Zedong's death on September 9, 1976 - and that the-emperors-that-be have lost their Mandate of Heaven.
Any such suggestions are not terribly welcome in Beijing at the moment, where the one word on everybody's lips - even more so than usual - is 'stability, stability, stability'. Media minders in the capital have sent word out to newspaper editors across the country that their usually dull newspapers should be even duller than usual over coming months.
Even in Guangzhou's hyper-competitive and normally feisty media market, where editors and journalists adhere to higher professional standards than their colleagues in other cities, the cautious tone has been evident.
Newspapers are full of articles about what the central and local governments are doing to help migrants and poor regions, for example. Also noticeable in their abundance are prominently flagged discourses on President Jiang Zemin's 'three represents' theory, which he hopes will earn him intellectual and ideological immortality alongside the likes of Mao and Deng Xiaoping.
Central to Mr Jiang's theory is increased recognition of the private businessmen the party once specialised in persecuting - and even their inclusion in party decision making, with recent reports saying that the hallowed halls of the Central Committee might be opened to capitalists.
In line with this new be-nice-to-businessmen theme, Guangzhou newspapers recently trumpeted the establishment of the city's first Communist Party Committee at a privately owned enterprise - in this case property developer Zhonggong Hengda. As evidence of the now officially sanctioned love affair between communists and capitalists, the head of Hengda's new party committee is also its board chairman.
The proliferation of such articles in the Guangzhou media has led to idle but interesting speculation about the political future of Guangdong party secretary Li Changchun. According to the gossip, it might all just be too little too late for Mr Li.
Mr Li was once thought a potential successor to Premier Zhu Rongji and contender for a seat on the Politburo Standing Committee. But - in the government sphere at least if not yet the party one - he is now reckoned more likely to end up with something less illustrious, most likely a vice -premiership.
According to the Guangzhou gossip mill, this could be because Mr Jiang, of whom Mr Li is reckoned to be a prot?g?, was expecting a big boost when he first announced his three represents theory in Guangdong two years ago - along the lines that Deng got after his famed 'tour of the south' in 1992.
But the party secretary of Guangdong is no risk-taker, so no big push on behalf of the three represents theory was forthcoming down south and Mr Li lost some of his lustre in the eyes of his mentor.
On the overseas front Premier Zhu Rongji is spearheading the latest instalment of the Chinese leadership's seemingly perpetual tour of Countries of No Consequence, having visited Algeria and Morocco last week. Pretty much every month some Politburo Standing Committee member is to be found paying a state visit to some backpacker backwater.
More substantially this week, Mr Zhu will be speaking at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg. Kyodo Protocol crusher and United States President George W. Bush will be Public Enemy Number One at the summit - but in spirit only because he would sooner serve in Vietnam than be caught at some global hippie environmental fest, as Republicans are inclined to view such events.
China's problems with Mr Bush at the moment go far beyond his snub of the summit to the desert storms now brewing in Iraq. Beijing can therefore be expected to continue to bleat its disapproval this week as the drums of war beat louder and louder in Washington. Shame nobody in Washington cares what China thinks.
