As one popular Chinese idiom goes, the writing mirrors the writer. Vice-President Xi Jinping's latest speech lambasting the mainland's bureaucrats for empty talk and pursuing vanity projects makes interesting reading, considering he will be the mainland's next leader.
As the head of the Communist Party's Central Party School, the top training ground for senior officials, Xi gave the speech at the school's spring semester on March 1. The fact that the full-text speech was published in the Communist Party's Qiushi journal, the Study Times newspaper and carried by Xinhua to a nationwide audience last Tuesday signals that fighting bureaucracy is something close to his heart.
To be sure, so-called bureaucratism is a malaise of governments everywhere in the world. It is also an issue which has generated a lot of talk among mainland leaders over the years on how to fight it, but they have little to show for.
But Xi's speech entitled 'The key lies in implementation' matters in the following way.
First, he once again put the debate right up front. More importantly, his speech offers some interesting clues as to what kind of administration he is going to lead in two years' time.
Xi is widely expected to replace Hu Jintao as head of the Communist Party at its 18th Congress next year in the autumn and as president in March 2013. Because of the leadership's diehard obsession with secrecy, the outside world has little understanding of Xi and other incoming leaders who are going to be in charge of steering the world's second-largest economy.