Wang Ruilin, aide-de-camp extraordinaire, is proving almost as useful to President Jiang Zemin as to Deng Xiaoping.
During an enlarged Politburo meeting last month, General Wang, a deputy chief political commissar and former military aide to Deng, three times vouched for the fact it was the patriarch who had ensured Mr Jiang's supremacy.
According to informed sources, the conclave was called by Mr Jiang to give an account of the political situation since the patriarch's demise.
In an apparent bid to dampen the jockeying for position that had intensified, Mr Jiang went into an uncharacteristically humble mood. He hinted it was wrong to assume he had schemed to get the positions he had, such as party chief, head of state, and commander-in-chief.
'When I was asked to take up the position of party general secretary, I thought there must be other cadres who had better ability or higher seniority,' Mr Jiang reportedly said at the Politburo meeting.
Whereupon General Wang said: 'General secretary, you are being too self-deprecating. We all know it was the patriarch who made the arrangement.' General Wang came up with similar protestations when Mr Jiang went on to say he had not sought for himself the position of state president and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC).
