BEIJING — In a year of China under lockdown, when dissident writers have received breathtaking prison sentences and the mere whisper of a “Jasmine Revolution” has spurred mass detentions, perhaps the riskiest thing a Chinese politician could do is put his iron glove on the shelf.
Which makes Wang Yang’s gamble this month in Wukan all the more interesting.
Mr. Wang, the up-and-coming Communist Party secretary of the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, faced a political turning point when 13,000 irate residents of Wukan evicted their leaders and barricaded themselves in their coastal village for 13 days in a last-straw uprising against local corruption.
Given a choice of storming the village with armed police officers or conceding that the villagers’ complaints had merit, Mr. Wang chose the latter. And in a single morning, he defused a standoff that had drawn unflattering worldwide news coverage.
The decision won him praise in the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, People’s Daily, which called it an act of “political courage” in a tense situation. Some analysts said it might have strengthened his already strong prospects to land a seat on China’s elite ruling body, the nine-member Standing Committee of the party’s Politburo, when a wave of mandatory retirements vacates seven of the seats this coming year.
And it raised the hopes of those here who want someone liberal — as defined by China’s restrictive definitions — to push for political and social reforms at the highest level of China’s leadership.
“He seems to favor reform,” said Zhang Lifan, a historian formerly with the government-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “At least Mr. Wang realizes that maintaining stability with force and violence is both economically and politically unsustainable, and came up with an alternative that seems to work better.”
But as is amply shown by the travails of China’s best-known quasi liberal, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, having a soft heart for the dispossessed gets a politician only so far in a party where stability is the trump card.
“How high can a man jump?” asked Yan Lieshan, a senior editor of Southern Weekly, a Guangzhou-based newspaper known for hard-hitting reporting. “If officials overstep the limits set by the central government, their positions will become untenable.”
