That Congress president Sonia Gandhi is heading to China later this week is good news. But her long delayed Chinese sojourn could not have come at a more unfortunate political moment. Although not planned this way, Sonia Gandhi’s necessary engagement with the Chinese Communists comes after her unexpected kow-tow to Indian Communists on the nuclear deal.

To be sure, Chinese leaders value old friends and will shower affection on Sonia Gandhi. Chinese respect, however, is reserved for those who are capable of taking bold decisions and have an appetite for hard power politics.

No wonder the Chinese establishment has great regard for the former prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, who surprised them in 1986 with his apparent readiness for military confrontation on the border and for having the political courage to rewrite India’s China policy when he travelled to Beijing at the end of 1988. Sonia Gandhi who accompanied her husband to Beijing would recall how difficult it was for Rajiv Gandhi to overcome the widespread opposition within the Congress Party to that path-breaking visit. Party elders like P.V. Narasimha Rao, then foreign minister, were upset at Rajiv’s seeming readiness to forget the political humiliation China had heaped on Jawaharlal Nehru.

Recognising the urgency of normalising relations with China, Rajiv Gandhi was not prepared to elevate personal sentiment above national interest. He was prepared to break the Congress mould on foreign policy not just on China, but also on the US, Pakistan and Israel.

The Congress leadership’s self doubt today stands in contrast to Rajiv Gandhi, who boldly ordered the scientists to build nuclear weapons in the late 1980s and his mother Indira Gandhi, who tested a nuclear weapon in 1974, signed the controversial security pact with the Soviet Union in 1971, and liberated Bangladesh in the same year.

The Chinese would surely judge that a Congress leadership that is incapable of doing the nuclear deal with Washington has little credibility as an interlocutor on the boundary dispute with Beijing.

All eyes on Xi

As the 17th Congress of the CCP ended with the unveiling of a new line of leaders on Monday, all eyes are on Xi Jinping, the 54-year-old Shanghai party chief, who is among the four new faces elevated to the Politburo Standing Committee.Xi’s meteoric rise has now culminated in his emergence as the likely successor of Hu Jintao who will step down as the CCP chief at the 18th Congress of the CCP in 2012 and as President of China the following year.

It was widely assumed that Hu’s preferred successor was the 52-year-old Li Keqiang, who heads the CCP in the Liaoning province in northeastern China. Xi’s elevation above Li is said to be part of a complex political bargaining between different factions in the CCP.

Clearly Jiang Zemin, who has continued to exercise influence in the CCP after yielding power in 2002, and his so called ‘Shanghai clique’ have had enough clout to position one of their own nominees to succeed Hu. Xi and Li, representing the fifth generation of leaders in Communist China, have now been truly launched. While Li represents the old rust belt in China and is closer to the populist strain represented by Hu Jintao, Xi comes from the dynamic east coast that is more liberal in its political orientation.

Princes’ party

As in Indian politics so in the CCP, family lineage does matter. If Sonia Gandhi represents India’s most successful political dynasty, Xi is among the many ‘princelings’, who owe their rise to their fathers’ leading positions in the CCP.

While the founder of Communist China, Mao Zedong, and its builder Deng Xiaoping, did not push their own children into the top echelons of the CCP, promoting the political careers of sons and daughters is now very much part of the Communist tradition in China. ‘Born Red’, the ‘princelings’ have good educational backgrounds and get on to the CCP fast track. Early on in their careers, they tend to serve as ‘mishu’ or personal secretaries to top officials who are friends of their fathers. They are also often pitch-forked by the central leadership into running major cities around the nation.

By then they are expected to pick up enough skills to elbow their way to the top of the party state.

The writer is professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore