National Reconstruction Front (Daxia): Difference between revisions

Internally the party under [[Qiu Heng]] did not show many signs of institutional maturation, its internal party laws and processes were an afterthought, there were no regular party congresses or meetings to discuss policy or ideological subjects. [[Qiu Heng]] seemed to regard it as merely an electoral tool and he was not interested in it being anything more, he ran the government by himself with input from a closed clique. This attitude began to change during his third term of office when his health began to fail him, the issue of succession began to be a topic of special consideration and the party would be needed to make the an eventual transition a smooth one. The party finally got a working structure below the General Secretary, with a Politburo created and stacked with the president's loyalists from the bureaucracy and former military men; regional committees began to meet regularly and pick up the sentiments and opinions of the membership and transmit them to the center and the president began to meet with the Politburo on a monthly basis. The president's preferrence on possible successors is not recorded, his former minister of defense Yuga Khan wrote in his memoirs that the president mentioned wanting a civilian to succeed him during casual conversation but that no names were said. What was known was that he did not have a high opinion of his eventual successor, general [[Chi Long Qua]], the few times he mentioned him was to deride him as 'General Pencil Pusher'; clearly he thought the man unworthy of following on his footsteps. Unexpectedly [[Chi Long Qua]] proved to be a capable operator of his own who by the time of the president's illness had begun putting many of his allies in positions inside the party's nomenklatura and was building bridges to the economic and military elites to convince them to join his presidential project. [[Qiu Heng]]'s untimely illness and death prevented him from imposing his own candidate and [[Chi Long Qua]] was triumphantly successful in his takeover of the party only a few months later.

[[File:何應欽院長.jpg|何應欽院長|thumb|Chi Long Qua in 1970 during his second term.]]

Chi Long Qua was elected as president in late 1964 after a campaign where his most prominent slogan was 'Continuity with a human touch', an empty phrase by the reckoning of most political scientists. The new president did not deviate much from his predecessors economic policies of growth based on import substitution but he did start dialing down the overwhelming presence of the state in the economy. He began the process of divesting the state from several sectors that had become unprofitable due to the corruption of state companies; he sold many of these state owned entities to government insiders and figures linked to the regime. This is the start of the phenomenon dubbed the 'musical chairs of wealth', the gist of it being that each new president disempowers and persecutes the economic elite that grew under their predecessor and grants their economic fiefs to figures closer to him; in effect creating a new economic elite that profits enormously during his term of office.