China-watchers are deeply interested in an essay by Chinese premier Wen Jiabao celebrating the life of former Party Secretary Hu Yaobang, a liberal reformer forced to resign in 1987 after a wave of student protests. His subsequent death in 1989 sparked the Tiananmen uprising, the moment when China’s experiment with real economic and political liberalization — an experiment that, as Yasheng Huang has argued, sparked an extraordinary boom in indigenous entrepreneurship that raised living standards across the country dramatically — ended and a long period of Potemkin growth centered on state-owned enterprises, foreign direct investment, and tight political control began.

So what exactly was Wen Jiabao trying to say? Victor Shih, a political scientist at Northwestern and author of the indispensable blog on elite Chinese politics and political economy called, helpfully, Elite Chinese Politics and Political Economy, has a fascinating post on what might be going on.

Now, the question is why send such a signal. To be sure, Hu Yaobang has been making a come-back in the official press. the last time that Hu was praised by a Politburo Standing Committee member was Zeng Qinghong’s speech in 2005. If you read the text of the Zeng Qinghong’s 2005 speech on HYB (which I also append below), it reads like a detailed official biography of Hu with some usual pleasantry about “great Marxist”…etc at the end. The Wen piece clearly appears to be the most “heart-felt.” Again, the issue is why the need to send such an emotional signal.

After floating the slender possibility that Wen Jiabao was sending a signal on behalf of Hu Jintao, Shih writes:

Finally, we come to the hypothesis that Wen Jiabao himself is in deep trouble and may be under threat of being removed. I find this possibility the most reasonable. In essence, Wen may feel that he is under direct threat of being removed or may implement a policy which puts him in danger of being removed. As either a last ditch effort or an insurance policy, he writes this article to rally HYB sympathizers on his side in case his enemies move to remove him from power.

And there you (might) have it. Isn’t it great to know that one of the world’s most powerful and important countries is governed so transparently? We have our flaws here at home, but I’d choose rank incompetence and free-lunchism over the climate of fear and the bottomless corruption that is hollowing out the Chinese state and threatening a medium-term collapse.