Communist Party

BEIJING - Jiang Zemin may have relinquished the top position in the ruling Communist Party yesterday, but his reappointment as head of the Central Military Commission immediately raised questions about the real extent of the power of Hu Jintao, Jiang's successor as chief of the Communist Party. As a weeklong meeting of the Chinese Communist Party leadership wound to a conclusion, the talk here was more about Jiang's apparent victory in nominal retirement than about Hu's ascension. The Standing Committee of the Politburo, the top council that was expanded yesterday to nine members from seven, was clearly packed with Jiang loyalists who could prevent any major departures in policy.

BEIJING - The last time power changed hands at the top of China's Communist Party, the event was preceded by hundreds of thousands of students leading demonstrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and other cities demanding democratic reforms. Thirteen years later, President Jiang Zemin, 76, is set to surrender his post as general secretary of the Communist Party to his anointed successor, Vice President Hu Jintao, 59, at the party congress that opens today. And China's young, bright minds are too busy having fun and planning careers to stop and take note.

THE PRESIDENT of Turkmenistan, who several years ago adopted the name Turkmenbashi, or Father of All Turkmen, yesterday renamed January after himself. He renamed April after his mother, who died in an earthquake in 1948. He renamed September after his book, Rukhname, which is required reading for all Turkmen schoolchildren. He also renamed the other months, and the days of the week. (Wednesday becomes Good Day. That's creative.) The National Council acclaimed the changes, by unanimous vote.

MOSCOW - Shoved to the margins of power, its legacy scorned or ignored, the Communist Party hopes to draw 100,000 marchers to its May Day demonstrations here today, for its biggest show in a decade. And Tatiana Skvortsova plans to be in the vanguard. She is 62, a well-educated Muscovite who joined the party four years ago, long after the collapse of the Soviet state. It was only after the old order was demolished, she said, that she learned where her duty lies: to struggle to restore the glories of the socialist era. "My father died protecting the Soviet system, for Soviet equality," said Skvortsova, whose father disappeared while delivering ammunition to Soviet troops in 1943 during the German siege of Leningrad.

BUDAPEST, Hungary - Elementary school teacher Iren Potharn thinks that the old Communist system had some good points and that a Socialist victory in elections today could bring back egalitarian values and give poor people a better deal. But Imre Csonka, the manager of a Mazda dealership, says the beleaguered center-right government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban deserves credit for nurturing the emergence of a middle class. Many of the newly prosperous voters are afraid of losing everything they've gained if the former Communists of the Hungarian Socialist Party come back to power, he said.

Maurice L. Braverman, who won back the right to practice law two decades after a McCarthy-era conviction and imprisonment as a Communist conspirator, died of pneumonia Monday at Union Hospital of Cecil County in Elkton. He was 86 and had lived in Baltimore's Windsor Hill and Waverly for many years. Mr. Braverman had practiced law in Baltimore for 11 years before his 1952 conviction in federal court of violating the Smith Act -- being a member of the Communist Party and advocating overthrow of the government by violence and force.

THESE DAYS in China, signs of greater openness abound. But make no mistake, in the name of the government's paramount goal of "social stability" -- meaning total political control by the Chinese Communist Party -- the Chinese people remain under a brutally authoritarian regime. The contradictions set in motion in the last decade by moves to a more market-oriented economy -- while maintaining a horrible record of human-rights abuses -- are challenging the party, but not yet enough to threaten its ultimate control.

BEIJING - President Bush may be more interested in talking with an illustrious graduate of Beijing's Qinghua University, the MIT of China, than to the students and faculty he is scheduled to address tomorrow in a speech to be broadcast on Chinese TV. The famous alumnus is Hu Jintao (who-gint-OW), who is 59 and favors wire-rimmed glasses and well-cut, Western business suits. For now, he is little known in the West. But if all goes as expected, Hu will take over as general secretary of the Communist Party at its 16th congress meeting in October and lead this nation of 1.3 billion people.

BEIJING - Two years ago, China's prime minister warned the people of Taiwan that if they voted for the island's pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party, China would be furious. Vote for the DPP, he said, and "you won't get another opportunity to regret." Last week, in an about-face, one of China's vice premiers invited members of the DPP to tour China as informal guests. What a difference a couple of elections make. In 2000, the leader of the DPP, Chen Shui-bian, won election as Taiwan's president.

KANDALAKSHA, Russia - It has been 50 years since Vitaly Vitalyevich Bianki first traveled to the islands of Kandalaksha Bay, and over the intervening decades he has made his mark so strongly on the Arctic bird sanctuary here that it is now impossible to think of it without thinking of him. He is the man to see if you want to know about the Arctic tern, which flocks here by the thousands in a yearly migration that stretches from the Antarctic to the...