Leadership, it may be said, is really what makes the world go round. Love no doubt smoothes the passage; but love is a private transaction between consenting adults. Leadership is a public transaction with history. The idea of leadership affirms the capacity of individuals to move, inspire, and mobilize masses of people so that they act together in pursuit of an end.
“The war,” Tolstoy answered, “was bound to happen simply because it was bound to happen.” All prior history determined it. As for leaders, they, Tolstoy said, “are but the labels that serve to give a name to an end and, like labels, they have the least possible connection with the event.” The greater the leader, “the more conspicuous the inevitability and the predestination of every act he commits.” The leader, said Tolstoy, is “the slave of history.”
Determinism takes many forms. Marxism is the determinism of class. Nazism the determinism of race. But the idea of men and women as the slaves of history runs athwart the deepest human instincts.
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong,” wrote Johan Mayard Keynes, “are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. The power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”
Leaders in thought often invent in solitude and obscurity, leaving to later generations the tasks of imitation. Leaders in action have to be effective in their own time.
The Founding Fathers of the US understood the difficulty. They believed that history had given them the opportunity to decide whether men are indeed capable of basing government on “reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend on accident and force.”
Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to justice makes democracy necessary.
It is true that around every man a fatal circle is traced beyond which he cannot pass; but within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free; as it is with man, so with communities.
The first is that due to a rule of the Communist Party Central Committee which states that, in order to spread out representation as much as possible, no 2 standing committee members can come from the same province.
ABC Radio Australia reported that Hu defended Jiang from more radical Red Guards in the turmoil at Tsinghua during the Cultural Revolution. Hu thus had 2 powerful and well-connected leaders on his side. Song Ping was promoted to vice chairman of the Central Planning Commission in 1981. Song and possibly Jiang as well gave Hu his next big break. In 1982, they recommended him to Hu Yaobang, CPC chairman from 1981 until he became general secretary in 1982, when the position of chairman was abolished.
The Communist Youth League was formed in 1922 as a training ground for young party members. The idea was to give young people ages 14-28 the general education, knowledge of party principles, and leadership experience they needed to keep the CPC vibrant from one generation to the next. The structure of CYL even mirrors that of the CPC, with its own Central Committee and National Congress.
The next stop for Hu Jintao would be another of China’s poorest provinces, Guizhou.
He became the first party secretary of Tibet without a military background, but he soon had to call upon the military’s assistance.
Hu arrived at the Panchen Lama’s residence on January 23. That day or the next, the Panchen Lama gave a speech in which he criticized the Chinese occupation of Tibet, saying that it had cost his people more than it had benefited them. On January 28, the Panchen Lama died. The official government report said that he suffered a major heart attack.
Martial law remained in place in Tibet for a year, through the violent and deadly suppression of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 and subsequent declaration of martial law in Beijing. Hu was among the first provincial leaders to voice his support for the Tiananmen crackdown.
When martial law is in effect, the military commander of an area or country has unlimited authority to make and enforce laws. Martial law is justified when civilian authority has ceased to function, is completely absent, or has become ineffective. Further, martial law suspends all existing laws, as well as civil authority and the ordinary administration of justice.
Perhaps it was Hu’s ability to get results without provoking or offending that allowed him to win support from leaders of different stripes and thus rise through the ranks so rapidly. In his earlier career he was often promoted ahead of more senior cadres, a practice not at all commonplace in the CPC.
Others argued that Hu’s reforms were only meant to justify and solidify the CPC’s monopoly of power in the country. By introducing for the most part only new economic ideas into the classroom while avoiding grassroots democratic theories, such as human rights and freedom of the press, the Central Party School could help open the country to a more market economy while lengthening the dominance of communism as the one legitimate form of government.
Jiang was considered a weak ruler when he became general secretary and then president. He was not considered a visionary or man of ideas like Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping; he had not yet established a network of political allies in Beijing; and he had no real connections to the military elite, despite being named chairman of the CMC in 1989.
In fact, Jiang seemed to be in danger of being purged before he even became president. In 1992, Deng conducted his famous “southern tour” in which he traveled around the south part of China calling for faster economic reforms. Many believed that Deng was expressing his disappointment with the speed with which Jiang was implementing Deng’s policies. Jiang sprung into action, issuing a series of documents supporting Deng’s reforms. Behind the scenes, Jiang exploited Deng’s fear of a military threat to his power by playing up the growing influence of the brothers Yang Baibing and Yang Shangkun. Instead of purging Jiang at the 14th NPC, Deng removed Yang Baibing from the military and Yang Shangkun from the presidency. The path was then clear for Jiang to become president.
While Hu spent the rest of the 1990s keeping a low profile and not offending Jiang by trying to grab power too early, he was not totally inactive during this time. He developed a reputation for fighting nepotism, the practice of awarding positions to people based on relationships instead of merit. After he was named to the Politburo Standing Committee in 1992, he implemented antinepotism rules and set standards for promotion based on performance.
Out of fear of appearing soft on the subject, Hu ordered 5 articles to be written condemning bourgeois liberalism — but only 5, no more, and they all had to appear in only 1 newspaper. By limiting the response in this way he could both claim that he moved against liberalism and at the same time stop the criticism from escalating into a broader hard-line movement.
As a nod to Jiang’s legacy, the Congress also made his theory of the Three Represents one of the guiding principles of the CPC, equally as important as Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and Deng Xiaoping Theory, according to the People’s Daily.
Under this interpretation of the “one country, two systems” policy, the 2 systems were only of an economic nature, not a political or civil rights nature. Moreover, HK’s economic system was one that China had gradually been moving toward since Deng’s days.
In October, the government released a report called “Building of Political Democracy in China” which seemed to contradict its own title by stating that “the most important and fundamental principle for developing socialist political democracy in China” was for the CPC to maintain its one-party dominance in the country.
The PRC has had an uneasy relationship with religion, particularly during the CR when thousands of religious buildings and sites were destroyed. The PRC wrote freedom of religion into its constitution in 1978, but the government still destroys unregistered places of worship, according to the US State Department.
The threat posed by Falun Gong has been superseded by organizations in the countryside that are vying with the party for people’s hearts. Some are event the spearhead of a movement to seize power from the Communist Party.
Russia has provided key political support to China, for instance by being the only country to stick by China’s side after Tiananmen. The 2 countries have come a long way since their split in the 1960s.
Hu said during Bush’s November 2005 visit that “the Chinese people are exercising their right of democratic elections and democratic decision-making.”
The PAP is a paramilitary force responsible for tackling domestic threats such as terrorists, separatists, and “large-scale mass incidents” — in other words, large protests.
Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese Communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao only once — in a chapter on etiquette. Today’s high school student will therefore be learning more about capitalism than about Marxism, Leninism, or Maoism.