I will progress from models of how power is distributed and structured in this system into the lives, the networks and the biographies of these and other key figures, looking in particular at the paths they have taken to get where they are, the things they have had to say, the debts they have accrued, and the things they are owed. In many ways, the CPC now operates like a ruthlessly successful MNC, its output GDP figuring like profit for the bottom line of a company, but its values and future profitability under threat from new challenges.
The Party, which came to power as a revolutionary force, lives uncomfortably with its violent past.
For while Xi may well belong to Party royalty because of his father, he was also a man of the people, working in humble positions as a teenager, with a tale of hardship much less contentious than Bo Xilai’s (around whom there were uncomfortable rumors of violent zealousness and excess).
Is the CPC guided by a utopian vision borrowed from regime founder Mao Zedong, striving to push society towards becoming a perfect Socialist heaven on earth? Or are its values pragmatic, national ones — simply aiming for the delivery of certain key outcomes and leaving the grand ideas to a future that will never come? Is the Party simply a sort of evaluative, structural entity that needs no real ideology but just allows space for people to thrive and prosper, or is it something more — embodying a coherent belief system that has real traction emotionally and intellectually over the enormously complex society of modern China.
The world of the super elite in modern China is a strange one. It has a specific geography and ritual, and even its own kind of language. The rhythm of daily life is set out according to meetings of the Politburo, audiences with foreign dignitaries, and liaison with and speeches made to local leaders, along with carefully planned domestic and international visits.
Once elevated to join the 25 members of the Politburo, a Chinese leader and his — it is almost invariably his — spouse will probably never again eat in a restaurant, stay in a hotel, fly in a plane or even drive on a road at the same time as any member of the public.
After the era of strong-man politics, elite leaders have had diminishing political capital. Individuals needed to form into groups promoting common interests rather than aiming to control everything themselves. The main configuration of factions, it is argued, occurred during the Jiang Zemin period from 1989 to 2002.
There is more competition in the power market in China now that Maoist centralization is gone. Sources of power are no longer in one place but dispersed through different institutions and bodies, locally and nationally. Aspiring politicians have to canvas amongst these different sources, recruiting support in order to have a chance to join the club of 3000 high-level cadres outlined above. Zhao Ziyang’s brief tenure as Party secretary from 1987 to 1989 proves that, without the time and the opportunity to build up a network in the ministries, provinces and other key organizations around you, your core support at the center when a major challenge comes can be very shallow. The most enduring figures in modern Chinese politics from 1978 therefore have been people who have managed to create this wide, supportive, enabling network. This “political feudalism” of power lords and serfs is something that will be looked at in depth below.
While the leadership in Beijing, divided at the time because of the student rebellion crisis, did not strongly support him, they also certainly disliked any other possible contenders more. Jiang’s early period in power was unsurprisingly lacklustre, and he was to tell a future interviewer that when the call came for him to come to Beijing to national leadership, he was as astonished as anyone else.
Jiang had luck, but he was at least able to seize this and show remarkable adeptness over the coming decade. In that sense, as those who tried to face Jiang off even in his retirement found out, his achievements while he was in charge of the Party over 13 years, and the wide networks of people who owed him because of their promotion and elevation during this time, were immense and continuing sources of influence. He carried these with him even after stepping down from formal position of power.
Even so, his first period as Party secretary from 2002 was beset with feelings that he was surrounded by those who owed their real allegiance to his predecessor rather than him.
This idea of “belonging” to someone in this way is, at least on the surface, a strange one. The means by which figures are appointed in the Party and government in China is highly opaque. The actual ways in which officials are finally elevated above their peers to win key positions remains largely a mystery.
What we are less clear about in this system is the criterion by which people are given a clear advantage over others, and the ways in which elite conflict and disagreement are brokered.
One of the illuminating issues about Bo Xilai’s case is how it showed that policy innovation and then promotion, when done too overtly and quickly, were read as both threatening and disruptive. This was not the way to do things in modern Chinese politics.
As evidence for this the letter claimed that in his decade as a leader in the Center Wen had never once, in a speech, report or interview, mentioned the name of Mao Zedong.
The whole letter was a forceful reminder that supporting state enterprises and holding foreign cooperation in deep suspicion still had traction within some intellectual communities in the country.
It may be concealed and hard to dig out, but money and profit have become overwhelming features in this system. One of the great political skills found in figures like Xi Jinping is their ability to navigate between the rhetorical positions of the Party in articulating public disdain for this outcome, even at the same time as there is almost universal indulgence in its promotion.
The elite have sometimes acted as though they were above and somehow outside all of this, imperiously directing and commanding, from another world. This is most visible in the ways in which they speak, with their highly controlled and somewhat unnatural love of a bureaucrat “socio-dialect” that is far away from the street language of the rest of the society — a sort of professional “language of power.”
Just as the economy of the PRC over the last 3 decades has been marketized, so have the power structures. There is now a power market, along with power and good ones. Within the elite, people’s stock rises and falls, the capital of their power and influence increases and then declines. In this system, there are investors, stakeholders, those who put some kind of influence and “capital” into it and therefore wish to see a return.
Chinese society is fundamentally rural. Life in rural society is very parochial. Villagers restrict the scope of their daily activities; they do not travel far; they seldom make contact with the outside world; they live solitary lives; they maintain their own isolated social circle. This is a society without strangers, a society based totally on the familiar. Trust in rural societies like these is based not on the importance of contracts but rather, on the dependability of people, people who are so enmeshed in customary norms that they cannot behave in any other way.
Their longevity and the fact that they survived purges, dangers and challenges gifted them with immense political capital. Their direct descendants have sought to translate that into material gain and financial wealth. The claimed behavior of the families of the Immortals as a controlled group gives some flavor to how networks are inherited, built, mobilized, and increasingly, monetized in contemporary PRC.
“His catchphrase of letting a few get rich first” might better be translated as “but first of all, let the family of Deng get rich,” then everyone else can try to follow.
Someone was likely to get rich from this period of liberalization, and it might just as well have been the families of the leaders who were in charge of the Party then, who were, after all, most trusted, and the ones who had sacrificed the most to get where they were.
My generation and the next generation made no contribution to China’s revolution, independence and liberation. Now, some people use their parents’ positions to scoop up hundreds of millions of yuan. Of course, the public is angry. Their anger is justified.
During the Warring States period political power was walled off and rendered invisible, or visible only in the walls and towers that were its outer manifestations. This was true particularly of rulers, who for security and cultivation of an aura of spiritual power were hidden from the outside world. Power was hidden behind not one wall but a whole series; those of the city, the palace district, the palace itself, the court, and finally the inner chamber. Power and prestige were marked by an ability to move ever inward into the holy of holies that was the imperial presence.
Key buildings for Party power in Beijing or elsewhere in the country bear no outward sign of what they are. The mighty Organization Department headquarters in Beijing, for instance, has no sign on it, and other security and strategic departments, for the Party and even sometimes for government, enjoy anonymity. Breaking through the constraints and barriers in this system to get to the truly powerful who sit at its center is an immense challenge, and one that has led Beijing to be called “the lobbying capital” of the world, because of the industry of consultants, fixers and key holders who promise some kind of route into the people whom one needs to talk to.
Li’s real ability was to use her sexual appeal to get senior leaders to leverage business deals. She was also able to gain their trust. Caijing states how “she wore clothes like they were weapons.”
The spite and opposition of enemies might be manageable when the going is good, but once trouble appears then they can be the source of alliances that can topple and end promising careers. Bo’s famously bad relations with Premier Wen had been known for a number of years (Wen famously never visited Chongqing when Bo was Party boss there). But it was only when Bo had been compromised and wounded by the activities of Gu Kailai and Wang Lijun that Wen was able to deliver the final ringing coup de grace, during his press conference at the NPC of 2012 when he indirectly denounced Bo. After that, Bo’s fate was sealed.
Media like Weibo or Weixin, are subject to powerful, state-run search engines that constantly hunt out materials about elite leaders, along with clever ways of disguising this.
Ministers in the British government system have power, but it is minuscule compared to that of a Politburo member in contemporary China. In China, the legal, institutional and social constraints on what they do are much weaker.
Within the carapace of the formal trappings of power — the buildings in which these people worked, the assistants around them, the institutions in which they operated, and the language they had to use — there was still a human. They speak, talk and act in ways that are far removed from others even in their own society.
It is clear that their privileged space in society, and that of the Party they seek to represent, is under threat as never before, and not from some powerful political opponent out in the open, but from the extraordinary forces of social transformation that their own economic policies have unleashed.
Elections in liberal democracies are milked by the media when they reach their culmination for every ounce of drama and excitement. They become like a kind of grand public theater. But the leadership change over 2012 in China was different. There was widespread confusion over precisely how this whole process had been undertaken, and which rules were ostensibly being followed.
For Deng Xiaoping himself at the end of the 1980s, finding a successor, despite all the effort his leadership had put into institutionalizing structures in the Party — making congresses more regular and ensuring that things were run with more orderly rules — proved challenging. Leaders seemed incapable of handing on that political capital they had accrued to their chosen successors.
It might be that Chinese elite leaders of the 1st and 2nd generations were incapable of thinking in terms of a succession. The world ended with them, in their own minds. So thinking seriously about how the party and country functioned once they were gone took up far less time in their minds than it ever should have. Succession in the Soviet Union had been messy, and IN DPRK the whole problem was solved by simply making it an inherited leadership, passed from father to son. Deng’s writ was able to extend to the choice of Hu Jintao, which was determined quite early in the 1990s. Once more this was a wholly new departure, with the idea that a former leader could choose not only a successor, but a leader after the retirement of that successor.
Nowhere in the Constitution, however, does it say precisely how members of congresses then elect members of the Politburo, how many should be on the Politburo, and then how the Standing Committee itself gets elected and how many can serve on this. The Constitution describes a highly abstract process, a framework within which succession is meant to work, with no real detail.
Zeng was never a popular figure. One of the many ironies of modern China is that most of the prospects for political reform may hinge on one of the least popular cadres of the Communist Party.
Zeng’s political objective, however, was, through this “sacrifice,” to see Xi — a person who was tribally and politically far better able to look after his own interests and those of the family and network of his great patron Jiang Zemin — prevail over the main competitor, Li Keqiang. The end result in October 2007, therefore, was to see Xi emerge before Li in the final line-up of the new Standing Committee, despite the fact that in many ways Li was the better qualified, administratively and academically, and the one that seemed much closer to Hu Jintao.
“Unhappy Hu” was a man who, in the words of one HK-published book, feared losing power, feared the military, feared the rights movement, feared the Charter 08 activists, feared Jiang Zemin, and feared the princelings.
His outsider credentials may have made him an attractive proposition at a time when alliances and elite formations were less secure than they became in the 2000s, but as these strengthened, his ability to create coalitions in order to achieve anything more than straightforward economic target goals was hopeless.
Princelings as a term attempts to give definition and clarity to a way in which former Party elite leadership are able to preserve their material and political influences and interests through the careers of their children and grandchildren, usually by their taking up political office.
All one can do is note that provinces are places where many leaders have to spend much of their time, and that their achievements there are very important for their future promotion. In these outposts, they are placed amongst alien networks, somehow having to make meaningful working relations with the people they find there. Such leaders, airlifted there, as it were, into these situations, are often permanently under siege, trying to deal with day-to-day crises and manage these in ways that do not alienate the business, tribal, and political loyalties that are ranged around them, were there before they came into their office and will be there after they leave. For these leaders, embarking on high-risk campaigns to clean out the local stables of vested interest and corruption would make them even more isolated and exposed.
Li is spoken of as someone who is a problem solver, but not a policy initiator — someone who is competent, but not creative. In this area at least, he does have the true qualities of Hu Jintao.
Li Keqiang has started recommending to his colleagues that they read Alexis de Tocqueville’s work because some Chinese academics see it as a warning — de Tocqueville blamed the 1789 French revolution in part on the fact that the bourgeoisie inspired envy among the masses while the nobles elicited scorn.
The book seemed to show that the French revolution was one of rising expectations that could not be met, and in this way had parallels with China, where poverty was largely under control and the real battles in society were from people who simply wanted more of the good things they had already started to get.
The premier’s position, the one that Li Keqiang finally reached, is primarily China’s disaster-manager-in-chief. It is to him that the issues others cannot solve come. Only when these become so overwhelming that intervention from the military or the people’s armed police is necessary does the Party secretary become necessary.
A Politburo in modern China is about creating political balance. It has to show Party-elite consensus across the spectrum of views, institutional interests and special groups in society. People are on it because they represent important constituencies and are supported by them. They are there as people, with their networks and links. But they are also there representing particular political standpoints.
Most commentators regarded the line-up as risk-averse, based on age, and full of people whose outlook was highly conservative. But looking at these 7 men, one had also to remember something about the things around them that were not visible that day: the networks of supporters, of people who had invested in them, supported them, helped them to be where they were in they phoney campaign the Party had been engaged with over the last few months and years. This was never a proper open competition but a process of slow moves, accruals of influence and power, and final decisions on who was able to bring the most into the circle.
Zhang Deijang had studied abroad in North Korea in the late 1970s when it was still regarded as economically more successful than China.
Are you sure of your managerial skills? Have you analyzed the corporate culture differences between the 2 parties? Do you understand how to deal with unions and their relations with management in the country where your target company is based? If you don’t know your target and yourselves well, your ambition really scares me.
Wang has shown great adaptability in his career. Never formally trained as an economist, he started to concentrate most in this area from 1982. He was regarded by his peers as open-minded, hardworking and highly accomplished intellectually.
He had also impressed the former PM of Singapore, LKY. Yew told James Steingberg that Wang was an exceptional talent.
He was very assured and efficient. Wang handled SARS superbly when he was in Hainan. He excelled in coordinating the Beijing Olympics. Li Keqiang may not get the Premiership and the Party is looking for a way to keep Wang on past his 65th birthday until he is 70.
This was the complex situation that Wang was put in charge of in late 2012. He had his work cut out. There were rumors that on his very first day in charge of the CCDI he ordered his key officials to write an outline of what they thought their key responsibilities were with no reference to the Party manuals and rule books.
Through his father, Yu Zhengsheng can be connected to the family of Deng Xiaoping, to whom he is very close, and whom, in many ways, he represents on the 18th Party Congress Standing Committee almost like a board member represents key shareholders in a family business that has now gone public.
That Zhengsheng was able to rebuild his position after a scandal of this magnitude shows great instincts for survival.
Yu’s ability to survive the impact of these shows that, at critical moments, just as it had after his brother’s defection in 1985, focusing on deploying all your political capital and patronage networks to protect your career is a major priority. From this angle at least, Yu’s ability for ensuring that no matter what problems he has come across, their impact in his career has been containable, is irrefutable.
There are 4 kinds here you need to draw a distinction between. The first are those who really want to take part in monitoring the work of the Party and the government, and this is supportive. The second are those who want to monitor but in fact have no experience and are biased, and there is little you can do about that except just let it go. The third are those who just want to attract attention to themselves, which is no big deal as far as I can see. The fourth are those who want to topple the Party from power, and are looking to establish Western-style systems.
Some comrades feel we can sort all our problems out with multi-party democracy. Is that really so? Look at Taiwan. Mainland China is vastly more complex compared to Taiwan. If China was to become a multi-party democracy it would end up as a political battleground, a place where ambitious people run riot for their own power interests, and separatists can carve up the place.
He has gained almost all he has through it — but he and his family have also suffered so much at its hands. In his life story, therefore, he represents in miniature the contradictions of the last 6 decades of Party rule. He comes across as someone who has been a victor and a victim.
Let people continue to grow wealthier, let the Socialism with Chinese characteristics give ideological cover to pragmatic acceptance of the market, and continue the full-on gallop towards the most raw capitalism the world had ever seen.
His hugely respected military and Party background meant that Zhang was solicitous of him, and made sure he was looked after well. It was to prove an excellent future investment. This solicitude over old retired cadres was a feature that occurred again when Zhang had moved to Shandong in the north.
For Liu, personal belief in the message he is carrying is not important. What is important is power. He is not someone who doggedly believes in Marxism and Leninism. His approach to political messaging is simple. On the one hand, a back-to-basics campaign over the years from 2009 relentlessly hammered home news stories of leaders getting close to the people, with voices given to the “masses” that fulsomely express their contentment and happiness.
But the CPC is vast, and nowhere near as united as it seems. It is a collection of many millions of people, promoting and pursuing sometimes highly individual objectives. There are rhetorical and administrative unities, but these often run skin-deep. As an organization, the Party’s flexibility in accommodating these differences has impressed many observers, despite the monochrome image it presents to outsiders.
Despite all these caveats, it is clear from all the figures that they had to meet the expectations of some of their patrons and support networks with real achievements and some kind of evidence that they had ability. That is simply politics, everywhere, every day.
In order to understand this political purpose, we have to look hard at the way these leaders say they see the world — what is their view of the world around them, and how do they define their key challenges, their main objectives and the outcomes they are driving towards? What sort of language do they use to mobilize people in the broader society for the political purpose they are aiming for? The issue of how they define their problems and challenges perhaps give the most insight into all the other questions.
The issue of the last 2 decades was a reliance on US and EU consumption in particular, where there had been a vast export market for China’s goods. But the 2008 crisis had shown this was a feeble and unreliable basis bo build on for long term growth. New sources of growth would now need to be as much from within China.
Creating internal demand is one of the main routes to sustainable fast growth. In big countries, internal demand is a key part of GDP growth. In the US and India, it accounts for 92% and 88% of GDP growth. In China it is 72.8%.
Industrialization in developed countries took 200 years, and meant that after the initial phase there was time to deal with the negative outcomes, from environmental degradation and resource depletion to social issues.
For Liu, propaganda create unity of purpose. Thought work is important. He even believes that propaganda is kind of a science.
The greatest networks to go for in contemporary China are elite support and business. The political rationale for Xi is that he alone combined the full range of networks. Family and provincial links are helpful. Least influential are intellectual and military network support. The CPC is like a partly family-run business on this model.
The Hu response to the inability to build consensus in the Party on these 3 tough issues listed was to use immense amounts of repression: through Stage agents; through blocking avenues to expressing opposition; and through creating an oddly contradictory atmosphere in which, on the one hand, society, social media and the economy were riddled by evidence of dynamic change, and yet on the other the “fiefdom” of the political elite at the center was increasingly isolated and reliant on a vast apparatus of control. The price tag for this was to exceed that for national defense. By 2012, China was spending $5B more a year on protecting it from itself than on safeguarding itself against the aggressive intent of outsiders.
From this angle, a merit-based leadership succession free of the intervention of powerful figures and their patronage networks was the ideal outcome. But in this endeavor, Hu failed. The heavy involvement of his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, in the 2012 lineup showed that individual power still trumped process. The immensely capable Hu protege, Li Keqiang, was beaten into second place finally by a man who was in many ways, at least on paper, far less able than he — Xi Jinping. The reason for this is simple — the support of Jiang Zemin.
Hu was always in Jiang’s shadow, even after having secured a more open space for his leadership after 2007. Part of the problem here was that Jiang had seniority, and was accorded second rank in official listings even after his ostensible retirement as Party secretary in 2002. The second issue was Hu’s poor status with the military. Before becoming vice chair of the central military commission in 1997, Hu had no formal links with the PLA at all. He had never served as a soldier, nor worked as assistant to any major army figure, and had no family links into this network. And while the PLA were in no way the political power block they had once been in the Maoist period, they were still significant and needed someone who at least showed they were able to fight their corner and understand their needs. Hu’s final great problem was that he was the poorest communicator ever to have been leader of the PRC, and his evident reticence and dislike of any show of public emotion, excitement or engagement became a major political liability, particularly in moments of crisis when China needed a leader’s voice to speak on its behalf.
Too many owed him debts, respect and allegiance in his long career before. Even if he wanted to, he was not to be so easily left alone.
A more modernist way of looking at him is as a sort of retired chairman of the board of directors of a company, in which he still holds a significant share. The CCP has some striking similarities to a company that is directed at seeking shareholder profit. It was Bo Xilai’s threat to the networks around Jiang that he had built up so painstakingly over the years that perhaps explains why Jiang was reportedly so supportive of his complete, quick dismissal from all positions of influence.
One of the striking issues over the leadership transition process was that there seemed to be no real debate about policy. The Party corporately wanted to present an outward image of utter unity, calmness and continuity.
In particular he had urged cadres not to live on their achievements in the past, indulging themselves and becoming complacent. A keen user of his iPad, Wang had been active in engaging, through new social media, with the opinions and ideas posted on the internet.
But as the assessment of Hu Jintao’s period in office already given made clear, this amount of stress on social management could be interpreted as evidence of the general inability of the leading politicians to make though decisions about how best to govern a society with such a dynamic and fast-changing economy in a more efficient way that avoided all this administrative intervention. In many ways, China in the late Hu era looked like a country with a modern economy that was still wrestling with structures of governance and administration borrowed from the Soviet Union.
Perhaps the most powerful of Wang’s statements, and the one that reached sharply towards Bo, was the idea that the Party in and of itself had no God-given right to power. It could not, just by being the Party, bring benefits and happiness to people. The idea of power being the Party’s by right rather than being earned was a subversive one. In Wang’s framework, the Party had to base its legitimacy on continuing performance, social relevancy, efficiency and public support. All was based on performance, and all could be taken away if the Party failed in this.
Wang Yang was placing his finger on one of the most sensitive issues for the contemporary CPC — that it was forever seeking elites to lead it, and that those elites had a habit of being formed around the core founding fathers and their direct family networks. How could a modern party, presiding over such a vast and fast-changing economy, rely on this sort of semi-monarchic system?
The idea of a ballot then talks is perhaps the key here. Casting a vote in a secret ballot is only halfway to getting someone elected. There also have to be “discussions.” And the room for these “discussions,” in which delegates were debated and harmoniously helped to reach the right conclusion, was at the heart of the transitional leadership process from 2011 onwards.
What was most striking when looking at the key contenders for promotion before the fall of Bo was how small the pool of eligible people was. Those that had the relevant senior provincial and national ministerial leadership expertise, and then had strong enough patronage and support links in the Party and government, were probably no more than a dozen.
The need for Roman Catholics to obey the higher authority of the pope in Rome, and the recognition, set out by Saint Augustine over 1,500 years before, of an allegiance to the State only in material terms, but to the Church in spiritual ones, was something the Party never accepted, particular in its more zealously atheistic period up to the early 1980s. Even in reform China, however, the Catholic Church was regarded with suspicion, and an indigenous Patriotic Catholic Church was set up which stood as a counterweight to the banned Roman one, appointing its own priests and bishops.
There was respect in some circles of the CPC for the longevity of the Church, its ideological cohesiveness and its moral standing. These were things the CPC itself wished to emulate. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Party School thinkers had studied the leadership and organization of the Church, seeking ideas for what they might be able to use in their own battle to survive longer than the minuscule 74 years that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had managed. “Each of these unelected elites relies on an historical mandate to exclusive powers. One claims power in the name of God, the other in the name of the proletariat. And both meet at times of acute crisis.”
How can we avoid seeking what we wish to find, rather than seeing what is actually clearly before our eyes? That will be the task set out in the rest of this book. And to achieve that, we have to come down to the level of the personal, of the individual life stories and inner dynamics of people who are often working very hard to avoid any details about their personalities or biographies beyond the barest outlines being known at all.
Her observation of the delegates was telling. Evidently, from the way they dressed and behaved they were extremely wealthy. While they were supposed drawn from all walks of life, assembled to create the idea that they were truly representative of a diverse society and able to reflect its wishes in selecting a new elite that they would have input on deciding (an idea that is perhaps highly questionable, seeing as it was probably 99% decided weeks before the meeting had even been called), in many ways they looked, spoke and even smelled of wealth and the power that wealth was able to accrue in modern China.
The Politburo somehow had to distill representatives of all these into one functioning body, demonstrating that it had the right to say it was truly representative of the people and the masses, and that it was hearing, listening to and learning from them. But there were dissenting voices who argued for a darker interpretation — that the Politburo was a brute declaration of raw power, that the very process by which the 18th Congress had been decided was explicit evidence of this raw power. In the end its membership consisted of a group of people who had managed to build significant enough alliances in their areas of society and politics to be able to win a seat and beat off potential opponents.
Power not only corrupts but reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary; to hide traits that might make others reluctant to give him power, to hide also what he wants to do with power; if men realized the traits or realized the aims they might refuse to give him what he wants. But as a man obtains more power, camouflage is less necessary. The curtain begins to rise. The revealing begins.
The career of Hu Jintao is illustrative here. In many ways, he never ceased to conceal, leaving many who observed him closely as confused about him at the end of his time as they were when he started. The criticisms of him was that for a decade at the top, he had done nothing and ventured nothing. Under him China had grown rich and complacent, and that was all. Hu’s continuous concealment of his personal opinions and vision despite being, at least in terms of formal positions, the most powerful man in the country, was puzzling. Perhaps this betrayed the fact that he never really had much secure power to begin with. He never had the space truly to reveal himself, and was surrounded by constraints and restrictions on his action. The modern role of the Party itself, and how it acts, are also important to factor in here. It has become an “organizational emperor,” increasingly restricting the space for individual politicians to make any real difference.
The people he had brought before the world as the new elite of elites of the political leadership in China were figures who had, institutionally and politically, been extremely good in one specific area, and that was to remain as little known as possible.
Zhao Gaoli was a taciturn apparatchik from the State oil industry whose greatest claim to fame was succeeding in pumping out immense levels of GDP growth wherever he had been, and who in his few public comment had boasted of the need to say less and do more.
But they too also offer insights into the nature of the remarkable world in which they live through the deals they have had to make, the debts they have accrued and the networks they had built around them: and at the core of this the lives they have lived and the ideals they have tried — or, more often than not, compromised over and failed — to live up to.The more one stares at these 7 figures, and sees them as representative and symbolic figures that have emerged from a process in which so much has had to be concealed and controlled, the more one can build out from them to a whole society around them.
Without the breadth of economic and personnel management challenges and political experiences that Xi got in his provincial career, he would not have been eligible for elite leadership later. The simple fact is that from the 1980s the road to the highest levels of Party leadership in Beijing lay through the provinces. Careers of people who had largely risen while working solely in Beijing like Wen Jiabao were the exceptions that proved the rule.
Even so, reports of Xi saying early in his career, and then repeating it often, that “if you want to get rich, don’t go into politics.”
As we will see with this younger generation of leaders, this trend to total clampdown on matters around their private lives is in many respects worsening. The family is a source of strength, but also, as Bo’s case proves, a source of attack and potential weakness, and that risk means that information about it must be kept to the minimum.
Modern Chinese leaders live in a world in which almost everything is political. Their every act is calculated, the subject of regimes of assessment and control. In their march towards the center of this power terrain the zones of freedom and release from this sort of restraint and control dwindle to the point they disappear. For Xi, the question of his having any kinds of friendship acquired in a life before politics, of intimacies and personal interests that have endured and transcend this later political existence, is a complex one.
The second is his management of crisis. Unlike Xi, he has managed far tougher and more contentious provinces — Liaoning and Henan. Both threw difficult challenges at him. He allow us to understand how important the management of crises is in contemporary Chinese politics and society, but also what the role of these are and how they occur.
Party secretaries are often outsiders. They come on their way from somewhere, hoping if they do well to head somewhere else. This is a staging post on their career. The one thing they don’t want is a calamity to occur that will mark their future careers and means their patrons and their networks weaken on them when promotion opportunities come. In such an environment, proactive policies are less important than management and crisis control. That there will almost always be crises because of the dynamism and fast change occurring economically in the society around them is unavoidable.
Chinese leaders are often described as having a strong sense of history. Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin insistently repeated the mantra of “5,000 years of civilization.” This means they are aware of the counter-history, where dynasties were undone by local unrest that got out of control, contaminating the whole body politic and ending up toppling governments nationally.
Management of unrest has been impeded by the simple fact that in the cadre evaluation system, by which officials get promoted or demoted, economic growth is a hard target and something that they have to succeed at, but providing social cohesion is a “soft” and less important one. For ambitious officials, therefore, unrest is an impediment to growth, and has to be stopped, no matter by what means, even if that entails use of State violence.
Li Keqiang’s record of crisis management is both a strength and a weakness. One criticism of him is that he has no real creativity, and no particular originality. He is a problem solver and manager of thorny issues.
Firstly, it showed collusion between local authority and business interests, and a lack of scruple about how they protected each other. Secondly, it showed that the initial response by officials when the scandal became public was denial, cover-up and harassment. Thirdly, it showed the lack of any proper system of accountability and crisis management.