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Following the Leader: Ruling China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping
Following the Leader: Ruling China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping
Following the Leader: Ruling China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping
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Following the Leader: Ruling China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping

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With unique access to Chinese leaders at all levels of the party and government, best-selling author David M. Lampton tells the story of China’s political elites from their own perspectives. Based on over five hundred interviews, Following the Leader offers a rare glimpse into how the attitudes and ideas of those at the top have evolved over the past four decades. Here China’s rulers explain their strategies and ideas for moving the nation forward, share their reflections on matters of leadership and policy, and discuss the challenges that keep them awake at night.

As the Chinese Communist Party installs its new president, Xi Jinping, for a presumably ten-year term, questions abound. How will the country move forward as its explosive rate of economic growth begins to slow? How does it plan to deal with domestic and international calls for political reform and to cope with an aging population, not to mention an increasingly fragmented bureaucracy and society? In this insightful book we learn how China’s leaders see the nation’s political future, as well as about its global strategic influence.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 9, 2019
ISBN9780520974296
Following the Leader: Ruling China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping
Author

David M. Lampton

David M. Lampton is Oksenberg-Rohlen Fellow at The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He is affiliated with the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. He also is Professor Emeritus and former director of China Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

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    Following the Leader - David M. Lampton

    Following the Leader

    A

    BOOK

    The Philip E. Lilienthal imprint

    honors special books

    in commemoration of a man whose work

    at University of California Press from 1954 to 1979

    was marked by dedication to young authors

    and to high standards in the field of Asian Studies.

    Friends, family, authors, and foundations have together

    endowed the Lilienthal Fund, which enables UC Press

    to publish under this imprint selected books

    in a way that reflects the taste and judgment

    of a great and beloved editor.

    The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Philip E. Lilienthal Asian Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Sally Lilienthal.

    Following the Leader

    Ruling China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping

    David M. Lampton

    with a new Preface by the author

    UC Logo

    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

    University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

    University of California Press

    Oakland, California

    © 2014, 2019 by The Regents of the University of California

    ISBN 978-0-520-30347-8 (paper)

    ISBN 978-0-520-97429-6 (ebook)

    The Library of Congress has cataloged an earlier edition of this book as follows:

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Lampton, David M.

    Following the leader : ruling China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping / David M. Lampton.

    pagescm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-520-28121-9 (cloth : alk. paper) —

    ISBN 978-0-520-95739-8 (e-book)

    1. China—Politics and government—1976–2002. 2. China—Politics and government—21st century. 3. Political leadership—China. 4. Political culture—China.I. Title.

    JQ1516.L36 2013

    320.951—dc23

    2013032715

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    28  27  26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19

    10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

    To Noah Joseph and Sadie Mae Lampton, who will live with and shape this century’s relations with China

    Contents

    List of Illustrations and Tables

    Preface

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction

    1. Evolution in the Revolution

    PART ONE. CHINA, A WIDE-ANGLE VIEW

    2. Governance and Leadership

    3. Policy Making

    4. The World

    PART TWO. CHINA, AN UP-CLOSE VIEW

    5. Nightmares

    6. Soldiers and Civilians

    7. Negotiation Chinese Style

    Conclusion: Driving beyond the Headlights

    Appendix: The Interviews and Interviewing in China

    Notes

    Index

    Illustrations and Tables

    FIGURES

    1. Budgeted national defense expenditure, 1978–2011

    2. Untethered pluralization

    3. Walker’s model of chains of command in communist China

    4. Nationality of interviewees

    5. Rank of PRC and HK interviewees

    6. Rank of Taiwan interviewees

    7. Domain of PRC and HK interviewees

    8. Domain of Taiwan interviewees

    9. Status of PRC and HK interviewees

    10. Status of Taiwan interviewees

    11. Gender of PRC and HK interviewees

    12. Gender of Taiwan interviewees

    TABLES

    1. China’s Comparative Starting Point, 1980

    2. Comparative Indicators of China’s Circumstances in 2010

    Preface

    This book’s title, Following the Leader, means to convey four ideas, the first being that this volume is about the period following the Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong, running from Deng Xiaoping to the dawn of the Xi Jinping era. Second, following the leader conveys the fact that Deng Xiaoping’s two handpicked successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, for the most part hewed to the domestic and foreign policy lines of Deng. The third meaning of the phrase concerns the character of Chinese political culture—the centrality of the leader to Chinese political life. And the final point relates to, but is separate from, the previous one. As in the child’s game of follow-the-leader, it is worth observing the capacity of societies to follow leaders down constructive highways or into unproductive cul-de-sacs.

    This book’s first edition was finished in spring 2013, just as Xi Jinping completed the protracted process of winning his trifecta of posts as general secretary of the party, state president, and commander in chief, as Xi has come to call himself (chairman of the Central Military Commission). At the moment of this book’s initial publication, all that could be said confidently concerning the era beyond Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao was that Xi Jinping’s evolution remains to be seen (68). Given Xi’s background as a son of Deng Xiaoping stalwart Xi Zhongxun, his previous leadership positions in China’s coastal provinces with deep connections to the West, and his family’s privations during the Cultural Revolution, there was hope (in some quarters, the expectation) that Xi would carry on the substance and the spirit of the reforms that his father initiated with Deng Xiaoping. Events have developed far differently. From the vantage point of 2018, China is no longer in the reform era.

    Being about governance, leadership, and foreign policy in the reform era, this book sketches four scenarios for China’s future development from the perspective of 2013, saying, All of these scenarios are possible (77). The first was political retrogression, strengthened authoritarianism, and political and economic backsliding. The second possibility was the rise of a transformational leader taking China rapidly in the direction of liberalism or authoritarianism—more likely than not, authoritarianism. The third possible future path was continuation of the incremental reform process underway since 1977, progressively embedding Chinese governance in law, norm-based behavior, responsiveness to increasingly numerous and empowered social forces, making the market an increasingly decisive allocator of resources, and growing compatibility with global institutions and practices of the post–World War II international system. A final, dangerous possibility was that China’s center—any center—could not hold, given the growing social pluralism, leading to an increasingly uncontrolled China internally and externally (77). Looking back on these hypothesized scenarios, the problematic possibilities outnumbered the constructive one by a ratio of three to one, at least from this Westerner’s perspective.

    Now, five years after the publication of the first edition, we see with increasing clarity the direction in which developments have moved, and continue to move, as of this writing. Xi did not seize the opportunity of his impressive consolidation of power during his first term in office (2012/13–2017/18) to push reform further along the trajectory charted by his three post-Mao predecessors. Au contraire, President Xi and his associates have strengthened Leninist internal governance methods and assertive foreign policy behavior. As if to confirm these developments, Xi and his acolytes refer to this period as the New EraXi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. Xi is not the steward and promoter of Deng-style reform in this new epoch—that is the vision of others. Instead, he is the architect of the China Dream and the Rejuvenation of the Great Chinese Nation. As it has turned out, Following the Leader is about the reform era that waned shortly after its publication. This volume, therefore, provides the baseline against which to measure how much Xi has departed from previous trends and to understand how and why that has happened. Xi’s ascendance reminds us that, as the wave of nationalistic and populist leaders elsewhere in the world also attests, leaders count.

    We now can say at least two things that could not be said when Following the Leader initially appeared. First, this book covers almost the entire reform era, starting with Deng Xiaoping’s ascendance to primacy in 1977–1978 and ending with Xi Jinping’s assumption and progressive consolidation of power coming out of the party and state meetings of late 2012 and early 2013. Xi further solidified his strongman rule in the process of winning a second term (2017/18–2022/23), with an option to serve longer, should he so decide—the end of term limits has come to serve as an indicator of the hit that gradually evolving norm-based governance has suffered since Xi mounted the rostrum (shang tai).

    Central features of the reform era included a steadily expanding market and non-state sector; a Chinese Communist Party not pushing its way into the foreground; strengthening norms governing leadership competition and succession; consensus-style decision making within the political elite; diffusing authority and resources and more prominence for civil society; and a foreign policy generally seeking to avoid conflict with others. Admittedly, there were important interruptions in these trends during the reform era, notably June 4, 1989, but the arc of history generally was bending in these directions. It also is true that reform was slowing and that it took some steps backward before Xi Jinping came to power. The rate of reform had slowed considerably under Hu Jintao, reflecting the facts that there had been so much change to digest coming out of the Jiang Zemin era, the Chinese citizenry was beginning to feel its national muscles after the progress of preceding decades, and there were new empowered interest groups that resisted further change. All this notwithstanding, in his first and now second term, Xi has moved China progressively farther from the reform agenda described above.

    And, second, we now can say that the global context has changed dramatically, reflecting China’s own actions abroad, the behavior of others (not least the United States), a shift in global power relationships, the widespread depreciation of expertise in many corners of the world, and mounting transnational challenges, such as climate change and immigration. Specific salient aspects of the international environment that have changed include: (1) The tremendous economic and credibility hit that the United States took in the 2008–2009 global financial crisis and its aftermath. This created an unanticipated opportunity for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to move rapidly toward the center of the global stage. (2) This window of opportunity for the PRC has been opened further by the Trump administration, which has alienated Washington from its historic bases of support in the international system, whether those supports be allies, multilateral institutions and arrangements, or the international free-trade system itself. (3) Beijing made maximum use of its 2001 World Trade Organization (WTO) entry and domestic economic reform to enhance its global economic position. China has been deploying its growing economic muscle on a worldwide basis, as I predicted in The Three Faces of Chinese Power: Might, Money, and Minds (University of California Press, 2008). (4) The rise of populism and nationalism around the world has made Xi Jinping’s authoritarian push seem less exceptional than it otherwise would have appeared. (5) The rise of computing power, artificial intelligence, and surveillance technologies have made possible the construction of infrastructure for social control that even Mao Zedong could not have contemplated. And (6), Beijing’s increasing concern that reunification with Taiwan is a receding horizon has led Xi to conclude that more muscle needs to be applied to Taipei if its drift toward autonomy is to be stanched. Moderating policy on Taiwan was midwife to Sino-American normalization in the 1970s; Beijing’s stiffening policy with respect to the island and U.S. pushback could presage growing conflict.

    Even prior to the Trump administration, the Obama administration had begun to change the strategic orientation of the United States toward the PRC with the late-2011 announcement of its Pivot to Asia. Predictably, this further energized negative domestic and foreign policy impulses within the PRC, with a new Chinese president needing to demonstrate that he was a vigorous guardian of China’s interests, sovereignty claims, and global stature. PRC reactions (and opportunistic moves initiated by Beijing, such as those in the South China Sea) fed pugilistic and confrontational impulses in the West, particularly Washington. The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (released in December 2017) had an expansive definition of the threat Beijing (and Moscow) posed to the American homeland and global interests: China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity. They are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.

    The core theme of Following the Leader is that China’s reform era witnessed three massive internal changes, in addition to integration into the global economy. The first was the rise of progressively less dominant leaders who were transactional in character and, relatively speaking, consensus seekers by disposition. The second macro-trend was the emergence of a society increasingly pluralistic, urban, and complex, a polity moving toward a more interest-group form of politics. And finally, the state-society balance was gradually shifting, affording civic society and individuals more opportunities to articulate their interests and aspirations. The middle class was (and is) growing rapidly. As long as these plausibly seemed to be the dominant trends in China, as they generally were in the period from Deng to Hu, then a policy by outside powers of patiently engaging the PRC and giving it space to evolve in its distinctive but complementary fashion made sense.

    But, verifying the old saw that history is one damn thing after the next, it was precisely these three massive internal changes that worried Xi and his allies. Further, the tsunami of societal upheaval abroad in the period just before Xi took over—the Color Revolutions and the Arab Spring—became the sum of all his fears, as were the growing number of domestic mass incidents. In short, the trends and hopes that gave staying power to engagement in the United States caused progressively more angst in China’s Xi-dominated elite.

    One of Xi’s first acts was to create a National Security Commission (2013/14) primarily aimed at stopping internal subversion from sources inside and outside of the PRC. Also, early in his first term, Xi launched a still-ongoing anti-corruption campaign that has felled large numbers of political opponents in the party-state, military, and locality networks. This campaign had the effect of empowering the old Leninist standby institutions of the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of State Security, and the Propaganda Department and its appendages, such as the mass media and the Ministry of Education. Xi has placed ever more emphasis on political indoctrination and media tightening, particularly evident on university campuses and in fractious areas, such as the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in China’s West. Predictably, given the above trends, the space for civic organizations, foreign and domestic, has been constrained by many things, including the 2016 NGO Law. All this was distilled in a single clause in Xi Jinping’s extended remarks at the Nineteenth Party Congress of October 2017—the party leads everything.

    These developments give rise to several very large questions, the most consequential of which is: Are the key changes of the reform era identified in Following the Leader (social pluralization, the shifting state-society balance, and less dominant leaders) underlying master trends that eventually will reassert themselves? Put differently, is the era of Xi an interlude or a long-term condition? My guess is that, unwelcome as contemporary developments may be, they can persist longer than one might like to think. But China’s leaders never assume stability—neither should outside observers.

    One emerging development that augments the capacity of the authoritarian direction to persist is the degree to which the regime has been able to harness the new tools of social media and societal monitoring to enhance its capacity for control. Social accounting, the utilization of big-data tools to monitor, compile, and analyze individual-level data and activity in real time, is an instrument of social control about which previous authoritarians could only dream. All this notwithstanding, over time, I expect the master trends of pluralization, shifting state-society balance, and less dominant leaders to reassert themselves. The question for the interim is: With what costs to China and the world before that day arrives?

    A second large issue concerns one’s understandings of China’s political culture(s), the kinds of orientations that a society’s people embrace with respect to trust in one another, the value of compromise, and their own individual status with respect to the state. Do most of China’s people tend toward conceiving of themselves as subjects or citizens? Do they aspire to be participants? Or, as I believe to be the case, do different segments of the citizenry hold different orientations with respect to these issues? And people’s views can oscillate as the domestic and foreign contexts change.

    For a long time in American popular and scholarly discourse, the politically correct answer to the issue of political culture has been universalistic in character—Of course, all people have the same underlying yearning for freedom, respect, self-actualization, and participation. In the end, I believe this is true, as Inglehart and Welzel document in their massive study entitled Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence. But often overlooked is Inglehart and Welzel’s accompanying caveat that under stress, retrogression is possible; older forms of more authoritarian and paternalistic behavior and governance can reassert themselves. So the questions are: How far might the current trend in China go, and how long will it last? How long will the Chinese people follow this leader or others in his mold? Will the intellectual and societal children of the reform era strongly assert themselves? And if they do, under what conditions? Alternatively, will they hunker down for a very long haul, or even positively embrace a muscular Chinese state in an uncertain world—a move toward state socialism (or state capitalism), perhaps in extreme forms?

    And a final big question mark concerning the PRC’s future trajectory is the character of its interactions with the outside world, particularly the United States. As Lewis Coser long ago told us in his The Functions of Social Conflict, in-groups often define themselves by whom they are against, the out-group. The more plausibly hostile the perceived intent and capabilities of the out-group are, the more will individuals within the in-group subordinate themselves to the need for overall social solidarity in the face of threat. The more Chinese leaders can credibly paint a picture of external hostility to the PRC’s economic, security, and status aspirations by the United States and others, the more difficult it will become to anticipate a reassertion of a liberalizing trend domestically within the Middle Kingdom. And, of course, PRC expressions of wariness of U.S. intentions produce hostility in America. The fact that in recent years about half of the U.S. and Chinese populations have viewed each other as threats (imprecise as that category is) does not augur well for future interactions.

    In the context of mounting Sino-American trade friction evident as of this writing (in December 2018) and of what can only be described as rapidly growing strategic antagonism and an accelerating arms race in all domains (space, cyber, maritime, air, and land), one would expect that defensiveness, assertiveness, and polarization are likely to characterize Beijing’s relations with Washington and others. The antagonisms of the security communities in both America and the PRC draw strength from each other. China, as noted in chapter 6, is building a military-industrial complex with many of the same dynamics and consequences as its counterpart complex in America.

    When Following the Leader first appeared, China seemed to be on a course in which succession was becoming progressively more norm-based and predictable, though not fully institutionalized or embedded in meaningful constitutional constraint. When talking about Xi’s then just-accomplished assumption of power in the book’s conclusion, I said, Imagine, for instance, that Xi Jinping had become incapacitated in the period leading up to his ascension to power in 2012–13: What was ‘Plan B’? There was none, and one is sobered by the possibilities (221–22). Now, with Xi’s dramatic weakening of the heretofore evolving succession norms by his ending of term limits at the Thirteenth National People’s Congress of March 2018, one can have even less confidence that the most basic function of a stable political system can be performed uneventfully—succession.

    This preface ends with the same question and two observations about prospects for U.S.-China relations that the first edition concluded with in 2013. However, as this edition goes to press, there is less reason for optimism than when this book first appeared. The question was, and remains: Will the centripetal forces of interdependence . . . prove stronger than the combined forces of different philosophical starting points, often divergent national interests, distinctive national narratives, and increasingly fragmented societies and polities? (232). The first observation was, and remains: Crude external pressure applied to accelerate internal change in China and crude external pressure designed to produce a more congenial PRC foreign policy generally backfire. And the second observation was, and remains: Excessive accommodation to PRC demands feeds an image in Beijing of weakness in the outside world that, itself, invites further attempts to push (232).

    In the current era of Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, both nations are following their leaders down dangerous roads. Xi is leading China in unsettling directions internally and externally, and the American response, in the era of Donald Trump, reinforces those patterns of PRC behavior, as it creates problems in many other directions. In 2013, Following the Leader concluded by saying that China’s greatest challenges were to manage pluralism constructively and to resist the siren song of nationalism. Now we can say that both China and the United States face these twin challenges.

    David M. Lampton

    Washington, D.C.

    December 2018

    Acknowledgments

    This book represents many things, not least of which is the accumulation of conversations and assistance I have received from people throughout Greater China since my residence in Hong Kong in 1972–73. I wish, therefore, to acknowledge the literally thousands of Chinese people who have given their time, shared their knowledge, and expended their energy to educate me over the years. I cannot thank them individually, but they know who they are and the gratitude I feel.

    No person is an intellectual island, and the tides and waves of many great teachers and colleagues have defined my shores, not least those from Stanford University, Ohio State University, the Kettering Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Committee on United States-China Relations, and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). I particularly want to thank one of my dearest and most respected colleagues, Ms. Jan Berris, vice president of the National Committee on United States-China Relations. In addition to all she has taught me about China and working with others, she made available to me her monumental collection of meeting notes that I used when writing about the early years following the epoch-changing visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) by President Richard Nixon in 1972.

    In undertaking this project I have benefited from the research assistance of several very talented PhD students at SAIS—individuals who have helped me install and utilize the data management system that has permitted me to exploit the large number of interviews that are central to this volume’s architecture and informational base. In addition, they have helped me think through concepts and have undertaken fact checking: David Bulman, Lily Chen, Eric Hagt, Selina Ho, Amanda Kerrigan, and Tabitha Mallory have my sincere appreciation and admiration. To Dr. Thomas Fingar at Stanford University, I express my thanks for his comments on the entire manuscript, as well as his friendship over our careers. On the editing front, I owe an enormous personal debt to my editor of long standing, Krista Forsgren. At the University of California Press, Senior Editor Reed Malcolm has given me much-valued substantive advice over the years, not least his assistance and guidance with this volume. I also wish to thank Dore Brown, project editor, for her careful and expeditious shepherding of the manuscript through the production process. To Elisabeth Magnus I wish to express my gratitude for her superb copy editing, and Susan Stone has my thanks for preparing the index. Moreover, the staff of UC Press have been most helpful, particularly Editorial Assistant Stacy Eisenstark. Finally, to the anonymous reviewers who assessed the manuscript for the Press, I express my thanks for their suggestions for revisions and corrections that improved the manuscript.

    For providing me the resources, time, and productive environment in which to execute the research and writing embodied in this volume, I express my appreciation to several individuals and organizations. Gratefully, I acknowledge the Rockefeller Foundation and its Bellagio Center for providing me a Residency at Villa Serbelloni on Lake Como in northern Italy. There I was free to do nothing but write and interact with a group of creative scholars and artists from around the world in mid-2011. I thank the Foundation and the Center’s managing director, Ms. Pilar Palacia, as well as the Center’s attentive and excellent staff, for affording me an unparalleled creative environment in which to work.

    At SAIS, I have been blessed not only with the graduate students mentioned above but also with a school administration and other colleagues that have been most supportive of my work. I wish to particularly thank former dean Jessica Einhorn, our senior associate dean for finance and administration, Mr. Myron Kunka, and our current dean, Vali Nasr, for their moral and material support of my work. To the Johns Hopkins University and its president, Ron Daniels, and then provost Lloyd Minor, I wish to express my thanks for the ongoing research support provided as part of my designation as a Gilman Scholar. To my colleague Zhaojin Ji, I express my gratitude for her help throughout the process of producing this book. Finally, I must thank the National Bureau of Asian Research and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for providing resources connected to the Scalapino Prize of 2010, resources that have greatly facilitated this project and others.

    Turning to family, the bedrock upon which my lifetime pursuits have been built, I want to express the love and gratitude I feel for my wife, Susan, and for her support over the forty-five years of our married life. I also want to thank my mother, Mary Jane Lampton, who passed away in April 2012—she and my father, Jack W. Lampton, to whom she was married for nearly seventy-four years, gave me the example of values and hard work that I have tried to emulate. To conclude, this book is dedicated to our grandchildren, Noah Joseph and Sadie Mae Lampton. As the world evolves, may it present them with a U.S.-China relationship that makes a better twenty-first century possible.

    David M. Lampton

    Washington, D.C.

    September, 2013

    Introduction

    "Mao was great because he made China unified/independent. Deng Xiaoping opened China. And Jiang Zemin, he let the Chinese people have a normal life. Before, when I was young, my folks told me not to make political mistakes. Now I can tell my kids to learn in school well and they can be millionaires. The environment is now free, more relaxing. People now like to go see Titanic [the movie], and one lady saw it nine times and cried every time. Enjoy everyday life, this is our new idea. Before we had to talk about contributing to the masses. But we came to the world to enjoy our short lives. A normal life is very important for Chinese. In the Cultural Revolution I was a Red Guard, and my daughter was surprised and said I had been a bandit. In my house, growing up, before every meal, before a picture on the wall of Mao [Zedong], we recited quotations from Mao. Now it seems funny to have done such stupid things."

    —Secretary-general of a special event, July 2003, Beijing

    Based on 558 interviews with Chinese leaders, on case studies, and on innumerable documents, this book humanizes China’s extraordinary course of development since Deng Xiaoping’s 1977 return to power, examining domestic politics, foreign relations, natural and manmade disasters, civil-military relations, and the Chinese style of negotiating. This volume reveals the human frustrations China’s leaders feel, the nightmares disturbing their sleep, and the sheer scale of the challenges they face. Challenges run the gamut from meeting rising political expectations and keeping the economic juggernaut going, to providing citizens breathable air and potable water and reassuring an apprehensive world that Beijing’s growing power is not a threat. In the second decade of the new millennium, China is in a far different political space than it was in 1977. Today, with weaker leaders, an increasingly fragmented society and bureaucracy, and empowered societal and interest groups, bringing a lagging political system into increasing harmony with a changed society is the central challenge.

    China’s unparalleled growth and societal change since 1977 poses a vital question: Will the Chinese government be able to control its own internal and external behavior in the years ahead? If not, major trouble lies ahead for China and for the world. Part of the answer to this question of whether control will continue to be maintained lies in the types of leaders China has had and will produce. What vision do China’s leaders convey to their people and the world, and how might that change? How will these leaders interact with the ever more complex and pluralistic society they seek to govern? Will China’s pluralism become progressively more anchored in institutions, laws, regulations, and ethical norms that are increasingly shared worldwide?

    Leaders count in world affairs. Their behaviors are grounded in a complex and ever changing combination of personal and group experience, domestic economic/social/political forces, institutional structures, international regimes, external pressures, and luck. Since leaders count in explaining the behavior of states, one must inquire into the specific motivations, capacities, and perceptions of individual leaders to anticipate future behavior. General theorizing is inadequate. China’s leaders face internal governance tasks of such magnitude and complexity that they will be preoccupied for a long time. Present and future PRC leaders are, and will remain, ambivalent about assuming international burdens and responsibilities that many outsiders consider essential. These leaders are torn between the attraction of gaining greater global status and protecting the PRC’s growing world-wide interests and the knowledge that their country remains poor and their grip on power tenuous. As China’s citizens, companies, and other organizations expand their global reach, Beijing will find it increasingly difficult to control their myriad activities.

    Since the early 1970s, how have Chinese leaders at all levels evolved their thinking about governing their own nation and dealing with the outside world? To what extent is the Chinese political system different than it was when Deng Xiaoping returned to the national and international stages in July 1977—the date at which I reckon the reform era began?¹ This book allows Chinese leaders to speak for themselves.

    However, this book has broader purposes than simply to humanize China’s extraordinary course of development—it presents an evolutionary picture, concretely specifying changes and continuities and revealing the reality, inasmuch as possible, of working in the often frustrating Chinese system. This work is a selective history of challenges confronting contemporary PRC leaders, illustrated with case studies and individual-level data. It defines in both graphic and theoretical terms how China has changed and the future challenges this presents to its people and to the world.

    Leaders I define here as those persons in the public, private, and social organization sectors who exert significant influence over diverse realms of policy and public discourse (political, military, social, economic, and intellectual). Leadership in China is broader in scope than simply the small number of members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo who sit at the apex of the national power hierarchy. One of the most important changes in Chinese society over the reform era has been the gradual enlargement of the scope and diversity of individuals who reasonably can be counted as leaders.

    There have been both continuities and dramatic changes in the reform period with respect to how Chinese leaders view the governance of China and its role in global affairs. Understanding these continuities and changes is important to those who live in China and to those abroad who must live with China in the twenty-first century. For example, one area of continuity with significant consequences for both citizens of the PRC and the outside world is the still deeply engrained idea among the vast majority of the Chinese population that the state has a legitimate, essential, and expansive role in information management; one Chinese Academy of Social Sciences study found that more than 80 percent of those urban Chinese respondents surveyed agreed that the Internet should be managed or controlled, with nearly 85 percent of those respondents arguing that the government should be the entity to manage it.² On the other hand, one great change over the past four decades is that the idea of global interdependence is increasingly recognized and accepted, not only by elites but by ordinary citizens as well. The biggest change is the development of a domestic social and political system characterized by a weaker, less cohesive leadership group, a more pluralized society and bureaucracy, and subnational actors in government, society, and the economy with more resources to promote their interests. If these trends continue in the absence of (a) more legal and regulatory control, (b) more transparency and accountability, and (c) more ethical constraints, an untethered China will spell trouble for itself, its neighbors, and the international community.

    HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

    In the twentieth century, China had three revolutions, two of which were in the communist era: the first was the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and with it the demise of the traditional dynastic system. After a protracted transitional period of domestic and international strife in the first half of the twentieth century came the second (communist) revolution with Mao Zedong in 1949 and what soon emerged as his grotesque exercise of power, which lasted until his death on September 9, 1976. Finally, in the last two-plus decades of the twentieth century came a third revolution, albeit a more gradual, less violent phase, in the communist order itself—the reform era. Its character is illustrated by an exchange between Deng Xiaoping and CBS journalist Mike Wallace in 1986. When Wallace commented, The China of Deng Xiaoping is different from the China of Mao Zedong. It’s a new revolution that is going on here, at least you are trying to make a new revolution, it seems, Deng replied, You are right. We too say that what we are doing now is in essence a revolution. In another sense, we are engaged in an experiment. For us, this is something new, and we have to feel our way. Since it is something new, we are bound to make mistakes. Our method is to review our experience from time to time and correct mistakes whenever we discover them, so that minor mistakes will not grow into major ones.³

    After decades, the extremes of Mao’s era appear distant, almost ephemeral, while the implications of the changes Deng Xiaoping wrought become clearer and loom larger. Though there is a certain popular nostalgia for the faux equality and simplicity of Mao’s era, deep dissatisfaction with some of the unwelcome consequences of the reform era that followed his rule, and deep resentment at changes that have failed to occur, there is no significant constituency for the deprivation, brutality, social and economic control, and national dysfunction that were the central features of Chairman Mao’s order. Chinese society has changed so fundamentally since 1977 that, barring something approaching total social breakdown, the preconditions for such national tyranny no longer exist.

    This book chronicles, explains, and assesses the evolution of the ongoing revolution from the death of Mao Zedong through the eras of Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao and into the era of Xi Jinping that began in the fall of 2012. Revolution is an abrupt and systematic change involving the repudiation and overthrow of the preexisting sociopolitical order. Though it can be initiated from above or below, revolution is energized by mass popular participation and characterized by new institutions and patterns of behavior. As Crane Brinton observed in The Anatomy of Revolution, revolutions often go through cycles of initial moderation, growing excess, popular reaction, and sometimes a new revolutionary sequence—this describes the Mao

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