World-China Forum

How is the Chinese leadership divided?

Winberg Chai says:  

Cheng Li (China’s Team of Rivals) has oversimplified reality in his analysis of China’s future leadership by dividing it into two camps: the “populists” and the “elitists.” In fact, there are six equally important rival factions competing for the top two positions in the Chinese government.

These six factions developed within the six separate and equal political institutions that exist under the overall guidance of the Chinese Communist Party. They are: the Central Committee, the Discipline Commission, the People’s Government, the People’s Congress, the Political Consultative Conference, and the Central Military Commission. All of them recruit and cultivate their own followers. Each one has its own leaders, who are represented at the party’s Politburo. These six groups’ leaders have their own complex mix of agendas, ties, worldviews, personalities, and priorities based on their own personal experiences and that of their political institutions.

Cheng Li replies:

Winberg Chai’s argument that there are six equally important rival factions in the Chinese leadership is empirically groundless and conceptually misleading.

One of the defining political characteristics of the People’s Republic of China is the long-standing party-state system. By design, the leaders of the Communist Party have always held the most important official positions in the government, the legislative body, and the military. In fact, three of the six institutions that Chai mentions—the Central Committee, the government, and the Central Military Commission—are headed by the same person (currently, President Hu Jintao). These six institutions are neither “separate” nor “equal.” Quite the contrary, the institutions of the party and the state are intimately intertwined, with the government implementing the decisions of the party. Two other institutions on Chai’s list, the People’s Congress and the Political Consultative Conference, are well-known symbolic “rubber stamps.”

(Foreign Policy, May/June)

The Uprising China Would Have Us Forget

It's habitual to think of Zhao as China's almost-Gorbachev: the man who might have disestablished the Communist Party, and introduced political pluralism, if only the party hardliners hadn't got him first. Yet the painful sequence of events recorded in Zhao's testament suggests another, nicer comparison. For, as Zhao goes to enormous lengths to establish, what happened in Beijing in 1989 had no legal basis whatever.

It was, in point of fact, an invasion of the capital by several hundred thousand troops of the Chinese army at the behest of a private group of individuals within the communist leadership, because of a fear that the people had mobilised, and were coming out on the streets in support of the party's general secretary. As Zhao told Yang in 1995, "our party had never done such a thing in all its history".

In short, 1989 was China's Prague Spring, and Zhao was its Dubcek. Ever since, the Chinese Communist Party has been haunted by the obscure but troubling recognition that it is in effect an occupying power in its own country, a kind of benevolent foreign tyrant, like the Moghuls or the British Raj, such as colonised countries have known for centuries.

This is why, I'd suggest, we should take June 4 as our own moment to "tread on the greenery", and to honour the memory of a decent man and his patriotic supporters, even though China's spring is yet to return, and the wisteria is still nipped in the bud. (David Burchell, the Australian)

Susan Shirk: The Legacy of Tiananmen for Chinese Politics

Ever since 1989, Chinese leaders have been haunted by the fear that their days in power are numbered. The regime was shaken to its roots by six weeks of student protests in more than 130 cities and the divisions within the Communist Party leadership over how to handle them. The regime remained standing only because the military followed Deng Xiaoping's order to use force to disperse the demonstrators.

Today, two decades after the "life-and-death turning point" of Tiananmen, Chinese Communist rule has survived, but its leaders remain anxious about the possibility of another revolutionary challenge. To foreigners, China appears like an emerging superpower, strong economically and influential internationally; but its Communist leaders feel much weaker as they struggle to stay on top of a society roiled by thirty years of market reform and opening to the world.

Although never publicly articulating it, the Chinese Communist Party has devised a formula for survival based on the lessons they drew from the Tiananmen experience. First, prevent large-scale protests. Second, avoid public leadership splits. And third, keep the military loyal to the Party.

The three rules are interconnected. If the leadership group remains cohesive despite the competition that inevitably arises in it, then the Party and the security police can stop the protests from spreading. Unless people receive some signal of "permission" from the top, protests are likely to fizzle out or be extinguished before they grow politically threatening. But if the divisions among the top leaders come into the open as they did in 1989, people will take to the streets with little fear of punishment. Then, if the military splits too, or refuses to use force to defend the Party leaders, the entire regime could collapse. For the past twenty years, with the spectre of another Tiananmen crisis haunting them, China's leaders have worked hard to shore up all three fronts -- social quiescence, elite unity, and military loyalty. (Susan Shirk, Huffington Post)

Minxin Pei: How Beijing kept its grip on power

Chinese leaders appear to believe that they have discovered the magic formula for political survival: a one-party regime that embraces capitalism and globalisation. Abroad, the party’s success raises fears that it has established a viable new model for autocratic rule.

As the world commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen tragedy, it is time to reflect on how the party has held on to power against seemingly impossible odds and whether the strategy it has pursued since Tiananmen will continue to sustain its political monopoly.

Clearly, the most important explanation for the party’s apparent resilience is its ability to deliver consistently high growth. However, largely through trial and error, the party has also developed a complementary and quite sophisticated political strategy to strengthen its power base.

A lesson taken from the Tiananmen debacle by the party’s leaders is that elite unity is critical to its survival. The political necessity of launching China’s economic reforms in the late 1970s required the party to form a grand alliance of liberals, technocrats and conservatives. But the liberals and the conservatives constantly clashed during the 1980s, over both the speed and direction of reform.

Disunity at the top sent out mixed signals to Chinese society and, during Tiananmen, paralysed the decision-making process. After Tiananmen, the party purged liberals from its top echelon and formed a technocratic/conservative coalition that has unleashed capitalism but suppressed democracy.

An additional lesson learnt from the party’s near-death experience in Tiananmen was that it must co-opt social elites to expand its base. The pro-democracy movement was led and organised by China’s intelligentsia and college students. The most effective strategy for preventing another Tiananmen, the party apparently reasoned, was to win over elite elements from Chinese society, thus depriving potential opposition of leadership and organisational capacity.

So in the post-Tiananmen era, the party courted the intelligentsia, professionals and entrepreneurs, showering them with perks and political status. The strategy has been so successful that today’s party consists mostly of well-educated bureaucrats, professionals and intellectuals. (Minxin Pei, Financial Times)

Revisiting Tiananmen Square: The Birthplace of Post-Revolutionary China

June 4, the day Peoples’ Liberation Army troops drove the students and their supporters from Tiananmen Square, is remembered in the West as a tragic example of state violence against unarmed citizens, and a memorial to the suppressed yearnings of the Chinese people for freedom and democracy. But, in the cold eyes of history, the 1989 movement and its aftermath may eventually be seen as the Chinese Communist Party’s “Machiavellian moment”, when Deng confronted the mortality of his republic, and saw what it would take to survive: Party unity based on urban growth.

By reunifying the party leadership and reestablishing solidarity between the party and the urban population, the crisis consolidated CCP rule, and accelerated China’s momentum down its current path of rapid economic growth. In her classic study On Revolution, Hannah Arendt observed darkly that “whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide, whatever political organisation men may have achieved has its origin in crime”.

The bloodstained Square on the morning of June 4 was in this sense perhaps the birthplace of post-revolutionary China. (John Delury, Brunei Times)

Hu Jintao Picks Core Sixth-Generation Leaders

While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) administration seems preoccupied with the twofold task of baoba and baowen—maintaining an 8 percent growth rate and upholding social stability—it is also giving priority to the rejuvenation of the party’s leadership. Attention is being focused on young turks of the Sixth-Generation, meaning cadres born in the early to mid-1960s.

Some of the mystery surrounding these rising stars was lifted when a current issue of the official journal Global Personalities singled out five Sixth-Generation politicians with colossal potentials: Governors Zhou Qiang, Hu Chunhua and Nur Bekri, respectively of Hunan Province, Hebei Province and the Xinjiang Autonomous Region; Agriculture Minister Sun Zhengcai; and First Party Secretary of the Communist Youth League (CYL) Lu Hao (Global Personalities [Beijing journal], April 22; Sina.com.cn, April 15). Apart from Lu, Zhou and Hu (no relations to President Hu) are former honchos of the league; and Nur Bekri had served in its Xinjiang branch in his younger days. It is thus obvious that President Hu, a one-time CYL boss who heads the CCP’s powerful tuanpai (CYL Faction), has played a pivotal role in the elevation of these forty-something neophytes. Moreover, Fifth-Generation stalwart Li Yuanchao, a Politburo member who is in charge of high-level personnel matters, is a tuanpai affiliate and crony of the president. Owing to factors including density of media coverage—and their prominence in the CCP’s dominant faction—Zhou, 49 and Hu, 45, seem to have pulled ahead of their Sixth-Generation confreres in leadership sweepstakes (Straits Times [Singapore], April 27). (Willy Lam, Jamestown)

Bao Tong on 20th Aniversary of Tiananmen

Since the crackdown on students in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, plenty has changed in China—but not enough. China's current leaders bear no responsibility for Tiananmen, but only they can share the truth. Otherwise, there will always be tension.

There are so many things I'd like to see now. If journalists could freely conduct interviews, I would be happy. If peasants who've lost their land were allowed to invite lawyers to defend them, I would be happy. If the Communist Party could abide by the principle of letting the majority decide, I would be happy. And if the innocent people who were wronged on that day 20 years ago could have their names cleared, I would be happy. But I don't have high hopes. (Bao Tong, Newsweek)

The Tiananmen Diaries

Scholars will mine "Prisoner of the State" for historical nuances. It is clearer here than elsewhere that Zhao was already in serious political trouble in 1988, before the democracy movement began; and that Zhao had bickered with Hu Yaobang over economic policy as early as 1982, even though the two reformist leaders needed each other. Deng Xiaoping appears more strikingly than elsewhere as a Godfather figure: Other leaders jockey for access to him, dare not contradict him and use his words to attack one another. Yet even Deng seeks to avoid responsibility for difficult decisions. The group has dictatorial power, yet is rife with insecurity.

Ironically, it was Zhao's incarceration after 1989 that brought him closer to the street life of ordinary Chinese. His guards told him it was "inconvenient" for him to play golf; he had to guess at the content of unwritten rules, to deal with "made-up excuses" and to engage in vacuous word games with functionaries. His indignation at such treatment suggests that he was learning about these routine features of his society's political life for the first time. But incarceration also provided him with time to read and reflect broadly on China's situation in history. At the end of "Prisoner of the State," we see Zhao arrive at positions more radical than any he had taken before -- positions that the Chinese government had long been calling "dissident." For instance, Zhao eventually concluded that China needs a free press, freedom to organize and an independent judiciary. The Communist Party will have to release its monopoly on power. Ultimately, China will need parliamentary democracy. (Perry Link, Washington Post)

Zhao Ziyang's Testament

While Deng is largely seen as China’s architect of reforms, Zhao’s account gives the former party head more of a supportive role, making it clear that he himself was the first one to make breakthroughs in economic thinking regarding the development of the household responsibility system, which sharply increased agricultural output and raised rural incomes, and the rise of special economic zones, which boosted the economies of coastal China.  Zhao, somewhat of a lone voice crying out for reform in the top Party leadership, manages to push his reforms through the cultivation of Deng. Realizing that he himself doesn’t have the power to keep reforms on track, he pleads with Deng not to retire. Mr. MacFarquhar says that Deng was the “best one-man constituency to have,” but points out that even Deng had to “bob and weave” when faced with opposition from fellow party elders. (Paul Mooney, Far Eastern Economic Review)

趙紫陽回憶錄 Zhao Ziyang memoir--videos

Excerpt 1 Tragedy

Excerpt 2 Punishment

Excerpt 3 Socialism

Excerpt 4 Economic Reform

Excerpt 5 Market Systems

Excerpt 6 Democracy

Excerpt 7 Foreigners