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Respected, feared, revered – 100 years of China’s Communist party told through its leaders
On a visit to the US in 2015, China’s president Xi Jinping did something passingly rare: he cracked a joke. Talking about the anticorruption campaign that had defined the first few years of his rule, he declared that it was about creating cleaner politics, not wiping out rivals. “This is not House of Cards,” he smiled, referencing the American political drama starring Kevin Spacey as crooked US president Frank Underwood. Not a bad gag, but pretty much a one-off. Over the past few years, Xi has made few other jokes in public. He has, however, instituted a new five-year economic plan while abolishing term limits and imposing a draconian national security law on Hong Kong. He has also fuelled global curiosity about the Chinese Communist party (CCP) and its aims. On the 100th anniversary of its foundation, there is a new urgency in knowing about the men (always men) who have run this emergent superpower.
David Shambaugh is widely regarded as one of the world’s most astute analysts of Chinese politics, and his lucid study pays particular attention to the personalities of the five top leaders who have shaped China since the communist revolution of 1949. “Mao [Zedong] often smiled, laughed and engaged with his interlocutors,” he notes. “Deng [Xiaoping] hardly ever did.” Humour is not the same as empathy; Mao was responsible for millions of deaths. But in a system as opaque and formalised as the CCP, any hint of personality at the top matters, whether it is gregariousness or reticence. Continue reading...