China's Leaders: The New Generation (review)

In the months leading up to the recent Sixteenth Party Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), scholars, government officials, and media commentators have frequently been asked to predict what Chinese politics will be like with Hu Jintao taking the top Party post. While the press looks for quick, bite-sized answers to this question, most who study China carefully know that short, neat answers are unlikely to tell us much. But one can get a real sense of China's third-and fourth-generation leaders by reading this wonderful study by Cheng Li.

Li conducted extensive research in China, interviewing leaders at the local, provincial, and national levels. His skill as an interviewer is apparent in the wealth of information provided to the reader. From the beginning, the book clearly portrays the characteristics of earlier Chinese leaders associated with Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping and, more importantly, details the differences between Jiang Zemin's "third generation" of leaders and the "fourth generation" that includes Hu Jintao. Li's analysis avoids demonizing China's leaders as evil, unskilled, or ill-informed individuals merely out for personal gain. Instead, he carefully examines how China's ever-changing political landscape has seen a steady leadership transformation from those whose experience was born out of revolutionary struggle to a generation that has both profited from and been victimized by the various political movements that have ravaged China over the past decades. The reader comes to understand why a single leader is no longer able to dominate the political scene in China, why traditional practices such as guanxi (connections) still play an important role in the recruitment process, how educational experience can make or break a career, how Party orthodoxy nowadays means following Party directives rather than engaging in debates about ideological purity, and why even top Chinese leaders cannot know how their colleagues, or even they themselves, will respond to the challenges they may face in the future. The author includes numerous helpful tables for comparing leaders, their recruitment experiences, their connections to older leaders, and their professional experience within the Party. The tables are useful not only for summarizing what is in the text but also as aids for students and others who are unfamiliar with Chinese leaders and find the mix of names, places, and institutions confusing.

One of the greatest mysteries facing China watchers is who Hu Jintao is and what his policy preferences are. After reading this book, the reader knows more about Hu Jintao in terms of his recruitment, his experience, and how he came to power, but, more importantly, the reader comes to understand why Hu is a mystery even to those who have worked with him. It is not simply that Hu has been careful not to say or do the wrong things; it also has to do with the subtleties of a system that has evolved with the political and economic changes in China, especially over the past twenty years. The book gives the reader tools to understand the tensions felt by China's ruling elites and cautions scholars against using labels often used by political scientists, such as "hardliners" and "softliners," in describing leaders who may be more or less likely to support liberal policies. Instead, Li provides reasons why Chinese politics remains the exclusive realm of the CPC, but also why, out of necessity, China has been forced to seek leaders who offer a broader range of expertise than was deemed necessary in the past. While this is a theme many scholars have touched on, Li provides much more detail and explores the topic in much greater depth as he describes the interplay of cliques, networks, technical expertise, practical experience, and common political experience shared by China's younger leaders.

If there is a shortcoming in Li's study it could be that it is a bit removed from the larger considerations found in...