The New Emperors

Power and the Princelings in China

Kerry Brown

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857733832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

China has become the powerhouse of the world economy and home to 1 in 5 of the world's population, yet we know almost nothing of the people who lead it. How does one become the leader of the world's newest superpower? And who holds the real power in the Chinese system? In The New Emperors, the noted China expert Kerry Brown journeys deep into the heart of the secretive Communist Party. China's system might have its roots in peasant rebellion but it is now firmly under the control of a power-conscious Beijing elite, almost half of whose members are related directly to former senior Party leaders. Brown reveals the intrigue and scandal surrounding the internal battle raging between two China's: one founded by Mao on Communist principles, and a modern China in which 'to get rich is glorious'. At the centre of it all sits the latest Party Secretary, Xi Jinping - the son of a revolutionary, with links both to big business and to the People's Liberation Army. His rise to power is symbolic of the new emperors leading the world's next superpower.

1

POWER AND THE POLITBURO

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.

Sometimes the members of this world try to come down to a more demotic one. The tale of a taxi driver issued through the Hong Kong newspaper Ta Kung Pao in April 2013 illustrated this. Late one evening by the Drum Tower in Beijing a driver named Guo picked up two men, one who sat in the front of the cab, one in the back. Not taking much notice of them at first, he started off some chit-chat about the recent very severe pollution in the city. ‘I said,’ Guo was reported by the paper as saying,

that there had been so much smog in Beijing this year, and that now the air pollution was really serious, and that was causing a lot of anger in society, and making common people get a poor idea of the government. The guy beside me said ‘It’s an easy thing to make pollution, but hard to manage it. You can make pollution in a minute, but it takes ten minutes to clear it up. People’s lives now are prosperous. You had to take care to look after society’s progress, and it was tough to balance on the one hand the management of pollution and on the other the production of pollution.’

Betraying immense powers of understatement and light irony, the driver was reported as having responded to this homily by observing to himself that ‘the way this guy talked was different to someone off the street’. It was only a few minutes later that he observed the man behind him, who he could see in the mirror looked very much like the newly appointed president, Xi Jinping. The paper went on to report that only when he dropped the customer off at the gates of the State Guest House did he realise that it was the one and only Xi Jinping – president of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).¹

Tai Kung Pao is regarded as a paper close to the Chinese government. This, along with the fact that the official State news agency, Xinhua, had initially seemed to confirm the story, created fevered excitement. Surely this encounter had been for real? And yet the idea of the most powerful man in China simply travelling incognito on the streets of Beijing ran against everything that had been assumed about the ways leaders at this level operated in the country. Even the most insignificant of the 200-strong Central Committee permanent members tended to travel in ways that closed down large parts of the air and land transport system when they descended on a place. The length and breadth of the land had privileged areas reserved for the accommodation of these god-like figures. For a Politburo member, let alone the highest ranking ones, to be apart from a squadron of security officers and protection police was revolutionary news. That Mr Guo had only a scribbled note on which the customer had written ‘Serve the people’ without even signing it, and a couple of anonymous cab tickets as evidence of his claimed encounter, gave some pause for thought. But the odd way in which the story was first confirmed and then denied by people who should have known what was happening complicated things. Maybe the denial meant the opposite – that in fact the Party secretary had broken free of his usual minders, and in the fashion of a modern-day Peter the Great of Russia from three centuries before, had gone anonymously amongst the people to find out what they were really thinking.

‘Once elevated to join the twenty five members of the Politburo,’ Australian journalist Rowan Callick, who was based in Beijing for a number of years, wrote in a book on the modern CPC, ‘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’.² The oddly isolated world of these figures is only testified to by a senior journalist based in China who said that one of the few ways the members of this elite club were able to try to peer back into the world they had just left was to have an hour a day during which, on open-access computers able to operate outside the parameters of the great firewall of China, they could surf the internet, checking the public pulse on issues, trying to work out what the country they led actually thought. In the 2000s, in the era of Hu and Wen, there had been information that in a single county in Inner Mongolia, out of a population of 400,000, 12,000 supplied information to various government agents. Hu Jintao, in his work report at the Seventeenth Party Congress in October 2007, had stressed the need for getting good-quality public feedback on government and Party services, and allowing people to participate more in decision making. But it was clear that in the new networked China, while information flowed through the air, what could be trusted, and how it would be interpreted usefully and reliably, were matters of deep contention.

SMASHING FACTIONS

Most accept that China’s political system is a hierarchical one topped by a small and very powerful super elite. But defining the unifying characteristics of these elite political groups in modern China is an issue dominated by lively argument. Right from the 1970s, scholars in the West have come up with various models to try to make sense of how elite politics works and what holds groups together. Factional models have been very popular. Experts have articulated models that show the links between political careers in the elite and important entities like the Party Youth League or the military or powerful ministries.³ Assumptions about the importance of factions in explaining elite careers are part of the landscape of trying to understand contemporary Chinese politics. But getting clarity on how factions work proves more elusive.

It is clear that Chinese politics is a world dominated by figures and groups who have shared cohesive and interlinking bonds. After the era of strong-man politics, which reached its acme under Mao Zedong, but still lingered up to a point in paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s period of domination from the end of the 1970s into the 1990s, elite leaders have had diminishing political capital. Individuals needed to form into groups promoting common interests rather then aiming to control everything themselves. The main configuration of factions, it is argued, occurred during the Jiang Zemin period from 1989 to 2002.

One of the most easily identifiable is the Shanghai faction. When Jiang Zemin was unexpectedly elevated to Party secretary after the demise of his predecessor as national CPC secretary, Zhao Ziyang, during the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, he came to Beijing after a long career mostly spent in the great coastal city of Shanghai. It was here that he had been mayor and then Party secretary. He was surrounded by important figures there, like Zhu Rongji, who was to serve as his premier later in the 1990s, but also fellow national leaders after 1997, Wu Bangguo and Huang Ju. All of these were to come to Beijing from Shanghai to work alongside him. He also raised Wang Huning, originally at Shanghai’s Fudan University but then lifted to direct the Central Research Office and become, in many ways, the Party’s chief strategic thinker from the late 1990s onwards. The other key member of the Shanghai group was Zeng Qinghong, Jiang’s chief lieutenant and right-hand man, who reached the level of vice president from 2002 to 2007, and whose influence on elite politics and policy throughout the Jiang and early Hu period was immense. Such a cluster of people who had worked so much in Shanghai naturally created talk of a ‘Shanghai gang’.

Then there are those associated with the China Youth League (CYL) faction, the branch of the CPC for people under 26, which had, as of 2010, over 90 million members. The importance of the League became clear in the Deng period in the 1980s, because it was seen as the training ground for future leaders. The former leader of the League, Hu Yaobang, had himself ended up as Party secretary from 1980. His successors – particularly Hu Jintao, who had been brought from one of the more remote western provinces, Gansu, to Beijing – were able to use their leadership of the League to capture the attention of the elder leaders, who at that time had mostly retired from politics but still exercised immense influence. The Youth League faction of the current generation of leaders is claimed to include figures like Premier Li Keqiang, who was active in the League at the same time as Hu Jintao. With its national networks, its immense importance in inculcating Socialist values in young cadres, and its ability to figure as a training ground for future elite leaders, the CYL became viewed as one of the chief power fiefdoms of modern Chinese politics.

We can add to this the princeling faction. Arguments about the definition of princelings continue to this day. The principal idea here is to track a cohesive group of current leaders who have family links going back to early generations of elite figures in the PRC. The idea of ‘a bloodline inheritance’ for Party membership reared its head at the very beginning of the CR – the long decade from 1966 – with class membership being viewed as a critical constituent of one’s Party fidelity and fitness to be called a Communist.⁴ Links to elite officials at this time were a double-edged sword. Originally, they were seen as potential sources of protection as the mass-mobilisation characteristic of that time got under way. This quickly became more complicated once the initial guise of the CR as a cultural campaign gave way to what turned out to be its real objective – at least in Mao Zedong’s mind.⁵ This was to attack the vested interest of the Party itself, and especially the bureaucracy that had built up around specific ministries and power centres. Figures at the very head of the Party like country president Liu Shaoqi and general secretary Deng Xiaoping were felled, and their families subjected to humiliation and sometimes physical violence. The impact of the CR on the Chinese elite was very deep and traumatising, and will be looked at in more detail later. But through their shared experience of suffering, it created a cohesive group of people. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, after the great rectification campaign largely spearheaded by Hu Yaobang with Deng Xiaoping’s support, elder leaders returned, but at a time in their lives when some of them were deep into their 70s and 80s. There was a decision in 1982 to ask leaders to retire from executive positions at the age of 70, but to allow each family to choose one younger member to carry on their interests. Bo Xilai was one of the beneficiaries of this. By the late 1980s, therefore, there were a select group of new leaders who were the children of former senior leaders, and the concept of a Party family aristocracy took root. Princelings became defined as those with blood links to people who had served at vice-ministerial level or above in previous administrations. Of the seven-strong Politburo Standing Committee from 2012 it could be argued that four, either directly or through marriage, are princelings. But as I will argue later, the term princeling raises more issues than it settles.

A more business-orientated group is the oil faction. As the Party defined its role more precisely in society from 1978, it became clear that there needed to be more clarity about the division between State-owned enterprises (SOEs) within the centrally planned economy, and political or administrative entities. Despite this commercialisation and reform, SOEs continue to have immense political importance, and their most senior management are still appointments made directly by the Party from officials within its ranks. The huge oil industry in particular, with what ended up as three key large State companies, has become important as a foundation for political power and careers. The most representative figure from this faction is Zhou Yongkang, Politburo member from 2007 to 2012, whose career in the oil industry lasted several decades before he became China’s security czar in the Seventeenth Congress. Another example is Zhang Gaoli, a member of the Politburo from 2012, and someone with 17 years in the petrochemical industry leadership, who was elevated onto the Eighteenth Party Congress.

Finally, there is the Qinghua University faction. Qinghua, Beijing is one of modern China’s top universities. At least under the Hu Jintao leadership, those who had been educated there became significant. Hu Jintao and his premier, Wen Jiabao, were both graduates in the 1960s. Xi Jinping was also a graduate. The rise of the Qinghua group represented for some analysts the appearance of a better-educated, technocratic generation of leadership, many of whom were graduates in the hard sciences. Qinghua figured as a training ground for the new elite in the same way as Oxford University in the UK (responsible for all but three post-war British prime ministers) and the grandes écoles in France.

Looking at the leaders in this way at least allows us to get some purchase on their careers and the rationale behind them getting into the final elite in contemporary Chinese politics, and provides some initial organising principles. But it clearly also has limitations. Many elite figures transcend boundaries between factions easily. Liu Yandong, a Politburo member from 2007, is perhaps the most representative. Liu is a princeling (or at least the female equivalent) through her father, Liu Ruilong, a former vice minister of agriculture, who had been instrumental in introducing Jiang Zemin into the CPC⁶ (thereby giving her a link to the Shanghai faction; her father had also worked there in the early 1950s and spent five years in jail there during the CR from 1967⁷). Liu was at Qinghua University from 1964 to 1970, overlapping with Hu Jintao, and took a series of positions in the Youth League from 1982 to 1991 in Beijing. The only faction that Liu does not seem to belong to is the oil one. Looking at other key figures, one sees similar interlinking networks. Xi Jinping is a princeling par excellence, a Qinghua graduate and, through his brief period in 2007 as the Party secretary there, arguably a member of the Shanghai gang. Making sense of leaders by using factionalism in China is therefore a hard business.⁸ Not many figures easily belong to one particular group. And some belong to almost all of them.

Factionalism as a means to understand elite politics in China probably reached its zenith in the build-up to the 2007 Party Congress that year. Throughout 2006 and into 2007 there was talk of a grassroots faction versus an elitist one. President and Party secretary Hu Jintao was seen as exemplifying the first. He was portrayed as coming from a modest background politically, with his father noted simply as a tea merchant, and his mother dying when he was not yet ten years old.⁹ He stood in stark contrast to someone like Jiang Zemin, his predecessor, who was portrayed as the son of a Party revolutionary martyr, and therefore a member of the elite. At this time, the elitist-versus-grassroots model worked nicely enough, and everyone could be shuffled into one or the other. But a few years later there were figures like Li Keqiang, who seemed not quite to fit in either. His background was modest enough, from a small town in Anhui. According to some reports he had relied on only his own abilities to get into the national elite Beijing University.¹⁰ But his father in law, Cheng Jinrui, had been a leading member of the very earliest Youth League established after 1949, working from 1952 as a representative on the second Zhengzhou City Youth League delegation, staying in the League locally into the CR until he worked in a national agricultural organisation in the 1980s. While he was not at vice-ministerial level, it is clear that Li was also linked to someone with a significant career in the Party bureaucracy.¹¹ Did that mean he was an elitist grassroots faction member? The only conclusion one can draw from all of this is that we need much more sophisticated categories to try to capture the links between leading political figures in China.

SO NO FACTIONS, BUT DEFINITELY ELITES

Factionalism might not help much, but we still have a definite elite to try to make sense of. China remains a highly hierarchical political system. To try to get to grips with understanding this elite we need to work out whom we are dealing with. One of the first questions is how big this group is, and how it is constituted. Research by Kjeld Eric Brødsgaard on the CPC organisation history showed that in 1998 there were 40.5 million cadres in China running the country. ‘Leading cadres’ constituted a little over 1 per cent of these, 92 per cent of whom were working at provincial level and below. That meant 0.1 per cent were in the centre in Beijing. And in this group, those working at ministerial level and above constituting the ‘high-level cadres’ (gaoji ganbu) came to a national total of 2,562, of whom a third were in Beijing.¹² There is a clear conclusion to be drawn from these statistics: China is a vast country, run by a small group of people.

The genealogy of this elite can be tracked back to the 11 Chinese members of the First Congress in 1921: a sort of gene pool of Party aristocracy, many of whom were felled in purges or destroyed in war before a second wave of elites appeared through the 1930s. Most of the new elite were linked to patronage networks around Mao Zedong as he rose to Party leadership dominance. These second generation elites turned on themselves in purges of various completeness and depth in the Maoist period from 1949 to 1976, the most serious and extensive being the CR. Those that finally emerged from this back into positions of power after 1978 became the basis for a new wave of elites, more often than not with links to the old. Deng Xiaoping’s attempts to introduce fresh blood into the Party simply created a new elite sitting alongside the old.

There is nothing as solid and well defined in modern China as a standard group of people operating like an aristocracy as part of a highly unified elite with a set identity and firm rules of how power can be passed from one to the other. There is, rather, a much more dynamic and changing network of different elites with porous boundaries that, with political skill and the cultivation of the right patronage networks, people from diverse backgrounds can enter. The one feature that holds this diverse clustering of elite grouping...