The Man Who Changed China, by Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Crown Publishers, New York, 2004
Book review and commentary
This is not just the biography of an important modern Chinese leader, Jiang Zemin, who became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and President of the country (1989-2002), but the inside story of China in recent decades as seen through the eyes of an insider. The author, an American who lived and worked in China as a businessman for many years, is uniquely qualified to do this due to his access to the inner workings of politics of China. He uses the life story of Jiang Zemin to illustrate the transition of modern China from the madness of the post-revolutionary Mao Zedong years – the Anti-Rightist witch hunts, the economic stupidity of the Great Leap Forward and the murderous Cultural Revolution. In all these insane communist experiments, tens of
millions of Chinese died and hundreds of millions were scarred for life. The astonishing thing is that China came out of these awful tragedies and reconstructed itself to become a powerful nation with a fairly advanced quality of life for many of its people, surpassing the achievements of all other developing nations. That is the story of this book.
When I visited China in 2009 and wanted to visit Mao’s mausoleum while in Tiananmen
Square, my young fashionably dressed and well educated Chinese guide made excuses and when pressed, said it was better to remember Chou En Lai. While China is now on the rise as a modern society, the memory of those dark years still lurks, as it lurked even in the mind of Jiang Zemin, according to this book. At the same time, it is not easy for Westerners to take a dispassionate view of these events in modern China as they find the transformation of China inexplicable in relation to their own experience and history. China, with a continuous civilisation of five millennia while being the largest nation on earth, is an enigma to them. It takes a person like the author who lived in China to
understand the psyche of the nation that underwent so many changes in such a short period of historical time, a transformation that took Western nations over 500 years. Western economists have been annually and ritually predicting the imminent collapse of the Chinese economy whereas, ironically, it is the economies of the West that are now in collapse. Most American experts have almost always been proved wrong in their prognosis of Chinese events, making America’s China policy often faulty and counter-productive to US interests.
Mao, “the Great Helmsman”, united China after centuries of chaos caused by Western and Japanese imperialism, warring regional warlords, bandit armies and a corrupt and rapacious Kuomintang regime. His experiments creating a pure communist society while he held onto absolute power as a divine figure was broken only with his death. Deng Xiaoping was ordained as “Paramount Leader” and cleverly guided the country away from ultra-leftwing madness using his immense prestige as a revolutionary fighter since Mao had already eliminated the more famous Lin Biao and Liu Shaoqi as possible successors.
The modernisation of China was unquestionably initiated by Deng Xiaoping who used carefully contrived euphemisms (such as “Socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics”) and clever aphorisms (“A cat may be black or white but it is a good cat if it catches rats”) to gain public approval for the creation of an open market economy in a country where Mao’s communist ideas were ingrained in the minds of large sections of the population. Jiang Zemin who was sponsored by him as his successor was among the first of the new generation of leaders (the Third Generation in modern China) who had not been in the revolutionary wars and were technocrats.
The story of Jiang Zemin illustrates the working of the modern Communist Party of China which was no longer dominated by an all-powerful leader but has different factions with differing views on the management and future of China. In this sense it is a very democratic party where ideas can be debated and leaders need to network with different groups and make compromises to obtain power and climb up the hierarchy. With 85 million politically committed members, about 10% of the adult population, it is also fairly representative. While critics in the West claim that their own multi-party system (in practice, only two parties almost everywhere, both representing the same powerful economic interests) is the true test of democracy, they cannot explain why their system has produced stagnant economies and growing social inequality while the single party China
advances economically, socially and culturally.
The modern Communist Party of China defies the traditional description of a communist party. It is not concerned with a class struggle but is focussed on economic, social and cultural development. It makes national plans like corporate operating plans. Unlike the democratic multi-party state where politicians are concerned with gaining power by short-term measures, broken promises and diversions into retrograde populist racial, religious and moral issues, the Chinese Communist Party survives through its commitment to
carefully planned, executed and monitored long-term development. For example, in 1998 the party even leads a campaign to introduce good manners in society (I have personally found that many ordinary Chinese citizens are notoriously uncivil in manners) and publishes “The Civilised Citizen’s Study Book” for public teaching.
The author illustrates the inevitable pitfalls of the communist system. The system required that all public ministries, departments and enterprises should have communist party officials to guide decision making and ensure conformity to party policies. This huge cadre of party loyalists were often the main source of corruption that hampered progress and the fight against official corruption is an ongoing national project with the penalty for high level corruption being execution. Some of the highest members of the party have fallen victim to this.
The movement towards a modern market-based economy would not have succeeded if not for the resolute efforts of the aged Deng Xiaoping who undertakes a “Southern Imperial Tour” of China in 1990 to voice his views on modernisation and force the national leadership to act swiftly. Jiang Zemin, still apprehensive about his position and beholden to the older left-wing leaders in the Politburo would not have acted decisively if not for this
forceful campaign by Deng Xiaoping who is in every sense the real architect of modern China.
But it was Jiang Zemin who was left to guide the critical phase of economic modernisation with the emphasis on science and technology and the opening of the market to foreign investors. His selfless dedication, political and managerial skills and personal charm helped to guide the country nationally and in gaining international acceptance and support, despite an ingrained aversion to China (and a continuing fear of China’s
ascendancy) in the Western capitals.
Jiang Zemin, like all the third generation of Chinese leaders, was an educated and cultured technocrat. The strong managerial skills that have propelled the Chinese economy in recent decades are seen in Jiang Zemin’s own work. He has a huge cadre of experts to guide him on all economic, social and political topics. Before foreign trips are undertaken, advance parties research the locations to determine the itineraries and activities to be undertaken. Armies of experts analyse possible questions at meetings and prepare suitable
responses. Little is left to chance. Jiang also, unlike his predecessors, is able to sing and ham in public to charm his foreign hosts and lessen their hostility. He is both an extraordinary leader and personality.
The communist party remains the solid foundation of China’s success and development. The peaceful transfer of leadership from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao in 2002 through elections within the central committee illustrates this and it ensures that the development policies will continue.
Kenneth Abeywickrama
23 September 2012.