China's Leaders. David Shambaugh

China's Leaders - David  Shambaugh


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The best leaders inspire and incentivize followers, and thus do not need to rely on other forms of inducement. I would say that only Mao and Xi, among our five leaders, possessed this skill. Finally, what about moral character? Here, all five strike out if measured by the repressive system they presided over and the personal use of arbitrary power each wielded. But, if measured on the basis of the behavioral type of Chinese Communist Party members and society’s citizens that each sought to foster—then we can say that all five advocated policies encouraging honesty, clean living, noncorruption, frugality, and other traditional communist values. There has been an additional expectation that China’s leaders should embody the traditional Confucian archetype of the caring, benevolent, and patriarchal figure (all five fit this paradigm).

      Some leaders exhibit the character trait of narcissism (excessive interest in or admiration of oneself), and this has been extensively studied by political psychologists.8 When it occurs in leaders this personality disorder usually leads to a compulsive desire of the leader for mass adulation and the creation of a “cult of personality.” Among the five leaders in this study, it is clear that Mao had a severe case of narcissism, Xi Jinping has a very strong case, and Jiang Zemin had a mild case. Deng Xiaoping and Hu Jintao were self-effacing individuals who were not so inclined (although in Deng’s case the propaganda apparatus nonetheless still tried to create such a cult of personality).

      To what degree do these early family rearing and socialization features shed light on the five leaders covered in this study? One interesting commonality is that only one of the five (Jiang Zemin) grew up in a close-knit and stable nuclear family environment. All the others had very disrupted youths with absent or deceased parents.

      In Deng Xiaoping’s case, his father was absent for long periods from the family residence in rural Sichuan, and thus Deng did not have much of a relationship with his father. His mother, like Mao’s mother, was loving, and doted on her first-born son. But she died when Deng was only 14. Deng then left home for middle school in Chongqing, also never to return. At just age 16 Deng had the wrenching experience of being sent on a long steamship trip to France for an overseas work-study program (which turned into much work and little study). Altogether Deng spent a total of six years abroad in France and one year in Moscow before returning to China at age 23. These early experiences on his own certainly bred a certain self-reliance in Deng. While in France Deng developed a liking for French food, liquor, and a passion for croissants. He found a series of odd jobs and factory work, but his schooling only lasted three months. Deng did find a peer group in relationships with other young Chinese and Vietnamese (including Ho Chi Minh) then studying and working there, many of whom were active in socialist politics following the Bolshevik Revolution (1917). One of these individuals who did play an important mentoring role in Deng’s life was Zhou Enlai, who was six years Deng’s senior and who brought him into the nascent Chinese Communist Party Socialist Youth League. Deng’s main job in the League was to produce propaganda pamphlets, for which he became known as “Monsieur Mimeograph.”

      Jiang Zemin is the only one of the five leaders in this study to have had a fairly normal nuclear and extended family life, growing up in Yangzhou, Jiangsu province. His father was a writer and part-time electrician, and Jiang recalled later that his mother was doting and loving.14 The Jiang family was well-to-do and well-known in Yangzhou, an important cultural and commercial center for centuries. Jiang was one of five children. His uncle Jiang Shangqing and his wife were second parents to Jiang Zemin, essentially raising him. Jiang Shangqing was a leftist intellectual who was active in communist underground activities, arrested and rearrested by the Nationalists’ police, and who had just joined the communist Red Army when he was killed in an ambush during the Japanese occupation in 1939, thus becoming a CCP martyr (giving the extended Jiang family a communist pedigree). Following his death Jiang Zemin’s natural father Jiang Shijun offered their son to his brother’s widow, as the couple had no male children of their own.15 This was not as disruptive for young Jiang Zemin as it might seem, as he had been living mostly with the aunt and uncle from an early age. Other than this anomaly, as described in Chapter 4, Jiang’s upbringing was quite normal and quite intellectual—which may have given him a secure self-confidence.

      Xi Jinping was also thrust into the world at the tender age of 14, when he was sent from Beijing to rural Shaanxi province during the Cultural Revolution. His father had been imprisoned five years earlier and his mother was sent to a rural cadre school. The Xi family household thus broke apart early in Xi’s young life—he was just 9 when his father was imprisoned— Xi was thereafter


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