The New Emperors: Power and the Princelings in China by Kerry Brown, review: 'scrupulous and valuable'
An impressive, eye-opening study of the seven men who rule China
Will the new members of the Politburo Standing Committee seek stability or take political risks?
Back in the 19th century, as frictions between China and Western colonialists grew, Europeans and Americans generated the racist stereotype of the "inscrutable Chinese", whose calculations and considerations lay far beyond the ken of "rational" Westerners. Well into the third millennium – an unprecedentedly networked era that ought to bring increasing opportunities for contact, study and understanding – the mutual incomprehension of the 19th century still seems to plague Sino-Western relations.
In November 2012, the Chinese Communist Party appointed seven leaders – a new Politburo Standing Committee – to oversee the country's next decade, a political transition comparable in importance to an American presidential election. Yet in countries including Britain, understanding of this shift remains troublingly limited. In The New Emperors, Kerry Brown, an expert China-watcher, provides a valuable overview of these seven extraordinarily powerful men.
The contemporary workings of Chinese politics are, admittedly, hard to fathom. China's ruling elites deliberately live isolated lives.
After becoming a Politburo member, one analyst claimed, a Chinese leader "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".
Even low-ranking, local Party bosses have, Brown writes,
"a small world to move in, largely policed by security agents and servants".
The process by which the seven members of the new standing committee were chosen is unclear. In theory, it was done by intraparty democracy. Yet, in practice, secret ballots cast by party members and their delegates played only a partial role. The real negotiations for the make-up of the Politburo took place in 2012 at the Party's favourite seaside resort, Beidaihe in the north east, where Party elites spent their holidays in huddled consultations.
Undaunted by these obstacles to understanding, Brown sets out
what we can know about the men – Xi Jinping, Li Keqiang, Wang Qishan, Yu Zhengsheng, Zhang Gaoli, Zhang Dejiang and Liu Yunshan – in charge of China. The non-Chinese media has spilt much ink on the importance of "princelings" in China today: a cohort of sexagenarians, currently at the apogee of their political careers, who owe much of their influence to having parents from the founding generation of Communist revolutionaries. Both Xi Jinping and Yu Zhengsheng seem to fall into this category.
Yet, Brown argues, parsing the loyalties and beliefs of China's super-elite is not so easy. Anyone who has spent their career in the interconnected world of Chinese politics will have links to an array of interests: to retired Politburo members, the military and institutions such as Beijing's top universities.
Brown is scrupulous to acknowledge the skill set of the new Politburo. They are all deft crisis managers and effective communicators (positively Obama-esque in comparison with the stony Hu Jintao, who retired from the presidency in 2012).
Political reform has stagnated in China over the past decade. Brown describes the approach of Hu Jintao (who prized "stability" above all) as "do nothing, stop everything".
As a result, by 2012 China was spending $5"‰billion a year more on domestic security than on external defence. The country's new generation of leaders does not have the luxury of sitting on the problem as Hu did. A biographer of Jiang Zemin, president through much of the Nineties, has argued that the "the risks of not reforming are now higher than the risks of reforming".
But it's far from clear how politically innovative China's new leaders will prove. Periodically throughout his career (and at his first press conference as President), Xi Jinping has criticised corruption within the Party. Yet, Brown writes,
"the brute reality is that for all Xi's talk, the structural issue of corruption locally had not changed". The Party currently faces a massive legitimacy crisis due to the way in which relatives of leaders have made fortunes over the past three decades. The recent New York Times investigation into the vast wealth of the family of outgoing premier Wen Jiabao (almost £1.7"‰billion) has exposed the scale of the issue; members of Xi's extended family have also acquired assets worth millions.
Li Keqiang, Xi's second-in-command and the first lawyer to serve on the Politburo, earned his spurs
assiduously engineering a cover-up of an Aids epidemic in east-central China, for which local government was significantly responsible. Liu Yunshan has so far distinguished himself as a heavy-handed propaganda tsar.
All, unsurprisingly, are committed to guaranteeing the unchallenged leadership of the Communist Party.
Despite the headlines trumpeting China's unstoppable rise to superpower status, and the state propaganda about the country's "5,000 years" of cohesive history, the People's Republic remains an insecure place. The new leadership is still acutely conscious of the country's traumatic experiences between 1840 and 1990 when – challenged by the West and then Japan – it lurched between foreign invasion and civil war. For the foreseeable future, China's new leaders seem likely to prioritise maintenance of hard-won stability over political risk-taking.
The New Emperors: Power and the Princelings in China by Kerry Brown, review: 'scrupulous and valuable' - Telegraph
