Kerry Brown - CEO, China: The Rise of Xi Jinping

I am grateful to Tomasz Hoskins and his colleagues at I.B.Tauris for their continuing support in commissioning this work, as well as to my former colleagues at the University of Sydney and Chatham House in London for all their insights, inspirations and assistance. I am also, as ever, grateful to my daughter Tanya Brown for her patience and forbearance while I wrote this in early 2015, and to Kalley Wu for her support. I am extremely grateful for the help of Emily Dunn, Simone van Nieuwenhuizen, Caroline Chong, Samuel Johnson and Haimin Huang for their work on correcting the text, and to Alexander Middleton for copy-editing it so well, Alex Billington at Tetragon for his work on the production, and Sarah Terry for her proofreading.

All transliterations of Chinese into English are in Pinyin. The translations from Chinese to English in the text are my own, unless otherwise stated in the endnote references.

There is an occupational hazard for anyone who chooses to write about Chinese politics in the second decade of the twenty-first century. We may live in an age of openness and information, but the inner workings of the Chinese political system, and in particular the lives and thinking of its leaders, remain one of the few bastions of opacity. Those who choose to write about it, therefore, have to face two different kinds of criticism. From one side, there is the complaint often made from within China that anyone trying to work out its internal politics doesnt really understand because he or she is an outsider. These people use dark phrases like you dont really know how China works. The implication is that the system is so fiendishly complicated and successfully protective of its secrets that only those deep within can truly understand it and of course, they are the last to say what they know. There are also many outside China who have a vested interest in maintaining this image of unknowability. To them, years of observation and careful scrutiny of name lists are the only legitimate pathway to understanding. Perhaps tellingly, one of the diplomats I worked with in the past combined professional interest in elite Chinese politics with collecting dead moths. He got a lot of things right, but spoke about China and the Chinese like they were taxidermy exhibits in a museum.

On the other side, there is the complaint that those who try to write with some sympathy, or attempt to understand internal Chinese politics too much on its own terms, are apologists, people who have gone native and are guilty of producing external propaganda for an immoral system. The work of (the American) Robert Lawrence Kuhn is most representative here. His earlier biography of Jiang Zemin was one of very few based on meetings and first-hand encounters with Chinas then president, and his follow-up book on the new leadership in 2011 was similarly advantaged by excellent top-level access. Kuhns writings, however, have been criticized for being over-respectful and fawning, presenting leaders like Xi in an uncritical light. This accusation of partisanship is a common taunt against those who write about Chinese politics in a far more neutral tone than Kuhns.

After almost a quarter of a century trying to work out what power means in China, how it is exercised and what makes Chinese elite leaders tick, something I have come to realize is that hybrid approaches work best, taking methods and insights from diverse areas and trying to link them to what one observes in China. It is a good idea too to treat Chinese political behaviour the way one would address political habits and modes of action anywhere. The United Kingdom and the United States both have peculiarities about their systems and the way people operate in them. But, broadly speaking, people strive for power and are motivated to acquire that power for very similar reasons no matter where they are. We are all part of one species, so there should be no shock about this. The important thing is to keep a sense of proportion between the unique features of specific systems and their shared attributes. Overstressing one and understressing the other are both mistaken.