Jiang As Gilley example essay topic

Allen Bullock HST 407 7/24/2003 Jiang Zemin, as the President of China, will be leading the world's most populous country into the 21st century. A new biography of Mr. Jiang describes him as an economic reformer but not a political reformer and as someone often mistakenly believed to have blundered his way to power. Bruce Gilley is the author of the first western full-length study of the Chinese leader. Historians, political scientists, and journalists hungry for reliable information about Chinese politics have to rely on official publications, and on the semiofficial and nonofficial accounts that bubble up in Hong Kong. These are the same methods of tracking and analyzing China's political movements that outsiders have used for decades. It is in this Byzantine context that Bruce Gilley has written Tiger on the Brink, a biography of Jiang Zemin and a highly readable account of modern Chinese politics.

Unfortunately, Gilley is sharply limited by the same lack of access as every other student of Zhongnanhai. A correspondent for The Far Eastern Economic Review who covered China out of Hong Kong, Gilley has done an admirable job of scouring Chinese-language publications for tidbits about Jiang's personal background. But hamstrung by lack of information, this story of Jiang's decade at the top of China's Communist Party only partly satisfies. Tiger on the Brink is essentially a first-rate job. However, Gilley had to rely overwhelmingly on secondary sources; as he relates in the preface, the closest he ever got to his subject was when he ran into the portly president in the men's room at the Great Hall of the People.

And Jiang left the restroom before a surprised Gilley could think of a question to ask. The big cat in the book's title apparently refers to China, not Jiang, for it is unlikely that anyone would ever mistake the genial and cautious leader portrayed by Gilley for such a ferocious creature. Gilley reinforces the assessment of Jiang as a politically slippery but tenacious survivor, less tiger than "Mr. Tiger Balm", a moniker he once gave himself, which Gilley uses to head a chapter. Jiang Zemin emerges from this book as a skilled political tactician, who distinguished himself over nearly 50 years of Communist Party politics not as an intellectual or a fighter but by his ability to get along with superiors and inferiors alike, and by making use of an unsurpassed knack for currying favor with influential men. It is tempting to assume that the world's most populous country will produce a leader with a character of similar magnitude. Yet Jiang tends to make a mild impression on those he meets.

Observers hoping to find him a liberal have been disappointed; yet so have been those who expected a reactionary or an ogre. If Jiang has any strong political views or vision, they remain well hidden. While Mao has been enshrined as the helmsman of the revolution, Deng is known as the architect of reform. Jiang, it is thought, would like to be remembered as the grand engineer, the man who kept the machine called China running. That may seem a modest goal compared with those of his predecessors.

But Jiang is a modest man, with much, as Churchill might have said, to be modest about. Jiang's leadership style -- indecisive, replete with contradictions and mostly concerned about muddling through -- reflects an uncertain time for Chinese Communists. While the nation executes a stunning shift from a planned to a market economy, Jiang and his colleagues continue to mouth meaningless shibboleths about the ongoing, dominant role of the socialist state. As corruption grows worse, Jiang announces one toothless, anti-graft crackdown after another. Jiang likes to present himself as a highly educated idealist in touch with the common man. Gilley shows him instead as an accomplished, calculating performer who has mastered the political routines of Communist Party politics.

Mao and Deng each possessed a charisma that grew out of deeply held political convictions, Jiang, as Gilley describes him, does not stand for anything. It is hard to imagine a man or woman on the streets of Beijing able to think of a single principle that Jiang represents -- apart from holding on to power. According to Gilley, Jiang once implied that he is "not a dictator" to a surprised group of American academics. Describing the checks placed on his personal power by the consensus-oriented philosophy of China's leadership, Jiang modestly insisted that his authority was limited. As Gilley aptly observes, Jiang's true audience for this speech was probably members of the Politburo, whom he hoped to placate with assurances that they were equals. While consensus may sound like an enlightened leadership style to outsiders, in China it comes only after endless back-biting, meddling, and negotiating between top leaders and their staffs.

Unfortunately, Gilley can only hint at such antics; the details remain beyond his reach, lost behind the omer ta of Communist Party politics. While the particulars may be obscure, the effect of Chinese 'consensus' is evident at many meetings held with foreigners, in which officials seem unable to speak freely and are restricted to repeating Communist Party lines. All of which have presumably been worked out in advance. Gilley illustrates the point with a humorous anecdote: Jiang's first meeting with President Clinton in 1993 was so badly hemmed in by the official script that it reduced the meeting to farce. After shaking hands, Jiang took out a prepared statement criticizing the United States for butting into China's internal affairs over human rights and read it aloud, word for word. After 20 interminable minutes, an exasperated Clinton interrupted to suggest that he and Jiang should talk to each other, not lecture.

Jiang looked up, but did not stop reading. After another 10 minutes, Clinton joked aloud to one of his aides that he "should have brought my saxophone along to get some practice in". Jiang's interpreter misinterpreted: "Mr. Clinton says he would like to play his saxophone for you". Jiang's eyes lit up with glee", Gilley writes.

"Really?" he asked, finally putting down his speech. "That's great. I play the er hu. I should invite you to my home in Beijing and you could play your saxophone while I play my er hu!" One might be tempted to put the exchange down to linguistic or cultural misunderstanding. But the episode reveals how, even after four years at the helm, Jiang still did not feel he had the authority to speak for himself. Though well liked and competent, as a bureaucrat Jiang exhibited little that hinted at his bright future.

His real skill always lay in finding and nurturing relationships with the political patrons who would later be key to his advance. In Beijing, for example, he befriended Wang Doohan, later mayor of Shanghai, who was to be instrumental in getting Jiang his post as electronics minister in 1983 and as mayor of Shanghai in 1985. It was in Shanghai that Jiang could make full use of his talents, wooing several of China's elder leaders, including Li Xian nian, Chen Yun, and, most critically, Deng Xiaoping, who apparently liked the special care lavished on them by Jiang during their visits to his city. And yet, apart from this routine history, the key questions about Jiang's career -- how he rose from the ashes of Tiananmen as the Communist Party's leader, how he dealt with his main political rivals in 1992 and 1997, and how he eventually usurped Deng's mantle as China's supreme leader -- remain, frustratingly, unanswered by Gilley. Were Chinese politics not so secretive, a biographer would never be excused for failing to illustrate Jiang's transformation from Deng's yes man to his successor. It was a subtle and painstaking process that probably involved a long series of tactical moves.

Yet Gilley relates few of them, since he knows almost as little about them as we do. The biggest challenge to Jiang's rule as Deng's successor came from the Yang brothers: former president Yang Shang kun and his half-brother, General Yang Baiting. In 1992, Jiang succeeded in outfoxing them both. But Gilley devotes a scant few paragraphs to this complex power play.

Again, what is troubling here is not that the author downplays the importance of Jiang's victory over his rivals, but that, bereft as his account is of relevant information, it cannot explain how it all actually happened or what it means. Gilley provides a more thorough analysis of Jiang's ouster of Chen Xiong, the Beijing party chief who was toppled in a 1995 scandal. That year, the suicide of Wang Bao sen, a deputy mayor of Beijing, exposed a web of financial misdealing's, secret mistresses, and secluded villas that eventually led to Chen's jailing. Here Gilley has more to work with, since China's official media published a big chunk of the case, full of lurid details. However, no one outside Beijing's inner sanctum knows why, in a nation where court verdicts are often handed down instantly, it took three years to bring Chen to trial. Gilley suggests that the lag reflected Jiang's maturing confidence, but this seems less likely than the possibility that it took Jiang that long to cope with the political ramifications of the purge of such a formidable rival.

Gilley may be obliged to rely heavily on secondhand accounts of Chinese politics, but his approach has major drawbacks. He mixes straightforward, largely reliable versions of events recounted by Xinhua, China's official news agency, with less-trustworthy material culled from gossipy Hong Kong magazines like Zheng Ming. One footnote tantalizingly refers to an unnamed official in Jiang's Beijing office, yet this mysterious person -- potentially a font of valuable knowledge about Zhongnanhai -- never fully materializes, vanishing no doubt behind the impenetrable veil of official Beijing secrecy. Gilley's reliance on official and semi-official publications also means that he gives too much credence to the official interpretation of events. For example, he refers several times to Deng Xiaoping's 'genuine wish' to retire, which was always the party line.

Contrary to the official version, actual evidence suggests that Deng never intended to give this up, until advancing Parkinson's disease finally forced him to do so in 1994. Similarly, describing the moment when Jiang was offered the post of party general secretary in 1989, Gilley takes at face value Jiang's modest protests that he was unqualified and unsure he wanted the job. It is hard to imagine anyone who succeeded in scratching his way to the top of Chinese politics actually hesitating when offered the prize. Playing hard-to-get is a common political ploy, and it apparently continues to influence journalists all over the world. In summary, Gilley follows Jiang's life and career from his early years as the adopted son of a revolutionary martyr, through his training in Western science and engineering, to his emergence as what many believed would be an interim figurehead in the wake of Tiananmen. Gilley shows how Jiang instead persisted as China's key leader following the death of Deng Xiaoping: While he shared the concerns of the last of the Party elders -- including their idealistic views of Chinese socialism -- he also accommodated the younger generation of economic reformers who have helped China to achieve staggering growth in its domestic economy and foreign trade.

Gilley's analysis of the careful and methodical transition of power from Deng to Jiang during the 1990's is a study in complexity and contrast, illustrating Jiang's ability to either placate his allies and adversaries or ruthlessly exploit their weaknesses.