Jiang Zemin's Style of Rule: Go for Stability, Monopolize Power and Settle for Limited Effectiveness

Abstract

It is a peculiarity of political systems that usually it is easy to characterize past systems but hard to generalize about current ones. The international system during the Cold War can now be easily described, but we have trouble explaining post-Cold War world politics. So it is with China: the essence of Mao's China was clearly the sovereignty of ideology, Deng's China is captured by the concepts of pragmatism, reform and opening, but it is not easy to find the right few words to characterize elite politics in Jiang Zemin's China. There are too many contradictory trends, and it is hard to tell which will be the historically decisive ones and which ephemeral. As a start, however, we can certainly say that political stability has been the overriding objective of Jiang Zemin's leadership circle. Their guiding principle is the belief that preserving the Party's monopoly on power is in China's highest national interest; and needless to say, they also agree that preserving the Party's domination is also in their own best personal interest. Operationally this means that the leaders want governing to be a normal, routine matter-nothing dramatic or extreme. They want government to be just the practice of management, not of politics, for that would involve contending over values. In contrast to the constant drama and excitement over new departures that characterized the Mao and Deng eras, public affairs under Jiang has become a prosaic, almost colorless activity. This quality of dullness seems to match Jiang's public persona, a technocrat who, on becoming the Party chief just after Tiananmen, was scornfully called the Flowerpot because of his penchant for standing around and looking pleasantly idle.' Chinese political gossip has been filled with deprecating jokes about