The New Shape of Elite Politics

Abstract

Four factors are particularly prominent in propelling substantial political change in China over the past decade: generational change within the top leadership, economic development and differentiation, the shadow of Tiananmen, and the different domestic and international political environments that have emerged in the post-Tiananmen and post-Cold War period. These factors have evolved more or less simultaneously and have interacted with one another. In the 1990s the actuarial tables finally caught up with the revolutionary that had dominated politics for half a century. Former president Li Xiannian, Jiang's closest political supporter, died in June 1992. Not long after, Hu Qiaomu, Mao Zedong's former secretary and the Chinese Communist Party's most authoritative ideologue, passed away. Chen Yun, the conservative economic specialist, died in April 1995; and Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader, finally succumbed in February 1997. Although Deng liked to refer to himself as the core of the second generation of leadership, so as to differentiate and distance himself from Mao, he and his colleagues were clearly part of the first generation, the revolutionary who had undertaken the Long March and led the revolution to victory. As these dominant leaders of the revolutionary passed from the scene, a few of their generational cohort-Wan Li, Song Ping, Deng Liqun, Liu Huaqing, and so on-have lived on into the new millennium and influenced politics from time to time, but their interventions are episodic and of declining importance (an exception perhaps being the crisis following the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade). The revolutionary no longer dominates the political scene. The 15th Party Congress in 1997 is usually taken as the symbolic turning point when power passed from the revolutionary to the first group of leaders who had won their promotions through their bureaucratic service rather