Roderick MacFarquhar
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS - August 13, 2015 Issue
The Governance of China by Xi Jinping Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 515 pp., $16.95 (paper) Chinese Politics in the Era of Xi Jinping: Renaissance, Reform, or Retrogression? by Willy Wo-Lap Lam Routledge, 323 pp., $145.00; $50.95 (paper)
In the almost one-hundred-year existence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),
its current general secretary, Xi Jinping, is only the second leader
clearly chosen by his peers. The first was Mao Zedong. Both men beat out
the competition, and thus secured a legitimacy their predecessors
lacked.1 Why was Xi chosen?
The
Beijing rumor mill had long indicated that the outgoing elders were
looking for a “princeling” successor, that is the son of a senior first-
generation revolutionary. Princelings, it was apparently felt, had a
bigger stake in the revolution than most people, and thus would be the
most determined to preserve the rule of the CCP.
Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was a respected vice-premier and member of the CCP
Central Committee known for his moderate views, but he fell afoul of
Mao in 1962 and was purged, then was rehabilitated and returned to high
office after the Chairman’s death. Xi Jinping thus has the additional
legitimation of being “born red,” as Evan Osnos put it recently in The New Yorker.
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