7 - Weak Successors

Summary

Although much of this book concerns political dynamics in the Mao Era, the tumults of the Cultural Revolution and the coalition rule that resulted from late-Mao politics indirectly led to an important political outcome by the 2010s, the survival of Xi Jinping as one of the few princelings among political leaders on the civilian side of the CCP. This created one of the preconditions for Xi to dominate the party soon after taking office as the head of the party in late 2012 – the relative absence of competition and oversight from other highly networked princelings. In the 1980s, two forces drove the selection of future leaders in the party. First, founding leaders such as Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping had a genuine desire to promote a new generation of well-educated, loyal potential successors as their health began to fail them. Second, as the rest of the book has argued, the top leadership and even mid-level officials at the ministerial level did not want serious competitors to their power bases, and each pursued a coalition of the weak strategy within his own jurisdiction. Thus, besides a few senior veterans who had placed their children on accelerated paths for promotion, the vast majority of revolutionary veterans resisted the promotion of princelings due to their Red Guard activism during the Cultural Revolution and to fear of interference by well-networked princelings.