China's New Rulers: The Secret Files (Second, revised edition). By Andrew J. Nathan and Bruce Gilley. [New York: New York Review Books, 2003. 280 pp. £8.99. ISBN 1-59017-072-5.]

Extract

China's New Rulers purports to represent what “lengthy internal investigation reports prepared by the [Chinese Communist] Party's highly trusted Organization Department” say about China's “new leaders' personalities, how they came to power, and what they intend to do in office” (pp. 3–4). It claims to provide its readers with “evidence from the internal reports of the Party's Organization Department [that] allows for a major advance in our understanding of Chinese politics” (p. 5). And yet its authors, as they themselves admit in their introduction, have never seen – much less read – even a single such report. All they have is faith in a particular “consistent” “version of Chinese politics” shared with them by a pseudonymous Chinese informant “Zong Hairen” (his name can be read as a strangely ominous-sounding pun on “invariably doing harm to people”) who, they explain, has told them that he was at one time given access to “long sections of working drafts” of such reports (pp. 29, 32–33). What Nathan and Gilley's book amounts to, then, is a rendition into “more accessible English” of what “Zong” convinced them of and has himself either written and published in Hong Kong or “broadcast in Chinese on Radio Free Asia” (p. 30, 38). China's New Rulers, in other words, is neither a book the contents of which are the “secret files” mentioned in its subtitle, nor a book by political scientist authors who themselves have accessed such files.