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.

Chapter 6 presents a case study of Xi Jinping’s wide-ranging anti-corruption campaign. By all accounts, corruption continued to grow in China throughout the 1990s and 2000s and became among the public’s largest governance concerns. Xi and other party leaders believed that the combination under the Hu Jintao administration of policy failings like the spread of corruption, risky political liberalization, and general party weakness was precipitating a crisis in the CCP’s ability to govern. Since 2012, Xi has pursued anti-corruption campaign as part of his broader mission to restore party discipline and reassert party leadership over China’s state and society. I argue that his administration’s campaign, though not yet finished, has already been successful in curbing corruption. Furthermore, corruption was curbed under Xi using decidedly authoritarian methods. Benefiting Xi was the fact that he has faced far fewer constraints on his leadership than Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin did early in their administrations. The larger political implication of my findings in this chapter is that Xi is succeeding in strengthening CCP organization and discipline, which likely helps prolong one-party rule.

The rise of Xi Jinping presents a stark contrast to the early periods of Jiang Zemin’s and Hu Jintao’s rule. Like Jiang and Hu, Xi was given a weak hand to play. But unlike Jiang and Hu, Xi launched a campaign against corruption that strengthened his power enormously. At the same time, he stressed the threat of “peaceful evolution,” which had brought down the Soviet Union, and underlay the “color revolutions” in Central Asia. This campaign saw a tightening of control over ideology. Xi also undertook an extensive reform of the military. Although this reform facilitated operational matters, it enabled Xi to gain personal control over the military (PLA).

This chapter shows, even more vividly, how difficult it is to pass power on in a Leninist system. Jiang Zemin only allowed Hu Jintao to succeed to office because of the decision of Deng Xiaoping. Even then, Jiang manipulated the “rules of the game” so that Hu Jintao could not consolidate power. Even in his second term, Hu Jintao, though stronger, could not consolidate power. He was able to promote a significant number of his followers, but few of them were able to attain positions of real significance. Hu was never able to control the military.

Chapter 9 focuses on the Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao administrations which followed Deng Xiaoping’s death in 1997, with particular attention paid to the lasting influence of the so-called “Shanghai clique” of high-level Party leaders who supported the outspoken Jiang and his conservative political, economic, and cultural policies in opposition to the more liberal and mild-mannered Hu. In contrast with Jiang, particular emphasis is placed on a Wikileaks “Cablegate” document from the US State Department in which Hu is described as having taken his cues from the business world, having more in common with a chairman of the board than Chairman of the Communist Party. Accordingly, Jiang is shown to have laid much of the groundwork for China’s two major developments in the international political sphere which took place under Hu: joining the World Trade Organization in 2001 and hosting the Summer Olympics in Beijing in 2008, just one month before the outbreak of the global financial crisis of that year. Jiang’s perception as a conservative is challenged with reference to both of these developments, and also to increasing openness to foreign investment. Loosening of media and cultural controls with the arrival of the Internet, are contrasted with repression of the Falun Gong religious group and of ethnic minority groups in Tibet, and Jiang’s “Three Represents” policy is compared to Hu’s “Scientific Outlook on Development” and “Eight Honors, Eight Shames”. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the challenges of the Hu era which were passed on to his successor, Xi Jinping.