After Mao’s passing in September 1976, the coalition that Mao had put in place at the end of his life, which was composed Cultural Revolution radicals with little revolutionary experience, even more junior officials like Wu De and mass representatives, the tainted Fourth Front Army (FFA) group, and a handful of trusted First Front Army veterans like Ye Jianying and Wang Dongxing, took over the People’s Republic of China. An uneasy truce persisted for a very short time before the Gang of Four had alarmed Hua Guofeng by challenging his role as the anointed successor, which compelled him to seek more drastic solutions (Zhang 2008b: 263). In this decisive moment, the FFA swung behind Hua, thus sealing the Gang of Four’s fate, but Hua also became very dependent on FFA veterans. His dependence on military veterans with vastly more experience and greater networks ultimately also brought about his downfall. Within two years of Mao’s death, none of the potential successors Mao had put into place just prior to his death survived as powerful figures in the party. The Gang of Four had ended in jail, while Hua was sidelined at the third plenum in 1978. Even FFA veteran Li Desheng, who had served as vice chairman of the party for a short while, ended his career in the 1980s as the head of the National Defense University (Zhu 2007: 425). Except for key members of the FFA group, the vast majority of Mao’s coalition of the weak had ended in jail or in retirement by the early 1980s. His legacy of continuous revolution also was completely expunged from the party ideology in favor of a single-minded focus on economic development.

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.

This chapter examines the passage of power from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin. It shows at least four things. First, that Jiang did not consolidate power until he had been in office for approximately five years. Second, the purge of the military leadership allowed Jiang to build support in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Third, Jiang was able to move supporters into critical positions and thus consolidate power, and, fourth, he was able to extend his influence even after he stepped down. Together, these phases in the consolidation of power show how difficult it is to pass on power in a Leninist system, that control of the military remains a critical part of consolidating power, and that personal networks remain critical to understanding how power works in a Leninist system.

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.