How China's Leaders Think: The Inside Story of China's Past, Current and Future Leaders
Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Language: English
Pages: 572
ISBN: 1118085906
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A fascinating look at China now and in the years to come, through the eyes of those at the helm
As China continues its rapid ascent, attention is turning to its leaders, who they are, and how they view the country's incredible transformation over the last thirty years. In How China's Leaders Think: The Inside Story of China's Past, Current and Future Leaders, Revised, bestselling author Lawrence Kuhn goes directly to the source, talking with members of China's ruling party and examining recently declassified Party material to provide readers with an intimate look at China's leaders and leadership structure, visionary principles, and convulsive past, and tracing the nation's reform efforts.
Focusing on President Hu Jintao's philosophies and policies, the book looks to the next generation of China's leaders to ask the questions on everyone's lips. Who are China's future leaders? How do they view China's place in the world? Confronting China's leaders head on, Kuhn asks about the county's many problem, from economic imbalances to unsustainable development, to find out if there's a road map for change. Presenting the thoughts of key Chinese leaders on everything from media, military, banking, and healthcare to film, the Internet, science and technology, and much more, the book paints an intimate, candid portrayal of how China's leaders really think.
* Presents a fascinating insight into how China's leaders think about their country and where it's headed
* Asks the tough questions about China's need for reform
* Pulls together information from over 100 personal interviews as well as recently declassified Party documents
Taking readers closer to Party officials than ever before, How China's Leaders Think documents China's thirty-year struggle toward economic and social reform, and what's to come.
foreigners—and there were calls for foreign missionaries to be expelled. In 1954, the official Chinese Protestant Church’s Three-Self Patriotic Movement was established. Islam, Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Daoism and other religions also conducted restructuring. (After the Korean War in particular, the U.S. government disallowed financial support to Chinese churches.) China’s relationship with the Vatican was occasionally tense. In 1947 and 1949 the Vatican ordered that no Catholic should join or
family. Peng was impressed by his dedication to his job, and told him: “Work and family complement each other. Only if you do your work well can you maintain a good family.” They talked about history, China, international affairs, their goals in life. Xi told her that he thought they had both “suffered in life,” but had maintained their “integrity and innocence.” Peng’s parents, however, didn’t want their daughter to marry an offspring of a senior official, since they believed that “princelings
government; individuals normally serve in several such posts, with increasing levels of responsibility, before being promoted to upper echelons of national leadership. Thus, when Global People magazine, published by People’s Daily, featured in 2009 five officials of full-ministerial rank who were born in the 1960s—and thus still in their 40s—observers took note.2 (In China, to make full minister before age 50 signals fast-track ascent.) Three of the members of China’s so-called “Sixth
premier and a few months later premier. Later, after a series of modest student protests in 1986, Zhao replaced Hu Yaobang as CPC general secretary in early 1987. At the 13th Party Congress (1987), Zhao presented the coastal development strategy that would come to power China’s economic boom. He envisioned the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province, and the Yangtze River Delta around Shanghai, as the two “dragon heads” which would drive development of China’s southern and eastern coasts.
enlarging the highways into expressways and reducing the pollution of the vehicles that travel them. Surely Hu was younger, more pragmatic, less flamboyant, more in tune with contemporary times, closer in sense and style to the new generation of international leaders like British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Hu liked getting out among the people, hearing and helping them. After all, Hu had spent the majority of his career outside the major centers—more than 20 years in the less-developed provinces