[QUOTE=xiix]
So no one here thinks that a “good” leader with entirely selfless intentions who wants whats best for their country might run China in a similar way to how its run now? I guess I just find myself torn between the logic that most of what the government does seems kinda evil, but at the same time, I believe that only enlightened brilliant people get to run Countries the size of China.
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From top to bottom (top being Hu Jintao) currently China is led by career bureaucrats/technocrats. These are people who have essentially been in bureaucratic, specialized offices for many years while concurrently moving up the political ranks in the Communist Party.
By and large I don’t see outright maliciousness from these, “fourth generation” Chinese leaders. A lot of these guys were educated as engineers within China itself. Hu Jintao started out in a hydroelectic facility and eventually worked his way up through party bureaucracy until he basically became the paramount leader of China.
This generation of leaders see themselves as the rightful “administrators” of China. I don’t get the impression that these are people necessarily interested solely in keeping power, they just think they are the rightful administrators and that they know best. There’s a big difference between the Fourth Generation and previous generations in that this generation came to power in the first transition in Communist Chinese history that was genuinely peaceful (although the transmission from Deng to Jiang Zemin was relatively peaceful.)
In fact Fourth Generation leaders specifically seek rule through collaboration, this is the ultimate result of the work of the third and second generation leaders. By and large one of the most important developments in the third and second generations was the move away from “cult of personality” leadership. It was actually seen as disadvantageous by China’s leaders for there to be “one man” who ran the entire state by fiat. While even Deng Xiaoping recognized this, he himself essentially had consolidate so much power that he was essentially running the state in just such a manner.
By and large the Chinese leadership isn’t stupid, they understand that when “one man” surrounds himself with a cult of personality and rules like Mao did, the country is prone to excesses and train wrecks. Chinese leadership isn’t so much focused on democratic ideals–that isn’t why there has been a movement to more structured/collaborative governance, but rather they just have realized that such structure and collaboration is necessary.
While Hu Jintao has an immense amount of power–control of state, party, and military, he has been selected in a very orderly, structured manner and there is a fairly structured timeline after which it will be expected that he cedes power to another leader.
I’m not saying I agree with China’s leadership, I just think that by and large these are a group of essentially career bureaucrats who look at China much like we would a corporation. They view the people as shareholders and are simply trying to shepherd the state in the best manner possible, that tends to result in fairly conservative change and decision making.
What will be very interesting is that the next generation after Hu will be an extremely profound change. Hu’s generation didn’t come to power through the military like all the generations prior, but rather they are technocrats who took power through bureaucratic politics. However Hu’s generation are still committed Communists by and large. The next generation of leaders are primarily entrepreneurs and people educated in business, people with vested interests in a free market system.
