By Zheng Wang
Whether bullying or flattering the top leader, China’s bureaucracy always has its own interests at heart.
There is a special phenomenon in Chinese politics that characterizes the interactions of the country’s top leaders and the bureaucrats. I call it theorybecause it has occurred repeatedly throughout China’s long history. In China, when the top leader is weak, the bureaucrats—especially the senior officials—would take advantage of the weak leadership and create supplementary difficulties for the leader to carry out his policies. They would steal his power and make him a mere figurehead. Very often powerful warlords, and/or eunuchs, emerged as the real controllers of the country. On the other hand, when the leader is strong and powerful, the bureaucrats will do anything to flatter, praise, and adore their leader and to make him happy—through god-making campaigns and hero worship.
In either scenario the bureaucrats are trying to influence the leader, and protect and maximize their own interests. China’s bureaucratic hierarchic system has a longer history than anywhere else in the world, and China also has the largest number of government officials. It is this group of people that perform the day-to-day governance; they are the ones that are actually running this big country. From the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC) until today, this basic scenario hasn’t changed.
The two recent administrations in China have proved this theory correct once again. Hu Jintao was a weak leader, and during his term (2002-2012) his power was very limited and he was a figurehead to some extent. Several Politburo members such as Zhou Yongkang, Guo Boxiong, and Xu Caihou became very powerful, and Hu’s top assistant and chief of his office, Ling Jihua, was to some extant the real person in charge of many of China’s political affairs. Hu’s retirement paved the way for the emergence of a new strong leader. Xi Jinping is now generally considered China’s most powerful leader since Deng Xiaoping. The history repeating itself now is that China’s bureaucrats have begun a new campaign of “praising our great leader.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat