ABSTRACT
It is a peculiarity of political systems that usually it is easy to characterize past systems but hard to generalize about current ones. The international system during the Cold War can now be easily described, but we have trouble explaining post-Cold War world politics. So it is with China: the essence of Mao’s China was clearly the sovereignty of ideology, Deng’s China is captured by the concepts of pragmatism, reform and opening, but it is not easy to find the right few words to characterize elite politics in Jiang Zemin’s China. There are too many contradictory trends, and it is hard to tell which will be the historically decisive ones and which ephemeral.
