ABSTRACT
Mao Zedong once referred to the ‘800 people who rule China’, a statement emphasizing the enormous importance of political leadership in shaping PRC history. In fact, the fate of the Chinese people has for a long time rested in the hands of a small handful of individuals and, at crucial junctures, solely with Mao himself. The unusual degree of leadership dominance of society for the Maoist period in particular had both broad cultural and historical specific roots: a culture of obedience to strong leadership, and a revolutionary process producing unimaginable success which led the elite and public to believe Chinese Communist Party leaders had the right to rule and transform China. A corollary to this is the tremendous importance of relationships among the political personae occupying the highest positions in the Party, relationships which by the 1990s involved more than sixty years of interaction for various key figures. This interaction was by no means static; it underwent dramatic changes under Mao from a very stable leadership for most of the 1950s to a less secure but still relatively unchanged power structure in the pre-Cultural Revolution decade, to the internecine turmoil of the Cultural Revolution itself. Throughout this drama links to the revolutionary past were everpresent; political power usually derived more from revolutionary status than current performance. With the post-Mao period the importance of such status, which had been partially disrupted by the Cultural Revolution, was restored with the dominance of Deng Xiaoping whose decisions were obeyed largely because of his exceptional revolutionary prestige. But with Deng and his veteran colleagues ageing, policy formulation as well as administration, although initially not ultimate power, fell to a younger generation of leaders lacking comparable revolutionary credentials, with the result that in the 1990s the leadership group under Jiang Zemin engaged in a ‘normal politics’ where leaders were much more vulnerable to social forces and the relations among them reflected political bargaining rather than the obedience that had marked the rule of Mao and, to a lesser extent, Deng.
