PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      Ever since I first started studying China and its politics in 1973 I have focused on a variety of aspects and dimensions of the Chinese political system, but none more consistently than its senior leaders and leadership. My first book in 1984 was in fact about a Chinese leader (Zhao Ziyang); it traced his life and career path from being a sub-provincial official in Guangdong province to becoming the national Premier and then General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party,¹ and other Chinese leaders have played a central role in many of my subsequent publications. Of course, leaders matter a great deal in the life and politics of all nations, but their impact is greater in certain autocratic systems—of which China is one. I have long been interested in the different dimensions of how Chinese communist leaders rule—their individual idiosyncrasies, how they interact with each other, what strategies and tactics they adopt, how they use the institutional levers of power and control at their disposal, how they impact Chinese society, and how they interact with the other leaders from other countries.

This book about China’s leaders has thus been percolating in my mind for many decades. As I have taught my own university courses on Chinese politics during the past three decades, I have always adopted a leader-centric approach, and would assign individual biographical books and articles on different leaders, but I always wished that there was a single volume that covered China’s main leaders and their periods of rule from 1949 to the present. The one that does successfully do this was edited by the eminent Harvard professor Roderick MacFarquhar;² in this volume and all others that he authored during his distinguished career, Chinese leaders played the central role in his analysis. Rod unfortunately recently passed away in February 2019, but during his scholarly career he was truly the doyen of the study of Chinese communist “elite politics.” Rod was always most kind and mentoring to me (although I was never his student), I hold him in extremely high esteem, and therefore I admiringly dedicate this book to his memory and to all that he contributed to the scholarly study of Chinese politics. During the period 1991–1996 when I served as the Editor of The China Quarterly, the leading journal in contemporary China studies, which Rod founded in 1960, Rod was also very supportive and mentoring from across the Atlantic and his professorial position at Harvard.

      While China has many leaders at any given time, who populate the approximately 25-member Political Bureau (Politburo) and the 7-member Standing Committee, there has always been one dominant “paramount leader” (much more than a primus inter pares). This book is about the five main individuals who have been in this position (Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping)—but it also definitely considers others who held the top institutional portfolios as party leader (Hua Guofeng, Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang) as well as a variety of other Politburo members who have been significant political players in their own rights.

      While the book is centered on the lives of these individual Chinese communist leaders it is also very much focused on their times as well. It is thus simultaneously a survey of the evolution of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over the past seven decades. Taken together, I hope that the combined focus on leaders and their times will serve as a good overview and introductory text for students and readers who seek a comprehensive survey of the PRC. In trying to make this an accessible and readable account that keeps the narrative moving along, inevitably I have had to make numerous judgments along the way concerning certain facts and events—providing sufficient detail but not so much as to bog the reader down. This has been a fine balance to strike—providing lots of detail but not too much. As Chinese politics (like all systems but perhaps more