Jiang Zemin :: essays research papers

Allen Bullock HST 4077/24/2003Jiang Zemin, as the President of China, will be leading the worlds most populous country into the 21st century. A naked as a jaybird biography of Mr. Jiang describes him as an economic reformer but non a political reformer and as someone often mistakenly believed to pull in blundered his way to power. Bruce Gilley is the author of the first western full-length study of the Chinese leader. Historians, political scientists, and journalists hungry for reliable information about Chinese authorities extradite to rely on official publications, and on the semiofficial and nonofficial accounts that spill the beans up in Hong Kong. These are the same methods of tracking and analyzing Chinas political movements that outsiders have used for decades. It is in this Byzantine context that Bruce Gilley has written tiger on the Brink, a biography of Jiang Zemin and a highly readable account of modern font Chinese politics. Unfortunately, Gilley is sharply limited by the same lack of irritate as every other student of Zhongnanhai. A correspondent for The out-of-the-way(prenominal) Eastern Economic Review who covered China out of Hong Kong, Gilley has do an admirable job of scouring Chinese-language publications for tidbits about Jiangs personal background. But hamstrung by lack of information, this story of Jiangs decade at the top of Chinas Communist society only partly satisfies.Tiger on the Brink is essentially a first-rate job. However, Gilley had to rely overwhelmingly on secondary sources as he relates in the preface, the closest he ever got to his subject was when he ran into the stout president in the mens room at the Great residence of the People. And Jiang left the restroom before a surprised Gilley could think of a question to ask.The big cat in the intelligences title apparently refers to China, not Jiang, for it is unlikely that anyone would ever mistake the genial and cautious leader envisioned by Gilley for such a fero cious creature. Gilley reinforces the assessment of Jiang as a politically slippery but tenacious survivor, less tiger than Mr. Tiger Balm, a moniker he once gave himself, which Gilley uses to head a chapter. Jiang Zemin emerges from this book as a skilled political tactician, who distinguished himself over intimately 50 years of Communist Party politics not as an intellectual or a fighter but by his talent to get along with superiors and inferiors alike, and by making use of an unsurpassed easiness for currying favor with influential men.