Jiang Zemin :: essays research papers

Allen Bullock HST 4077/24/2003Jiang Zemin, as the President of China, will be leading the worlds nigh populous country into the 21st century. A new biography of Mr. Jiang describes him as an economic reformer but not a political reformer and as someone often mistakenly believed to have 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 cultivation about Chinese politics have to blaspheme on official publications, and on the semiofficial and nonofficial distinguishs that bubble up in Hong Kong. These are the same methods of trailing 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 Chinese politics. Unfortunately, Gilley is sharply limited by the same lack of access as e very other student of Zhongnanhai. A correspondent for The distant Eastern Economic Review who covered China out of Hong Kong, Gilley has done 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 Party 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 portly president in the mens room room at the Great Hall of the People. And Jiang left the restroom before a surprised Gilley could think of a question to ask.The big cat in the books title apparently refers to China, not Jiang, for it is unlikely that anyone would ever mistake the genial and cautious leader portrayed by Gilley for such a ferocious creature. Gilley reinforces the perspicacity of Jiang as a po litically 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 nearly 50 years of Communist Party politics not as an intellectual or a fighter but by his ability to get along with superiors and inferiors alike, and by making use of an unsurpassed knack for currying estimation with influential men.