In China's Own Eyes

There are several ways to read The Man Who Changed China, an officially sanctioned portrait of Jiang Zemin, China's recently retired top leader, written by the American investment banker Robert Lawrence Kuhn. Indeed, the biggest challenge of this book is figuring out exactly how to approach it.

The most obvious way is as a biography. But although the book gives a detailed account of Jiang's public life, it fails to provide deeper insights into his personality. Instead, it recycles commonly known information: that Jiang is a social conservative, that he is a political reformist, and that he likes science and engineering. The wooden narrative gets nowhere near the aims of true biography.

One might also approach The Man Who Changed China as history. But the book's main claim -- that Jiang is responsible for China's remarkable transition from disintegrating underachiever in 1989 to emerging superpower today -- is not substantiated. Kuhn does not define how China has changed since 1989; he makes no attempt to refute alternative explanations for China's boom, such as the role of structural forces or of über-reformer Deng Xiaoping; and he provides only smatterings of inside evidence to show how Jiang's actions led to particular outcomes. The claim that Jiang changed China is plausible. But it is not one that this book proves.

Alternatively, one might read this book for the occasional behind-the-scenes look at Chinese politics. When Jiang was elevated to the weakened position of party chief in 1989, his sister recalls, "We certainly didn't celebrate. His appointment wasn't worth celebrating." His chief mentor, Wang Daohan, warns of the "many complications and contradictions" of politics in Beijing, "especially all the subtle conflicts between different interest groups." And the book fascinatingly describes several personal telephone calls Jiang was forced to make to obtain political information or order policy changes. Still, although Sinologists will hold these gems in trembling hands, for the lay reader they are hardly worth hundreds of pages of agitprop.

There is, however, one way to approach this book profitably: as an autobiography. The Man Who Changed China is valuable because it provides insight into both how Jiang sees himself and how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sees itself. It is, in other words, a text that reflects the preoccupations and worldview of its subject. Beginning in 2001, a secret state propaganda team oversaw the writing of the book. Ten percent of the English version was censored for the Chinese edition, but 90 percent remained the same: the book's main intended market was China itself (where it appeared simultaneously in Chinese and quickly sold a million copies). This is the image that Jiang and China's new leaders want their people to see. How then do they style themselves, and what does this mean for China's future?

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

To write his biography, Mao Zedong chose Edgar Snow, a member of the U.S. Communist Party; Jiang chose Kuhn, a member of the U.S. business elite. An investment banker with a zeal for science, high culture, and business, Kuhn personifies the new ideology that has swept through China since 1989. China's state propaganda team even chose to leave the name of Kuhn's Chinese collaborator out of the book to emphasize the American financier's authorship. Nothing better symbolizes Jiang and his cohort's transition to a right-wing developmental dictatorship; every year, they carefully chip away at their socialist heritage.

Accordingly, the book focuses on Jiang's pragmatism and his reluctance to take part in Mao's political campaigns. This, however, is nonsense. Jiang was an avid participant in the anti-rightist purges of the 1950s (as was Deng), and he rode out the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution by cheering on the Red Guards (as did China's current leader, Hu Jintao). But credibility in China today depends on distancing oneself from that radical leftist era, so Jiang and other present-day Chinese leaders burnish their connections to the pre-1949 CCP, which enjoys great prestige as an upright, anti-imperialist brigade. Again, in Jiang's case, this portrayal is largely inaccurate. The book repeats two "facts" that have been seriously questioned by independent researchers in China: first, that Jiang was adopted by the widow of his uncle, a Communist martyr, in 1939 (Jiang seems to have arranged this adoption retroactively after the Communists won the civil war in 1949); and, second, that he joined the underground CCP in 1946 (he probably did not join until after 1949, prior to which he was not a party activist but a general student activist).

Nonetheless, the vision is clear. What was once a utopian party seeking to change the pre-1949 past is today a practical party seeking continuity with it. Today's CCP portrays itself as the inheritor of the remarkable long-term capitalist boom that was initiated with the start of China's republican period in 1912 (and almost ruined by the party's 1956-76 flirtation with Stalinism). Beijing's historic 2005 reconciliation with Taiwan's Kuomintang Party, which authored that boom, had far more symbolism on the mainland than across the strait. Kuhn's dry descriptions of Jiang's year-to-year activities repeatedly feature watchwords such as "science," "consensus," "pragmatism," and "revitalization" -- this is a China picking up the pieces from the Qing dynasty, not smashing them again.