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The Big Three principles of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism shape the philosophical, spiritual, and belief systems of Chinese leaders. Although, one could argue that, Legalism is also a significant factor in Chinese political society, Legalism deals with compelling conformity through the rigorous application of reward and punishment based on laws and regulations, and...

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Sun Yat Sen, the putative father of the modern Chinese nation—for both China and Taiwan—was a Chinese sage leader with a revolutionary zeal to modernize China. Sun devoted his life to transitioning China from an imperial, feudalistic, and weakened nation into one that could realize a national identity and shape its own destiny as a modern nation free from foreign control....

Chinese revere the legacy of Sun and his efforts to instill in the nation the courage to overthrow the Qing Dynasty. Sun’s China Dream was that the Chinese people would seize their own country and destiny in a wave of political idealism. Contrasted with Sun’s China Dream, was a very different dream in the legacy of Sun’s contemporary, Yuan Shikai, who is remembered for his...

With the end of the Qing Dynasty, Chinese society discovered a newfound self-awareness, experienced intellectual revitalization, and faced decisions about the ideological direction of its future. Student and academic leaders blamed adherence to old traditional values and culture for China’s flaccid state as the cause of its imperialist abuse by the West. Consensus emerged among the...

Jiang, most widely known in the West as Chang Kai-Shek, was a military officer who used his military bearing and demeanor to advantage in becoming GMD party leader, statesman, and president of the Republic of China or Taiwan. Jiang hailed from an upper-middle class merchant family. Jiang’s father died when young Jiang was only eight, so his mother filled the role of both parents. She was a...

In a 2012 panel discussion at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., the then 89-year-old former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger–nearly as old as the CCP itself–presented an insightful assessment of Mao based on his forty years of experience dealing with Chinese leaders: “Each generation of Chinese leader. . . reflected the mission and the...

It is difficult to image Deng Xiaoping as synonymous with cats, but he is indeed a “cat of nine lives” who survived numerous political purges from the top echelons of Chinese leadership power. As the prescient leader in the post-Cultural Revolution anarchy of ideological radicalism, Deng espoused economic modernization as a policy priority through capitalistic pragmatism....

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This section addresses the rise of Xi Jinping to the presidency of China, recognizing the influential factors of the preceding leadership tenures of Jiang Zemin in the 1990s and Hu Jintao of the early 2000s, China’s third and fourth-generation leaders. This period could be summarized as leadership power consolidation through factional politics during which the formation of leadership...

The twelfth NPC in March 2012 confirmed Xi Jinping to succeed Hu Jintao as general secretary. Eight months later, in November 2012, the eighteenth Party Congress confirmed Xi as president. As a “princeling” of a Chinese revolutionary veteran, Xi has been described in purported diplomatic circles as “Mr. Clean.” Xi, who is thus far ostensibly untainted by scandals and...

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The CPS is the sine qua non of executive leadership training in China for the first-among-equals and exclusive among the elite ranks of CCP political leadership. It is the supreme training incubator and pedagogical center of excellence for CCP cadre. The CPS is comparable to the senior executive leadership training programs of US think tanks, Harvard University’s Kennedy School of...

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