Speaker: Dr. Cheng Li
Abstract
At the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party in the fall of 2017, China will likely experience its largest leadership turnover since the height of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s. Xi Jinping is one of the most intriguing and complex world leaders of our time, and China’s political trajectory is crucial to the peace and prosperity of the world. Xi’s legacy, as Li argues, will largely depend on whether he encourages or obstructs the trend of political institutionalization in governing the world’s most populous country as it becomes increasingly pluralistic.
Cheng Li provides a nuanced account of how the structure and dynamics of party leadership have evolved since the late 1990s, challenging Western conventional wisdom about the Middle Kingdom. His insights into what many China analysts call the “black box” of leadership decisionmaking draw on the meticulous biographical information he includes in this volume on the members of the party’s Central Committee, with tables and charts detailing their family origins, education backgrounds, occupations, career patterns, and mentor-patron ties.
About the Speaker
Cheng Li is Director and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center. He is also a director of the National Committee on US-China Relations, a member of the Academic Advisory Team of the Congressional US-China Working Group, a member of the Committee of 100, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author/editor of numerous books, including, The Road to Zhongnanhai: High-Level Leadership Groups on the Eve of the 18th Party Congress (2012, in Chinese), China’s Political Development: Chinese and American Perspectives (2014), Chinese Politics in the Xi Jinping Era: Reassessing Collective Leadership (2016) and The Power of Ideas: The Rising Influence of Thinkers and Think Tanks in China (forthcoming).. He is the principal editor of the Thornton Center Chinese Thinkers Series published by the Brookings Institution Press.