Poised to take the helm: Rising stars and the transition to the fourth generation

Abstract

Central leaders have had to use indirect methods of assessing changing public expectations from a growing plurality of social strata. As society continues to outgrow the Leninist bureaucratic structures intended to contain and control it, central authorities are uncertain how to cope with the new constraints on their authority created by commercialization and cultural impact from the outside. China’s leaders in the 1990s addressed the challenge with Band-Aids-marginal readjustments to shore up the existing social and political structures for co-opting and controlling society. The focus on internal Party reform at the Sixteenth Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Congress is viewed as a substitute for systemic structural change. Recent sociological studies of the relationship between State and society in China, would suggest that new Chinese leaders will face some very difficult historic choices in social policy and political reform.