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Concept
Generations of Chinese leadership
Summary
Generations of Chinese leadership is a term historians use to characterize distinct periods of the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and, by extension, successive changes in the ideology of the CCP. Historians have studied various periods in the development of the government of the People's Republic of China by reference to these "generations".
While in English the chronological leadership groups are commonly referred to as "generations of Chinese leadership", there is no exact equivalent expression in Chinese. The usual term in official discourse for such a group is a "leadership collective", which are counted in generations. Thus, for example, the "first generation" of leaders identified below are labelled as "the first generation leadership collective". In official discourse, they are also not viewed as leaders of the state (the People's Republic of China), but rather leaders of the party (the CCP).
In the CCP's official discourse, the "generational" division and identification of the "core leader" for each of the first, second and third generations was set down during the leadership of Jiang Zemin and first publicized in 1999. This division and identification was not uncontroversial at the time, since the party had hitherto regarded his immediate predecessors as the party's General Secretary, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, as its leaders, and regarded Deng Xiaoping as the "power behind the throne" rather than a formal leader. The revision of party history into "generations" helped to secure Jiang's position as "core" and anointed heir. Through the invention of the concept of the "core", it also helped to de-legitimize Jiang's deposed predecessors (such as Hu and Zhao), by relegating them from party leader to mere "membership" of a "leadership collective", which also conveniently helped to legitimize their deposition.
Jiang's successors have maintained this generational division, but have retreated from identifying a "core leader" in the fourth generation, and the succeeding general secretary Hu Jintao has never been identified in official announcements as the "core" of the fourth generation, preferring to be simply called by his title "General Secretary".
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