The New Emperors gives the back-story to the CPC’s Eighteenth Congress, held in November 2012, at which the new leadership – President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang, and their five fellow members of the Standing Committee of the CPC’s Politburo – was announced. It contains biographies of the committee members, identifying those aspects of their careers which helped them to reach the top. Running throughout the book is the argument that the conventional explanation for their elevation – that it was the result of a consensus worked out between factions – is inadequate.

‘Factions’ are the hardy perennials of China analysis. The more concrete of these constructs are rooted in actual regions or institutions, like that based on Shanghai, associated with China’s Third Generation leader, President Jiang Zemin, or on Beijing’s Qinghua University, associated with the Fourth Generation leaders, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. More subjective are groupings like the ‘grassroots’ and ‘élite’ factions, which were invoked to explain the outcome of the Seventeenth CPC Congress in 2007.

But in Brown’s view, this ‘faction’ model is too deterministic and static, and ignores the ‘dynamism’ and ‘fluidity’ of Chinese politics. He argues that his explanation allows more for the actions of individuals and the impact of unforeseen events – like those which made 2012 so dramatic. Beijing had been hoping for a leadership transition ‘so quiet and unspectacular that hardly anyone noticed’. Instead, the process turned into a ‘roller coaster’. From the beginning of the year, when scandal erupted over the murder of the spooky British fixer Neil Heywood, right to the end, when the size of the new Standing Committee remained in doubt until the very last moment, events conspired to thwart the CPC’s desire for quiet.

Of course, a lot happens that is not in the party script. There are the so-called ‘mass incidents’: mini-uprisings, outbreaks of popular fury against abuses like land grabbing by corrupt officials, police brutality and Beijing’s rule in outlying regions like Tibet and Xinjiang. Brown tells us that the CPC’s worst fear is that such unrest will get out of hand: that elements of the police and army will side with an enraged populace, thus ‘threatening national security itself’.

So a good track record in ‘stability maintenance’ – Beijing’s doublespeak for its iron internal security régime – is one prerequisite for leadership in today’s China. Another is general experience in regional administration. Then there are the shared experiences which, while not prerequisites as such, bind today’s leaders together – such as the scarifying impact of the Cultural Revolution, which cast such a grim shadow over their youth.

While ‘stability maintenance’ marks the front line between China’s rulers and ruled, The New Emperors is about conflict and competition within the ruling élite itself. And this élite is tiny. ‘High-level cadres’ constitute a small fraction of one per cent of CPC members, themselves a small fraction of the overall population. Brown’s book is an analysis of how the Fifth Generation Leaders rose to the top.

As he builds his argument against the notion of ‘factions’, Brown runs a critical eye over the clichés of China analysis. One is guanxi, the ‘connections’ which are the bread and butter of the China consultant, a term which he says is ‘so broad in its usage now as to verge on the meaningless’. More tangible is the label ‘princeling’, defined as a senior CPC member with family links to people who have served at vice-ministerial level. Brown calculates that four of the seven Standing Committee members can be so described.

To make the leadership transition process more ‘quiet and unspectacular’, the CPC has sought to establish precedents, such as that the current leader chooses his successor. But the outcome of the Eighteenth Congress dramatically flouted this principle. President Hu Jintao wanted his protégé Li Keqiang to succeed him, but Li was ‘beaten into second place’ by Xi Jinping. Xi became president, while Li became premier.

And the opacity of the Chinese power structure permitted this to happen. Although the list of candidates for high office was chosen by a ballot, that list was then winnowed down by a shadowy group of senior figures – the ‘Gang of Old Men’, as they were dubbed – led by former President Jiang Zemin. In this way, the long-retired leader Jiang wound up overruling the incumbent Hu.

Brown explains this seeming contradiction by arguing that formal position is only one aspect of political power in China. Political power, he argues, should properly be thought of as ‘capital’, which is acquired, traded, and transmitted through all-important personal links, of which the family ties of the princelings are a salient example. Jiang’s store of political capital, accumulated over decades at the top in Shanghai and Beijing, more than compensated for the fact he had given up formal power years before.

The outcome in 2012 was also determined by unpredictable events. One was the dramatic fall of princeling Bo Xilai, CPC chief of the inland mega-city Chongqing and initially a candidate for Standing Committee membership (if not an even higher rank). The details – the murder of Neil Heywood by Bo’s wife, the flight of Bo’s security chief to an American consulate – were complex, salacious, and susceptible of varying interpretations. But Bo’s fall did highlight the fundamental divide in the debate over the political and economic management of China between those who want the state and planners to play a greater role, and those who want the market and individuals to do so.

Though a party apparatchik, Bo Xilai acted like a populist politician. His ‘Chongqing model’ – subsidised housing, welfare programs, anti-corruption drives – emphasised the role of the state and thus implicitly stood opposed to President Hu Jintao’s reliance on the market to produce a ‘rich, strong country’. Bo’s Maoist rhetoric revived the fundamental issue of whether the CPC should be ‘guided by a utopian vision’ and strive towards a ‘Socialist heaven on Earth’, rather than going down the capitalist road. And so, even though Bo Xilai was personally one of the big losers of 2012, his advocacy of the radical egalitarianism of the Mao era still resonates in Xi Jinping’s China.  

Brown’s exposition of Chinese politics is lucid and closely argued. Yet for all that he debunks ‘factions’ and pours scorn on guanxi, the explanations he offers in their place boil down to political ‘capital’, shared experiences, and personal links – which sound very much like the same currency in different denominations. To the lay reader, it may seem as if every aspirant for high office is a faction in themselves.

The New Emperors scrutinises a political structure which is actually designed to deflect scrutiny. In Brown’s view this opacity is a political necessity, because the whole legitimacy of CPC rule depends on the legitimacy of the leadership transition. When it comes to the choice of Xi Jinping and his colleagues, Brown maintains that ‘precisely who decided, for what reasons, and the defensibility of those reasons, is a highly contested question’.

The answer will affect not just China, but the outside world as well.