Thinking from the Heart!

Thinking from the Heart!

By LIU HAILE & TAN XINGYU

How China’s Leaders Think: The Inside Story of China’s Reform and What This Means for the Future (hardcover) By Robert Lawrence Kuhn 600 pages US $35 Published in the U.S. by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. in December 2009

An American investment banker and a longtime China observer, Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn became a household name in China as the author of The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin, a bestseller in 2005 demonstrating the life of China’s former president. The success of this book facilitated his subsequent work in this country. His experiences, accumulated over four years of crisscrossing the nation and dozens of interviews with officials at all levels, have been published in his new book: How China’s Leaders Think: The Inside Story of China’s Reform and What This Means for the Future.

Dr. Kuhn visited China for the first time back in the early 1980s. After that, his frequent trips to the country gave him the opportunity to get to know this land and its people more closely. The more places he visited, the more Chinese he interviewed, the more he could see just how much the rest of the world misunderstood China. Kuhn gradually realized that China is a complex country and thus couldn’t be properly interpreted through the method of a “blind man feeling an elephant.” People in the West tend to think of China in simplistic terms: No freedom of speech, media censorship, human rights issues and lack of religious freedoms. But each story has its complexity. They also tend to generalize Chinese leaders by assuming that they all think alike.

In his new book, Dr. Kuhn presents the diversity of the Chinese leadership and how their individual philosophies are revealed across different areas. He interviewed over 100 Chinese officials, including high-ranking officials like Vice President Xi Jinping, Vice Premier Li Keqiang, provincial and municipal governors, as well as leading figures in business, trade, finance, science, the military, religion, culture, media and sports. “To some extent, each leader had his own reality. I do my best to explore the real depth in people. For me, one of the best methods is to visit Chinese leaders as many times as possible, both top leaders and local officials. It is only then that you can better understand China and its people.”

“What I do is to display all parts of the elephant as though we are all blind.” He tried to present a real picture of China – from the perspective of its economic imbalances, migrant workers, gender equality, bankruptcy, corruption, pollution, global conflicts, and its role in the global financial crisis – all its problems and successes. Dr. Kuhn brought together these leaders and gave them a platform to speak to the world, to enable the world to see their diversity. Knowing that he was at times dealing with sensitive subjects, he approached his writing in a very serious manner, making sure that every word – even every punctuation mark – was accurate. “You may disagree with what these leaders say, but consider first what they’re really saying,” Dr. Kuhn cautions. He refused to give his conclusions on each topic but rather believes that readers can find their own.

He did sum up his impressions of the country’s leaders in the first part of the book: pride, stability, responsibility and vision. Dr. Kuhn painstakingly traces the political philosophies of the Chinese leadership. To him, it is important to tell the stories of reform, but it is more important to personalize the reform, to understand the mindsets of the key players that have initiated and pushed forward the nation’s progress over the last three decades. So he began with Deng Xiaoping Theory, moved onto Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents,” and fleshed out Hu Jintao’s “Scientific Outlook on Development.” “It is important to understand China’s current policies in terms of political directions,” Kuhn believed. “They give the whole story coherence.”

Through interviews Dr. Kuhn explores the profound changes that have taken place in China’s politics, economy, education, science and many other fields, combined with the changing attitudes of its people, and their conceptual refinement.