Wang Huning

Wang Huning (b. October 6, 1955)

After PLA tanks crushed the dreams of liberal democracy sprouting in China, CCP leadership began searching desperately for a new political model on which to secure the regime. They soon turned to Wang Huning. When Wang won national acclaim by leading a university debate team to victory in an international competition in Singapore in 1993, he caught the attention of Jiang Zemin, who had become party leader after the Tiananmen massacre. Wang, having defeated National Taiwan University by arguing that human nature is inherently evil, foreshadowed that, “While Western modern civilization can bring material prosperity, it doesn’t necessarily lead to improvement in character.” Jiang plucked him from the university and, at the age of 40, he was granted a leadership position in the CCP’s secretive Central Policy Research Office, putting him on an inside track into the highest echelons of power.

Wang Huning served all three of Deng successors, Xi, Hu, and Jiang.

What is singularly remarkable about Wang is that he’s managed to serve in this role of court philosopher to not just one, but all three of the PRC's previous top leaders, including as the pen behind Jiang Zemin’s signature “Three Represents” policy, Hu Jintao’s "Harmonious Development of Economy" and "Scientific Development View," and Xi Jinping's "Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era." In the brutally cutthroat world of CCP factional politics, this is an unprecedented feat. Wang was recruited into the party by Jiang’s “Shanghai Gang,” a rival faction that Xi Jinping worked to ruthlessly purge after coming to power in 2012

A member of the CCP’s seven-man Politburo Standing Committee (ranked 5th), he is the party’s top ideological theorist, quietly credited as being the “ideas man” behind each of Xi’s signature political concepts, including the “China Dream,” the anti-corruption campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative, a more assertive foreign policy.

in 1988, Wang won a coveted scholarship (facilitated by the American Political Science Association) to spend six months in the United States as a visiting scholar. Wang recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book America Against America. In it, he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York City and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government. As the 2020 Marxist insurrection roiled American politics, Chinese people began turning to Wang’s America Against America for answers. And when a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, the book flew off the shelves. Out-of-print copies began selling for as much as $2,500 on Chinese e-commerce sites.

At the start of 1989 the young Wang returned to China and, promoted to Dean of Fudan’s International Politics Department, became a leading opponent of liberalization. He began to argue that China had to resist global liberal influence and become a culturally unified and self-confident nation governed by a strong, centralized party-state. He would develop these ideas into what has become known as China’s “Neo-Authoritarian” movement. This reflected his desire to blend Marxist socialism with traditional Chinese Confucian values and Legalist political thought, maximalist Western ideas of state sovereignty and power, and nationalism in order to synthesize a new basis for long-term stability and growth immune to Western liberalism.

External link

• Chinese President Xi’s “Secret Philosopher” Analyzed America And His Findings Could Reverse Our Country’s Decline, Revolver News