IN 1926, five years after becoming one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Mao Zedong listed China’s enemies as ‘the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class [businessmen dealing with foreign interests] and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them’. It is ironic that Mao would eventually create a new aristocracy, often referred to as the ‘princelings’ (taizidang), every bit as hierarchical as that against which he had previously railed.
Perversely, when Mao Zedong came to power in China in 1949, there were not many structures of authority left to destroy. In the period of warlordism that succeeded the overthrow of the Qing dynasty by Sun Yat-sen in 2011 and ended with the consolidation of nationalist (Kuomintang) power by Chiang Kai-shek in 1936, the aristocracy of imperial China had been swept away. So too the Mandarin class, the Chinese bureaucrats selected by civil service examination, a system that started with the Sui dynasty in AD 581. As for the Chinese aristocracy, its last vestiges ended with the abolition in 1935 of the Dukedom of Yansheng which belonged to the descendants of Confucius.
So, in terms of social hierarchies, Mao inherited a clean sheet when he established the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. The CCP leadership soon proved that, in the immortal words of George Orwell in his novel Animal Farm, ‘all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’. In Beijing, Mao and China’s CCP leaders took residence in the palatial compounds located in Zhongnanhai, a waterside park established by the Yuan dynasty in the 13th century.
There is not even equality within the ‘red aristocracy’. Gradations are as clear-cut as if there were princes, dukes or marquises. The highest rank is accredited to the offspring of those CCP leaders who participated in the Long March. This iconic fighting retreat to a remote plateau in Shaanxi province followed the defeat of the Red Army in October 1934.
It is perhaps difficult for people in the West to understand the scale of Chinese veneration for the individuals who completed the Long March. With the possible exception of the migratory treks along the Oregon Trail, there is no comparable event in American or European history. Throughout their lives, leaders of the Long March enjoyed unparalleled prestige; it was a prestige that passed down to their children – hence the princelings.
The creation of the red aristocracy started with Mao himself. Within a few years of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, Mao became a de facto emperor. On occasions he even referred to himself as such. He certainly lived the life of an emperor. At his commodious palace in Zhongnanhai, Mao surrounded himself with a harem of dancing girls who would occupy his bed and his swimming pool. In time-honoured fashion, China’s head of security and intelligence, Kang Sheng, procured girls for Mao as well as thousands of volumes of pornography.
Mao fancied himself a philosopher, poet and intellectual and delegated the boring work of running the country. From his elevated position, he hypocritically disapproved of the increasingly decadent lifestyle of his fellow Long Marchers. He harrumphed that his colleagues ‘complain all day and get to watch plays at night. They eat three meals a day and fart. That’s what Marxist-Leninism means to them’. Given Mao’s example, it seems barely surprising that a red aristocracy emerged.
China’s current paramount leader, Xi Jinping, albeit a high-ranking princeling, is not in the first rank of the red aristocracy. His father Xi Zhongxun was not a Long Marcher; he was a guerilla leader in Shaanxi province. Here he met up with Mao’s bedraggled troops as they arrived in China’s remote north-east.
General Zhang Youxia, the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, who has come to prominence in recent months as the power behind the throne, is also a princeling. It was Zhang who militarily covered Xi’s back as he sought his unprecedented third term as General Secretary of the CCP in 2022 – an act that he is said to regret.
Reportedly Zhang Youxia fell out with Xi because of the latter’s push to invade Taiwan. It is now widely assumed by China watchers that Zhang Youxia has defenestrated Xi, who remains as a defanged figurehead of the CCP. Since July 2024 when Xi reportedly had a stroke at the Third Plenum, Zhang has used his princeling status and connections to purge the army of Xi’s acolytes.
Not being a politician, Zhang Youxia needed a political insider to corral opposition to Xi within the politburo. The man who seems to have been teed up for this job is a princeling of the first rank, General Liu Yuan. His father Liu Shaoqi, who became the vice chairman of the CCP, was a Long Marcher. So was his mother. When Mao turned on the liberal reformers in the CCP, he named Li Shaoqi ‘Capitalist Roader No 1’ during the Cultural Revolution and had him purged and killed.
Unusually Liu Yuan had both a successful political and military career; a perfect intermediary then between General Zhang and the princelings and party elders. Although Liu Yuan, a reformer like his father, was purged by Xi Jinping in 2015, in recent months he has made a highly visible and for some an astonishing comeback – another ‘smoke signal’ suggesting that Xi’s star has fallen.
The princeling class is not a closed shop. The children of the new men who came to power after Deng Xiaoping have also spawned princelings. Thus, for example, the children of Jiang Zemin (General Secretary of the CCP from 1989 to 2002), Hu Jintao (General Secretary of the CCP 2002-2012) and Wen Jiabao (premier from 2003-2013) are high-ranking princelings. In effect the princeling class has become what Tony Zhang, the academic author of The Rise of the Princelings in China, has described as a system of ‘collective elite reproduction’.
While the princelings can be seen as a nepotistic class who have built up a network of power within the both the CCP and the PLA (People’s Liberation Army), it is more than that. Not all princelings are politicians or soldiers. Far from it. Many of the second and third generation princelings opted for business rather than the hard grind of politics. Their high-level contacts helped them to make fortunes. Deng Xiaoping’s liberalisation of the economy in the 1980s and the privatisation of SOEs (State Owned Enterprises) gave them ample scope for wealth creation – in effect a system of crony capitalism.
The best-known example is the family of Wen Jiabao, China’s premier from 2003 to 2013, whose family fortune has been estimated at £2billion. His wife was a diamond dealer and founder of the Shanghai Diamond Exchange. His son, Wen Yunsong, a graduate from the Kellogg School of Management in Illinois, became a principal in the New Horizon private equity fund.
Other princeling business titans include Xi Jinping’s brother-in-law, Deng Jiagui, who is in real estate; former premier Li Peng’s daughter, a power company tycoon; Zeng Wei, son of former Vice President Zeng Qinghong, another real estate businessman; and Larry Yung, (net worth £2.2billion), son of Vice President Rong Yiren, who built CITIC Pacific in a major Hong Kong based conglomerate.
My own experience of the princeling world confirmed that in China, despite its vast population a very small group of families form a governing nexus that has power far beyond its numbers. It is a group that seem to be getting stronger. The princeling proportion of the CCP central committee rose from 6 per cent in 1982 to 9 per cent in 2012. When I spoke to a princeling friend about the politburo standing committee that was elected in 2012, she told me that she personally knew five of its seven members; to her great delight three of them were princelings. It was through her that I met Deng Xiaoping’s daughters and spent a ‘country house’ weekend with them and her princeling pals.
Here it became clear that, while most of the princelings I met were reformists in the Deng mode, there are also factions that are hard-line Maoists, like the one led by Xi Jinping. At the moment it appears that the reformist princelings have gained the upper hand. More light on Xi Jinping’s future and the outcome of this princeling tug of war may be shed at the Fourth Plenum of the 20th CCP Congress starting on October 20.
