[MUSIC] One of the important components of Chinese leadership, Chines Elites, and I've alluded to this, I've mentioned this before, is really the importance of generations. Now let me first define for you what a generation is. What we mean by generation, is a group of leaders who share some common experience, and they rise to power at the same time, sort of coming up at the same time. Now one of the assumptions, one of the reasons we care about generations, is we make an assumption that shared recruitment experience. When you join the party? How you move up? Big political events that can happen in your life that somehow if you all share this experience it will give rise to the same kinds of values and attitudes towards politics. Now, I want to talk about four key generations. The first key generation are whom we call the Long March generation. These are the guys who went on the long march. Remember when I showed you that the big board game that we were playing, I pointed out the fact that the Long Marchers actually got almost the longest ladder to move up. And a whole group of them, it's interesting 90,000 or 100,000 people set out on the Long March in 1934. And they went all across China and in the end they made it up to Yan'an but only 10,000 people made it. From those 10,000 people, they came to dominate politics in China, in the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, well into the 1990s. And that's the strongest and most important generation. It's worth remember that in Tiananmen, when there were the problems in Tiananmen Square, Deng Xiaoping, Yung-Shin Kung, both of whom were long marchers. We're very quick to pull out the gun and say we will not give up power, we will use force if necessary. Now, that whole generation is dead and gone pretty much. Deng Xiaoping was called the second generation. I really don't know why because he was busy making revolution in South China as of 1927. So, we'll leave that second generation aside and we'll move to the third generation. Third generation very interesting generation, they are a generation of people who were trained in the Soviet Union. Really beginning in around 1949, 1950, China and the Soviet Union establish very close relations really beginning in '49 and '50. And China's universities are not very well developed so a lot of the future leaders of China actually go off to university in the Soviet Union. People like Lee Pong, people like Jung Su Men and they move up over time through the system. And my own view is that they have a pretty positive view of reform under socialism. Because they're living in China particularly Jiang Zemin, is living in Russia, not China. Is living in the Soviet Union in 1954, 55 when reforms start to take place in the Soviet Union as well. Fourth generation, Hu Jintao's generation. They graduated from college in the first half of the 1960s, so when the Cultural Revolution breaks out, they're already on the job. And so the chaos that goes on around them really in there in their work units, really makes them very concerned about stability. And another key difference between them and the fifth generation, is because they're already on the job, they've already graduated from college when the cultural revolution breaks out. And Mao decides to send all the college students and many of the high school students out to the countryside, to sort of calm down the cities, they’re too old to go so they stay in the cities throughout the entire cultural revolution. It’s also worth mentioning that they have no foreign experience, right? If you look Look at that generation, because China didn't send people abroad from 1962, 63, all the way until 1975, 76, none of the fourth generation really have any significant foreign experience. The fifth generation, and it says here, was expected to take power in 2012. And I say expected because there still were people when I showed you the slide before that Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, that when they take over there are still four members of the Polypeuro standing committee who are sort of half a generation behind them. They are really kind of four and a half generation in terms of their age and their experiences. The fifth generation has not completely taken over, but they will really take over in 2017. But they were already being groomed for leadership positions at the 17th Party Congress and getting ready to take over power. And these would include people like Xi Jingping, Li Keqiang. These were all people who lived in the countryside, Wang Qishan, they lived in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, and they entered college between 1975 and 1980. And so when the reform era of the 1980s is underway, they're already out there working and being involved in a lot of the reform politics and policy of the 1980s. Those who took the college entrance exam, this was a really unique group, in Chinese they're called the [FOREIGN] or [FOREIGN] right, the 77, 78, 79 group. These are people who took the college entrance exam in that period and they are really smart. And the prime minister Li Keqiang is in this group. Because what happened was the universities were closed for 11 years from 1966 to 1977 in terms of exams. The people who got into college in that period of time really got in because they knew people. We call them back door, all right? They didn't take a national exam, as we know now that they do in China. And so there was this huge back log. And so in 1977 when the party called on people, young people, to take the exam, seven million people signed up to take the entrance exam for 110,000 university spots. That's 1.5% of the people who took the exam. And so what happens when a guy like Li Keqiang gets into the best university in China, that really says he's the top of the top of the top. On the other hand you can look at people like Wang Qishan and Xi Jinping, the current leader, they were back door a bit. Right, Xi Jinping was able to use his father's, his father was a revolutionary, he was able to use those ties and get into university in 1975, before the exam. But still, they're very active in the reform period. Now this new generation, this Fifth Generation, actually shares power between what we call the tuan pai, or the Young Communist League. Some of them are Young Communist League people who worked under Hu Jintao, and the other are the princelings, who are the children of the top Party officials. Now, you can look at your own country. Do you have political generations in your country? Can you think about a whole cohort of leaders maybe in the military, maybe within your parliament. Many of whom came to power at the same time and who would have been in positions to run the country for a long time.
