I recently finished reading the biography of Deng Xiaoping by Ezra Vogel.
One of the things I noticed was how all of the people featured in Chinese history from that turbulent period, and the ones who were put by Deng into positions of power had all come through the Long March. These were his war comrades. He seemed to know many of them personally. And if he didn’t, they were recommended by Long March veterans that he did know. In some ways, surviving the Long March was the ticket to respectability, dependability, and the highest credentials.
I think that he did this because he was looking for people who believed in China as a cause with higher value for them than personal gain. He knew that he was transforming his country into something new and he needed people with vision, and a willingness to make sacrifices for their country.
This quality is lacking in our Western culture. In Canada, we used to call the top level civil servants in Ottawa, “Mandarins”. They were powerful civil servants who ran their individual departments as fiefdoms, independent of politicians, and for what they believed was the best for Canada. They would have come up the ranks of the civil service, self-selected for the power, peer-selected for their ability. Regardless of the method used to choose them, they embodied the desire to make Canada a great nation.
We seem to have lost that respect for the civil service and its potential to help our country forward. If only we had a “Long March” that we could use to choose the leaders of our civil service so that our government would be moving our country forward. The various “Conservative” movements that have been elected occasionally have heaped disdain on the civil service and actively worked to limit it. As a result, we no longer have the best people in government; the “Ottawa Mandarins” are no more.
A leader is judged by his lieutenants. I hope that Xi Jinping knows this truth. When he chooses his closest aides, I hope that he has a metric like the Long March that will let him choose the best of China to guide its development. So his lieutenants are people who love China more than their own self interest. And I hope that our government recovers its ability to recruit and develop Mandarins
Random Thoughts 