User:PalaceGuard008/Paramount leader

The paramount leader in modern Chinese history and politics is a term used to describe certain leaders of the Communist Party of China and government of the People's Republic of China. The most common application is to Deng Xiaoping during the late 1970s and the 1980s, who, without holding the highest posts of either party or government, was nevertheless acknowledged both within the Communist Party and by outside observers as the real paramount personality in China.

While China was ruled by strongman regimes in various periods of the 20th century, the first leader usually described as a "paramount leader" is Mao Zedong. From 1949, and especially from 1966 until his death in 1976, Mao was the unquestioned paramount leader of China.

Several years after Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping became acknowledged as the "paramount leader" of China. While Deng did not hold the highest posts or either party or government, he was the political leader of the Communist Party, and successive party leaders up to 1989 acknowledged that the party's protocol was that Deng was to be consulted on important matters of party and state. Deng formally retired in late 1989, and commentators differ on when his role as "paramount leader" should be regarded as having ended. On the one hand, Deng's influence in day-to-day government appear to have decreased after his retirement. On the other hand, he continued to exert occasional but important influence on the course of government policy, such as his 1992 southern tour.

Current situation
Events in 1989 triggered a change in Chinese constitutional convention. Whereas the 1982 Constitution envisaged central political power being distributed amongst several leaders, with the President being a symbolic figurehead, political conflict in 1989 caused a re-think among the leadership, which led in 1992 to a new convention whereby the leader of the party, the General Secretary, would concurrently serve as the head of the army and the head of state (the President). (. At the same time, decision making became a more collective process within the Politburo Standing Committee, with no single leader having the sort of paramount status enjoyed by Deng. As a result, while the three General Secretaries since 1989 (Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and the incumbent Xi Jinping) have occasionally been called "paramount leaders" in the press, their positions are of a different nature to that of Deng.

Certainly, after Deng the term has seldom been used since power is held more or less collectively by the members of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China with the General Secretary acting as a first among equals figure, and different factions jockeying for influence. Policy decisions are thought to be made via majority vote of Standing Committee members following internal discussions. For example, though Jiang Zemin left the Standing Committee in 2002 and resigned all his posts in 2004, members of the Shanghai clique (of which Jiang is a member) retained a majority in the Standing Committee.

List of paramount leaders
To date, "paramount leader" has been applied to six individual Chinese leaders (dates approximate):


 * Generations of leadership: