He trusts another guy, we'll talk about him in a minute, Wang Qishan.
But by and large, he cannot trust the other people around
him on the Politburo Standing Committee, because they're simply not his people.
And so, he may have to wait until the 19th Party Congress,
which will be his second Party Congress, when he can bring in, all of his people.
And then he will be able to implement all of his new policies.
Now, one of the things about China, because we don't know in fact,
we don't even know how Xi Jinping was elected to be the leader of China.
So the succession process in China.
Who gets to be the next leader, is really not institutionalized.
It's not like in the West, where in the United States you know which
day of the year, every four years, there's going to be an election for
the President and you know the process, it's very clear.
In Prime Ministerial governments, Britain, Canada, Australia,
the politics of getting to be the leader is pretty clear.
But in China, as I said, it's just not institutionalized,
we just don't know how things happen.
So, in fact In 1954 one of the people who had a good chance to get ahead,
a guy name Gao Gang, potential successor, disappears.
[SOUND] Just gone.
Doesn't show up at some meetings that he's supposed to, and so for
a long time people have tried to figure out what actually happened to him.
A very sad character is Liu Shaoqi, who worked with
Mao most of Mao's life, they worked closely together.
Liu Shaoqi, early in the 1920s, was in the underground
Communist Movement within the cities, while Mao was in the countryside.
Came to power with Mao and
was really number two, in the Chinese leadership throughout most of the period.
But he becomes the major target of the culture revolution in 1966,
and in 1969, the poor man dies of pneumonia in prison.
Mao has him locked up and sent off to a cold,
dank prison, and he dies of pneumonia, and that's really very sad.
A third example would be here in 1981, where Hua Guofeng,
who in some ways is Mao's unofficial successor,
Mao dies in 76, Hua then takes over most of the key positions in China.
He becomes Prime Minister.
He become the Chairman of the Communist Party, just like Mao.
And he becomes Chairman of the Military Affairs Commission.
Yet In 1981, he can no longer hold onto his position,
and Deng Xiaoping is able to push him out.
Now here you have a longer list, I've only mentioned three of them.
But just think about how much waste of talent, right?
How much energy is spent by these people, just like on the board that I showed you,
trying to stay alive, trying to stay ahead,
trying to build up their own power base so they can move forward.
But in the West we do have people who run for office.
They run against other people.
And they lose.
And very often in politics in the West,
we don't remember the names of people who ran for President and lost.
We certainly don't remember the names of Vice Presidents,
who run with the President, and their side loses.
But here, different than in the West, loser often dies or
is put under house arrest, and we never hear from them very much in future.