Though Chinese politics is forever a mystery to Westerners, one can make out its outlines. Supreme power lies in the six-man Standing Committee of the Politburo. The Politburo of 25 men is where politics shifts and simmers; below it is the 210-member Central Committee, where younger people, engineers, technicians, provincial party leaders voice the growing pressures from below. Outside them all is the army wary, suspicious, slowly being subordinated by the Standing Committee to the government.
All decisions come to final judgment in the six-man Standing Committee, a band of old wartime veterans dominated by Deng Xiaoping. He does not hold...
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