What's happening in China today is bad, but it's more your fault than mine. You, and everyone like you, abandoned us reformers and now we are going backwards.' That stinging rebuke, delivered by a visiting Chinese scholar at a scientific research conference in the United States in the summer of 1990, changed the life of the event's host, Robert Lawrence Kuhn. Kuhn - whose new book, How China's Leaders Think (John Wiley & Sons, US$35 hardcover), is a 546-page tome promising to tell 'the inside story of China's reform and what this means for the future' - had first visited the mainland one year before, in 1989, after being invited to join a US financial advisory delegation. The trip happened weeks before the violent suppression of student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and Kuhn says, 'I didn't want to go back.' But that public admonishment by a mainland scientist 'who had paid his own travel expenses to attend our conference' several months later forced a rethink. Kuhn returned to the mainland, and has continued to do so ever since. With homes in New York and Los Angeles, he now spends 'about 30 per cent' of his time in Beijing. Nineteen years later, Kuhn is in the lounge of Shanghai's Langham Yangtze boutique hotel. He stares at the unopened copy of his book on a table and still seems surprised that it contains his work. 'I trained in brain science and became an investment banker. I never expected I would write books about Chinese leaders,' he says, smiling. Kuhn's opus is the result of observing, from close quarters, mainland leaders drive their nation from the status of castigated political outsider to 'an economic superpower competing in every arena of human endeavour' in two decades. 'I had a vision to tell the story of China in a prospective manner, looking at the way of thinking of Hu Jintao and other senior officials,' Kuhn says. 'But also through the stories of leaders in politics, business and many different sectors that people around the world may never have heard of.' Having already met and consulted with several key mainland officials through his business dealings, Kuhn and his translator, Adam Hu - whom he met on his first trip to the country in 1989 - spent 20 months travelling on a self-financed journey to 'around 40 cities in more than 20 provinces' on the mainland to meet and talk to '100 Chinese thought leaders'. Beyond the complex logistics, time spent travelling and delayed meetings, the challenge was two-fold. 'This was always conceived as a two-book process,' Kuhn says. A Chinese-language edition was published almost one year ahead of the international version, in time for the 30th anniversary of the mainland's economic reforms on December 18 last year. A secondary phase followed of 'further conversations with the likes of Li Yuanchao and Wang Yang - people who will be the leaders of the next generation' to update the English draft for publication on the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China. Submitting the English manuscript was complicated by the collapse of the world economy, and the mainland's fast-tracked elevation to a position of central influence on 21st century global policy. 'I knew I had to make changes,' Kuhn says. 'But it was more work than I realised.' The central tenet of the book resides in an article Kuhn wrote about the effects of the world recession on the mainland for Business Week in June. Describing a conversation with Wang Yang, the Guangdong party secretary, he wrote: 'Even though China's economy is suffering, Wang Yang [like other Chinese leaders] rightly believes that the country is now stronger in comparison with the US, Europe, and Japan. According to Wang, the West needs to know 'the real, changing China'.' Concurrently, mainland leaders need to upgrade their knowledge of the world beyond their borders. 'There has been a change of approach in the way people I have come to know now [on the mainland] treat foreign policy,' Kuhn says. 'They thought they had maybe 10, 15 or 20 years before China became a senior global player, which would give them time to deal with indigenous problems.' One year after the economic meltdown, however, the mainland has been 'thrust into a co-leadership of the world much sooner than it expected'. Writing is Kuhn's second career. After completing a doctorate in brain science, Kuhn left academia for a career in investment banking, building his own mergers and acquisitions business, which he 'sold at the right time and that gave me a degree of financial security'. He now acts as a senior adviser to Citigroup, consults for the mainland government and is a partner in CCTV-IMG Sports Management. Kuhn's business interests have given him access to the mainland's most hallowed corridors of power, and he recognised that much of what he witnessed and heard was not reaching the outside world. When it did, the reaction was often negative. 'Often when I am on the US media arguing with China critics, I talk about the political philosophy, because to me it is an interesting probe of what is happening in China,' Kuhn says. 'People in the West often just discount that as Communist propaganda.' To understand the mainland, especially given its global repositioning, the international community needs to understand how the country's leaders think, Kuhn says. 'To do that, I wanted to show the progress of thinking from Deng Xiaoping through president Jiang and President Hu and on to the next generation of leaders.' In particular, Kuhn is drawn to President Hu Jintao's 'scientific perspective on development', which he describes in the book as 'a modern, sophisticated way of thinking that optimises social, environmental and political concerns along with continuing economic growth'. The upshot, Kuhn writes, is that the mainland is now charting 'one of the most fascinating human experiments ever - to bring real democracy, real political reform and real human rights and still maintain absolute control of the one-party rule. I'm fascinated to watch that.' Kuhn's affirmably pro-mainland views will come as no surprise to anyone who has read his regular columns for Business Week. How China's Leaders Think is his third book on the mainland, following The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin (2005), which was the first biography of a living mainland leader published in the country; and China's Banking and Financial Markets: The Internal Research Report of the Chinese Government (2007), co-written with Li Yang. It was the controversial Jiang biography that Kuhn says helped him 'build credibility in China'. Despite having 'around 15 to 20 per cent, although they told me 10 per cent' of its content censored and raising the ire of some mainland bloggers, Kuhn describes the feedback process as a 'positive experience'. In particular, he took heart from an unnamed 'senior Chinese official' who told him that although he didn't agree with everything the book said about the former president, it did present Jiang 'as a normal person, and not as a god or a devil' as previous mainland leaders were perceived. 'The thing with Jiang is that he changed China into a normal country,' Kuhn says. 'He never had the absolute power of Deng Xiaoping and he had to deal with a lot of internal conflicts, but he oversaw a massive transformation in the economy and society.' Consequently, the current leadership under Hu inherited 'the problems of a normal country' - but one whose economy was growing faster than the rest and whose national population outnumbers any other. Kuhn's list of 24 pivotal problems facing the mainland today perhaps outweighs those of any other 'normal country' on Earth. Headed by economic imbalances, environmental pollution, unsustainable development, human rights and democracy, the list also includes social instability, protests and demonstrations, global confrontations, resource competition and military expansion. Kuhn argues that continuity of leadership offers the mainland its best chance of confronting these challenges. The Communist Party's transition from Jiang through Hu and, in 2012, on to new leadership will have secured 'barring disruptive events, 15 years of predictable senior leadership ... prepared to deal with the challenges of an increasingly complex society and interdependent world'. The progression of political thought from President Hu to the mainland's next leaders will be guided by four defining principles: pride, stability, responsibility and vision, Kuhn writes. Stability is the dominant recurring theme, for which Hu is 'consistently on message'. Kuhn's access to the mainland's political hierarchy is impressive. Xi Jinping, widely tipped as the mainland's next president, tells him that, 'Leaders are responsible to be decisive and action-oriented to make good things happen,' while Leng Rong, head of the CPC Party Literature Research Centre, comments: 'You don't have to hit us over the head with a baseball bat. We believe in the universal values of freedom, democracy and human rights. We just need time to apply them to the realities of China with 1.3 billion people.' In other chapters, Liu Mingkang, chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, describes the long road to banking reform that started in 1979, while Ye Xiaowen, director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs, discusses his struggle to explain 'how religion is compatible with socialist society'. Kuhn also interviews executives, ranging from a 1998 discussion with Haier president Zhang Ruimin who described the company's employees as 'servants of the market', to a meeting 10 years later in Ningbo with Li Rucheng, president of Youngor Group, one of the world's largest men's garment manufacturers, who says, 'Capital no longer constrains our expansion. Management is our major challenge.' As an American commentator on the mainland 'who was not trained as a China scholar, whose degrees are not in Chinese and who never formally studied Chinese language or culture', Kuhn is fully aware that he may be labelled a 'naive foreigner' - a conduit for presenting the mainland's political message to the world. 'I know that everything I write about China is always going to be criticised, both in China and outside,' he says. 'With the access I've had, there will be people who naturally assume I am a defender of the standing order.' Kuhn's defence is at once polite and practised. 'I am accurately presenting what Chinese leaders have told me, and I try to analyse what they are really thinking. My scientific training gives me a certain sense of rigour, and I know that I am not totally dull when it comes to human cognition.' Publication of the book, he hopes, will trigger a 'recursive process' whereby those leaders featured 'will see themselves as I reflect them, and maybe that will change their views. The feedback will help them be more sensitive to how people in the world think.' How China's Leaders Think will be available in Hong Kong at the end of October
