When Wang Huning enters politics, the Chinese president is called Jiang Zemin. Bill Clinton is in the White House and François Mitterrand is about to leave the Elysée. It was in April 1995. Jiang Zemin has, in the meantime, given way to Hu Jintao (2003-2013) who was succeeded by Xi Jinping. Twenty-eight years later, Wang Huning is still there. Better, since October 2022, he is, at 67, number four in the regime.
So far the undisputed boss of propaganda and ideology, he could also, in March, take over the presidency of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and also become responsible for a burning issue: Taiwan. A career that is all the more exceptional in that, unlike all the other leaders, Wang Huning has never held political office in the provinces. This intellectual left his post as an academic in Shanghai to be promoted to advise Jiang Zemin in Beijing. Since then, his influence has continued to grow, although Xi Jinping thinks worse than hanging from his two predecessors.
Workaholic
When, at 39, Wang Huning left his students to pursue a political career, he already has a dazzling career to his credit. Born in 1955 to an officer father, the teenager, who lives in Shanghai, was caught up in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). At the end of his secondary studies, in 1972, this young man with an introverted character escapes, thanks to a fragile health, the programs of re-education in the countryside. He even manages to study French at the University of Shanghai.
When, in 1978, Deng Xiaoping reinstated the gaokao, the very difficult university entrance exam, the mark obtained by Wang Huning was so high that he was directly admitted to follow the master’s degree in international politics at the very selective university. from Fudan, Shanghai. Under the direction of Chen Qiren, a convinced Marxist, he wrote a thesis entitled “From Bodin to Maritain: on the theories of sovereignty developed by the Western bourgeoisie”.
The man is a workaholic. The day before his first marriage (to a student from a good family), his fiancée asks him to buy flowers, he brings her some books. In 1985, at just 30 years old, he became the youngest professor at Fudan University. The Wang rocket is launched. In less than a decade, he published a dozen books on political science, on China, Marxism or the West.
“In all his ideological works, there is a form of hatred of liberalism. » Stéphanie Balme, Research Director at Sciences Po
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