The Embedded Mentor

I. Inside the System

The mentors in this series stand beside power. Ivan Ilyin, about whom we wrote in “The Bones from Zollikon”, has been dead for seventy years and speaks only through quotations. Fritz Kraemer, “The Invisible Mentor”, refused every office of rank and worked through his pupils. Peter Thiel, “The Stone That Looks Back”, works through his money. None of them sits at the table where decisions are made.

Wang Huning sits there. He belongs to the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the seven-member body that governs China, and ranks fourth. Since 2023 he has chaired the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. In February 2026 he received envoys of Taiwan’s Kuomintang, in July he led a delegation to North Korea, at the end of September he spoke about “national rejuvenation”. He is the case in which the mentor and the powerful have become the same person, or almost.

II. The Boy Who Had to Copy Mao

Wang was born in Shanghai in 1955. His parents had fought in the Red Army; his father was persecuted in the Cultural Revolution. To keep his three sons off the streets, he locked them in and had them copy out Mao’s works. After Nixon’s visit in 1972 Wang learned French; later he studied international politics at Fudan University. His thesis dealt with Western theories of sovereignty. In 1985, at the age of 29, he became the youngest associate professor in his field in China.

He became known for a thesis called “neo-authoritarianism”. A country in rapid upheaval needs strong leadership in order to remain stable and to reform at the same time. Later he put it this way: a strong central authority is the fundamental guarantee for achieving modernisation quickly, stably and at relatively low cost. Political systems, he wrote, must be rooted in a country’s historical, social and cultural conditions. They cannot be transplanted. This already explains why a Western hope was disappointed, one we described in “The Next Illusion About China Will Soon Fall”: that China would become democratic of its own accord as prosperity grew.

III. Thirty Cities

In 1988 Wang spent six months as a visiting scholar in the United States, at the University of Iowa and at Berkeley, and travelled through some thirty cities. The result, in 1991, was the book “America Against America”. It is no pamphlet. Wang admires the credit card, the think tanks, the peaceful transfer of power and the view from the Sears Tower. But he sees a contradiction that runs through everything: freedom and equality stand against each other, and freedom almost always wins.

His diagnosis is harsh. The real cell of American society, he writes, is not the family but the individual. Everything can become a commodity, “human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power and law”. A society without shared core values will have difficulty ordering itself politically, and at the end stand chaos and moral crisis. He saw an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis”. When demonstrators stormed the Capitol in January 2021, second-hand copies of the long out-of-print book were traded in China for around 2,500 dollars.

IV. Tutor to Three Emperors

In 1995 party leader Jiang Zemin brought the professor to Beijing, into the party’s Central Policy Research Office. Wang headed it from 2002 to 2020, longer than anyone else. During this time he supplied three party leaders with their guiding concepts. For Jiang the “Three Represents”, with which the party opened itself to entrepreneurs. For Hu Jintao the “Scientific Outlook on Development” and the “Harmonious Society”. For Xi Jinping the “Chinese Dream”, “Chinese-style modernisation” and “Xi Jinping Thought”. He also wrote the first Chinese academic paper on “soft power”, long before Beijing began to promote it systematically around the world.

In our book “Die chinesische Form der Megamaschine” (German) we described the logic by which rule in China has justified itself for three millennia: the Mandate of Heaven, Tianming. Legitimate is not whoever was elected or anointed, but whoever proves himself. Whoever administers the order well holds the mandate; whoever fails loses it. After the end of world communism, we argued there, the party can only justify itself as the bearer of this tradition, and that is exactly what it does: the “Harmonious Society” takes up Confucius, the “Chinese Dream” combines Marxist development with the restoration of former greatness. Who cast this return to tradition into concepts, we did not ask in the book. The trail leads to Wang. His neo-authoritarianism is the modern version of the logic of proving oneself: a strong centre, measured by its success. What the dream means for people when machines take over their work, we asked in “Two Dreams, One Machine”.

Online in China he is called guoshi, teacher of the nation, a title once borne by the advisers of emperors. What is remarkable is how he outlasted three rulers whose camps were not well disposed to one another. He never governed a province, never built a power base of his own, has given no interviews and has withdrawn completely from the academic world. He is said to be sleepless, obsessed with work and reserved. He likes to read martial-arts novels. His first marriage broke up after he moved into the Zhongnanhai government compound in 1996. In a book from 1994 he wrote that his goal in life had been to write books and teach students.

V. The Diagnosis Becomes Therapy

Whoever reads Wang’s book on America and then looks at China’s policies recognises some things. In 2021 Beijing limited children’s time on computer games to three hours a week, called online games “spiritual opium”, broke the power of the big technology companies, made celebrities disappear from the internet and declared that the cultural market would “no longer be a paradise for sissy stars”. The American writer N. S. Lyons interpreted these measures in 2021 as Wang’s programme: what he had seen as decay in America was to be spared China.

This connection is not documented. The party attributes its decisions to no one but itself and its general secretary. But it is plausible, and it leads to a bitter twist. The ailments Wang described in America have arrived in China anyway: isolation, inequality, childlessness. And young people have found a word of their own for it, tang ping, lying flat. In “Where the Lever Never Was” we described how in August 2026 almost one in five young people in China’s cities was without work. A strong centre can forbid many things. The meaning it wants to give people it cannot decree.

VI. The Price of the Seat

For this series Wang is a borderline case. We distinguish the whisperer, who talks; the court theorist, who justifies; and the mentor, who shapes. Wang is all three and at the same time none of them. He does not talk, for he is publicly silent. He does not merely justify, for he designs. And he shapes no pupils; he shapes concepts that appear under someone else’s name.

Kraemer and Wang answered the question of how close a thinker should come to power in opposite ways. Kraemer remained a simple official so that he could say what he thought, and when his pupil Kissinger became too soft for him, he did not speak to him for thirty years. Wang went all the way to the top and gave up his own voice for it. His thoughts are everywhere; his name stands under none of them. “I’m inside the system now” is the most precise description of this exchange. The embedded reporter sees the war only from the vehicle of the unit that takes him along. The embedded mentor thinks only what may be thought within the system.

This changes the question that stands above this series: who conducts the leaders? With Wang the two can no longer be separated. The conductor has himself become part of the circuit. Whether he still steers the current or merely conducts what the top wants to let through, no one can say from outside. Perhaps he himself can no longer say.

In the book we wrote of Xi Jinping that he was not born charismatic but is being made charismatic, by the institutions built around him and by the talk of the nation’s rejuvenation by 2049. Who is making him so? “Xi Jinping Thought”, written into the party constitution in 2017 and into the state constitution in 2018, is attributed above all to Wang in most accounts. The embedded mentor has thus helped create the very tension we described in the book. The old logic of proving oneself measures every ruler by his success. A doctrine that bears one man’s name and runs towards a fixed goal lifts him above that test. A mandate bound to a person cannot be lost without the person falling.

VII. How This Text Could Be Refuted

The first objection: Wang’s influence is overestimated in the West. Chinese politics is opaque, and Western observers like to look for a mind behind the scenes because that is easier to narrate than an apparatus. What matters is Xi himself. That must be taken seriously. Documented are Wang’s offices, his books and the sequence of the guiding concepts. How much of them came from his pen, only those involved know.

The second objection: Wang is no longer an independent thinker at all, but an official who supplies every ruler with what he needs. That he served three party leaders with very different projects supports this. But then he would be the purest case of a conductor: one who does not determine what flows through, but ensures that it flows.

This text would be refuted if it could be shown that the great guiding concepts of the last thirty years arose without Wang.

VIII. The Last Task

Since 2023 Wang has been deputy head of the Leading Group for Taiwan Affairs. He is to devise a theory to replace the old promise of “one country, two systems”. The promise was made to Hong Kong, and Hong Kong has shown what remained of it. The man who described America’s contradictions thirty-five years ago is now to find a formula with which to win a free society for union with an unfree one.

A thinker who has become an office can do many things. Only one thing he can no longer do: step out of the system and say that his own formula does not work.