Ananth Krishnan

“Mao mobilized people to turn against each other,’ she said. ‘This was not like Stalin’s labour camps or Hitler’s death camps, where the state was the perpetrator.’ Here, ordinary people became murderers as they turned on one another.”
― Ananth Krishnan, India's China Challenge: A Journey through China's Rise and What It Means for India

“You can’t see the Party because it chooses to stay out of view, and as a result, what visitors to China see are the institutions (which the Party controls from behind the scenes) that on the surface resemble those of any other country: a government and cabinet ministries, courts at all levels, a central bank, two houses of parliament, and of course, above them all, a president. Yet, even the president, largely for the purposes of global optics, dons this title only for the outside world. ‘President’ does not even exist within the lexicon of domestic Chinese politics. China’s English-language media refer to ‘President’ Xi Jinping, but the domestic media translate the same title as the ‘National Chairman’, all aimed at conveying to the world a subtly different message about how this system really works. The title of National Chairman is itself the least important of the three crowns Xi wears. His position as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China is what gives him his power, as does his being the Chairman of the Central Military Commission that controls the PLA. The Party, as always, comes first.”
― Ananth Krishnan, India's China Challenge: A Journey through China's Rise and What It Means for India