[mikeash]

I think the question is, how did it end up like that in the first place?

And as far as I can tell, the answer is that the party leadership was sufficiently spooked by the craziness of Mao and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution that they decided to spread out power rather than vesting it entirely in a single person.

[matt4077]

The answer might actually be “communism”. Central to that ideology was a democratic element, where certain groups (workers of one factory, say) would elect delegations to similar groups one level up, in a sort of pyramid. This would repeat all the way to the general committee of the party. “General Secretary” is a title that pretty clearly denotes a certain lack of power: compare the UN, where the top post is named the same, very deliberately indicating their rather beaurocratic leadership function, clearly subordinate to the Presidents and Prime Ministers selecting them.

Now, obviously no communist country ever came close to actual communism. But still: if you spend an inordinate amount of the state’s resources on indoctrination, you will at some point raise a new generation of leaders that cannot completely shake these stories they were told (and forced to repeat) during their rise through the ranks. In such a way, lip service becomes service. These leaders have also risen through the ranks of hundreds such committees with their endless late-night cigar-smoking and scheming. Anyone too daring, or too easily bored, will drop out of the competition long before they get to the actual levers of power. That’s why you get uninspiring beaurocrats, and the colorful cool dictators like Qaddafi or Saddam Hussein only ever get to power in their respective “lesser banana republics”