Xi Jinping, prince among princes

Just over ten years ago, Xi Jinping suddenly disappeared.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
15 October 2022 Saturday 04:30
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Xi Jinping, prince among princes

Just over ten years ago, Xi Jinping suddenly disappeared. He was then China's top leader in pectore and was about to amass a host of titles that would make him the most powerful man on the planet. Without explanation, his aides canceled meetings with foreign dignitaries, including one with Hillary Clinton, then the US Secretary of State. Western analysts were taken aback.

Outside observers are very sensitive to such absences. Last September, Xi's prolonged absence in public triggered rumors about his political health again: on the 27th of that month he denied them by visiting an exhibition that highlighted the achievements of the Communist Party under him. However, in 2012 those cancellations of diplomatic appointments seemed different. Xi took two weeks to reappear. Analysts are still wondering what happened then and what his absence meant.

Speculation about the reasons for Xi's disappearance ranges from a health problem to an assassination attempt. Chris Johnson had recently left the CIA and his position as a China analyst. In his view, it was likely Xi's retort to Communist Party elders, who (although happy with his rise to the top) would have bristled at a drive for power that disregarded his views. . "Well then, find someone else for the job," Johnson imagines Xi telling them.

"It was a good opportunity to show that he was not going to let himself be overwhelmed by any retiree," the former spy considers. Xi wanted “not just to be first among peers, but simply first.” If such a theory is correct, Xi got away with it. He has proven more powerful and ruthless than any leader since Mao Zedong, who died in 1976.

He has carried out extensive purges of the party and security forces to remove corrupt figures and political enemies (including many allies of the elder leaders). It has turned a fractured party that had disappeared from the lives of many ordinary citizens into an omnipresent machine, rearmed ideologically and with extensive recourse to technology. It has crushed dissent by eliminating much of civil society, building a gulag for Muslims in Xinjiang, and wiping out freedoms in Hong Kong.

Xi has turned some sandbars in the South China Sea into fortresses, threatened Taiwan by carrying out military exercises off the island's coast, and increased the deployment of nuclear weapons to keep the United States at bay. He has bolstered China's global power by using its economic clout in a battle for political influence with the West, which he derides as chaotic and in decline.

On October 16 the party will have inaugurated its five-yearly congress. Over the course of a week, it will reshape large sections of the ruling elite. The new group will meet later to choose what will be the core of the political leadership for the next five years. Xi will almost certainly be reappointed party leader and military commander, and will be reconfirmed as president early next year. This is an unprecedented event in the post-Mao era. The norm for these positions has always been a maximum of two five-year terms. Xi has apparently decided to rule as long as he wants.

The last ten years have revealed much about his way of thinking. However, the increase in tensions with the United States and especially with Taiwan has made the study of her character an increasingly pressing task. Will he become another Vladimir Putin, willing to take huge risks to secure territorial ambitions? How important is it to him that China and the West move away? Is he animated by a Marxist spirit ready to disrupt the post-Mao economic order? Will he let his obsession with preventing the spread of covid-19 cripple one of the world's biggest engines of economic growth?

Over the past few months, The Economist has spoken to many with insight into Xi's personality, from former Western officials to Chinese familiar with the secretive world of their country's elite and the influences that may have shaped preferences. Xi's policies when he came to power.

When Xi came to power in 2012, some observers were cautiously optimistic that he was a reformer of some kind: not another Mikhail Gorbachev, but at least someone who governed more delicately and tried to get along with the United States and West. Those hopes were dashed as it became clear that Xi was determined to amass immense power, wield it ruthlessly against his critics and those in the party, and use it to turn China into a world power capable of impressing the West. The personal attributes that allowed him to take that path will continue to push him forward. So will the forces around him: a nationalist elite, a party always afraid of losing control, and a citizenry that does not reject a strong man.

Among the optimists of a decade ago were Chinese who knew the inner workings of the party. One of them was Li Rui, who had been Mao's deputy minister and personal secretary in the 1950s, then spent nine years in jail for criticizing Mao, and was finally reinstated as a senior official in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping. After retiring and until his death in 2019, he remained a clear advocate for economic and political reforms. "When Xi Jinping became number one, my father was very happy," recalls his daughter, Nanyang Li, who now lives in the United States. "My father told me: now the situation is good... there is hope for our political system."

Li was well placed to judge. In 1982-1984 he had played a crucial role as deputy director of the party's Organization Department, a body that manages China's huge bureaucracy and helps select officials for promotion. He was then entrusted with the creation of a new office within it, the Office of Young Cadres. His job was to identify and prepare young officials likely to become the future leaders of the country. The office drew up a list of 1,100 candidates. Of the 14 men promoted to the pinnacle of power (the Politburo Standing Committee) after the 2007 and 2012 party congresses, all but two were on the list drawn up four decades earlier. It was also Xi, who became general secretary in 2012. Li had sent a subordinate to investigate his suitability.

So why were Li and so many others so wrong in their assessment of Xi as the supreme leader? There are two main reasons. First, 2012 assessments of Xi's personality were largely based on his family ties. He is the son of Xi Zhongxun, a veteran of the revolution that brought the party to power in 1949. Xi Sr., who died in 2002, had been purged by Mao and rehabilitated by Deng. He was an economic reformer who, under Deng, oversaw the creation of China's first "special economic zone," in what is now the bustling megacity of Shenzhen. That capitalist experiment made party conservatives cringe (some hardliners even refused to visit the area). Like father like son is a characteristic of Chinese political culture. Many expected that the son of a pioneer reformer would be in some way like him.

The other reason was the lack of information. Before appearing as top leader in pectore in 2007, Xi kept a low profile. His wife, Peng Liyuan, a singer of opera songs and patriotic folk ballads, was much more famous than he was (she has ten albums on Spotify). After the Chinese army crushed the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, he performed there for the troops.

Xi was a little-known politician who had said or done nothing flashy. Unusually for a budding top leader, he had spent 17 years in one province (Fujian, on the southeast coast) before landing his first post as provincial party chief in 2002 in neighboring Zhejiang. Alfred Wu was a journalist for the Fujian state media and was assigned to cover Xi's activities. It was a boring job. "He was very quiet and a bit shy," says Wu, who is now at the National University of Singapore. "Nobody ever imagined that he would become the top national leader."

In 2011, a year before Xi took power, Joe Biden (then vice president of the United States in the Barack Obama administration) traveled to China to meet with him, then also vice president of his country (a clear sign that he had become the heir). Biden was accompanied by Evan Medeiros, director of the National Security Council for China. "There was very little we knew" about Xi, Medeiros recalls. Biden tried to strike up a relationship with China's future leader: They clumsily played basketball together during a school visit. Xi came across as a "very controlled and careful politician," says Medeiros.

Things haven't changed much. Since he took power, Xi has not given personal interviews to Western journalists, nor has he held any press conferences, except for brief ones with foreign leaders on state visits. His speeches are often not published until long after they are delivered (for example, the one discussing the collapse of the Soviet Union and the "enormous risks and challenges" of keeping the Chinese Communist Party in power in the distant future was published on September 15, much more than four years after it was pronounced). Unlike Putin, he does not deliver rambling monologues on state television. While spreading China's power around the world, Xi has kept himself shrouded in mystery. His last disappearance from the public scene occurred after a trip to Central Asia, the first he had made abroad since the declaration of covid-19 as a pandemic.

Biden's visit to China in 2011 provided some insight. Daniel Russel, who was Medeiros's boss in the White House, recalls a dinner where Xi "spoke at quite a length" about the revolts that had toppled some authoritarian leaders in Arab countries that year. Xi reflected on the possible cause of these developments, pointing to corruption, factionalism within the ruling parties and the leaders' loss of contact with ordinary citizens and their needs. Russel recalls that he said those very things could topple the Communist Party if it didn't act together.

Perhaps the biggest mistake made by observers at the time was to underestimate the extent to which Xi was driven by fear of party collapse, the lengths he would go to prevent it, and the extent to which his concerns were shared by the ruling elite. Much of Xi's behavior as a political leader, including his boastful nationalism, can be explained as a response to concerns he conveyed to Biden in 2011.

He was right to perceive a danger. China had changed drastically in just a few years. Within a decade or two a large home-owning middle class had emerged. With the rapid growth of private enterprise, the party's presence in society had weakened: most city dwellers felt little connection to it anymore. Social networks had just appeared as a communication tool; smartphone ownership increased. Across China, people used those technologies to share grievances. Small NGOs arose that defended the rights of the most disadvantaged.

And divisions arose in the party. A rival of Xi's, Bo Xilai, was vying for attention in the southwestern Chongqing region, where he was party chief. Bo (charismatic and handsome) won public support by ostensibly fighting corruption and appealing to nostalgia for supposedly fairer days under Mao, when the state provided housing and health care for city dwellers. .

Bo, a member of the Politburo, was arrested for corruption and abuse of power in early 2012. After coming to power months later, Xi put Bo on trial. He was sentenced in 2013 to life in prison. The officials pointed out that he had planned a coup. Others, including China's former security chief Zhou Yongkang and two retired generals, were accused of collusion. Assets worth more than $14 billion were seized from Zhou's family and his associates.

Many analysts were surprised at Xi's ability to topple such powerful figures. Zhou had held the highest rank of anyone convicted of corruption since 1949. The generals had been the highest-ranking uniformed officers on the party commission that controls the armed forces. Bo's trial and the downfall of these men in the first three years of Xi's rule was a true political drama that rivaled the arrest in 1976, shortly after the death of Mao, of the Gang of Four, the ultra-radicals who they had orchestrated Mao's ruthless Cultural Revolution.

The purge was made possible by two crucial features of Xi's power and personality. The first is the support he enjoyed within the elite. The West saw a country that had weathered the storm of the 2007-2009 global financial crisis and was growing rapidly. Inside China, however, party members were less optimistic. They privately criticized Xi's bland predecessor Hu Jintao for letting the country drift and the party lose its discipline. They believed that for the party to survive, it was essential to inject a renewed sense of purpose into it and tighten control over it. Xi's speech on the "Chinese dream" of the country's "great rejuvenation" struck a chord with many.

Xi's other asset was his pedigree. In China, Xi is known (quietly) as taizi, or prince. The word is very commonly applied to the sons of leaders, especially the sons of the founders of Communist China. Members of that group enjoy political advantages. Among the first 600 promising young civil servants identified by the Office of Young Cadres in the early 1980s, around 5% were “princes”. In the Politburo Standing Committee that Xi took over in 2012, they were the majority.

As Machiavelli wrote some 500 years ago, "hereditary states ... are maintained with much less difficulty than new states, since all that is required is that the prince does not depart from the usages of his ancestors." Perhaps Xi disagrees about how easy that sounds (Machiavelli himself might have written something different about a colossus like China). However, the Chinese president is convinced that preserving the traditional ideological rhetoric of the party (even if it is not in line with many aspects of current state-run capitalism) is vital to keeping its 97 million members united and with him. commanding.

In 2009, the US embassy in Beijing sent a classified cable to Washington (later published by Wikileaks) mentioning the assessment of an unnamed (but clearly trusted) Chinese university professor who had known Xi early in his career. . “Our contact is convinced that Xi has a deep conviction of 'legitimation' and believes that members of his generation are the 'rightful heirs' of their fathers' revolutionary achievements and therefore 'deserve to rule China'” said the office. Xi was not guided by ideology, the academic claimed, but rather he had chosen to survive by "making himself redder than red." By wrapping itself in the communist mantle, the ruling elite would consider the party to be in good hands.

When it comes to how Xi has chosen to craft his image, that contact was more on target than the optimistic liberals. In recent months, officials across the country have been shown a film (yet another) about the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The documentary points out a great lesson: don't criticize the giants of communism's past. Attacking Stalin, as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev did in 1956, sowed the seeds of ruin.

Xi is not a Maoist. He wants to bring private entrepreneurs into line, but not eliminate them, as Mao did: his contribution to the economy is too valuable to do without. Unlike Mao, who took pleasure in destroying party structures in pursuit of utopian goals, Xi wants to strengthen the country's political and economic framework with firm control of the party.

For Xi, the party as an institution is more important than for Mao. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao tried to purge critics of him by launching the Red Guards, spontaneously formed radical gangs independent of the party, against them. In many places they seized local power and attacked party officials and organizations as "reactionary" or less than Maoist. Xi's family was the target of those attacks. His father was tortured. A stepsister committed suicide to avoid similar treatment.

Those experiences may have reinforced Xi's belief in a strong party. The party had to be strengthened to avoid the appearance of such chaos. Unleashing the masses was dangerous. “What I see is not just the superficial things: the power, the flowers, the glory, the applause,” Xi said in 2000. “I see the cowsheds [referring to Red Guard detention houses] and that people are changeable and can be for and then against.”

Few people dare to be against Xi; those who have done so have ended up jailed or otherwise punished. Xi has used the party as a weapon, planting party committees in private businesses and reviving them in neighborhoods. Party cells have spearheaded the mass mobilization of people to impose Covid-related lockdowns, round up carriers of the virus and place them in supervised quarantine, as well as carry out endless nucleic acid tests and door-to-door inspections. In Xinjiang, party secretaries were given the final say in who was sent to detention camps for "deradicalization." Xi has created new party groups, often with himself at the helm, to oversee the work of ministries. As he puts it: "East, west, south, north and center: the party runs it all."

He too does the same. He is in charge of the main government portfolios, including economic policy, which previous general secretaries left in the hands of the prime minister. After the party congress in mid-October and once the new alignment of the political leadership has been revealed, his unprecedented third term as general secretary will be analyzed in great detail, a mandate that will surely be granted to him. Now, given the power that he has, it has never ceased to be likely that he will remain the supreme leader even if he decides to hand over the post of party chief to someone else. Even Deng, who tried to introduce a more orderly succession system, exercised ultimate authority for years after resigning.

So the 69-year-old Xi is likely to rule, formally or informally, for as long as he is in a position to do so. He could be overthrown, but it will be difficult given the technological surveillance state he has created. In the remaining years of his government, it does not seem that things will change much in China or abroad to the point that he decides not to rule with an iron fist or challenge the United States.

In any case, Xi continues to be tormented by the fate of the Soviet Union and continues to see internal enemies. Despite what appears to be strong public approval of his tenure, he has reason to be concerned. He has been waging a war against a "political faction" within the police for the past two years. According to the authorities, it posed a "serious threat to political security". Recently, the alleged ringleader of the plot, Sun Lijun, a former Deputy Minister of Public Security, has received a suspended death sentence that could be commuted to life in prison without parole. Others have been sentenced to long prison terms.

As the economy slows, public support may wane. Xi will be even more likely to crack down on dissent and will be even more suspicious of private entrepreneurs running big business, who might challenge his policies. He has personally identified with the national "zero covid" strategy. Despite the heavy burden he places on the economy and growing complaints from citizens affected by draconian lockdowns, he is unlikely to abandon that policy until he is sure doing so will not lead to a spike in deaths. . And, as a nationalist, it does not seem likely that he will speed up the introduction of foreign vaccines that would allow the country a quicker exit from the epidemic.

Externally, Xi will stand firm in his decision to curtail US power in China's neighborhood and beyond. He sees the United States as a growing threat due to its attempt to strengthen ties with democratic countries to counter China's influence and cut off its access to cutting-edge technologies. It is not known what he really thinks about the war in Ukraine, but he will continue to support Russia diplomatically and see it as a vital bulwark of authoritarianism. Taiwan must continue to worry. Xi has not shown signs of being an irresponsible reckless like Putin. Above all, given Biden's repeated declarations that the United States will defend Taiwan militarily, he cannot be sure of a quick victory if he decides to try to conquer the island (a greater challenge in some ways than subduing Ukraine, given the terrain and distance to the mainland). However, the seizure of Taiwan remains a stated goal of the party. Xi is hastily building the necessary equipment for it.

Optimists may pin their hopes on a change for the better in China when Xi eventually fades from the political scene. Perhaps they are right. Some more liberal-minded leaders have risen from time to time in communist China, though never to the pinnacle of power. Still, the broad political elite that helped Xi's rise -- including retired leaders, generals and princes -- may prefer to keep China on the same political path after he is gone.

In Xi's words, China is undergoing "changes not seen in a hundred years," both domestically and globally. Amid such uncertainties, it is quite possible that most of the ruling elite wanted a firm hand on the helm (another "helmsman," as some sycophantic officials are beginning to call Xi), just as they appreciated the firm gesture. of Deng when he sent the army to Tiananmen Square. Despite his imposing and domineering personality and his way of changing the rules, Xi represents both continuity in Chinese politics and change. Even imagining a China without him, it's hard to be optimistic.

Translation: Juan Gabriel López Guix