In the weeks before his final elevation in late 2012, Xi met with a famous liberal scholar, Hu Deping. During the discussion, Xi reportedly acknowledged the great challenges that China faced. The four ‘uns’ made famous by Wen Jiabao, former premier, a few years earlier, figured prominently. China was using an economic model that was unstable, unsustainable, unbalanced and inequitable. The 2008 global financial crisis had underlined this. China’s economic model, mostly based on manufacturing, had been shown to be vulnerable to the vagaries of an outside world which had proved itself, once again, to be capricious and fickle. Already, fears of the dreaded middle-income trap were looming on the horizon: as the political scientist Minxin Pei put it, that the country might be trapped in a transition between being the world’s factory and a place more reliant on services. China still had an economic model characterised by distortions: high levels of capital investment in fixed assets, low levels of consumption, a service sector that was growing but still lower than in other, similar, economies, and finally high, and unknown, amounts of public debt, particularly at local levels. To cap all this, no one knew the full situation as local officials had exaggerated in some areas while under-reporting in others, to protect their own backs. Statistics were therefore regarded with suspicion.
These distortions were accompanied by a population who had not experienced a recession since the time of Mao. Technically, in fact, the country’s economy had not had a contraction for decades. Even when the Chairman had been steering the ship using his highly primitive, autarkic, centralised economic model there had been growth. Younger Chinese had always lived in a context of annual double-digit growth as normal, not an aberration. Since the mid-1990s, the middle classes – those living in urban centres, working in services and starting to enjoy the paraphernalia of the kinds of lifestyle experienced by similar socio-economic groups in the West – had moved from dreaming about having a freezer, a small scooter, a television and a phone to now wanting new, good-quality housing, a clean living environment, a car (usually imported, despite the huge tariffs), and the latest mobiles and electronic gadgets. For this demographic, their expectations and demands knew no bounds. Even more worryingly, they were increasingly aware of their new (albeit limited) legal rights, and were willing to protest, either through the courts or via petitions or other means, in order to be listened to.
All these issues must have been on Xi’s mind when he met Hu in mid-2012. But there were also more explicitly political issues underlying their discussions. For instance, both men had a heightened awareness of how the one-party model had fared so badly in most other places, particularly in the Soviet Union, and there was also a sense that the Hu Jintao era had been about one story, and one alone – pumping out enormous amounts of growth at the expense of everything else. Since 2001, China had quadrupled the size of its economy. But it had also seen huge increases in inequality, with more billionaires than any other country but also 100 million people still living in poverty. The natural environment was at breaking point, with rapid industrialisation triggering extreme weather patterns and causing the ice caps on the Tibetan Plateau to melt. The worst environmental problem, politically, was the dense smog now descending across coastal China from Shanghai up to Beijing, which was having an impact on people’s breathing, leading to premature deaths from bronchial problems, and generally advertising the limits of the government’s powers to deliver the good lifestyle it had promised. Added to these issues were huge demographic challenges – an ageing population due to the one-child policy in place since the 1970s and 1980s, gender imbalances, and increases in the incidence of the sort of diseases that had blighted developed countries, such as cancer, heart disease and obesity. As some observers caustically put it, China was a country that was growing old before it got rich and poisoning itself before it became fully developed.
The lost years of Hu, as they came to be called, had gifted his successor with one massive asset – a truly vast economy, with plenty of room to grow. The issue was what to do about the country’s political and administrative challenges. It would be impossible to continue pumping out massive amounts of growth; there would have to be a slowdown at some point. The issue then was about efficiency: China needed better management, not breakneck production of GDP. A leadership focused on political rather than economic issues was on the horizon. The question was what shape this politics would take, and how the new leaders would be able to utilise the immense benefits such a huge economy brought them. Broadly, the Party had a choice – either to consider fundamental reforms to the political realm before things got out of control, or to act counter-intuitively and have a period of retrenchment, devising a new form of reform and modernisation that would maintain political restraint and serve the one-party model but make it possible to navigate the difficult transition to middle-income status.
All this gives the context for Xi Jinping’s first words on 15 November 2012, when he emerged as General Secretary of the Communist Party in Beijing after the tumultuous events of the previous few months. There were three salient points in his brief speech that day. The first was the way he stressed that the Party narrative was intrinsically part of a national one, with rejuvenation at its heart:
Our responsibility is to unite and lead people of the entire Party and of all ethnic groups around the country while accepting the baton of history and continuing to work for realising the great revival of the Chinese nation in order to let the Chinese nation stand more firmly and powerfully among all nations around the world and make a greater contribution to mankind.
The second was to stress the notion of service – of the Party still abiding by the ethos from the earliest era of its existence of being a servant of the Chinese people:
This great responsibility is the responsibility to the people […] Our people love life and expect better education, more stable jobs, better income, more reliable social security, medical care of a higher standard, more comfortable living conditions, and a more beautiful environment.
The sense of the Party serving the expectations of the country’s people was now set in a new context in which China had become wealthier, meaning expectations had increased. In the past, as leaders often said, the main objective had been for everyone to have food and clothing. Fulfilling these most basic needs was viewed as the construction of the primary stage of socialism. But now those elemental material needs had been met, there was a complex set of different demands, ranging from good healthcare to education provision, foreign travel, housing and a clean environment.
Thirdly, there was the issue of what the Party’s function was in all of this. It was, as Xi made clear, a ‘political’ party:
Our responsibility is to work with all comrades in the party to be resolute in ensuring that the Party supervises its own conduct; enforces strict discipline; effectively deals with the prominent issues within the Party; earnestly improves the Party’s work style and maintains close ties with the people. So that our Party will always be the firm leadership core for advancing the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Even someone with no background in Chinese politics would be struck by how each of these three key points was focused on the Party, and on its centrality to the narrative of China’s national development. It was clear from his speech that Xi was a Party man – and that his central mission was to ensure that its hold on power was sustainable. The key challenge was to convince the people that the Party did not want power for power’s sake, but to advance a greater cause – that of national rejuvenation.
Since Xi Jinping took the helm in 2012, these three core themes have featured throughout the various actions, meetings and policy initiatives that the Party has pursued. A future story has been mapped out in which, using short- and longer-term goals as milestones, the Party takes the nation towards its moment of destiny. The most important landmarks in this future are referred to as the ‘two centennial goals’, the first of which will be in 2021 when China will achieve middle-income status and the CPC will celebrate its centenary. Under Hu, this was called the ‘historic mission’, a phrase that Xi returned to on 18 October 2017 in his report to the 19th Congress. That remains in hand. China now has a centrality in global issues as never before – from concerns about the environment to support for free trade, to its contribution to development through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The country has finally been recognised externally as a global power, and I will deal with this issue in more detail later on.
Regarding the second point in Xi’s inaugural speech, that of the importance of the Party’s political function to serve the people, his priority has been to offer a clarification of the Communist Party’s role in society and its core messages. These were spelled out in some detail in the recognition of Xi Jinping Thought and the language relating to the modernisation of socialism with Chinese characteristics which was written into the Party constitution in 2017. On the administrative side, the anti-corruption struggle, ongoing since 2013, has instilled discipline into the Party, and its role is now much more clearly political. It has aimed to create a space in society for other actors to work towards the main strategic goal it has stewardship over – delivering a rich, strong, powerful country.
Before we look in detail at the areas mentioned at the start of this chapter, we have to address the question of why the Party is so important to Xi’s overall mission and his style of politics. This is a hugely important issue. The claim explored in the Introduction that Xi is a powerful leader – that he has more power than any of his predecessors and might even be as powerful, if not more so, than Mao – needs to be examined by considering what the Party is, and its relationship to him as its leader.
The Communist Party of China has been called resilient, adaptive, authoritarian, fragmented, Leninist and consultative. The adjectives mount up. If nothing else, they testify to how hard it has been to categorise the Party. Looking at its history, we can find some clues. The Party emerged from the broad efforts to modernise China during the twilight years of the Qing dynasty prior to 1911. Marx’s ideas, via Japanese translations into Chinese, first found their way into the country in the first decade or so of the twentieth century, but they were simply part of a broad confluence of ideas and beliefs that intellectuals, many of whom had studied abroad, were using to get to grips with the immensely problematic question of why it was that China, with its rich history of early scientific achievement, had fallen so far behind. While Japan had steamed ahead, emerging from centuries of pre-modern isolation to embrace industrialisation, technology and modern governance, China had remained stuck in a largely agrarian or small artisan economy.
The tiny handful of early communists were nurtured, and in a sense grew up, in the shadow of the great 1917 revolution in Russia. When the USSR was finally established, and had some stability, it was able to send aid, personnel and inspiration to its comrades in China. Up to 1927, the Communist Party of China was almost wholly dependent on its Russian big brother. But a savage attack against it by the nationalists resulted in a rethink, largely led by Mao Zedong. Bit by bit, the Chinese found their own path, seeking support in rural areas, setting up the Red Army and articulating a more practical doctrine.
Under Mao the Party became nationalist and indigenised, with everything ‘according to Chinese characteristics’. These are the two identities that have stuck, despite the radical shifts in its specific ideology and the economic programmes it has pursued. The overall vision has always been to use Marxism to fulfil the creation of a rich, strong, powerful Chinese nation. Mao’s contribution to the Party as a revolutionary, guerrilla movement is well appreciated. But the shift from being a revolutionary party to one in government proved difficult. In many ways, its prime attribute under Mao was how it always seemed to be on a war footing, fighting against class enemies, enemies within and outside China, clashing with UN forces in the Korean peninsula, the Indians, the Russians and, finally, the Vietnamese in the years up to 1979. Internally and externally, Mao’s China, infected by dialectics, was not a tranquil place.
The Party may have radically altered its approach to governance since the reform and opening-up period in 1978, but its overarching commitment to the creation of that great dream – a strong, powerful, confident China restored to its place at the centre of the region and the world – never once dimmed. For all the mistakes it made (and there were many, from the Great Leap Forward to the tragic famines of the early 1960s, and then the grotesque political pantomime of the Cultural Revolution for the decade from 1966), its underlying commitment to a powerful, strong country never wavered. Invoking this commitment remains the Party’s chief rationale to this day, and it operates as a justification of every action the Party has ever undertaken.
For those unfamiliar with this grand nationalist commitment of the Party, making sense of the dramatic shifts, reverses and changes over the last seven decades proves bewildering. How can it be that a leader like Xi, living in the fourth decade of the Party under reform, can bridge the gap between pre- and post-1978 history, with its radical differences? Up until Mao’s death, the economy had almost totally been in the hands of the state, in ways which were more extreme than they had ever been in the Soviet Union. There were no entrepreneurs, largely because they had all been thrown in jail. The chief ideological commitment was to strive for utopian goals through the cleansing of society, removing the class enemies in it. China supported revolutionary struggle abroad in such an idiosyncratic way that by 1967 it had only one ambassador serving overseas – Huang Hua, in Egypt. From 1978, albeit in controlled phases, all of this changed. The class struggle vanished, and a market economy arose under close state scrutiny. Entrepreneurs became increasingly important. China accepted foreign capital abroad, and, even more extraordinarily, started exporting money in the form of investments. By 2017, it was the chief trading partner for more than 120 countries.
Is it possible for these stories to belong to the same entity, or are they really two different ones? And is the party writing them actually a single coherent organisation, or in fact something resurrected, reformed and reborn after the Maoist onslaught of the 1960s? As the previous chapter showed, Xi himself has personal experience of this period and remembers it all too well. He has been called a Maoist, but that description would make no sense to him. Instead, he is the inheritor of a tradition in which Mao played a seminal role. There will be no de-Stalinisation in China. Mao will remain embalmed in his shrine/tomb in Tiananmen Square at the centre of the country. This is because Xi is the inheritor of the Party’s commitment from its very beginnings to use whatever means necessary to ensure that China, with its searing history of suffering, victimisation and colonial bullying at the hands of outsiders, would never return to this state of vulnerability.
To truly understand why the Party gets its strength and legitimacy from this history, we need to recall just how horrifying life in China had been prior to communism. By the turn of the nineteenth century, China was entering a period of ominous stagnation and imminent decline which had begun during the period of high imperial culture of the mid-Qing dynasty, under the three great emperors Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong, who had ruled, between them, for a total of 140 years. The clues to this decline were visible from within and outside – from China’s capitulation to the British in 1842 following the first Opium War, to the horrifying casualties sustained during the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64. The Beijing imperial court was riddled with factionalism, but largely held under the sway of conservatives. China gained the unenviable name of ‘the sick man of Asia’. But for a culture with such strong pride and identity, and a powerful sense of its historic coherence, much worse lay in store. After the fall of the Qing in 1911, the Republic era intimated a new period of modernisation. But China’s reward for fighting on the side of the Allies in World War I was to see the concessions held by the defeated Germany in its territory ceded to Japan. In the 1920s, the country was beset by regional divisions and imbalances. With the rise of militaristic leadership in Japan, China’s vulnerability and its lack of any meaningful modern military, navy or infrastructure made it a prime target for annexation, and from 1932 the Japanese mounted a series of provocations and attacks, resulting in all-out war from 1937.
The issue of the Sino-Japanese War is by no means finished for Xi Jinping and his comrades, even though they are the first generation of elite leaders born after 1949. Lived memory of the epic war fades by the year, but its commemoration is a heavy burden to shoulder, one which every leader needs to address. The matter is complicated by China’s historically contentious relationship with Japan, which reaches back not decades or centuries but millennia. This relationship is characterised by competitiveness and deep resentment, and the 1937 war was the most savage manifestation of this. In China’s view, tensions have been exacerbated by the failure of the Japanese to fully accept their culpability in the same manner as the Germans did in Europe after 1945.
The Communist Party is a product of this history, and is infused with the country’s particular need for moral retribution and delivery of justice for its people. That, more than anything else, remains the Party’s most powerful source of appeal. And while its tactics since 1978 have been to use economic means to deliver power, the end product is the same – a unified, stable China able to relate to and deal with the world on its own terms. A China, as late Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo put it, returned to its place at the centre of the world.
Xi did not construct this historical narrative; he simply occupies a place within it. He is the current lead in the story, but he did not write the words, or even decide when the final act might be. Like any actor, therefore, his real skill is in his performance rather than the creation of a whole new work off his own back. In this context, the elite leadership of the Party resembles a five-act play, with Mao in the first, Deng in the second, Jiang and Hu in the third and fourth respectively, and Xi now central to the final act. His responsibility is to make sure that we are not watching a tragedy but a stirring drama of moral resurrection and restoration of justice to the Chinese people. They are the true masters of this drama, and it is on their behalf that the Party is performing.
Despite his current pre-eminence, Xi Jinping remains a product of a Party training process which has produced many tens of thousands of other leaders. The only option for these people to wield power in Chinese politics, albeit in an organised context, is within the Party. There are no other options in the political arena. And that has involved the acceptance of a specific culture, ideology and world view, service to which remains critical. For those who progress to leadership, a very specific tone and space to operate within is already set. It means belonging to an elite cadre who function as servants of the great meta-narrative – a unified Party bringing about a rejuvenation of a great nation, using the tools of Marxism–Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. The latter is simply the ‘Sinification’ of the former: an application of the universal principles of dialectic materialism to build the appropriate societal superstructure, but always – and this is the crucial addition – in ways which are in accordance with the specific situation in China and Chinese national conditions.
China, the USSR and other communist one-party systems have frequently used the promotion of a cult of personality and the creation of a charismatic leader as a strategic tool to communicate their ideology to people and to mobilise them. The extensive use of propaganda featuring Mao and the levels of adoration surrounding him were phenomenal during the Cultural Revolution, meaning that in some sense this era is the only one in Chinese history where there was a universal belief system linked to the spiritual attributes of one superhuman figure. Under subsequent leaders, there have been high levels of resistance to this worship of a single leader. But that does not remove the importance of promoting leaders’ individual personalities and stories. The leader is a powerful strategic tool, acting as a moral exemplar and demonstrating the Party’s ideological commitment, unity and cohesiveness. The leader’s individual qualities are part of its identity and crucial to the way it operates.
Does this mean that Xi Jinping is the new Mao, as has often been claimed?
The best way to answer that question is to look at context. The China of Mao was a radically different place to that which exists today, one in which the media, industry and political messages were accessible only to regimes of control. During the Mao era the country was isolated, its borders tightly closed, its newspapers, radio stations and few television outlets under centralised management structures. Most people lived in rural areas, where the Party was the only viable organising entity. The China of Xi Jinping, on the other hand, saw 120 million people travel outside the country’s physical borders in 2015 alone. China is now a place where more than 50 per cent of economic activity is in the hands of non-state organisations. It is a place where 3 million young people have studied abroad since 1980, and where over 200 million are learning English. Almost a billion Chinese people now have mobile phones, and through these access to the internet, albeit one guarded by the Great Firewall. Even with these restrictions, these Chinese have access to freedoms and are able to make life choices that would have been unimaginable to their forebears under Mao. Calling Xi Jinping the Mao of modern China is as meaningful as calling Donald Trump the George Washington of the US. The times they live in are too radically different for the comparison to make any sense.
Even more striking is that unlike Mao, Xi is a Party man through and through. Mao was famously able to defy and challenge the Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution by accusing it of becoming ossified by bureaucracy and self-interest, threatening in the mid-1960s to resign from the Party and retreat to the countryside to raise a new force to seize power. This was no idle threat: his charismatic hold over the Chinese people was so powerful that few doubted his ability to do this. Xi, on the other hand, would never make such a threat. He is powerful because the Party he leads is powerful, and he has no individual power outside of that structure and context.
Xi’s role as a Party man gives meaning to his main actions since coming to power in 2012. Unlike his predecessor, his leadership has been political, rather than administrative or economic. Whereas under Hu the country’s focus was on GDP growth and pumping out new economic results, Xi has been working to consolidate the role of the Party in its national mission to make the country strong and great. He has sponsored Party-led building campaigns, promoted the Party line and enforced ideology and discipline, the last of these as part of the national struggle against corruption. All his tasks as leader have been completely focused on the Party and its health, sustainability and centrality. With this in mind, it is clear why Xi was so keen to underline the importance of the Party’s role in his November 2012 speech. It is an absolutely central and integral part of his leadership.