Two decades ago, I was a British diplomat serving in Beijing. During an earlier stay, I had become aware of the leadership compound that lay beside the vast Forbidden City in the heart of the capital but had never managed to set foot in the place. However, during the visit of a senior British politician around the turn of the millennium, I was invited to accompany them to this hallowed place. The experience was disorientating. Driving through the chaotic and crushing traffic in the city centre, our embassy car swept into a side gate. It was as though we had disappeared into another world. Peace reigned. Beyond the security guards at the entrance, there was no one in sight. Classical buildings stood by tranquil lakes. The grass looked as though it had been cut by scissors. Everything was still, calm – the opposite of the metropolis, one of the largest 2 and most congested in the world, we had left outside. The place exuded an intangible sense of power.
In modern China, power is largely seen as something real, which certain people possess and others don’t, but which has an air of mystery about it. One of the numerous ‘givens’ for Western journalists covering Chinese elite politics over the past few decades is that those at the top of the ruling Communist Party of China have an abundance of it. There are not many of these people. The assumption is that they are laden with vast surfeits of this thing called ‘power’; they can run riot with it, annexing everything around them at their individual will. But is this really the case? Does ‘power’ have such a common currency and such consistent characteristics? Two of the finest historians of the modern country’s events, Fred Teiwes and Warren Sun, went to great lengths in their meticulous account of the final years of Mao’s rule to say that, while everyone can agree that he did have massive authority, ‘things were more complicated’.1
One source of confusion about structures of power in China is the idea that leaders today are little different from the emperors who led the country during its long imperial history until 1912. Like them, Mao, Deng and Xi are similar to modern gods, ruling with absolute authority over their subjects, enjoying an almost semi-divine status. It is questionable whether Chinese emperors did in fact have such powers. 3 The vast majority of their subjects probably spent their lives completely oblivious as to who was reigning over them. But the China that Xi Jinping lives in and rules today is not the same as the Chinas that existed before. Ironically, for all the claims about the great antiquity of Chinese history, the People’s Republic of China is not yet a hundred years old. It is a young state. Places such as the United Kingdom, France and even the United States and Australia can make claims to some sort of cohesive national narrative going back at least 150 years, and in some cases much further. Their governance structures and administrations are often much better established than those of the People’s Republic in Beijing, which only took form in 1949. While the concept of ‘China’ is, on the surface, a very ancient one – and there certainly is overlap between the geographical reach of predecessor states and the current one (particularly the expansionist Qing era, 1644–1912) – one could claim that much of the country we see today has been created since the Second World War, and in many cases even more recently. Power is moulded both by what it is directed at and what it is intended to have influence over. Like water, it changes its shape depending on what it strikes against. Xi Jinping’s powers are therefore different to those of China’s leaders prior to 1949 because the place he exerts power over did not exist then.
Even after 1949, each core leader has had bespoke styles and kinds of power, as much because of the changing economic 4 and political situation of their country, as anything to do with them personally. Mao Zedong, who ruled from 1949–76, was the great founder, a figure of God-like proportions. His successor, Deng Xiaoping, who was leader from 1978–89, was more prosaic and strategic – history will probably judge him as being much more effective than Mao in creating sustainable outcomes. After Deng’s era came Jiang Zemin, who ruled as party head from 1989 to 2002. He presented a more extrovert, oft-mocked leadership style, despite the fact that with his slippery, often buffoonish character he stabilised the country after the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising and recommitted to play a role in the global economy through finally joining the World Trade Organization in 2001. Hu Jintao, the faceless, egoless successor to Jiang, mastered the art of making China a vast factory for economic growth, quadrupling the size of its GDP over the decade he was in office from 2002 to 2012, an unrivalled achievement in modern history. After all of these leaders came Xi. He has been talked of, by no less a figure than President Obama, as the leader who has most quickly and effectively consolidated his position since the time of Mao. What links these different figures is that they worked within the Communist tradition of governance. Maybe Xi is the most powerful of them all. But this is because China has greater significance as a country now than it did in the past. It is not because Xi has some kind of magic quality. The reasons 5 for his power are very prosaic – China has more money, more technology, more military equipment than ever before, and this is in comparison to a West that is weakening. There is nothing mysterious in any of this.
Xi and his colleagues certainly see themselves as occupying a phase in a continuous project that started in 1949, one where their actions are only possible because of the achievements of their predecessors. Xi himself has made it clear that the idea of repudiating Mao will not happen, at least under his watch. For Xi, without the Chairman, there would be no China as it exists today, in pole position to achieve its dreams of modernity and to overtake the US to become the world’s largest economy within the next decade. If Xi is the most powerful leader of the country since Mao, this is because of the systems and structures, and achievements, that arose from the hard work of his predecessors. He himself doesn’t deny this. He will see the country achieve things that Mao dreamt of but could never realise – his country having a navy with more vessels than the US, one that is able to speak back as an equal to American presidents, one that has eradicated absolute poverty. This sense of belonging to a great tradition of Communist Party leadership since 1949 in China, therefore, is crucial in understanding Xi as a political figure.
Xi’s power also exists to serve a purpose. This is not about his own individual aims. It is about the great objective of the 6 Communist Party to build a strong, rich country. This transcends specific leaders, and particular eras. The Communist Party is an atheist organisation. But that doesn’t mean it has no faith. Belief in the almost semi-mystical entity of ‘China’ with its spiritual import, its cultural richness and human vastness is the great overarching creed that has prevailed since 1949, and it has roots that extend far further back than this. Making this China powerful, strong and central in world affairs once more, as it had been in the distant past, is the key mission. Xi is a servant of that greater mission, almost in the same way the Pope leads the Catholic Church in its mission to deliver humanity to the Kingdom of Heaven. The main difference is that for Xi’s faith, that kingdom will be found on this earth. Of all the sources of Xi’s power, this one is the most potent.
The nature of the leadership he practises needs to be interpreted as serving these larger, longer-term aims related to faith in the great nation. If we want to describe Xi as an autocrat, it is because he is serving autocratic aims. There must be total fidelity to the great cause of making China great again. This is a jealous objective, and one that does not permit any vagueness nor any lack of commitment. Xi’s leadership style can be seen as almost designed to recognise this. The autocratic cause creates the leadership style, not the other way around. This is a crucial issue, if one truly wants to understand what is happening in China today. 7
On more mundane levels, Xi’s powers also need to be seen as circumscribed and limited. The Communist Party of China does not merely have a strong guiding, nationalist faith, but also a strong identity and ethos. Most of this was created long before Xi even became a member in 1974. To succeed in it at any level means adhering to this pre-determined set of rules and customs. You become as the party wants you, rather than you making the party become like you. As scholar Zheng Yongnian pointed out, contemporary China does indeed have an emperor – but it is in the form of the organisation of the Communist Party, rather than a human individual.2
In terms of the context of Xi’s power, and how one can compare him to predecessors like Mao, we have to recognise that the country that he rules over today has radically transformed from the one that existed only four decades ago. Socially, culturally, economically and in its physical appearance, it is almost a different country. Change itself is the great constant of modern China – change in terms of how people live, what work they do and how fast this change has occurred. The sole constant is the fact that the Communist Party has continued to have a monopoly on power. Beyond that, everything else seems to have been remodelled.
Even an outsider like myself can testify to this. In the mid-1990s I lived in a fairly typical provincial city in China for two years. It had no high-rise buildings, was served by 8 often pockmarked roads and its central area was dominated by a charming, chaotic and ramshackle old city where temples nestled beside shops, merchants’ houses and tombstone sellers. Returning to this place in the early 2000s after a few years’ absence, I was wholly unable to find my way around. Literally nothing remained to orientate me. A vast, shiny new airport had been built, as had a new museum about ten times the size of the old one, with huge halls displaying dinosaurs, furnished with interactive, hi-tech teaching aids. New civic buildings dominated one part of the city. There were skyscrapers everywhere, glittering in the sun. The roads were pristine, with glitzy, expensive imported cars driving along them. Only after much searching could I find at least one of the old temples, turning the corner of a huge new boulevard running south through where the old city once was. There it stood, almost stranded in a sea of change, its doors and courtyard recognisable. I found this strangely moving and reassuring. But after gazing at it for a while, I realised that even this place had experienced an extensive makeover.
This is not a unique incidence. Change has infected every part of China. It means that the kinds of tasks and the sorts of objectives the leadership – by which I mean the institution rather than specific personalities – must fulfil have also changed. And yet, as we will see, a choice has been made by Xi and those around him, deep in the party, to maintain this 9 almost old-fashioned, highly unified leadership model. It is as though the Communist Party were like that former temple I recognised in among the sea of change the day I revisited my old home – a focal point to orientate and reassure people that they have not strayed on to a totally different planet. In a country undergoing this extent of transformation, and with the impact of all its technological advances, the commitment to a single, authoritative centralising figure has remained the default. In Xi’s China, the party is not back to the future, but back to the past. In every other aspect of Chinese life, the reverse is true, with things becoming more complex, diverse and renewed by the day. To opt for a leadership like this has a simple logic: in a world where everything else is pervaded by change, transformation and transition, the party and the party alone is the great bastion of stability and permanence. To coin a phrase, in the kingdom of change, the changeless one is King!
How deliberate a construct is the Xi political persona, bearing in mind the context of leadership customs and the party’s custodianship of a strong, enduring identity and ethos? Acknowledging this is not to the denigration of Xi’s individual political skills; far from it. In February 2018, James Fallows wrote in the Atlantic that Xi is an autocrat, not a reformer; but while much of the Western world seems to be consumed by fears that they are seeing the rise of yet another terrifying Asian dictator, there is little recognition that when dealing with 10 a potential opponent, a good place to start is by recognising their strengths.3 At a dinner in London some years back, an American sitting next to me airily declared that, of course, ‘Xi Jinping is evil.’ It was hard to work out what they meant by that, beyond seeking an easy way to consign him to a pigeonhole from which he could be easily dismissed. Xi’s political convictions might be considered problematic, along with the policies his government has implemented that have affected minorities, such as the population in Xinjiang. These are often profoundly concerning and hard to understand. But merely dismissing Xi Jinping’s success as a leader means one is not seeing him clearly enough to fully engage with the challenges he and his country pose. Xi is a problem for the world not because he is some old-style Communist dictator playing by the rule book of Stalin and Mao, but because he is an effective leader of a modernised economy, a modernising military and a powerful, modern state. Dismissing him with a lazy label helps no one.
That he has succeeded in a political system which is deeply disliked by many in the West, means that, in today’s world, even a bald statement asserting that Xi is a hugely effective and talented leader is likely to bring massive opprobrium upon the head of whoever makes such an assessment. At a time of deep divisions between left and right in America, hard attitudes and policies towards China are one of the few things that unites both sides. Republican Mario Rubio in the US has called 11 China a ‘genocidal regime’,4 while in the same year, President Joe Biden said that the country is a ‘threat to democratic way of life’.5 In Europe, too, the country has moved from being seen as a partner to a ‘systemic rival’ – a phrase used by the European Union in 2019.6 There are even darker and murkier issues of potential xenophobia about Western uneasiness towards such a culturally different power becoming predominant for the first time in modern history. As Covid-19 spread across the world from China in 2020, the lamentable incidences of people of Chinese heritage being abused and attacked in the UK, US and Australia increased rapidly.7 The combination of these attitudes created an often toxic brew. It also raises uncomfortable questions about how much the response to China’s new prominence is about the country itself, and how much is about the already existing fears, prejudices and obsessions of those observing and witnessing this new power.
In this chaotic and confusing situation, we can see evidence of Xi’s political skills – things he did well regardless of our views of the system he works in. He managed to emerge from the messy transition period between him and his predecessor Hu Jintao with enough space around him to build what he wanted. Unlike Hu, whose stint in power was reportedly blighted by the persistent interference of the man he had succeeded, Jiang Zemin, Xi seemed to have his hands on all the levers of power from the word go. He was head of the party 12 and the military from November 2012 and became president in March 2013 – things Hu had to wait a year or two for in the succession a decade before. He has had an obedient and capable group of colleagues around him, people such as Li Keqiang and the formidable Wang Qishan, who have offered no distraction from the leadership persona that he wanted to construct. The former had no power base of his own, while the latter was already too old to pose much of a long-term threat. By focussing on anti-corruption and building up rule by law to protect commercial rights while ceding no ground to political opponents, Xi was able to discipline the greatest threat to him – contenders in the party and its high-level leadership who felt they, not Xi, should have the top spot. Most importantly, with concepts like the ‘China Dream’, an idea issued by the party in 2012 to refer to the vision of the country being powerful and rich in the next decade, and Xi’s key foreign policy idea, the Belt and Road Initiative (all of which will be explained in more detail later), he has been able to craft a narrative that grants meaning and purpose to the context of his leadership and explains how it serves in delivering the great overarching political vision described above – the creation of a powerful, great China. The country now has vast wealth and a new capacity, accrued since the time of Deng Xiaopeng in the 1980s. It has the economic capital to be able to take decisive action today. These financial gains were not for their own sake, but 13 for something more. Xi may well be the lucky man who found himself in the right place at the right time, when the country not only has a nationalist vision, but also has the means to make this a reality as never before.
No matter where a politician works, or which environment they are in, making the most of good fortune and opportunities is a key ability. Just like a football player on a pitch who has the chance at a shot at goal, the difference between a good player and a great one is how many of these opportunities are converted to goals. Xi is well known as a keen football fan. Despite the terrible record of the Chinese national football team, at one point in 2011, immediately before coming to power, he spoke of the three Chinese dreams: for the country to compete once again in the World Cup finals (its only other participation took place in 2002), to host the World Cup and to be World Cup winners.8 He has shown that, like the football stars he so admires, and successful politicians everywhere, he knows how to use that luck. He is a supreme opportunist, a convertor of chances into goals. What differentiates him from other contemporary national leaders is the sheer scale of the opportunity he has been given.
Xi has had his fair share of luck since 2012. There were a few years when it seemed that everything was going his way. The world was distracted by turmoil in the Middle East and Russia’s annexation of the Crimea. The US was being consumed by culture wars between left and right, which 14 culminated in the brutal 2016 presidential campaign that pitted Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton. Europe was in a seemingly perpetual crisis as it fought first with the fallout of the 2009 Eurozone crisis and then the rise of populist political parties in countries such as Italy, France and Germany. The terrorist group ISIS was looming as the biggest security threat since 9/11. But in 2015, when the central Chinese government fumbled the response to a collapse in the Shanghai Stock Exchange, impoverishing the all-important middle class who were the main holders of accounts in the country, it seemed that Xi’s luck was starting to run out. The 2017 election of Donald Trump to the White House and the start of his administration’s sustained pushback on China resulted in a trade war and the imposition of tariffs; and then the catastrophic Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020 proved Xi’s greatest test yet. As the pandemic took hold, the first signs did not augur well. Xi effectively disappeared in late January 2020. As journalist Jamil Anderlini put it in the Financial Times, the pandemic was China’s Chernobyl, the mismanagement of which in the mid-1980s by the government of the Soviet Union presaged the country’s demise. In February 2020, the Wall Street Journal published an article declaring that China was ‘the sick person of Asia’ because of the woes facing it.*
15And then the pandemic spread throughout the rest of the world. It was no longer a rerun of the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak of almost two decades earlier that had been restricted to Asia. By April, countries in Europe, America, Australia and elsewhere were starting to become overwhelmed by infections. Around the same time that China, after strict lockdowns and social controls, managed to get on top of the spread of the infection, other nations began to buckle under the strain. Impositions of orders to restrict the free movement of people and shut down society meant that much of the world started to look just as China had. The one difference was that other nations, with their delayed lockdowns, hesitancy to enforce the use of face masks and fierce internal arguments between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, appeared to be far more incompetent. As transmission rates soared, and deaths tragically rose, China itself became more like an oasis of calm. Residents in the city of Wuhan, where the crisis had started, may initially have been furious at their own leaders. But this frustration was soon replaced by bewildered gratitude, as they saw a US president downplay the disease and then promptly contract it, before trying to prove he was healthy by emerging from hospital while still infectious, to parade up and down in a car to small crowds. The chaos didn’t end there. The British prime minister who had told the public the disease was nothing to worry about, and shaken hands with 16 Covid-19 patients in a hospital, was himself hospitalised by the disease. Compared to this, Chinese leaders seemed the acme of prudence and competence.
Covid-19 is certainly not the sort of opportunity Xi’s government may have wanted to prove their administrative prowess. The impact of the pandemic has created a far sharper, more divided world, and one where there are greater levels of antagonism towards the country from other states. But it showed that Xi could deal with a huge emergency arguably more effectively than many of his fellow national leaders, and that he knew how to turn this to domestic political use. This is not to dignify the claims that the whole episode was deliberately concocted by the Chinese government, which belong to the outer reaches of fantasy. After all, if the pandemic had got out of hand in China, as so nearly happened in January 2020, it would have had a devastating effect on Xi and his colleagues.9 But it proved that Xi could turn a negative event into a positive one, creating political opportunities. By February 2022, according to data collated by Johns Hopkins University in the US, China had had 120,000 infections and 4,800 deaths from the virus since it appeared two years before.10 (These figures have been disputed by some as dramatically underreported – but were they even several multiples higher they would still fall far short of US or European levels, particularly taking China’s size into account.) Although it has a quarter of China’s 17 population, by the same date, the US had 74 million infections, and 884,000 deaths.11 Brutal it might be, but when accused of having disdain for human life, Xi’s government could say it had done more to preserve the wellbeing of its citizens during the pandemic than the world’s greatest democracy.
How exactly the outside world frames Xi and understands the context of his power matters. As the pandemic spread, I was struck by how long-established narratives about China were brought to the fore, and how increasingly unfit for purpose they were when faced with the complexities of contemporary geopolitics. It was as though we were trying to use the language of Newtonian physics to describe quantum mechanics. A glance across the various portrayals of Xi in much Western (by which I mean North America, Europe and other aligned multi-party democratic systems) media and commentary shows that, since the Covid-19 crisis started, he has received oblique praise, with the BBC in May 2021 calling him a ‘consummate political chess player who has cultivated an enigmatic strongman image’.12 Xi is imputed with super-human powers. His is the hidden hand that creeps into governments, gets close to political leaders and buys up the allegiance of powers across Africa, Latin America and the rest of the world.13 His Belt and Road Initiative is a master plan for domination and control. He is ‘buying’ universities as august and long established as that of Cambridge.14 His is the genius 18 behind companies like telecoms equipment and technology manufacturer Huawei, whose public insistence that they are independent of his government carries no weight among the main experts on the invisible world of cyber espionage, who produce weekly accounts of the terrifyingly effective tricks and deeds that China is undertaking.15 This is a highly flattering level of influence to grant one man. If even a fraction of this corpus of material were true, it would show that Xi has been by far the most effective of the modern non-Western leaders in rattling the West’s self-confidence. If this were a psychological war (and perhaps in some ways it is) then China currently seems to have the advantage.
It is interesting that, while there is a corresponding fear of foreign interference and agitation within China, Xi’s domestic language acknowledges that the far greater threat is not from the other nations but from within. The party he belongs to is the target of his most severe dissatisfaction and ire and has been accused of being the greatest source of potential failure if it does not get tougher on itself. In this respect, he is similar to Mao. Even before coming to central power, during his years as party leader in the province of Zhejiang, he was palpably angry at the party’s ability to undermine itself through its lack of focus on the larger political vision. At a time when most officials were swimming in narcissism and focussed on material self-enrichment, feathering their own and their 19 wider network’s nests, this was not a popular message. But as of 2022, it has proved to be a politically rewarding one. Xi seems to have worked out that the most powerful thing in modern China is to believe in anything at all, at a time when most people merely believe in money.
Whatever ‘power’ might be, on one thing we can all agree: for Xi it is clearly vital. Where does he believe that his power is derived from? The huge security services under his command? The military that is growing bigger each year? The vast economy his country has built? We can, at best, speculate. But while it is likely he regards these as important instruments for power, they are merely a means to an end. By studying his actions we can learn where he expends most of his energy, time being his most precious asset. Beyond the great effort spent in disciplining and berating the party he leads, what Xi spends most of the rest of his time doing is in telling stories. It is evident that he believes it is by these means that he can reach the real place where he must have influence and authority – the minds and emotion of the people he leads. The Maoist phrase that power grows from the barrel of a gun has become a cliché in modern China. It is also imprecise. Power is not about the gun, but what is in the mind of the person holding that gun. Xi seeks to enact and relate narratives that give Chinese citizens meaningful ways in which the Communist Party relates to their daily lives today. Many of his stories are 20 about the national mission to make the country great again and restore this ancient civilisation to its central role in the world, in ways that transcend politics and which each individual can take part in. This reduces the vast distance between the party’s elite and the people on the street. By talking this way, Xi is not the Communist Party leader, but something more akin to a trusty big brother, a father figure or the Xi Dada† that became popular on Chinese social media around 2014, before the censors grew nervous about its levity and banned it.
When told in China, that story of the country’s rise to great power has impact and significance. Outside the country, though, things grow trickier. Here the audience is not Chinese people with their shared symbols, language and habits. The context of the lives of non-Chinese are very different. For this external world, in the era of China’s modern rise since the death of Mao in 1976, there have been two broad stories about this complex, ever-evolving country. One version sees the place as some vast ersatz capitalist project, aping Western money-making processes and discourse. If one adopts this storyline, China could be seen as either a potential object of huge material enrichment for companies or, more negatively, as an economic competitor and threat. The alternative story positions China as a hell of human rights abuses and misery, 21 where the desperate citizens silenced by oppressive state censorship are sending out cries for liberation and help to the outside world. In fact, these two plotlines are not new. From the start of European engagement with Ming-era China, five centuries ago, Jesuits and other Catholic missionaries regarded the country as a vast pool of potential converts to Christianity, and saw themselves as liberating the people from their unenlightened and Godless blindness.‡ In the late 16th century, the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci was the most celebrated of these, a man who lived in China so long that he adopted Chinese dress and mannerisms, and wrote his works in the local language. This sat alongside the mercantile approach, which viewed the place as a source of trade opportunities, and potential wealth creation for outside governments and companies, such as the infamous British East India Company. The latter came to the fore after the First Opium War of 1839–42 when the reigning Qing dynasty was forced to open up to outside trade, at the hands of forces including the British military. These broad narratives of commercial opportunity and the possibility of ideological conversion versus human rights hell have continued like two well-worn train tracks to the present day. And they are, as is obvious even on this bald retelling, in increasingly overt conflict; if one believes a place’s values are truly problematic, one cannot trade with it without being accused of hypocrisy.
22 Under Xi, the moment where these two stories are no longer fit for purpose has arrived. We now have no illusions about the business opportunities provided by China. It offers real but hard-won gains, with some investors such as Goldman Sachs and Apple winning big and others enduring spectacular failures – Mattel and Tesco, who both lost significant amounts of money and ended up closing their operations in China despite their initial success in the 2010s, spring to mind. In 2020, the Beijing government introduced the idea of ‘dual circulation’, a framework prioritising domestic consumption which would make Chinese citizens the source of future economic growth, rather than exporting goods to an increasingly fickle and unreliable outside world. Even so, China still stressed that it wanted to maintain good links with partners in tech and other areas where the country remained behind the West. Ironically, the Chinese population could provide clients for the sophisticated services sector in terms of insurance, different investment products and mortgages for their property that many Western companies dream of accessing – precisely at the time when, for political reasons, such an opportunity is harder to take advantage of due to antagonism with the country. The EU–China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, for example, was negotiated for seven years; 23 although it was, perhaps, the first European deal with China where the EU came out on top by opening up the services sector in the People’s Republic, the European Parliament overwhelmingly refused to ratify it in Spring 2021, because of sanctions that the Chinese government had deployed against five of its members.16
With regard to moral and political values, the situation is even more vexed. Xinjiang is a lamentable example, where since 2017 the establishment of ‘re-education camps’ have seen the detention of an estimated 1 million people, largely of Uyghur ethnicity. The treatment of the Uyghurs shows Xi’s China at its most disturbing. Parliaments of Western countries like Canada started to deploy the phrase ‘genocide’ as news of the crackdown in the region seeped to the wider world, although tellingly some other governments were less keen to follow their lead.17 These disturbing developments sat alongside a devastating purge of dissidents and other contrarian domestic forces, beginning in 2015 when over 300 Chinese human rights lawyers were detained in one crackdown.18 The consensus among well-informed observers, such as Reporters sans Frontières and Human Rights Watch, is that for academics, and for people working in the civil society sector, things are tougher than they have been for decades. The party has the most advanced surveillance technology in the world. This is not Mao’s China. Then, technology was minimal, often 24 ineffective, and the state maintained control through copious human surveillance – neighbours, colleagues at school, even family and friends. For Xi, artificial intelligence, facial recognition technology and mobile apps keeping tabs on people are important tools. This is, as the Economist has called it, digital totalitarianism at its most complete, the velvet prison par excellence.19
And yet, before one becomes too comfortably ensconced in the story of China as the human rights hell, there is the irrefutable fact that, materially, the vast majority of Chinese people have never been better off. A country that experienced mass famine in the early 1960s, which caused the deaths of possibly as many as 36 million people, has long since solved its food supply challenges. At the 2021 annual gathering of the country’s parliament, the National People’s Congress, the Chinese government declared that it had abolished ‘absolute poverty’ (defined in China as people living on less than $2.30 a day). Never before have more Chinese travelled abroad, with a staggering 169 million overseas trips taking place in 2019. More young people attend university, either domestically or outside the country, than at any point in the nation’s history. The middle class have secured stronger property rights, and more opportunities at work and in education as well as in their daily lives. Their interests are looked after by officials who now, whether through fear, discipline or an actual sense of duty, are 25 more likely to obey regulations in case they attract the interest of the dreaded anti-corruption body, the National Supervision Commission. Xi Jinping has also removed ambiguity in business and diplomacy, in a country where connections (the fabled guanxi), the back door and under-the-table deals used to be standard practice. Although the legal reforms brought in since 2013 have brought no succour to dissidents and those fighting for civil rights, commercially they have made things crystal clear. Courts that used to issue judgments that went largely ignored are now in the business of being heard. The lax implementation of rules was one of the prime complaints made by outsiders in the Hu era. Now, strangely, they complain of the opposite – far from making unfulfilled promises, the party does indeed carry out what it has said it would.
If one has a simplistic, monolithic view of China, then the power Xi possesses, and the sort of politician he is, will also seem similarly monolithic and straightforward. In this interpretation, he is the man who has removed all opposition, and who stands completely alone, like some colossus in the midst of a largely empty plain. Everything in this vast country comes to his attention and is subject to his decree. As Australian sinologist Geremie Barmé has put it, he is the Chairman of everything.20 And yet over-fixation on this neat story fails to explain quite how it is that such a vast and complex country should become the fiefdom of one man. The 26 Communist Party that Xi leads today is 95 million members strong. In the 2021 census, the population edged over 1.4 billion people – China is a place that seems to have every shade of humanity. Never before has its population been so complex and hard to categorise. At least 5 million of them have been educated at degree level abroad. They are users of over 1 billion smart phones. China’s civil service employs around 8 million people, with about ten times that number working for state enterprises. The vast majority of the rest of the working population are employed in businesses, or own different kinds of enterprises, many of which, on paper at least, are classified as non-governmental. In China’s vast terrain, people are living every conceivable lifestyle, with the country going through a sexual revolution reminiscent of that experienced by Europe in the 1960s with rising levels of divorce, people living together before marrying, and engaging in extramarital affairs, only vaster in scale, and quicker. The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s ended in political failure once Mao died. Today’s cultural revolution, an ongoing transformation where economic, social and technological change, and openness to the wider world, is reaching deep into the lives of every Chinese person in ways never seen before.
And yet, while the lives of the population become more complex, the story of the country’s leadership and its politics mysteriously seems to have travelled in the opposite 27 direction. Gone are the myriad factions and different parts of the Communist Party that figured in accounts from last century, when respected analysts like Cheng Li of the Brookings Institution could talk of the Shanghai, Princeling and Youth League factions in the party. Gone too is any sense of internal opposition. Even in the Mao era, when the costs of going against the Chairman were staggeringly high, there was always at least some form of dissent, voiced by people like his defence minister in the 1950s, Peng Dehuai, who was felled after criticising Mao following the famine in the early 1960s. In the Deng Xiaoping era, there were people such as Deng Liqun (no relative) who was deeply critical of the post-1978 reform process, which led to China engaging more with the outside world and taking on some capitalist practices. This group of dissidents were significant enough to merit their own label – the new Leftists. Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao both had to deal with internal opponents. Apart from his tussle at the very start of his period in office with fellow Politburo member Bo Xilai, who was ultimately imprisoned, Xi seems to have faced nothing like this kind of depth and force of opposition. There have been some grumblings – an open letter published online, for instance, by an unnamed critic in 2015, or articles by businesspeople voicing unease at his style of rule. One individual from within the party, Cai Xia, did declare that Xi had become a dictator – but only after she left the party and had gone into exile 28 to the US in 2020. For a leader who has even abolished time limits for being the country’s president, as Xi did in 2018, it is a mystery as to why there has been so little internal opposition.
There is certainly a climate of fear in contemporary China. But the country has always had a history of courageous individuals who have spoken out no matter the cost, even during the Mao, Deng and Jiang years. Figures from that era such as Hu Feng in the 1950s, Li Yizhe from the 1970s,§ Wei Jingsheng in the 1980s and 1990s and Liu Xiaobo in the 21st century all come to mind. Some of them languished in jail for years because of their opposition to the government. Why has there been so little of this under Xi, at a time when the opportunity to speak through the internet and other mediums has never been greater? I suspect this is a result of the power of the story the party is telling about China. The reality is that despite any issues the Chinese people might have about Xi, opposition to him inside and outside the party is made difficult by the fact that he and the party have bolted his style of leadership to the widely supported mission of making China a great, powerful country. This is not an abstract dream pushed into the distant future, as it was in the time of Mao, Deng, Jiang or Hu. Xi can realistically promise that on his watch, barring disaster, China will finally be said to have achieved modernity on its 29 own terms, while maintaining political stability. The signs of this are everywhere. Under his stewardship, China has already set up a space station and landed spacecrafts on Mars. It has constructed more high-speed rail than the rest of the world put together – some 40,000 kilometres and counting. According to one international university ranking list, it has seen half a dozen of its universities enter the global top 50, with Beijing and Tsinghua universities edging into the top ten.21 A country formerly accused of being an intellectual property thief is now, as shown in the revised 2020 partial trade deal with the Americans, keen on better protection because of its inventions and innovations in artificial intelligence, telecoms and life sciences. In terms of vessels, if not in technology, China has the world’s largest navy. But the show is not remotely over. Sometime in the next decade, China will go to sleep one night as the world’s second largest economy and wake up the next day as number one. Psychologically, symbolically and geopolitically, this will be a moment of enormous import. In some ways, it will change nothing: in per capita terms the country will still be far behind the US, European and many other countries. But it will also change everything: in terms of sheer economic size, for the first time since the Second World War, the US will no longer be top dog. The world’s greatest capitalist will be a Communist-led country. This is not where history, as seen by supporters of liberal democracy, was meant to end. 30
With these prospects it is not hard to see why even those in China with reservations about Xi as an individual or his approach might find him a tricky figure to condemn openly. In the past, China’s success was always contested. Its achievements under Xi can be questioned and re-contextualised, but there is no disputing the space landings, the high-speed trains, the inventions. They are real. They are happening. As long as projects like these are going in the right direction, contributing to the great objective of national rejuvenation so often stated in current propaganda, to dissent would be a sign of being a bad patriot – and Chinese people are, broadly, very patriotic. It may well be that the Xi leadership is manipulating and exploiting them. Indeed, it would be very incompetent not to do so. But the stereotype in much of today’s Western discourse about China of the gullible, manipulated Chinese person, a target of state management and control, is just that – a stereotype. Xi’s vision is effective, and he has proved a hard target for dissidents to dismiss not merely through the repression of any opposition, but for the rather more unpalatable fact that his style of politics, and the messages underlying it, appeals to the emotions and aspirations of many Chinese. His vision offers a positive image of their nation which, after a tough, often calamitous modern history, is finally emerging as a winner on the global stage. Maybe under the surface there is less support for the current leader of the Communist Party than one sees. Chinese 31 people are probably no less nor more cynical about their leaders than people anywhere else. But if the largely unqualified, and politically inexperienced, Donald Trump could successfully run for the highest office in the US because many of his supporters thought him an idiot, but that he was their idiot, then why not apply the same logic to the reign of Xi?
In many ways, contrasting Xi with the forty-fifth President of the United States is helpful in understanding the Chinese leader. Unlike Trump, there is no shadow of doubt about Xi’s commitment to the political force he heads and the need for its unity and cohesion. He enforces discipline and obedience. Nor can Xi be accused of being disdainful of intellectuals and experts. He peppers his speech with references to thinkers in ways that Trump never did. Ironically, with the commitment to the Paris Agreement on climate change as the main evidence, Xi is a far more committed globalist than Trump. When Trump’s replacement, Joe Biden, took the US back into the Paris Agreement in 2021, China along with the US and many others signed up to the COP26 deal to ultimately phase out fossil fuels, though Xi didn’t attend in person. As Xi’s talk at the 2017 World Economic Forum at Davos set out, the paradox is not that China wants to make a completely new world order to replace the current one, but that it is increasingly committed to many of the current features of Western-originated globalisation in terms of participation in multilateral fora 32 like the UN conventions, and entities like the World Trade Organization. This is probably because Xi understands, in a way Trump never bothered to, the integral links between individual nations and the sort of existential threats – from climate change to global pandemics – that face them, which cannot be solved without collective action. Under Xi, there is no argument about whether these issues should be taken seriously, nor of playing to domestic audiences by withdrawing from existing conventions. Unlike Trump, Xi is experienced in governance and public administration. His governments have largely been stable: in both his first and second standing committees of the Politburo, which is the equivalent of a top-level political cabinet in the Chinese system, no one who served was fired or removed from office. His administration’s control over leaks has been unnerving, and complete. With Trump, by all accounts, the situation was the reverse. Trump’s final management of the pandemic crisis – an event that contributed hugely to his defeat in the 2020 election – underlines the difference between the two men. Despite its savage impact, Covid-19 has only made Xi seem more entrenched and secure in his role. Trump lost power in his political system; at the moment, Xi continues to win in his. This is the ultimate benchmark of effective politics where home wins always matter more than those played away.
Seeing Xi Jinping principally as a politician, this book aims to examine in depth how his political power works. It 33 will eschew easy binary views and the neat narrative of Xi as the all-powerful dictator. Instead, it will attempt to offer something more nuanced. When Xi took office in 2012, the seeming ease with which he managed to gain all the key levers of power intrigued me. Something seemed to be happening, although no one had noticed when it began. In fact, we were seeing the end of a process that had started long before. What sort of process was this, and what was it meant to achieve? In the 1990s, he was a provincial leader largely regarded as undistinguished and unlikely to gain national prominence. At the 1997 Party Congress, Xi received the lowest number of votes out of the 151 alternate members of the Central Committee, far from the centre of power.22 To compound things, Xi’s father was a high-ranking military and political figure in the Mao and Deng eras, at a time when politicians who were judged to be offspring of former party elites were highly unpopular. His future looked dim. There was no inevitability about his ascent to power. Behind the façade, in the opaque workings of the party, Xi must have had something that differentiated him from the many other contenders in the highly competitive and ruthless world of Chinese elite politics, one where the stakes have always been horribly high.
Only in the very final stages of Xi’s journey to power, around mid-2007, did his selection for ultimate office become more obvious to observers. And the process by which the final 34 decision was made to appoint him party boss and country leader in 2012 is still, to this day, shrouded in mystery. Clearly, Xi’s individual qualities and convictions were crucial to his success and meant he ultimately emerged the winner over his competitors. But what were these qualities and convictions?
In hindsight, the views Xi had espoused in Zhejiang, earlier in his career, which are described in this book, can now be interpreted as a manifesto. They give insights into what made him tick back then, and therefore what sort of qualities and ideas he had that made him different from others. These garnered broader support far beyond his own individual appeal. In the thoughts he promoted in the years immediately before coming to Beijing to be a player in national politics, he forcefully supported a greater division between the worlds of politics and business. He had greater confidence, too, in speaking about China having a moral right to a higher status on the world stage. The deep belief in the country’s destiny as a powerful, strong and rejuvenated nation was key, along with a desire to ensure the emerging middle class were better served in terms of property rights and public policy by a Communist Party which acted on principle, rather than solely to preserve the privileges and perks of its members. The absolute centrality of the party’s mission to make China a great country again is evident from Xi’s earliest recorded statements. This is surprising when one thinks of the general erosion of belief in the 35 honesty and integrity of officials during the years of excess and material enrichment in the Hu period, when levels of corruption were so high. That pure, almost zealous, message was something that resonated with a significant number of the political elite, as well as members of wider Chinese society.
History is not necessarily shaped by the figures with the most ability, nor by the brightest, but by people with the strongest faith. Xi is a Communist leader in a country often accused of having no real beliefs, run by a system that only values having power as an end in itself. But this book will argue that, in fact, Xi is a man of faith, and that it was the quality and intensity of his faith that has taken him to where he is today. The greatest mistake the rest of the world makes about Xi is to not take this faith seriously. The hardship of his early years, his long period in the political wilderness outside of Beijing, his air of confidence and ambition despite the setbacks he experienced, are important evidence for seeing this faith in action. In post-Mao China, people often declared that Mao was man, not God. He had been misunderstood and miscategorised. Xi, too, is no divinity. But while he may subscribe to an atheist creed, for him, God is the Communist Party – and it is in demonstrating loyalty, commitment and total faith to that epic cause that his power, and his mission, have meaning. And as leader of a country that constitutes a fifth of humanity, which is set to have an impact on all the major questions of our collective 36 future, whether we like the nature of Xi’s faith or not, we have no choice but to take it seriously. To not do so would be a catastrophic mistake.
225Notes
1. Frederick Teiwes and Warren Sun, The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics During the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972–1976 (New York: Routledge, 2007) offers a good example.
2. Zheng Yongnian, The Chinese Communist Party as Organisational Emperor. (London: Routledge, 2010).
3. James Fallows and Caroline Kitchener, ‘Xi Reveals Himself as an Autocrat’, Atlantic, 26 February 2018.
4. Kapil Komireddi, ‘Senator Marco Rubio says business-as-usual with Beijing is “not an option”’, The Critic, 17 March 2021.
5. David Charter, ‘China is a threat to democratic way of life, says Joe Biden at summit’, The Times, 9 December 2021.
6. ‘EU–China Relations factsheet’, European External Action Service, 20 June 2020, https://eeas.europa.eu/topics/external-investment-plan/34728/eu-china-relations-.
7. Tessa Wong, ‘Sinophobia: How a virus reveals the many ways China is feared’, BBC News, 20 February 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-51456056.
8. Kiyoshi Ota, ‘World Cup glory is Xi Jinping’s dream for China’, The Conversation, 17 June 2018, https://theconversation.com/world-cup-glory-is-xi-jinpings-dream-for-china-96750.
9. A minority of scientists have hypothesised that the virus may have been created by mistake in a laboratory specialising in the study of this area in Wuhan and then unintentionally transmitted to the outside world; on that the consensus is undecided, as of December 2021. 226
10. ‘China: Overview’, Coronavirus Resource Center, Johns Hopkins University, https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/china.
11. ‘America: Overview’, Coronavirus Resource Center, Johns Hopkins University, https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/united-states, and ‘COVID-19 Data Repository by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University’, Johns Hopkins University, https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19.
12. ‘Xi Jinping: From princeling to president’, BBC News, 12 May 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11551399.
13. For claims of Chinese influence in American, British and Australian politics, see Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party Is Reshaping the World (London: One World Publications, 2020).
14. Charles Moore, ‘Jesus College’s China problem’, Spectator, 1 August 2020.
15. See for instance, Jack Stubbs, ‘Britain says Huawei security failings pose long-term risk: govt report’, Reuters, 1 October 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-huawei-idUSKBN26M64S and Timothy Nerozzi, ‘Biden admin says Huawei is “national security threat”’, Fox News, 15 December 2021, https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/biden-admin-huawei-national-security-threat.
16. Yen Nee Lee, ‘Escalating EU-China tensions could jeopardize new investment deal’, CNBC, 23 March 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/23/retaliatory-eu-china-sanctions-could-jeopardize-new-investment-deal.html.
17. ‘Canada’s parliament declares China’s treatment of Uighurs “genocide”’, BBC News, 23 February 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56163220.
18. ‘China: More than 300 rights lawyers detained in nationwide crackdown, including lawyers who handled cases on corporate abuses; at least 6 face formal charges’, Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, 13 July 2015, https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/china-more-than-300-rights-lawyers-detained-in-nationwide-crackdown-including-lawyers-who-handled-cases-on-corporate-abuses-at-least-6-face-formal-charges/.
19. ‘Big data, meet Big Brother: China invents the digital totalitarian state’, Economist, 17 December 2016. 227
20. ‘Chairman of everything’, The Economist, 2 April 2016, https://www.economist.com/china/2016/04/02/chairman-of-everything.
21. ‘The World’s Top 100 Universities’, QS, https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/choosing-university/worlds-top-100-universities.
22. Willy Wo-Lap Lam, Chinese Politics in the Era of Xi Jinping. (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), p. 48.
* The Chinese government responded by expelling the newspaper’s journalists from the country.
† Uncle Xi
‡ Many of these missionaries came to have a deep knowledge and complex appreciation of the culture they had been sent to transform.
§ A pen name for three people working together – Li Zhengtian, Chen Yiyang and Wang Xizhe.