On 15 November 2012, several weeks after its expected date of mid-October, the Eighteenth Party Congress of the Communist Party of China was coming to its culmination. I remember gazing at a television screen in a hotel lobby in Beijing; a few streets away, in the Great Hall of the People beside Tiananmen Square, journalists were waiting nervously. After a long delay, the moment was approaching when the leadership team would walk out before the world’s cameras and finally, after months of fevered speculation, it would be confirmed who was in the Standing Committee of the Politburo. However, the time of the expected announcement came and went. I wondered what was causing the hold-up, studying my Twitter feed to see if any announcement had been made, and then looking back at the television screen, which still showed an empty stage. I imagined a fraught meeting in 92 some back room, maybe even people shouting at each other, jockeying for their final positions before trooping out before the world. Close to noon, an hour later than scheduled, the door beside the stage opened. Seven men moved expressionlessly through to take their places before the cameras. Xi stood at their head. Whatever last minute problems existed, they had obviously been ironed out. He was now certainly the leader of the Communist Party, the position from which everything else in China flowed. He had won the top spot. We were now living in the Xi era.
A great deal was at stake for whoever finally got the top job. The winner would be in charge of a country that had quadrupled its wealth in the decade since 2002 and was now the second largest economy in the world, having overtaken Japan two years before. With a fifth of the globe’s population, and over 10 per cent of its global GDP, everything had changed for China since the previous transition of power except for one thing – the structure of the Communist Party, where real control was concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of people. The winner of the fight to be pre-eminent in November 2012 would take all. In this event, there were to be no runner-up prizes.
It is important to dwell briefly on the lead-up to this moment. Xi’s emergence as a front runner in the party at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 2007 had been something of 93 a surprise. But in the months before the 2012 congress, once secure in his central leadership position, Xi was a prime candidate in the hierarchy to succeed Hu.* Much of the uncertainty of five years before had evaporated. His ascension was received wisdom, though it would not have been found written down anywhere in the party’s constitution. The only general guiding idea, though it was unwritten, was that in order to institutionalise the party processes and ensure it didn’t fall prey to the whim of one man, as it had under Mao, all senior leaders had to observe two five-year time limits for top positions, retiring at the first congress to be held after they passed the age of 68. In 2012, having met both of these criteria, the question was therefore not whether Hu Jintao would go, but how.
In retrospect, there were clues of Xi’s status as a possible replacement for Hu a few years earlier – even though, at the time of the events, these were interpreted cautiously. Xi was still seen as just one of a group of potential contenders, rather than the stand-alone candidate who was being groomed for succession. One major moment was when Chen Liangyu, the party boss of Shanghai city, was removed from office in early 2007 after claims of corruption and Xi was brought in from neighbouring Zhejiang to run the city for a few months. Shanghai is a hugely important place, economically but also 94 politically. It has often been seen as a stepping stone to greater things. It was here, for instance, that president and party boss from 1989 to 2002, Jiang Zemin, had worked in the decade before his surprise elevation after the student protests in 1989. Even so, precisely what Xi had done prior to 2007 to deserve him being given this high-profile new post was a mystery. In the Zhejiang years, he had passed the test of maintaining focus and discipline while running that huge province. But so had plenty of other similar officials in other areas of China that were equally important. His performance in terms of delivering economic gains and ensuring social stability was good but not remarkable. Once more we have to look to less tangible aspects of his performance – for example, his insistence since his time in Fujian in the mid-1990s that his relatives should not undertake any business dealings in the places where he was in office. Family financial dealings had compromised many other leaders but, despite being surrounded by temptation and opportunity, this had not proved an issue for Xi. He had told his brothers and sisters to keep away. This marked him out as a ‘true believer’ in the party mission, and was unusual behaviour in the era of China’s vast growth boom.
Such habits continued in his time in Zhejiang and during his seven months in Shanghai. It was almost as though he were St Anthony in the desert, being tempted by mirages of wealth and beauty but proving his mettle by rejecting them. 95 Fujian offered plenty of material opportunities for those easily swayed. Zhejiang offered even more. But Shanghai was the greatest honey pot of all. As Xi’s immediate predecessor, Chen Liangyu, had proved in 2007, it could fell even the toughest and seemingly most corruption-proof figures. Xi’s strategy to deal with this final test was very simple: he bided his time. One person I spoke to in China at the time, who was based in Shanghai around that point, told me of their amusement when they observed how keen Xi was to keep a low profile and avoid anything that posed the slightest air of risk. His days were largely passed undertaking low-impact activities, ensuring that there would be no unfortunate hiccups before he could be sent to Beijing. It was for this reason that I had my single chance to meet him as part of a sister city delegation from Liverpool, in which I was a member, which was twinned with Shanghai. Needless to say, our discussion of cultural, football and heritage links posed no potential danger. We were, in that sense, the perfect delegation for him, focussing on the Beatles and Everton rather than geopolitics and questions about human rights and political reform.
Xi’s reward came quickly. At the Seventeenth Party Congress in October 2007, after only seven months in Shanghai, the curtains leading to the main stage of the Great Hall of the People parted to show him emerge as number five in the nine-strong hierarchy – the same curtains he would walk 96 through as top dog five years later. More important than his rank was the detail that the five figures that preceded him would all be over retirement age by the next congress. And, crucially, he was one place ahead of his main rival by then, Li Keqiang, which meant he was higher in the pecking order. The opacity of party processes where elite leadership choices are concerned meant that no one could be sure of Xi’s eventual success at the time. Of the party’s many secrets, those about leadership selection are among the best guarded. But this was the first and strongest evidence that the man who had failed to make full membership of the Central Committee a decade before had achieved a transformation in his fortunes. The Xi era began in 2012. However, the road to it started in October 2007.
From 2007 to 2012, Xi was finally based in Beijing, after decades away from the city. He was made vice-president, a principally diplomatic post that exposed him to overseas travel and foreign leaders. He became head of the Central Party School, the think tank and education centre based in the capital, which has a huge influence on party ideology and propaganda. He was also placed in charge of the Olympics, which were held in August 2008. In each case, he did an adequate job. Much of the preparatory work for the latter had already been done by the time he arrived, in the years following 2001 when China was awarded the games. The vast budget, in excess of $40 billion, used to rebuild large parts of the capital 97 to host this event had already been spent. Xi’s job was to get everything over the finishing line. But beyond this, he was largely kept away from the more complex issues of the late Hu era: the fight against the impact of the global economic crisis of 2008 was left to economists under the premier in charge of the government and economy, Wen Jiabao; the management of the escalating protests in Tibet and Xinjiang lay at Hu Jintao’s own door, as the only person who had direct executive control over both the party and the military; and finally, the daily fight to keep the lid on a country that seemed to become more fractious as it grew richer belonged to Zhou Yongkang’s fiefdom as head of security. As Mao Yushi, a widely admired economist wrote in a Chinese language book at this time, the country was a wealthier one, but a more and more worried one. ‘Where has the anxiety of Chinese come from today?’ he asked, citing a raft of issues from economic pressures, expensive housing, lack of job security and rising environmental pollution.1 Against these huge changes, the government seemed to deploy a single approach – to continue to grow the economy so that, finally, there would be enough money to placate everyone. ‘All the Communist Party has in the end is money,’ a friend in China remarked to me around 2007. ‘Forget everything else.’ At that time, money seemed enough.
Over these five years, Xi maintained a sphinx-like inscrutability. But one event, around 2009, revealed that under this 98 indecipherable exterior lay something punchier and less passive. On a visit to Mexico that year, he was caught on camera complaining about foreigners ‘with full bellies’ always criticising his country and picking faults with it. He was evidently not someone with a slavish, awed attitude towards the wider world. In view of this, it is not surprising that, once in office, Xi’s demand was that his country’s officials and leaders take a proactive and confident stand in dealing with the outside world. The Xi era marks the end of the period of China having a feeling of inadequacy and a lack of confidence about their own culture and national standing before other states. This, for his critics, is one of his greatest crimes. But internally, it is a position that makes absolute political sense.
This assertive, combative attitude towards the rest of the world was shaped by the 2008 Olympics. If there were ever a case of total cognitive dissonance in geopolitics, this was it. It was as though there were two separate games – the one that the Chinese saw, and the one witnessed by the rest of the world. Despite the expense and commitment China had shown in hosting the event, the global press was critical before a single medal had been awarded, highlighting the Tibet protests that took place in April that year and labelling the event the ‘genocide’ games.2 While this was going on, party propagandists in China complained that their country was not being given a fair hearing. Their policies, they explained, had led to many of 99 the world’s poor being lifted out of poverty. The international media reporting remained limited and polarised – coming back to those two standard storylines explained in Chapter One, either viewing the country as a lucrative source of business opportunities, or as a place of injustice, human rights abuses and brutality. Into this narrative was plumped an event as huge in meaning for China and the rest of the world as the Olympics, which tested the adequacy of these simplistic views to their limits. For a leader like Xi, what should have been a moment for the world to celebrate the successes of China’s previous three decades was marred by complaints and criticism from outsiders. No wonder, then, that by 2009 Xi regarded foreigners as people with bellies full of food and mouths full of complaints.
Despite the efforts by the Hu administration to make the transition of power a non-event, lulling the world to sleep as it happened with boring pronouncements and an attitude of business as usual, the very final months of Xi’s ascent took place over a set of confusing events between 2011 and 2012, with twists and turns worthy of a Hollywood action film. Chinese elite politics seldom catches the imagination of the outside world. This is because of the generic nature of Chinese politicians, at least in terms of outwards appearances (who are almost always the same age, same gender, from the same ethnic background and even dress in same style of suits and ties). But during this period, stories started to appear of power 100 struggles, attempted coups and even that Xi had been injured in an assassination attempt.3 At the centre was the palpable ambition of a fellow member of the historic elite, Bo Xilai. Bo’s father, Yibo, had been an even more prominent figure under Mao and Deng than Xi’s own father. Bo junior was, in many ways, the great alternative to Xi. He was urbane and handsome, with a decent command of English. He was also a tremendous self-publicist, more than Xi’s equal in terms of confidence and self-belief. Earlier in his career he had been a leader in the north-east of the country, attracting plaudits for his ability to woo foreign business investment in Dalian city, where he was mayor, and in Liaoning province, where he had served as governor. As minister for trade during a crucial phase in the relationship between the European Union and China in the mid-2000s, when the two were struggling over market access, he had managed to smooth over some tricky disputes regarding textiles and tariffs. Finally, as a provincial leader from 2007 in Chongqing, a vast urban area in the south-west of the country, he had undertaken a series of bold campaigns, clamping down on mafia and illegality in the city and inspiring the public with nostalgic ‘red song’ singalong events, reminiscent of the Mao years. All of this grabbed domestic and international headlines. For many who met him, Bo was the real deal. He also gained public support by implementing very popular affordable housing policies, examining 101 how to address inequality and by speaking the language of sustainability every bit as fluently as Xi. Perhaps most striking of all, he fulfilled the Xi criterion for an official: he didn’t merely speak empty words but tried to enact real change.
It is deeply ironic that much of what Bo did from 2007 until his fall in 2012 has obvious parallels in style and content with what Xi would later do at the national level. The clampdown on mafia and anti-social elements was criticised in the international media at the time, because of the brutal treatment doled out to both suspects and their lawyers. But in terms of cleaning up the city and ensuring people followed regulations – precisely the things Xi had supported in Zhejiang – Bo was a success. So, too, was the way in which he was able to speak directly to the people, something that Xi had insisted was a core responsibility of leading cadres. As a European politician who knew Bo quite well pointed out to me in 2011, around the time the Chinese official was attracting international attention: ‘Bo is the only leader in China today who appeals to people’s emotions.’ This was a powerful insight. It also pointed to the characteristic that most unsettled his colleagues: Bo seemed to be genuinely popular.
For the people sitting beside him in the Politburo, the body that sits at the top of the Communist Party, however, the intensity and strength of Bo’s ambition was unsettling. The premier up to 2013 and, in reality, the second most 102 powerful person in the country, Wen Jiabao, reportedly harboured a deep detestation of his junior colleague, pointedly never visiting Chongqing while Bo was in power. Xi had no such reservations. On a visit to the city as vice-president in December 2010, Xi relayed the attractiveness of what he witnessed there. Referring to the ‘red songs’ campaign, he stated that ‘these activities have gone deeply into the hearts of the people and are worthy of praise’, and that they ‘were a good vehicle for educating the broad masses of party members and cadres about [politically correct] precepts and beliefs’.4
Ultimately, Bo was felled not by his ambition, but as a consequence of his wife, Gu Kailai, being involved in the murder of Neil Heywood, a British businessman, in late 2011. The lid was lifted when the head of Chongqing police and, in effect, Bo’s chief security official Wang Lijun, dramatically fled to the US consulate in neighbouring Chengdu in February 2012, apparently carrying proof that Gu had been present when Heywood was killed in a hotel in the city.5 His murder was reportedly due to a business deal between the two that had gone wrong.6 The gravity of Gu’s crimes ended up tarnishing Bo by association, even though there is no evidence he played a direct part in them. He managed to survive a few more weeks, before being removed from office for corruption. He was expelled from the party and imprisoned in 2013. By that time, his dream of competing with Xi for national leadership 103 was long dead. Gu herself was convicted of Heywood’s murder and given a suspended death sentence in 2012.
It is hard to imagine what might have happened had the Heywood case never occurred. For Xi, these sordid events involving murder, embezzlement and violence had brought about precisely the sort of opportunity that could now be used to his advantage. While Bo disappeared from the equation, Xi managed to accord him the compliment of using a few of his policies and populist measures, doing so in the comforting knowledge that their creator was silenced and behind bars, unable to complain.
Parallels between Mao and Xi have often been made. In some ways, the final weeks before Xi was appointed party head in 2012 had a Maoist air about them. They were reminiscent of the time towards the end of the Chairman’s life in the 1970s, when unexpected events took place almost every week. Bo’s fall was the most dramatic but not the only scandalous event in this period. Newspapers reported that Xi’s colleague from the Standing Committee of the Politburo, Zhou Yongkang, had been involved in moves to disrupt Xi’s succession.7 Soon afterwards, in the spring of 2012, the son of a high-level aide to Hu Jintao, Ling Jihua, was killed in a car accident. The young man, Ling Gu, had been racing a hugely expensive Ferrari around one of the ring roads of Beijing, with a couple of young, reportedly naked, women in the car (who, fortunately, survived the 104 crash).8 In October, the New York Times and others reported links between Premier Wen Jiabao’s wife and huge profits that had been made from diamond trading.9 In September, during a visit by the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Xi himself disappeared for a fortnight, stirring rumours about his health. This is when the dark murmurs of assassination attempts grew loudest. It is unclear to this day exactly what took place to incapacitate him around that time.
But as I witnessed in that hotel lobby during the Party Congress in mid-November 2012, despite the turmoil and rumours of arguments and horse trading in the background, in the end, predictability was restored. In an atmosphere of almost complete calm, face impassive and unruffled, Xi walked out with his six colleagues obediently trooping behind him. This was the new Politburo. At the preceding congress, the departing president and party leader Hu Jintao had recognised China’s vast material improvement over the previous five years, speaking of these phenomenal events with a wooden blandness that belied how remarkable they were. The country’s economic explosion over the past decade was the greatest single act of mass enrichment the world had ever witnessed. But in keeping with his persona as someone ever vigilant against complacency and self-regard, Xi’s terse first words as supreme leader showed that a new energy was in the air. He made references to China’s harsh recent history, its sense of destiny and its mission to be a 105 great, powerful modern country. There was also a direct reference to the people, and to their centrality in party work. ‘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,’ he declared.10
But it was the party that occupied most of his attention, as it had done ever since his time in Zhejiang: ‘Our party [now] faces many severe challenges, and there are many pressing problems within the party that need to be resolved, especially problems such as corruption and bribe-taking by some party members and cadres, being out of touch with the people, placing undue emphasis on formality and bureaucracy, [which] must be addressed with great effort.’ In hindsight, this served as a warning of what was to come. For officials, their years of excess and personal gain were over.
If Xi’s path to power were based on any manifesto or political programme, this would be it. That day he articulated one objective – to make the party more effective as a political force – which has framed all his subsequent actions. The party’s centrality to all that Xi does is the link between his life before and after becoming national leader. In November 2012, he stood on a single manifesto promise: making China great again by making the party great. The years of officials feasting out in luxury restaurants or going on multiple visits abroad every year 106 to inspect the shopping malls of Paris, London and New York at public expense, of siphoning off multiple millions of dollars of money to their overseas bank accounts and acting with complete impunity against the very laws they were meant to uphold, were about to come to an abrupt end.
It quickly became evident that Xi was firmly in control. In his early period in power, he used a different tone of language to his predecessor – sharper, more concrete, more personal. He conveyed a new narrative for the country as it moved towards great power status, derived from the years of wealth creation of the previous decade. The ‘China Dream’ concept and its associated publicity campaign, which was introduced in 2012, was among the most prominent, presenting the idea of improved living standards being within reach of everyone, not only the elite, and which the party was meant to be delivering to the people, rather than creating for itself. Xi was obviously keen to speak directly to the Chinese in ways that Hu had shown little interest in. He had talked before of the need to attend to the grass roots of society. In his statement at the Party Congress on 15 November 2012, he referred to officials ‘being out of touch with the people’. In the first months of his leadership, therefore, he addressed this by undertaking publicity tours during which, among other things, he visited a dumpling restaurant in Beijing. The official newspaper, China Daily, described the event: ‘Chinese President Xi Jinping showed 107 off the common touch on Saturday with a surprise visit to a steamed bun restaurant in Beijing, where he paid for his food and chatted happily to surprised customers.’ It went on: ‘In pictures widely shared on China’s Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo, and confirmed by state media, Xi could be seen lining up for his food and posing for photographs, apparently not surrounded by the high security which normally accompanies visits by top leaders.’11 Xi Dada was truly a man of the people, it seemed. In addition to the photos of Xi eating at a modest eatery, surrounded by ordinary customers, there were also clampdowns on officials blowing large sums of money on luxury restaurants and meals – these were so effective that five-star hotels in cities across China experienced a major slowdown in their revenue.12 Some were bankrupted and had to close. The imperative was to eat ‘four dishes and one soup’, in official parlance, rather than, as had become the norm for some officials, sitting at a table groaning with delicacies, most of which went to waste.13
Xi’s lifestyle itself was also used to promote this message of simplicity. One article, originally reported by the Chinese state media but now deleted, stated: ‘Chinese President Xi Jinping eats breakfast before dawn. He speaks in a “bold, down-to-earth manner” … And the head of state is incredibly diligent: While others are gathering for family dinners or watching TV, Xi is still burning the midnight oil.’14 A picture issued in 2014 108 showed him standing in a field, wearing rolled-up trousers and holding his own umbrella, looking like a normal resident of the countryside. This awareness of the importance of images and words and their political use in Chinese propaganda is hardly new. But the insistence on Xi, the son of a member of the political elite, being seen as down to earth and diligently working for the good of the people was almost relentlessly consistent. It came across in the words he used when meeting a foreign business delegation later in the decade, when he said that ‘running such a huge country is a grave responsibility and it brings arduous work. I will fully commit to the people and never fail them. I am ready to put aside my own interest and devote my all to China’s development.’15 This sublimation of Xi to the great task he was now involved in – bringing about the culmination of the modern rejuvenation of the country – had an almost cinematic quality. It was as though the population and the rest of the world were an audience watching a carefully crafted piece of drama, where nothing could go wrong nor any part of the narrative deviate from the script. The question was who precisely was directing this grand new blockbuster, and whether it was Xi, or a whole committee of screenwriters, who were writing the material being performed.
While these campaigns were striking in intensity, none of the specific actions Xi took nor the stories he told were novel. In fact, they were deliberately well-established, and developed 109 from long-standing previous iterations of the China story crafted by the Communist Party since 1949. The stress was on continuity, and legitimisation through this continuity, rather than the disruptiveness of new ideas and policies. Reinforcing these lines of continuity, Xi followed in his predecessor’s footsteps, visiting the famous special economic zone of Shenzhen in December 2012 and remarking on the enormous significance of this place in the country’s history of development, as Hu had. In 1980, Shenzhen had been a relatively quiet fishing community, but its proximity to Hong Kong meant it could be exploited. During the period 1979 to 2017 it had experienced an average annual growth rate of 22.4 per cent.16 The district’s population surged from 30,000 to over 10 million between 1979 and 2019. Shenzhen was seen as almost sacred terrain, proving that China could succeed at capitalist levels of modernisation and advancement, while still maintaining a one-party socialist system. But in order to show continuing links with the countryside, in the same month that he travelled to Shenzhen, Xi visited the impoverished Baoding area in the central northern Hebei province. Hu Jintao had engaged in a similar exercise a few years before when, in November 2008, he had stayed the night in a remote village in Shaanxi. The media had reported that ‘Hu spent the festival night with villagers, having meals and joining in festive activities including a traditional dance’.17 Those who remember Xi’s inexpressive 110 predecessor, with his almost pathological lack of emotion, may find this image quite hard to visualise.
As well as continuity with Hu’s time in power, early on the Xi leadership put a strong emphasis on the idea of the party and the country being on a joint mission to achieve a successful and historic national renewal. The message was unambiguous: no unified party, no chance of national rejuvenation. A world without the unifying function of the party would be a return to the bitterly divided, chaotic and impoverished past China had experienced in the years before 1949, at the hands of the Japanese and other colonisers. The most important statement conveying this message came when Xi attended an exhibition on the theme of ‘The Road to Rejuvenation’, at the National Museum in central Beijing on 29 November 2012. Here he referred to the standard story of China’s modern history, one where ‘the Chinese people went through hardships as gruelling as “storming an iron-wall pass”. Its sufferings and sacrifices in modern times were rarely seen in the history of the world. However, we Chinese never yielded.’ Now ‘we have finally embarked on the right path to achieve the rejuvenation of the Chinese people’, Xi declared.18 It was on this occasion that one of the core slogans of the Xi era, the ‘China Dream’, had its first outing.
A few weeks later, in another nod to the accepted historic narrative that he saw himself as a part of, Xi celebrated the 111 120th anniversary of the birth of Mao Zedong. At a symposium on 26 December, he discussed the concepts behind Mao’s thought, such as Chinese destiny being decided by Chinese people and the need to have the party at the centre of national life. These ideas were of enduring value, Xi believed. They consisted of ‘seeking truth from facts, the mass line and independence’.19 Mao the dictator, the man responsible for imprisoning Xi’s father, and the trauma that possibly caused the suicide of his half-sister, the man whose decisions meant that Xi himself had been forced to leave Beijing as an adolescent and live in the countryside for seven years in miserable circumstances, appears under a wholly different guise in these statements. Here, Mao is seen instead as the great founder, central to the legitimacy of the party, even in an age so utterly different to the one in which he ruled over China. The country was still in the early stages of socialism, as it had been in Mao’s time. Officials therefore needed to ‘promote theoretical innovation based on practice’ as Mao taught them. They particularly needed to remember the notion of what Mao called the ‘mass line’, where the party represented all people in society and had to build a vast joint consensus. People here ‘are the creators of history’ before whom leaders ‘are always students’; that their collective voice, which only the party fully understands, is the sole one that should be listened to. Finally, Mao had taught the iron rule that still needed to be adhered 112 to: ‘Chinese affairs must be dealt with and decided by Chinese people themselves.’
A lengthy biography of Xi was issued by the state media a few weeks after he came to power. This hadn’t happened for either Hu a decade earlier or for Jiang Zemin, when he was appointed in the chaos after the 1989 uprising. In Xi’s Xinhua-issued tale, his ‘tough childhood’ in the countryside was deployed to embed the notion that here was no remote leader, but someone whom Chinese people could see as one of their own. ‘Xi,’ the profile breathlessly stated, ‘has expressed his deep feelings for the people on many occasions, saying for example, “How important the people are in the minds of an official will determine how important officials are in the minds of the people.” His love of the people stems from his unique upbringing.’20 This ‘unique upbringing’ formed a major part of the ‘selling’ of this new leader’s persona and its connection to the existing party narratives. The underlying message was unmistakable: here was someone who had earned his right to be in this position. Despite appearances, Xi was not some entitled member of the elite. He had suffered and seen real life. He had, to use that crucial word, authenticity.
An alternative view was provided in the sceptical note, published by WikiLeaks, detailing the account of Xi’s childhood friend who spoke to the American embassy official in the late 2000s. In their view: 113
Xi is a true ‘elitist’ at heart … believing that rule by a dedicated and committed Communist Party leadership is the key to enduring social stability and national strength. The most permanent influences shaping Xi’s worldview were his ‘Princeling’ pedigree and formative years growing up with families of first-generation CCP [Chinese Communist Party] revolutionaries in Beijing’s exclusive residential compounds. Our contact is convinced that Xi has a genuine sense of ‘entitlement’, believing that members of his generation are the ‘legitimate heirs’ to the revolutionary achievements of their parents and therefore ‘deserve to rule China’.21
However, a story is just a story. Xi’s enablers, those in the elite who were now committed to his political fortune, needed to perform the true alchemy of propagandists. They had to tell the stories in a compelling manner, appealing to deep emotions in the targeted audience, in ways that the hearers themselves might not even be conscious of. Xi Jinping Tells Stories, the 2017 book produced by the official party news agency, divided these first talks of the Xi era into those for the outside world and those aimed at a domestic audience. ‘Whoever tells the best stories, wins the masses, and then has the power of being listened to, the power of speech,’ the introduction stated. 114 Xi could appeal to his audience by making sure there was a direct link between his life story and the party’s own extraordinary and dramatic rise to power. Like his New Sayings from Zhejiang, these were short, direct pieces of a similar style to those in Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’, Quotations from Chairman Mao, which was published in 1964, and widely read during the Cultural Revolution a few years later. Xi Jinping Tells Stories also uses well-known fables, such as that on which the Beijing opera Farewell My Concubine is based (rather than the 1985 novel by Lilian Lee and the 1993 film adaptation by Chen Kaige). This story recalls the battles waged over 2,000 years ago to unify and strengthen imperial China, establishing the Han dynasty, one of the most successful and longest lasting in all Chinese history. In Xi’s retelling, the power of faith in the party is extolled in order to maintain the country’s strength and integrity, as is the need to be clear-sighted about adversaries. This group, the corrupt and malfeasant, would become major targets of Xi’s administration – portrayed as the enemy within, who were undermining the whole project of national renewal. Like most storytellers, Xi and the party well understand that depicting a world with definite boundaries between good and evil, and having vividly drawn enemies, is always an effective means of grabbing people’s attention.
This was the reasoning behind Xi’s ‘anti-corruption campaign’, as it was called in Western media, being framed in 115 terms of a struggle between good and evil. It was as though the country were some chaotic town that had been run to ruin, and Xi were the sheriff who had arrived to clean it up. Anti-corruption campaigns were nothing new. From the 1980s onwards, there had been sporadic attempts to tackle corruption in China, but the breadth and tone of the one under Xi was different. A man called Wang Qishan was put in charge of the whole process; he was a formidable and widely respected operator, someone who had put out major fires in the past, such as dealing with the ruptures over misconduct and embezzlement in the build-up to the 2008 Olympics when he was mayor of Beijing. An historian by training, who had also worked at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences before becoming an official, Wang was the chief interlocutor between the Obama White House and the Hu leadership. Observing him during a meeting looking at party work and the corruption campaign I took part in with foreign and Chinese scholars in 2014, I could see why he was regarded with such fear. He chose his every word carefully, and his immense self-control created an aura of power and authority around him. At that meeting, Wang spoke in a quiet, soothing voice – so that one almost had to lean towards him to hear his words. Every phrase he used seemed laden with hidden meaning and import. Like many charismatic politicians, he showed the ability to control the pace of events and keep his listeners attentive to what 116 he said. The clampdown on corruption was not a campaign, he said, but a life and death struggle. It would never end. It would stretch from party officials to all other parts of society, because in the end everyone had duties to the party. Pausing and looking around the room, he asked why the party was doing this. Because, he explained, answering his own question, the greatest issue the country faced was inequity and inequality. That is what most angered and upset people. Seeing tangible injustice and unfairness with their own eyes, where some members of society could act with complete impunity because they were party members, and others could accumulate illicit wealth, while the majority struggled and barely survived. As Wang spoke, I imagined what it would be like to have him appear in your life if you were an official under investigation. With those soothing tones, that quiet, commanding voice accusing you of being a traitor and reprobate, I could envisage all too well how terrifying that experience could be. That day, I left the meeting deeply relieved I was only an unimportant visiting researcher, and not someone who would ever be remotely significant enough to attract Mr Wang’s very unwelcome attention.
Wang had reason to speak with such self-belief. By the time I was part of the delegation that met him, the campaign he had spearheaded had been a public success. A few months later, I was speaking to a Chinese businessperson when the conversation turned to how the removal of so many cadres 117 at all levels had been perceived by the public; my companion said that, from their point of view, whether one agreed with laws and regulations or not, at least now officials would have to carry them out rather than blithely ignore them, which had been the case in the recent past. China, once so anarchic and chaotic, was now a relatively predictable place to do business. That view was echoed by a lawyer in the relatively undeveloped and more remote Inner Mongolian region I spoke to at around the same time, who had despaired about local court rulings not being implemented as the region was saturated by vested interest and cronyism. Now, to their amazement, once the courts opined, decisive actions had to happen.
Wang’s boss, Xi the storyteller, also framed the fight against corruption as an existential struggle. He spoke of the battle against ‘tigers’ and ‘flies’; of the powerful leaders, small officials and those who had fled abroad feeling they would be safe there.22 The trial of Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang, a member of the Standing Committee in charge of security from 2007 to 2012, and someone accused of backing Bo’s claims to power, showed that the biggest of the tigers were not immune; both were sent to prison for many years. It was unprecedented that a figure as high ranking as Zhou should have this treatment meted out to them. Ling Jihua, Hu Jintao’s key aide whose son had died in the car crash in 2012, was also removed. A few years later, in 2017, Sun Zhengcai, another Politburo member 118 who had frequently been slated for promotion while head of the same ill-fated Chongqing area that had once been Bo’s empire, was also dramatically felled. Wang Qishan’s enforcers sent their tentacles deep across the system. General Guo Boxiong, a senior army leader and member of the Politburo and vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission (the body chaired by Xi regulating the armed forces), was arrested in 2015, expelled from the party and sentenced to life imprisonment. Ma Jian, former head of counter-intelligence in the Ministry of State Security, a department shrouded in mystery and previously regarded as almost untouchable, was also removed and imprisoned in 2016. Even those who had worked for international organisations, like Meng Hongwei, who served as the head of Interpol from 2016 to 2018, were caught up in the corruption crackdown. He was detained in 2020 while back in China and sentenced to thirteen years in prison for bribery.
These are the most high-profile cases of the Xi years; many thousands of lesser-known figures were also arrested. This number, however, was a small proportion of those investigated, and a tiny proportion of actual working officials. As American scholar Andrew Wedeman has written, to be corrupt in China is still statistically a relatively risk-free activity.23 The trick was to create a sense of apprehension and fear by showing, in a few highly representative cases, the vast costs that were incurred 119 if one were ever caught. The real impetus for the party giving itself such a monumental public drubbing was to fulfil Xi’s promise to clean it up, and for the party to become humbler, more focussed on society, and more accountable. This may be why much of the anti-corruption campaign involved a massive dose of theatre. In real terms, it is unlikely that a self-inflicted beating would ever be as harsh as one administered by someone else. But that wasn’t the point: at least the party looked as though it were trying to get its own house in order. Once this was done, it could then demand high levels of discipline from other sectors of society.
By 2015, state-owned enterprises and private sector companies were also being targeted. Strategically, the anti-corruption ‘struggle’ as Wang Qishan called it, certainly created enough fear and uncertainty to make party officials behave. The mere threat of the body that he headed, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), appearing and undertaking investigations was enough to make most fall into line. Wang’s people had almost unbridled powers to turf through material, take people into custody and do what was necessary to ensure they cooperated with investigations. There were complaints of people disappearing while they were being interrogated, and of others being mishandled and abused. As Mao Zedong once said, ‘A revolution is not a dinner party.’ Nor, most certainly, was being investigated by the CCDI. 120
Accompanying the hard and nasty business of weeding out corruption went the more routine work of party building and ideological training, which had also once been more common than in recent years. From 2013, cadres were sent to the grass roots, to villages and small towns, the most basic units of governance, to get experience. Their training was made stricter and more uniform. One official I knew in Beijing told me that they were going to be sent to Tibet in 2017. ‘It will be excellent for my career,’ they said, a very different response to that which an earlier generation might have expressed, who would have regarded such a posting as a form of internal exile and punishment. New digital technology was brought in to promote intellectual and behavioural conformity, including a ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ app, which fed cadres daily wholesome quotes and tested them on their ideological knowledge. The motive behind all of this was to address the crisis of faith in the party, and make sure that officials didn’t mouth platitudes but actually acted on the beliefs they professed to stand for. Respect for the ‘mass line’ – a Chinese way of referring to public opinion – was important, as was a culture of better serving the people and doing more to communicate with them. Xi visited state media outlets in 2015, spoke to thinkers in the cultural and intellectual realm and targeted universities. The message was obvious. The West was not some paradise. People should not be naïve about its offers to help with Chinese political reform. 121 What they really wanted, Xi and his colleagues believed, was to see China become as weak as Russia had after the collapse of the USSR.
This attitude had intensified since the global economic crisis in 2008. At that time, Western capitalism had proved it did not have all the answers, not even for itself, let alone China. While Western democratic systems, universalism and federal governance models had all been examined in the past, the Chinese people could now safely conclude that such structures were irrelevant for their country. The leadership expected loyalty on this point. As Xi had said before, while consensus was being formed, new ideas and new proposals were fine. But once agreement had been reached, the discussion stopped. The Xi era has shown that debate and argument is over on the issues of Western democracy and governance. Those who want to continue to challenge Xi’s orthodoxy must be prepared to face the consequences. One such figure was academic Xu Zhangrun, whose criticism of Xi and accusations of hubris and arrogance were rewarded with the loss of his job and social isolation. He was even briefly arrested in 2020 on charges of using prostitutes (which were subsequently dropped). The ‘era of moral depletion’ was the phrase that Xu deployed about Xi’s rule in 2020.24 But Xu’s voice was a lone one, which only made his courage in speaking out all the more remarkable. 122
The cleansing of the party through the anti-corruption struggle, the forging of loyalty through ideological training and education, and the efforts put into messaging and propaganda continued apace. In some senses, Xu and other critics were wrong. These policies were not for Xi’s own personal delectation. Even in his seemingly all-powerful position, Xi had to satisfy important groups and factions from the party elite, the military and the business and other sectors – people who could, if they felt the strategy was not going well, cause him significant problems. Real trenchant dissent has largely been manageable so far precisely because it has come from human rights lawyers and individual scholars such as Xu, who have limited domestic networks. These are groups that were already viewed by the party as potential sources of opposition long before Xi appeared. Even when a letter expressing disquiet about Xi’s autocratic style of rule surfaced in 2016, reportedly from ‘loyal party members’, bringing it a bit closer to more dangerous territory, it was anonymous and caused barely a crack across the placid surface of the party façade.25 It is telling that among the group that most matters to Xi for his day-to-day work – the upper levels of the elite within the party – everyone appears to remain firmly wedded to this ‘collective leadership’, with no fissures appearing as of the time of writing in early 2022. Deng had to deal with the new leftists in the 1980s, Jiang with the subliminal but obvious reservations 123 of former Politburo member Qiao Shi, and Hu saw his own Premier Wen Jiabao start to muse about the necessity for political reform and democracy in China towards the end of the 2000s. Xi has had no such critical figures. The silence of those around him and immediately beside him is almost eerie. What, beyond fear, could have precipitated this?
One possible reason, which became evident from 2012 to 2017, is that Xi is definite about who is at the heart of his political project, those who would be so significant for its eventual success: the emerging middle class. This group were not easily defined when Xi came to power. The Chinese economy had changed in such a way that there were now more people than ever working in the services sector; these were no Marxist proletariats. This group owned property. They worked in management or finance, rather than factories. Many ran their own companies. Then there was the issue of the per capita income figure across China– uneven across provinces, but still creeping up across the board. By 2019 China was able to classify itself as a middle-income country with a national average per capita GDP of over $10,000 a year.26 The middle class in this society were better educated than ever before, with more and more going to the country’s growing number of universities. Forty million people were enrolled in college and degree courses by 2020, with 8.7 million graduating that year.27 China had 225 million privately owned cars by 2021, 124 a five-fold increase since 2009; and the number of people living in urban areas increased by 15 per cent, to almost a billion people, between 2010 to 2021.28 This all testified to a society in flux. Historically, the party had been the vanguard of the workers and the farmers; now it needed to make room for the new middle class – Communism was serving the bourgeoisie.
This group is critical for both political and economic reasons. Around 2014, Xi’s premier and his effective deputy in charge of administration, Li Keqiang, talked of a ‘new normal’. The dramatically large increases in GDP that China had experienced in the previous decades were slowing down. As Xi declared in 2013, the main challenge facing China was ‘unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable development’.29 The Hu administration had also recognised these issues – once more, there was nothing remotely radical about what Xi was trying to do, it was only a continuation of previous undertakings. The difference was a stronger focus on the middle class, who were greater in number and more real in potential impact in 2015 than ever before. As economic growth fell to 6.7 per cent in 2016, they had also become more important.30 China did indeed have the world’s greatest economic asset: not resources nor manufacturing capacity, but the spending power of its own people. Looking at the composition of the Chinese economy in 2017, this was unmistakable. Over 41 per cent of GDP was invested in fixed capital formation, 125 and only 54 per cent in consumption.31 This latter figure had remained stubbornly fixed from 50 to 60 per cent since 2003, despite repeated attempts to increase it. Hu’s government had launched its fiscal stimulus programme in 2008 to respond to the financial crisis and encourage people to spend more, but this had limited impact. Even in 2022, the consumption figure has still not shifted dramatically.32 In comparison, 81 per cent of the US economy in 2020 was in personal consumption, a figure almost a third as high as China’s.
The standard explanation for why the Chinese people save so much and spend so little has been that they have historically lived in an environment of great uncertainty. The social security system is uneven and imperfect. Those who fall ill must pay large costs up front, and improvements in health insurance have not changed this. There are limited means of investing. Bank accounts give miniscule rates of return on savings deposits. In the past, the Shanghai Stock Exchange or purchasing property offered far better prospects, but there was a constant fear that they might collapse. In 2014 and 2015, the Shanghai Stock Exchange did fall dramatically, meaning many of the 75 million personal account holders lost money. This particular incident saw the Xi leadership curiously flat-footed in its response, not reacting for a number of days as though unsure what to do. Trust was a word Xi had used a lot; the issue for the new middle class was trust, or rather the lack of 126 it. Their loyalty was not a matter of only obeying orders from the party, or even threats from it – the middle class comprised far too many people for that to succeed. The main ploy was a combination of nationalist appeal, institutional reform and a more service-orientated ethos for the government. Xi calls himself the servant of the people – but it would be more accurate to say that he is the servant of the middle class.
In this context, the campaign on party corruption was good domestic politics. But Xi was also starting to look at issues such as the rule of law. This had been a tricky area for some years; the party has never liked lawyers. As a party official told me in 2010, ultimately, the party had risen to power illegally. It regarded lawyers as disruptive, opportunist and easily politicised, and it categorically rejected American or European models, where an independent judiciary was able to issue judgments to politicians, impacting on their ability to act. China needed rule by law, because it wanted predictability. But it emphatically did not want rule of law. Ruling was the party’s business. The law should keep well away.
The resulting legal reforms began in 2014, with the strengthening of property laws. Responsibility for local courts was removed from the corresponding provincial government to more senior administration, taking away potential conflicts of interest and sources of collusion. Up until this point, one section of society had always suffered for the benefit of 127 another demographic. First the farmers had suffered, enduring low wages and poor conditions so that the cities could receive investment. In the reform era, the great sacrifices had been made by migrant factory labourers, working long hours and earning very little compared to the value of the products they were making. In Xi’s middle-class China, finally, the bourgeoisie would have to work harder, contribute more in terms of consumption and, perhaps one day, even pay a far higher burden of tax revenue. This group is far more rights-conscious and voluble than the farmers or migrants had been. It needs stronger reassurances that their property rights are protected, their commercial interests are secure and the party is on their side in providing good-quality universities, public services like social welfare and pensions and healthcare services.
This group also explains some of the other striking aspects of the Xi leadership. In late 2015, vast amounts of military kit were paraded through the streets of Beijing to mark the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Asia. The outside world was deeply unsettled by the display, but to the domestic audience this visible manifestation of their country’s hard power was reassuring and satisfying. China was no longer a weak marginal country. Xi’s confidence and the proactive nature of his diplomacy, compared to the low-key, more humble approach of his predecessors, appealed to this nationalist strain. The imaginations and emotions of 128 the Chinese middle class were fired by the sight of their rejuvenated, powerful, wealthy and, sometimes, feared country. Surveys such as that carried out by the Ash Center at Harvard University from 2003 to 2020 found that Xi’s government enjoyed high levels of public support and satisfaction; this was due to the fact that, in the words of Tony Saich, one of the authors of the report, ‘in their lived experience of the past four decades, each day was better than the next’.33
Unlike Japanese nationalism in the region, Chinese nationalism has a far more shadowy modern track record. Since 1979, China has never initiated a major conflict or campaign of physical aggression on any significant scale against its neighbours.† But the Xi leadership has been unashamed in deploying the idea of China as a great and powerful country. Part of the ‘China Dream’ from 2012 relates to this set of sentiments, speaking directly to Chinese people and their aspirations to be wealthy, live prosperous lives and have the same kinds of public services, housing and living environments, and the same life opportunities, as those in developed countries like the US or in Europe. This ‘dream’ is not, therefore, nebulous, but one in 129 which all Chinese can participate, as stakeholders in a country on the rise, materially displaying its new power and confidence.
Despite confusion about how best to understand it, nationalism as we are witnessing today in the People’s Republic has not fallen from a blue sky. Far from it. All Chinese leaders since 1949 have shared a concept of China as a vast, ancient, inspiring ideal. In a country where there are complex, often clashing belief systems from Buddhism, to Daoism, to Confucianism, to Islam and Christianity, the vision of the great nation offers a quasi-religious ideal that can transcend and bind together these disparate faiths. China can unite behind the idea that the country has a moral right to become great, powerful and respected after its difficult modern history of instability, victimisation and suffering during events like the catastrophic Sino-Japanese War from 1937, which saw up to 20 million Chinese perish, and as many as 50 million displaced in the wide-scale destruction of this era.
Nationalism aside, Xi’s onslaught had brought him huge powers. One of the main aspects of this over the 2012 to 2017 period was the vicious and devastating repression against those regarded as dissenting voices. The incident in July 2015 during which around 300 lawyers were detained on the grounds that they were using legal work to disrupt social stability has already been referred to. A similar action targeting non-government organisations followed in 2017, after a 130 new regulation restricted the involvement of foreign partners and funding. That year, China’s most famous dissident, the poet, critic and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo, tragically died of cancer during incarceration after nearly a decade in jail. What changed was that China was now pursuing its opponents beyond its own borders. Booksellers in Hong Kong were detained, accused of peddling rumours about the Xi leadership; one individual suffered an extra-territorial kidnapping in 2015. This was despite the promise that as Hong Kongese, they would live under a different legal jurisdiction until 2047. China-based foreigners like Peter Humphrey, a British national, were apprehended over accusations of corruption. Despite consistently protesting his innocence, Humphrey was jailed for two years in 2014, and forced to appear on state television.‡
Like Mao, Xi is definite about who should be seen as enemies to the national mission; they are a fundamental part of the storytelling now taking place. In one of his earliest works from 1926, ‘Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society’, Mao said that, for revolution to succeed, one must work out who are your friends and who are your opponents. The same principle applies for Xi’s China. Among those regarded as the 131 most dangerous, and therefore the most savagely treated, are people and groups accused of separatism. On 1 March 2014, around 30 people were murdered at Kunming train station by what was claimed to be a group of Uyghur terrorists; an attempted suicide attack in Tiananmen Square in late 2013 also rattled the central government and the wider population. The government’s response to such threats has been fierce, with a particular focus on the vast Xinjiang province, in the north-west of the country. Beginning in 2017, an estimated 1 million people of Uyghur ethnicity were detained, marking a new campaign by the party against what it claimed were the ‘three evils’ of terrorism, separatism and political extremism. This sparked international concern and outrage, with some condemning it as ‘genocide’.34 The availability of new forms of surveillance and facial recognition technology has led to some calling Xinjiang a large prison state.35 However, the Chinese middle class largely supported this move by the party on the grounds of security. As of 2022, the government has remained unapologetic about its actions and unmoved by criticism from the West. This had caused countries such as the US to diplomatically boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics hosted in Beijing.
It was obvious from the start that the Xi leadership prioritised politics over economics. Even when Xi’s comments superficially seem to be about economics, they largely fall into 132 the political space, usually referring to issues around equity and the need for social cohesion. The stakes are high in the search for political stability. Since the Arab Spring in 2010 and the colour revolutions in the former USSR satellite states, the leadership in Beijing has been deeply aware that the country is living in a precarious and dangerous moment. As the decade wore on, the US witnessed rising levels of unrest, while Britain and Europe split from each other. In 2021, the world’s sole remaining superpower oversaw a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, leaving it in the hands of the Taliban after two decades, which led to the loss of trillions of dollars and countless military and civilian casualties. There are no good models to follow for China, nor easy allies. The decision to go it alone has already been made.
By 2017, Xi had already made clear the extent of his ambitions. An annual meeting of the party in late 2013 had set out a programme of legal and economic reform, which alluded to a timeframe of decades rather than that of one or two years. A small high-level group chaired by Xi was established at the same time, calling itself the ‘Committee for Comprehensively Deepening Reform’. ‘Reform’ became a buzzword. In this opening five years, Xi’s main focus was on getting the party into shape. Like a runner about to embark on a marathon, the party was forced to train, lose some of its bad habits, and acquire focus and discipline. Xi undoubtedly thought he had 133 done a good job. From 2017, he and his colleagues started to speak of a ‘New Era’ being imminent. It was evident that they believed that the next act of the great, ambitious drama they were in had already started – a performance in which they had revealed themselves to be the screenwriters, the actors and the director. Xi Jinping Season Two had begun. 134
Notes
1. Mao Yushi, Where has the Anxiety of the Chinese Come From (Shanghai: Qunyuan Books, 2013).
2. Eric Reeves, ‘China, Darfur, and the 2008 Summer Olympics: An Intolerable Contradiction’, E-International Relations, 20 April 2008, 229 https://www.e-ir.info/2008/04/20/china-darfur-and-the-2008-summer-olympics-an-intolerable-contradiction/.
3. See, for instance, Clifford Coonan, ‘Mystery of Xi Jinping’s two weeks in hiding’, Independent, 2 November 2012.
4. ‘Xi Jinping’s Chongqing Tour: Gang of Princelings Gains Clout’, Jamestown Foundation, 17 December 2010, https://jamestown.org/program/xi-jinpings-chongqing-tour-gang-of-princelings-gains-clout/.
5. Charles Hutzler, ‘China police chief sought asylum in US, says Chinese media’, Christian Science Monitor, 19 September 2012, https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-Wires/2012/0919/China-police-chief-sought-asylum-in-US-says-Chinese-media.
6. ‘Murdered Briton Neil Heywood’s mother in China appeal’, BBC News, 12 August 2013, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-23662795.
7. ‘Top Chinese officials “plotted to overthrow Xi Jinping”’, BBC News, 20 October 2017, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-41691917.
8. Jamil Anderlini, ‘Beijing on Edge Amid Coup Rumours’, Financial Times, 21 March 2012.
9. David Barboza, ‘Billions in Hidden Riches for Family of Chinese Leader’, New York Times, 25 October 2012.
10. ‘Full text: China’s new party chief Xi Jinping’s speech’, BBC News, 15 November 2012, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-20338586.
11. ‘Xi shows common touch with visit to bun eatery’, China Daily, 31 December 2013.
12. Matthew Timms, ‘Chinese five-star hotels fight to downgrade as luxury is shunned’, Business Destinations, 5 June 2014, https://www.businessdestinations.com/relax/hotels/chinese-five-star-hotels-fight-to-downgrade-as-luxury-is-shunned/.
13. ‘Four Dishes and One Soup’, China Economic Review, 22 January 2013, https://chinaeconomicreview.com/four-dishes-one-soup/.
14. Sean Silbert, ‘Given glimpse into Xi Jinping’s daily life, China goes gaga’, Los Angeles Times, 27 October 2014.
15. Xi, The Governance of China, Volume 3, p. 170. 230
16. The Story of Shenzhen, United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2019, Nairobi, https://www.metropolis.org/sites/default/files/resources/the_story_of_shenzhen_2nd_edition_sep_2019_0.pdf, p. 3.
17. ‘Hu Jintao visits county to promote ideological campaign, People’s Daily, 18 November 2008, http://en.people.cn/90001/90776/90785/6535378.html.
18. Xi Jinping, The Governance of China, Volume 1 (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 2014), p. 37.
19. Ibid., p. 27.
20. ‘Profile: Xi Jinping: Man of the people, statesman of vision’, China Daily, 24 December 2012.
21. ‘PORTRAIT OF VICE PRESIDENT XI JINPING: “AMBITIOUS SURVIVOR” OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION’, WikiLeaks, 16 November 2009, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09BEIJING3128_a.html.
22. Tania Branigan, ‘Xi Jinping Vows to Fight Tigers and Flies in Anticorruption Drive’, Guardian, 22 January 2013.
23. Andrew Wedeman, Double Paradox: Rapid Growth and Rising Corruption in China (New York: Cornell University Press, 2012).
24. Xu Zhangrun, ‘Viral Alarm: When Fury Overcomes Fear’, translated by Geremie Barmé, 10 February 2020, China File, https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/viewpoint/viral-alarm-when-fury-overcomesfear.
25. Josh Rudolph, ‘Loyal party members urge Xi’s resignation’, China Digital Times, 16 March 2016, https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/03/open-letter-devoted-party-members-urge-xis-resignation/.
26. ‘China’s per capita GDP crosses $10,000-mark for the first time’, Business Standard, 17 January 2020, https://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/china-s-per-capita-gdp-crosses-usd-10-000-mark-for-the-first-time-120011701060_1.html.
27. Gerard A. Postiglione, ‘Expanding Higher Education’, China Quarterly, Volume 244 (December 2020), pp. 920–41, p. 923.
28. ‘Privately owned vehicle number in China 2009–2019’, Statista, 29 October 2021, https://www.statista.com/statistics/278475/privately-owned-vehicles-in-china/#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20approximately%20225.09%20million,cars%20were%20registered%20in%20China. 231
29. Xi, The Governance of China, Volume 1, p. 78.
30. ‘China’s economy grows 6.7% in 2016’, BBC News, 20 January 2017, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38686568.
31. World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.GDI.FTOT.ZS?locations=CNandhttps://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.CON.TOTL.ZS?locations=CN.
32. World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.CON.TOTL.ZS?locations=US.
33. Dan Harsha, ‘Taking China’s Pulse’, Harvard Gazette, 9 July 2020, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/.
34. Perhaps the most concise presentation of this argument is by the UK Uyghur Tribunal of 2021, whose final judgment (albeit an unofficial one unrecognised by either the UK or Chinese government) can be found here: https://uyghurtribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Uyghur-Tribunal-Summary-Judgment-9th-Dec-21.pdf.
35. ‘Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State’, New Yorker, 26 February 2021.
* Since 1982, congresses have been held regularly, unlike in the Mao era when they were far less frequent.
† This was the unsuccessful attack on Vietnam that year. Since then, apart from some low-level clashes in the South China Sea involving fishing craft, and somewhat primitive physical brawls with Indian soldiers on the disputed Sino-Indian border, there has been no conflict of note.
‡ Two Canadians were also detained in 2019 on charges of espionage, and only released in 2021.