In mid-2017, I visited China to speak at a couple of events; the schedule was tight and on one day I had to leave Shanghai at lunchtime and make it to Beijing by late afternoon. Only a few years earlier, attempting a journey like this would have required something close to a miracle. The train journey usually took over 12 hours; even with the new network of highways, driving took about the same length of time – and that was if the driver paid no heed to speed limits. Flying used up only two and a half hours, but getting from downtown Shanghai to one of the city’s two airports, then clearing security, took at least another two hours. At the other end, it was the same process in reverse – battling through the capital’s traffic or taking a chance on the underground. Leaving Shanghai at 1pm meant there was precious little chance of getting to Beijing before 8pm. And that was without the air traffic delays that blighted 136 so many flights in the country, where only a fraction of the air space is allowed for civilian flights in favour of the military, causing severe congestion.

In Xi’s second term, following the Party Congress in 2017, the high-speed rail network now covers the whole country. Like so much else, including many of Xi’s principal policies, building the infrastructure was begun in the late Hu era, after 2006. But since 2012, China has built 40,000 kilometres of track, allowing trains to travel at 300 kilometres an hour or more.* In theory, it is now possible to travel from one end of the country to the other in a matter of hours. In comparison, not a single train in the US can go above 250 kilometres an hour; in the UK, as of 2022, there are less than 500 kilometres of high-speed track for use, with another line extending north from London not due to become operational for another decade or more. China’s achievement is astonishing: it constructed many times more high speed rail than the rest of the world combined, in only a few years.

That day I had lunch in a hotel along the historic Bund by the water in Shanghai; I finished eating at 1pm and took one of the new underground lines that have made the city’s network the longest in the world. Forty minutes later I was at 137 the high-speed rail station. The train to Beijing departed at 2pm, I arrived in the capital soon after 6.30pm and was sitting down to an evening meal by 7pm. That, too, was courtesy of the world’s second longest underground network at the other end. As the train rocketed north, passing rice fields, rivers, towns, roads and wooded areas, I remember being struck by how, for a Chinese citizen, this transformation of their physical world must have been cause for satisfaction and pride. After all, as recently as the 1980s, many Chinese people’s greatest dream was to own a domestically produced Flying Pigeon bicycle. These days, even Ferraris and Bentleys have become common enough to not prompt too many local jaws to drop. In 2020, despite the pandemic, 2.53 million luxury cars were sold in China.1 After decades of struggle and toil, was China finally becoming a lucky country?

Like the Chinese physical landscape, by 2017, Xi seemed to be consumed by an even greater sense of purpose. This fresh confidence played well domestically – reinforcing this conviction that China’s moment had come. Speaking as he was reappointed that year, Xi declared that, thanks to ‘decades of tireless struggle’, the country now stood tall in the East. ‘The Chinese nation,’ he went on, ‘has stood up, grown rich, and become strong – and it now embraces the brilliant prospects of rejuvenation … It will be an era that sees China moving closer to centre stage and making greater contributions to 138 mankind.’2 His words echoed those made by Mao at the dawn of the People’s Republic in 1949, when he too had said that, after decades of war and struggle, the Chinese people and nation ‘had stood up’. But for Xi, unlike for Mao, there was empirical evidence that this truly was the case, rather than an emotion-fuelled aspiration; it was testified to by achievements like the high-speed rail, luxury car ownership and, ironically, the fact that now China was genuinely not only respected but feared by the West. In a perverse way, this above all was proof to the fact that the country had arrived.

Some (J.F. Kennedy among them) have pointed out that the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ (weiji) places the character for ‘danger’ (wei) next to that for ‘opportunity’ (ji). In fact, as linguists will point out, this is not the case – with ji having a far less precise meaning than that given to it here. Even so, this captures well the idea often attributed to Chinese leaders of believing that events have the possibility to be good or bad due to human action and intervention, rather than because of any intrinsic properties they have. Speaking confidently and powerfully, from 2017, Xi seemed to reinforce the sense created by the anti-corruption purges and his increased assertiveness in foreign affairs that he was a strongman able to re-channel fate and transform danger into opportunity. It was at precisely the same time as Xi described China as standing tall that the Economist carried the sobering message that he was the most 139 powerful person in the world. ‘Xi Jinping has more clout than Donald Trump,’ the magazine declared. ‘The world should be wary.’3 As though to ram this home, in 2017, significant repressive measures began in Hong Kong, as did the first signs of a major security move in Xinjiang.

Had things been different at the start of Xi’s time in power – had economic growth fallen unexpectedly, or relations with Japan, India or the US become more confrontational – it is interesting to wonder what type of leadership style Xi would have adopted after 2017. But a relatively good stretch of success, coupled with the anti-corruption campaign having removed his most problematic opponents, meant that by October that year Xi’s political capital ran high. Then came the announcement that at the 2018 National People’s Congress, China’s annual parliament (as opposed to the Party Congress which meets every five years), the existing time limits of presidential terms would be scrapped, meaning Xi could continue in his role for good. ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ was also inscribed in the state constitution. Commentators in the West wondered whether they were seeing the rise of a dictatorship. These were politically crucial moves which carried huge symbolic weight and reinforced the image of Xi as a leader in total control. In 2009, in the WikiLeaks cable, the unnamed figure who had known Xi as a young man remarked that, while he was probably uncorruptible by material gain, 140 Xi was potentially corruptible by power. Was this what the world was starting to witness?

When the 2017 congress line-up eventually emerged, the leadership around Xi had been completely overhauled. Only his premier, Li Keqiang, survived. All the other figures on the previous seven-strong Standing Committee retired. But while the formidable Wang Qishan lost his Politburo place, he was given a new role as vice-president, meaning he could continue working. In this single move, the willingness of Xi to innovate and change the unspoken rules of Chinese politics to fit the new situation were made starkly clear. The informal understanding that people had to retire as soon after their sixty-eighth birthday as possible, which had started in the early 1980s as part of the reforms under Deng Xiaoping, meant that extremely capable people had been sidelined in the past. Deng himself, for example, had come into his element only in his mid-seventies. Xi’s leadership was revising the unwritten rulebook. As with other rules, the fact these practices had never been written down anywhere in the first place meant changing them was easy. In this case, too, there was a healthy dose of self-interest. Xi was creating a precedent that would be very useful to him five years hence when he too, over 68, should be retiring.

The new top-level line-up were survivors of the anti-corruption struggle. It was as though they were the last men 141 (and they were all men) standing from a huge shoot-out, in which everyone else had been eliminated. They were politicians with lengthy administrative experience but zero charisma or no substantial autonomous political power bases in their own right. Wang Huning was the most striking. An academic until the 1990s, he had played a significant role in Beijing politics since the days of Jiang Zemin, crafting and devising a series of concepts such as the Three Represents, which allowed entrepreneurs to join the Communist Party in the early 2000s; the Scientific Development ideas of Hu, which introduced the notion that the quality of economic growth was more important than quantity; and now the China Dream under Xi. His world view was underwritten by a strong sense that the West was failing, and that China’s principal mission was to ensure it was not corrupted by the ills of capitalism – from inequality to the loss of the party’s values. In the 1980s, he had spent a brief period as a visiting scholar in the US. A book published in 1991, curtly titled America Against America, summarised his conclusions of his stay. America was a declining power with a sense of cultural arrogance, but no real underlying cultural confidence. Reinforcing the sense of the Chinese enjoying thousands of years of deep cultural identity and coherence was the great thread that ran through Wang’s work, and which, in Xi, met a politician deeply receptive to these ideas. 142

Beyond this, Xi’s new group of colleagues could not easily be consigned to separate networks or internal factions, as had been the case in the past. Han Zheng is a good example: formerly mayor and then party boss of Shanghai for many years, he briefly worked with Xi when the latter was in charge of the city in 2007. He had survived in an environment of dizzying wealth and dynamism, akin to that Xi experienced in Fujian and Zhejiang, without being caught up in the various complex scams and problems the city had experienced. In 2007, when Chen Liangyu was removed from power over claims of massive corruption, along with a raft of other officials, Han was left untouched. This was reminiscent of the Lai Changxing smuggling case in Fujian, where Xi was left similarly unscathed by graft that seemed to connect to everyone else serving there. Other new figures in the line-up like Li Zhanshu and Wang Yang were veterans of provincial leadership, with the latter having led firstly Chongqing and then the vast Guangdong province. The final figure was Zhao Leji, who had combined provincial leadership with heading up the party’s personnel department.

There was no single unifying characteristic shared by these figures. They were not all united by having worked with Xi in his previous career, nor were they all members of the so-called Princelings faction, with parents or grandparents who had been elite leaders in the past. For a leader keen to control 143 the narrative, ironically, it was hard to know what the story of this line-up was telling the world. The only discernible theme was that this group seemed to have deliberately been selected to fulfil claims that the top-level Chinese leaders were faceless, generic and almost like automaton. There would be no upstaging of the real star of the show – Xi himself – here.

If one reflects more deeply, however, perhaps another more subtle narrative emerges. For a storyteller like Xi, this high-profile event was too good a chance to miss. David Runciman, the British political philosopher, has argued that, in the end, Western politicians mainly specialise in failure.4 They constantly have to scale back their promises and come to terms with the intractable, unforgiving reality that they can never fulfil their earlier pledges. This would not be a definition that any Chinese politician today would recognise, publicly, at least. They are in the business of success and live in a world where, they believe, any problem can be solved with enough time and the right principles. In their view, society is predictable, merely a vast machine, and once the inputs, outputs and formulae are applied, things will necessarily work out. In many ways, the 2017 leadership members were engineers installed to deliver one successful outcome: to make China a middle-income country within 100 years of the Communist Party being founded. They were qualified for this role because they already had a track record of delivering success in complementary fields, 144 from the ideological to the administrative. Importantly, they had done this while not drawing attention to themselves as individuals but, ostensibly, as obedient, loyal servants of the party. In that context, they were actors in a drama where the main theme was devotion to the party mission, almost to the point of selflessness.

In any case, in 2017, the real player more than ever was the party as a corporate body. Through the use of new technology, it could see into the hearts and minds of individuals as never before. It was able to extend itself in a wholly different way to what had been possible in the past. In the Mao period, this level of penetration may have been desired, but the technology to deliver it did not exist. By 2020, once around a billion Chinese had gravitated online, their consumer habits, their personal lives and their innermost thoughts were theoretically available. Far from being, as media mogul Rupert Murdoch claimed in the 1990s, a threat to one-party systems, increased cyber capacity has ended up providing an immense harvest, an extra source of power and influence, something that China’s Communist Party has seized on with almost greedy eagerness. It no longer needed neighbourhood watch committees and spies working among the people as it did in the past. It could snoop and eavesdrop and observe from the many anonymous buildings spread throughout China where the state cyber analysts worked, producing their daily spreadsheets for leaders 145 with hot topics and buzzwords that needed to be monitored carefully. As a Chinese journalist told me in 2015, ‘Our leaders spend an hour or so a day online looking at public opinion and surveys.’ Who needed to go on time-consuming, gruelling investigation tours to the countryside to check the public pulse when you could do it in an hour or so from the comfort of your own office?

Xi recognised the power of technology and its importance for the party early on. During his time in Zhejiang, he saw first-hand the creation of successful internet start-ups, like Alibaba. He had also engaged in blogging and online communication himself. In the early days of the internet, the party had been behind the curve with this new virtual world. In the 1990s, outlawed groups such as Falun Gong were able to use the internet to proselytise and to organise themselves for protests; one rally in 1999 saw thousands of followers appear, as if from nowhere, and surround the central government compound at Zhongnanhai in Beijing before a brutal government offensive stopped them in their tracks. International organisations like Google and, very early on, Facebook could ignore the physical boundaries of China as a country, and come in with sinified versions of their products to try to conquer the huge emerging internal market. During the 2008 Olympics, the party grudgingly offered to allow unfettered internet access. However, this didn’t last long. 146

Towards the end of Hu’s time in power, the party had started fighting back. It was profoundly rattled by the role that Facebook and other social media platforms played in the Arab Spring. Fang Binxing, a former president of the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications, set up the first national system of vigilance and cyber enclosure; he was subsequently nicknamed the father of the ‘Great Firewall of China’. Ironically, the Great Firewall grew from a system of eavesdropping on the telecommunication surveillance that Fang had devised for Bo Xilai, Xi’s nemesis, in Chongqing around 2010, which was then extended to blocking large numbers of sites and content considered unhealthy and politically unacceptable. The implementation of the Great Firewall was the reason for Google’s withdrawal from China in 2010, and it explained why, as the decade wore on, certain international websites were inaccessible in the country unless virtual private networks were used.

With Xi, this process has reached its culmination. Speaking in 2015, he referred to the country enjoying ‘cyber sovereignty’. The notion that there was a global common space in the virtual world was debunked. Deeply distrustful of the motives of outside governments, and suspicious of them using the internet to infiltrate the country and infect it with subversive ideas and thinking, Xi upended the tables. Much as there were universal values for the West, which did not apply 147 to China’s unique set of convictions, so there was a universal virtual space for others if they wanted it, but China was opting out and creating its own. Bit by bit, on visiting China, I noticed that once-accessible websites were blocked unless you were using a virtual private network. After Facebook, Gmail was slowed down, then closed. The BBC was an early victim, but soon Bloomberg, CNN and finally even websites that central leaders themselves apparently kept a close eye on, like those of the Financial Times and the New York Times, were either permanently or sporadically blocked. By 2021, even the last one standing, LinkedIn, finally succumbed and withdrew its services in China.

Xi’s government were willingly assisted in this great project of separation by companies like Alibaba. They had the most precious resource of all – vast amounts of data on what Chinese people were buying, what was trending, what they were interested in: a million clues as to what made them tick. A visit to Alibaba’s headquarters in Hangzhou, shortly before the October congress in 2017, brought this home to me. On a screen, the presenters from the company PR department showed real-time information on how goods were moving around China, what was popular at any particular moment, who was expressing interest in what. Soon Alibaba was being pressurised by another entity, Tencent QQ, which is the Chinese equivalent of Facebook and Twitter combined. In 148 their vast skyscraper in Shenzhen, they were also harvesting information. Entering the meeting rooms at the top of their headquarters, which I visited a year later, a huge sign declared that this private company was ‘serving the party’.

Tencent and its ilk had no choice in this. In a National Intelligence Law introduced in 2017, extremely broad definitions were given to what constituted security. All the state information service Xinhua would say, when the law was passed by the National People’s Congress on 27 June, was that it was an ‘intelligence law to safeguard national security and interests’.5 Foreign commentators were more damning. Calling the law ‘insidious and pervasive’, one writer stated that ‘it does indeed oblige citizens to spy on one another – the only question is at what point in the process the spying can legally begin’.6 The political reality was that there was no way the party would let such an opportunity pass it by. That would have undermined its claim that it was the custodian of the mission of national greatness, and therefore free to use any means to promote this endeavour. For companies to hold back this information would have been unpatriotic and treacherous. It was not only their duty, but, in the party’s view, their honour to contribute this for the national good.

The mindset betrayed by this legislation was not conducive to friendly relations with the outside world, although Xi’s purposeful style of governance and mode of expression 149 created a level of predictability. By 2017, people inside and outside the country knew where China stood, whether they liked it or not. This offered an interesting conundrum. What was more unpalatable? A China that maintained a little ambiguity, one that the West could imagine converting to a state resembling democracies such as those in North America or Europe? Or a China it understood, where previous ideals would have to be set aside but at least the West would know exactly what it was up against? Had the West not demanded that China become more transparent about its aims? There were definite regulations and laws now – just not the ones the West had hoped for. What’s more, the new legislation was being implemented. Companies from outside China that assumed they would receive preferential treatment, as they had in the past, found themselves rudely disabused. The playing field was flatter. China’s language with the outside world was becoming blunter and less laden with polite rhetoric. Instead, it started to spell out exactly what it wanted. China’s leaders had talked about a ‘new normal’ of slower growth from 2013. But starting in 2017, there was also a new normal in the country’s geopolitics – an assertion that it now had the status and the right to be considered a great power on a par with the US. That did not mean it was similar to the US, nor that it planned to duplicate America’s role on the global stage. Rather, it meant that it would never be spoken of as some 150 subordinate or understudy. There was the American way, and now a Chinese way.

This new clarity on China’s role meant the 2017 leadership undertook to deliver a very different message to the one the international community had invested so much in over the previous decades. In 2015, I recall one senior, retired former American National Security Advisor addressing a conference full of Chinese students from the elite Tsinghua University in Beijing, expressing his hope that, one day, ‘the young people here will breathe the free air of democracy’. The applause was polite and restrained. It was a noble vision, born from good intentions. But it was also, alas, one facing a far more complex reality. For those who passionately believed that China was following the USSR and other failed Communist systems, Xi Jinping’s leadership was deeply unexpected. For instance, American scholar Larry Diamond had predicted in 2012, after the Arab Spring, that a wave of democratisation would sweep across Asia, including China.7 Historian Gordon Chang had spoken of China’s imminent collapse with such regularity since 2005 that one wonders whether he hoped that, if he said it often enough, one day he would be proved right. Disappointment of figures like these (and there were many others), with a passionate and sincere commitment to the cause of democracy, was understandable – but for some, their expressions of resentment and irritation often sounded 151 as though their feelings had got the better of them. By 2019, Diamond was saying that China’s lack of meaningful democratic change posed a threat to the rest of the world.8 The new reality would not change merely because outsiders were unhappy, as Xi made apparent when he spoke after his reappointment in 2017.

When we contemplate this more assertive, muscular tone and approach under Xi, we have to remember who his main audience is. To whom is he really speaking? In China, there exists a marginalised 1 per cent – dissidents, disaffected, haters of the system, separatists. These are figures that, rightly or wrongly, get much attention in the liberal West for their unjust treatment. Figures like the lawyer Yu Wensheng, who was imprisoned for four years in 2020 for representing contentious cases in court; or journalist Zhang Zhan, who was thrown in jail for her work exposing Covid-19 blunders by the government in 2020. These figures spread across social groups. Sun Dawu was a billionaire pig farmer whose outspoken criticism of the government was rewarded with an eighteen-year sentence in 2021. These are people who are cared about and championed outside of China. But the fact is that, within the country, they are seen by the leadership as part of the disloyal, noisy, self-centred, tiny unrepresentative minority who are soiling the country’s image and causing it to lose face. Even worse, they are jeopardising the success of 152 China’s national mission. There is no liberal doctrine of judging a society by how well it looks after its most marginalised people at work here. For the Communist Party in Beijing, the moral calculation is simple. In the New Era of national rejuvenation, disloyalty to the great message of the China Dream is a form of treason. Under Xi, the party looks after the interests of the majority, because the majority will keep the party in power. For the minority – those regarded as enemies of the system – the promises safeguarding their rights to a beautiful life do not figure. Instead, a wholly different, brutal and inhumane criterion of treatment is brought into play.

To be categorised as a person in Xi’s China is to be one thing; to be a non-person is a very real, and very terrifyingly different, status that many people have. It means that your networks close in around you. People will not speak with you. Only your most immediate family will stand by your side and, sometimes, even they will abandon you. Your legal and political rights, such as they were, disappear. You lose your right to freedom of movement and association. Even a visit outside your apartment to buy food becomes a chore, as you are followed and harassed by myriad personnel from the underworld of Chinese security. In imperial times, those who lost the favour of their emperors were sent to the edges of the empire to spend their days in poverty and destitution. These days, the party cuts your internet and social media access, causing a digital, 153 but very real, isolation. Under Xi, the China Dream is tangible for many, many people. But for a small number, it is a nightmare. That is the great moral quandary his leadership poses – whether it is acceptable to look after the interests of the vast majority with no regard for the small number of people who don’t fit in.

Alongside such brittle treatment of dissidents are other significant sources of anxiety that Xi’s administration must face if it is to deliver on its promises to the majority, whose support it needs to stay in power. One of the most imminent and urgent of these issues is that of demographics, that of an ageing population. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have all come up against this issue, though with far smaller populations. In the space of a generation, family sizes have fallen from four or five children to less than one. In China, this has been exacerbated by the imposition of the one-child policy in the 1980s, which was intended to manage the country’s then burgeoning population. Demographers both inside and outside China have argued about whether shrinking birth rates were caused purely by these restrictions, or whether they are due to the impact of rising wealth levels and a desire to have smaller families that kicked in even while Mao was still in control. What is certain is that China’s population growth has fallen to its lowest level in six decades, the structure of the population today is one where the average age is rising and the numbers of those aged 154 over 60 is increasing, as people have fewer children, later in their life. China’s working age population has fallen to such an extent that a country that had an almost infinite supply of cheap labour a generation ago, has become one with labour shortages in manufacturing, causing wage inflation. Ageing China is a real and pressing problem, with implications for healthcare, how the elderly are looked after and pensions. Xi’s government is aware of this. The family size and birthrate policy has been adapted and changed to encourage people to have more children. In 2014, married couples where both partners were single children were allowed to have two children. In 2021, even this restraint was removed to allow up to three children per couple.

What does Xi’s world look like for those cadres and officials who need to implement his great project, and do something about the demographic, environmental, social and other challenges the country is facing? After all, they are the party foot soldiers, doing the most basic level work to ensure that this whole immense endeavour remains on track. The placing of Xi Jinping Thought in the constitution in 2018 was regarded as yet more evidence of the leader’s hubris and arrogance. And yet, an understanding of how Xi Jinping Thought relates directly to these millions of lower-level operatives and officials is important. It is no abstract, academic matter to them but akin to a set of instructions telling them how to live. 155 Their performance will be assessed against this Thought, and their career success depends on delivering it. Being regarded as effective implementers will mean rising through the system, being rewarded with better jobs and greater responsibility. This is a real incentive. Chinese politics is an ultimate version of Squid Game, the 2021 South Korean drama, in which competitors who failed playing childhood games were immediately executed. A wrong move, a poorly made decision, a meeting where you irritate your boss or fail to keep the upper levels of government happy can have dramatic consequences. In the very worst cases, the anti-corruption enforcers can appear and turn your life upside down.

Xi complained in 2021 that officials were being too overcautious to innovate. There are good reasons for this. On the one hand, those with even the lowest level leadership positions in Chinese towns or prefectures must remember that now, unlike in the past, their main function is to serve the people. Xi Jinping Thought places the people at the forefront of everything. But it says little about who these people are. An official will need to look after businesspeople, who generate growth and employ others; they will need to remember the many disgruntled laid-off workers and rural dwellers who feel that they are receiving none of the benefits of development gained by others; they will need to deal with petitioners, those who feel that the system has not addressed their claims for 156 compensation and redress. Armed with the shield of Xi Jinping Thought, they will need to leave their safe government compounds and be visible, and connected, to the people. They must ensure that their public statements are in accordance with the new ideology – and that they do not slip into language that seems to support Western ideas like free markets and division of powers, or support for lawyers. Xi and his Thought have made clear, China must follow its own path.

With Xi Jinping Thought, cadres will need to support dynamic local enterprises that create the innovative Chinese companies that were made a priority in the dual circulation ideas of 2020. The days of attracting investment from foreign enterprises or trying to broker deals that allowed technology transfers with them are over. For local officials, armed with Xi Thought, the onus is on self-reliance, harking back to the years under Mao. The difference is that today the country is the world’s largest exporter and second largest importer. Realising meaningful trade autonomy will not be easy. But this is what the cadres need to demonstrate they are working towards.

Then there is the final and perhaps most important issue. Success depends on doing things differently, on being a changemaker. In 2017, Xi’s congress speech included a tsunami of promises – almost one full hour of his three-hour speech was about what the party needed to do next. Clean up the natural environment. Help the poor. Improve social welfare, and sort 157 out hospitals and healthcare. Housing needed to be affordable, and of a better quality. In a country with more expensive property in some urban areas than Australia or Britain, Xi asserted in 2020 that one’s house should not be an investment opportunity but a place to live. Alas, for local officials, selling off property for commercial development, no matter who the inhabitants are, is one of the few ways they have been allowed to make money. The Xi government was promising a pension system for the ageing population, and a better, world class education system. It was saying that people could have the jobs they wanted and the lifestyle they dreamt about. The party was their servant on this, and officials at the local level were on the front line of making sure this whole edifice worked.

However, the problem with doing things differently is the heightened risk of failure. For Xi, as for Deng, success is the ‘sole criterion of truth’. But the much more common corollary is not great – failure is the road to perdition. A wrong initiative, an idea put into practice that goes awry, will receive no mercy. The sky can only have one sun in it. This is a law of physics and Chinese politics. And Xi alone shines. The risk of being accused of failure and the ensuing costs were why, in late 2019, when some doctors on a messaging service in the central city of Wuhan started talking of seeing patients suffering from a strange new cold, local officials silenced them. When the ophthalmologist Li Wenliang spoke of his worries about 158 this new cold, he was told by local security officers to stop making trouble. Tragically, he died of the virus a few weeks later. For a few critical days, the Wuhan officials trusted to their luck, hoping that the problem would go away. But this time, their gamble didn’t pay off. On 31 December 2019, the central government finally alerted the World Health Organization (WHO) that the virus, which was then named SARS-CoV-2, was causing Covid-19, a severe respiratory disease similar to the SARS outbreak the country had experienced almost two decades before. Spreading like wildfire, by the middle of January 2020 it was already appearing abroad. By March, the world was in the grips of a full-grown pandemic.

The officials in Wuhan were no doubt as zealous in their fidelity to Xi Jinping Thought as those elsewhere. This did not stop two senior officials from the local health bureau being sacked in early February, followed by the top official for the whole of Hubei province, Jiang Chaoliang, who went the same way a few days later. Ma Guoqiang, his counterpart in Wuhan itself, was removed the same day. Draconian lockdowns were announced wherever cases of the virus were found. Initially, the rest of the world watched from a distance, writing, as they had with SARS in 2003, of this pandemic largely being a Chinese affair. But in March, similar orders for people to work from home, wear face masks and not to socialise were issued in the UK, across Europe and in the US. 159

Like Mao, and Deng, Xi Jinping Thought eschews book learning; it is presented as an ideology. It is akin to a code of practice, a way of living that officials, the priests of the party faith, have to follow. Armed with this new faith, they have to embrace it not only with their words, as had been the case in the past, but with their actions. Their rewards: to see their country rise higher and higher on the world stage, in terms of the power attributed to it and the fear it generates. In early 2022, a mocking film appeared on the Xinhua website of two Chinese actors pretending to be a figure called James Pond, agent 0.07, and his assistant. They spoke of a world cowering in fear before China, that China was the heart of all their worries and the greatest security issue of the time. It was a pointed message. China might have not wanted this kind of acknowledgement in the past, but the discomfort of the FBI in the US, and MI6 in London, showed that it really mattered. For all the stress and risks from their jobs – which were often poorly paid and increasingly prone to public scrutiny and pressure – like most people serving a faith, there were rewards for the average party official under Xi. They were servants of the main objective of Xi Thought – the construction of a great, powerful nation, which had finally found its own way. This was the New Era that Xi referred to in 2017. The future had arrived. It belonged to China. Finally, victoriously, Chinese were not only masters of their own affairs, as had been promised in the past. 160 They were masters of more and more of the world outside. As Xi Thought said, all they had to do was believe, and this, their great dream, would come true.

Notes

1. ‘China’s luxury cars see sales surge in 2020’, China.org, 2 February 2021, http://www.china.org.cn/business/2021-02/02/content_77179184.htm.

2. Tom Phillips, ‘Xi Jinping heralds “new era” of Chinese power at Communist party congress’, Guardian, 18 October 2017.

3. ‘Xi Jinping has more clout than Donald Trump. The world should be wary’, Economist, 14 October 2017.

4. David Runciman, Politics: Ideas in Profile (London: Profile Books, 2014).

5. ‘China adopts intelligence law’, Xinhua, 27 June 2017, http://www.xinhuanet.com//english/2017-06/27/c_136398422.htm.

6. Bonnie Girard, ‘The Real Danger of China’s National Intelligence Law’, Diplomat, 23 February 2019, https://thediplomat.com/2019/02/the-real-danger-of-chinas-national-intelligence-law/.

7. Larry Diamond, ‘Why East Asia – Including China – Will Turn Democratic Within a Generation’, Atlantic, 24 January 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/why-east-asia-including-china-will-turn-democratic-within-a-generation/251824/. 232

8. See ‘China’s Threat to Democracies Around the World’, Democracy Works Podcast, https://www.democracyworkspodcast.com/china/.

* A fatal 2011 train crash in Wenzhou, in which 40 people were tragically killed, meant that although speeds of over 350 kilometres an hour were perfectly possible, they were barred for safety reasons.