Chun Hang Wong traces how China’s Supreme Leader fanned nationalist passions around Communist rule, and rewrote or bent rules at will to become an autocrat
By the yardstick of what autocracies produce, Xi Jinping is as ruthless and self- serving as a dictator can be. Unlike most one-man shows the world knows or has known, Xi presides over an economic and military goliath which, until recently, was also the most populous country. Decisions he takes singularly in China are not only imposed forcibly on his people but can cast a destabilizing shadow on the world. Covid-19 was a stark example.
The Wall Street Journal journalist Chun Hang Wong, who covered China from within for years until he was ordered out, says Xi has cemented his status as the country’s most formidable leader since Mao Zedong — a remarkable achievement for a man who has none of the latter’s revolutionary credentials. But even overconfident dictators run into problems — as Mao discovered. Xi may have delivered a semblance of steady governance, but stability is not the same as resilience. “Our party is the world’s largest party,” Xi once gloated. But Chun rightly warns that by remaking the party around himself, Xi may have become the weakest link in his quest to build a Chinese superpower.
This is the strength of this book, which uncovers one of the world’s most secretive political organizations — the Communist Party of China (CPC) — and its supreme leader who brooks no dissent. After taking power in 2012, Xi has rewritten or bent rules at will to become an autocrat, doing away with the collective leadership Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997) put in place to ensure that Mao’s one-man rule never returns. He has pushed rivals into retirement, packed allies into the party leadership and taken a norm-breaking third term as general secretary.
Centralising decision-making authority
Those who questioned his leadership have been harassed, locked up or forced into exile. How did Xi — who became a CPC member only in 1974 — achieve all this? How could he overturn so easily what the veteran Deng struggled to establish? Chun’s findings are that many misread Xi not only before he became a leader on the rise but also during his early years in power, believing that he would steer an economically vibrant China towards more openness, rule of law and pro-market economics. After seeing his father suffer during the Mao-unleashed Cultural Revolution, Xi (whose family was a victim of the officially-sanctioned anarchy) learnt an invaluable lesson: lie low and bide your time.
This would be the best way to navigate party intrigue. The staid image he maintained for long paid off. He kept his mouth shut during inconvenient situations. Wherever needed, he plied his superiors with alcohol — something he would suppress after taking supreme power. It is no surprise then that when he was elected to a new nine-member Politburo in October 2007, many in China asked themselves: Who’s Xi Jinping? Once in the top decision-making body, he successfully led a party panel which supervised the final preparations for the showpiece of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, earning kudos. During a visit to Mexico in 2008, Xi went public with nationalist straight talk — cheering millions of Chinese social media users. He was more open when the then US vice-president Joe Biden visited Beijing in 2011. China, Xi said, badly needed “a strong, single point of leadership”. He not only revealed publicly for the first time what he had in his mind but it was also an implicit criticism of the prevailing Chinese leadership. It is another matter that no one took him very seriously.
By the time Xi took power in 2012, only five socialist states remained. The CPC never stopped worrying over the collapse of the Soviet Union. Xi often referred to it. Any deviation from Marxism had to be resisted, he argued. After coronation, Xi centralised decision-making authority and strengthened control over all levers of power, set up an expansive definition of national security, and directed the state’s coercive apparatus to suppress threats to China’s economy, social stability, territorial unity and one-party rule. He fanned nationalist passions around Communist rule and vowed to restore China’s glory as a great power.
The cost of Xi’s top-down governance
Not everyone in the CPC agreed with his approach. To show detractors, real and perceived, that he meant business, Xi launched a withering crackdown on corruption that punished 1.6 million people in his first five years in power. This included at least 50 officials of the ministerial rank. (Even if everyone was not guilty, the figures reveal how capitalism-induced corruption was eating away China from within.) Unlike what many thought, the sweeping campaign never halted. In one decade, the party members punished stood at a staggering 4.6 million. If this wasn’t enough, he side-lined rivals, purged indolent officials, quashed activism, silenced dissent, demanded unstinting loyalty from the rank and file, and built an unprecedented sophisticated surveillance state. In the process, even the most cautious dissidents began to get caught.
Xi revived Maoist slogans and practices, waging ideological purges and ordered officials to engage in Mao-era self-criticism. Simultaneously, to pander to the nationalist feelings of the Chinese, he was not afraid to challenge the West and was not apologetic while defying diplomatic norms. Even as China became brazen over territorial disputes (including with India), Xi unleashed his ambitious signature project to put Beijing on the global saddle with a worldwide trade infrastructure and by exporting the country’s excessive industrial capacity: Belt and Road Initiative. By the time Xi’s third five-year term began, the United States, which once naively thought that free-market economics would weaken and perhaps implode the CPC, and much of the West were on a collision course with an unstoppable China even as many foreign businesses reconsidered investments in the country.
Xi’s top-down governance, by all accounts, has led to many problems because everyone is out to satisfy the leader’s demands and to avoid his wrath. His tendency to micromanage has stifled debate and sowed confusion, at times leading to policies that aren’t carefully thought through. This is also what happened when Covid-19 struck. Local officials in Wuhan feared sharing the bad news with Beijing, causing terrible delays that eventually derailed the world.
A single-point of failure for China?
“Building a nation’s fate on the reputation of one or two people is very unhealthy and very dangerous,” warned Deng, knowing fully well what Mao unleashed. Xi has firmly buried that notion, partly with the help of mythmaking that has helped his rise to pre-eminence. No wonder, more and more Chinese scholars are moving abroad to secure more autonomy. Like it happens in dictatorships, online mobs harass people who criticize the party or allegedly show disloyalty to China. Xi has also dumped the pretences of autonomy for minorities (Muslims).
Now comes the most important question: Will Xi ever cease to govern China? Having generated so many enemies, can he afford to step down? Xi himself has said little publicly on succession planning. Chun fears that Xi may struggle to find suitable heirs and end up exiting office — through death or incapacitation — without a successor in place. He would be 74 by the time his third tenure ends in 2027. Some fear he could stay on till 2035, the target date for completing some of his signature initiatives.
Since strongmen prefer pliant successors who won’t outshine or betray them, whoever Xi chooses — if he does — may well be a relatively weak ruler. The CPC will survive without Xi no doubt but it has already come to resemble the imperial bureaucracies of the old — bigger and better organised but no less autocratic and plagued by succession woes. In the process of building himself a larger than life figure, Xi may have become a single-point of failure for China.
At a time when understanding China has become absolutely necessary, Chun’s scholarly work is more than welcome. He tells you, with years of exposure to the Middle Kingdom and his understanding of the CPC’s working, that Xi’s China has become brash but brittle, intrepid yet insecure.
