The World According to Xi

Everything You Need to Know About the New China

Kerry Brown

• Editore: I.B. Tauris
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781838609672
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Negocios y empresa
• Categoria: Negocios en general

China is now the most powerful country on earth. Its manufacturing underpins the world's economy; its military is growing at the fastest rate of any nation and its leader - Xi Jinping - is to set the pace and tone of world affairs for decades.
In 2017 Xi Jinping became part of the constitution - an honour not seen since Chairman Mao. Here, China expert Kerry Brown guides us through the world according to Xi: his plans to make China the most powerful country on earth and to eradicate poverty for its citizens. In this captivating book we discover Xi's beliefs, how he thinks about communism, and how far he is willing to go to defend it.

1

XI’S STORY

A book produced in July 2017 in Beijing carried the simple title Xi Jinping Tells Stories. Divided into two sections, covering stories about the outside world and those about China’s domestic situation, it started with a tale borrowed from Mao Zedong – that of the foolish old man and the mountain. Exhaustively related during the Maoist era, it told of an old man who was trying to move a mountain to get a better view from his house. He was doing so, however, only with the aid of buckets. Observers laughed at him, saying he was doomed never to succeed. But he replied simply that if he didn’t shift the earth, his children, grandchildren or great grandchildren would.

That sort of resilience was something that the Party, with its codes of selflessness under Mao Zedong, wanted to inculcate in society. The great project of modernising a country which had suffered so much, and fallen so far behind, was its most important mission right from the start. It was a mission that has connected the various phases of Party leadership since 1949. For the other tales contained in Xi Jinping Tells Stories, Xi used sources from abroad, and from the rich and endless inheritance of Chinese classical literature. As the national storyteller-in-chief, Xi was attempting to emulate Mao’s ability to encapsulate complex stories in a simple format. The punchline to the story of the old man and the mountain was an uplifting one. God appeared, moved by the patience, faith and resilience of the old man. The mountains were shifted. Justice prevailed.

One of the most striking stories Xi has been telling since he came to power is his own. A book published in 2017 covered the era in which he lived in a cave in the remote Yan’an area in Shaanxi province – another parallel with the life of Mao. The message was simple: this was someone who had really lived among the people, who had experience of hardship, and through this had earned the right to speak about the things that affected all Chinese people. Xi was referred to as a ‘peasant emperor’ because he came from an elitist family but had been sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, where he had experienced deprivation and hardship. Lee Kuan Yew, the late leader of Singapore, even went as far as to call him ‘Asia’s Nelson Mandela’, while the foreign press referred dramatically to his time in the early 1970s as a pig farmer. This all conveyed the idea that somehow he had earned the right to occupy the high office he now holds.

This formal recognition of Xi’s backstory was a radical departure for the Party. His immediate predecessor Hu Jintao had been the man from nowhere, someone who never once in public referred to anything remotely like a personal history. Even his precise place of birth was unclear. With Xi there was a conscious effort by the Party to make something of his story, using it to develop more of an emotional bond between the supreme leader and the Chinese people.

There are two components of the story Xi has been telling about himself: his own personal narrative, and that of the era of Chinese history he lived through. Xi’s early years were spent in unusual circumstances, in the prelude to and aftermath of the strange, distorted period of the Cultural Revolution. This decade-long, complex movement remains an endless source of fascination for people both within and outside China. More than 50 years later, there is no easy interpretative framework into which it will fit; even those who lived through it are often unable to understand precisely what happened. The Cultural Revolution is regarded as either an inter-elite power struggle that went badly wrong, a whim of Mao’s that careered out of control, or a profoundly significant spiritual holocaust for the Chinese people which led to the collapse of their values and world views. It is most probably a mixture of all of these things.

Xi’s experience of this era was dominated by a power struggle among the elites – one that he had direct links with because of his family background. He was born in 1953, the son of Xi Zhongxun, a military leader and ally of Mao Zedong from the 1930s. Zhongxun had been vice premier with some responsibility for culture up to 1961, when he became embroiled in a dispute over unfavourable interpretations of a novel published that year. Caught on the wrong side of a political spat, he was placed under house arrest but saved from imprisonment, reportedly following a direct instruction by Mao. For almost the next two decades, he remained out of power, to all intents and purposes incarcerated. Over that period, his son is thought to have only seen him a few times.

For Xi, the second-oldest boy of seven children, the years when he was entering adolescence were the usual mixture of insecurity and bewildering personal changes. In 1966 he stayed on at an elite school next to the Zhongnanhai leadership compound, but he was then unceremoniously shipped down to the Yan’an area of northern Shaanxi province, joining a production brigade there. It seems that during this time he had contact with a figure who would be an elite leader alongside him later on – Wang Qishan. However, this period is romanticised in his current storytelling: both historical and contemporary testimonies from others who went through this process revealed an era that was often traumatising and alienating. Children from the city with no experience of rural life, and no useful local networks, were sent to areas which were mostly unable to look after themselves properly. Abuse and bullying were rife. Tales of resentful farmers and rural dwellers grudgingly looking after large numbers of people who were in their view pampered and mostly useless are plentiful. There is even a whole literature made up of testimonies about this unique phase in modern Chinese history in which the urbanisation process was reversed and cities shrunk rather than increased in size. It is called ‘scar’ or ‘wounded’ writing.

The contemporary hagiography of Xi’s rural life tells us that he succeeded, gained the respect and admiration of the peasants he was living among, and managed to acquire a deep knowledge of the conditions in one of the most backward areas of the country. Whether this is accurate or not, this period would have undoubtedly had a huge impact on him. Even Deng Xiaoping, exiled to rural Jiangxi to work at a tractor factory around the same time and at a far more advanced stage in life, was profoundly changed by his experiences in this sort of community. For Deng, the poverty he saw in his sixth decade, after more than 40 years of working for the Party, was irrefutable evidence of communism’s failure in China to do what it had set out to achieve – to improve the lives of rural workers. Almost three decades after socialism had first become the country’s governing system, people in rural areas were experiencing widespread malnutrition, their living conditions were still very basic, and levels of backwardness were shocking. This was a moment of profound re-evaluation for Deng, and his experience of the period lay at the heart of his sponsorship of wholesale changes when he was in a position to support these after Mao’s death in 1976.

For Xi, who was younger and more inexperienced, the impact of the things he saw in Shaanxi was different. But it has evidently endured. In 2017, even while lavishly praising the national rejuvenation that was taking place, Xi stated that poverty in China would be a thing of the past by 2020. And his domestic visits have included returning several times to what had been his rural base in the 1970s, and visits to similar villages. It is telling that the period he spent in this sort of community figures so prominently in official accounts of his life. Of the recent leaders of China since Deng, in many ways Xi is the one with the most authentic, best-known links to the countryside, and his use of this set of experiences aims to convey this.

Like many of the sent-down youths of the Cultural Revolution era, Xi’s period of rustication ended almost as abruptly as it had begun, with his return to the capital in the mid-1970s to study engineering at Tsinghua University. The educational system had largely been crippled by internecine struggles and political turmoil throughout this period. Universities in Beijing had become hotbeds of leftist activism and rebellion. There was controversy after Xi’s final elevation in 2012 about just how credible his entry to the elite Beijing-based university had been. A quota system existed for youths like him who had been sent to rural areas; his elite background may, ironically, have helped, even at a time when such things were regarded as a stigma. That Xi studied engineering nominally makes him a technocrat.

It is worth considering in a little more detail the meaning of the Cultural Revolution for people who like Xi came of age when the mass movement was at its height, and whose formative years were overshadowed by the events leading up to it and the developments which followed. In 2016, during the 50th anniversary of the issuance of the 16 July Notification – widely accepted as the official start of what is still called in domestic discourse in China the ‘ten years of turbulence’ – the sole event marking the occasion was an editorial in the People’s Daily, the newspaper of the Party. The article decried, in standard terms, the loss of time and the destruction that the movement had involved. This has been the default attitude since the Party Resolution on the history of this era was issued in 1981. For Xi, his infrequent and brief mentions of the decade have been negative. For a leader often accused of being Maoist and having a similar cult of personality around him, it is odd that he and the Party propagandists have spoken little of his own direct experience of Maoism. Xi has displayed not a trace of nostalgia for this era, and yet in many ways it would have been the most powerful influence on him, with its mass adoration of a political figure, its extraordinary mobilisation of large parts of society, and the brief but intense and intoxicating fervour that it inspired.

One of the great dilemmas today for the Party as it looks back over this era is the simple but unpalatable fact that the Cultural Revolution was – at least while it was happening – a popular movement, and one that engaged the active involvement of millions of young Chinese people. It was also a moment when China, for the only time in its long history, was unified by a faith – that of Mao Zedong Thought. This ended up being a faith that failed. But it left a profound stain on people’s memories. In Xi, for example, it gave him the world view of a victim rather than a victimiser. That has proved an asset. It means that his role is more complex: he is more a survivor of Mao than a diehard follower. His later commitment to Mao makes more sense if seen as a fidelity to a symbolic figure and to the creator of a body of ideas around sinified Marxism that are still seen as relevant. But as for Mao as a person, things are more complicated. The one fact widely known about Xi is that his father at least survived the Cultural Revolution and made a comeback in the late 1970s during the era of Dengist rehabilitation. In that sense he was spared. Many of his peers had perished. Xi the son stood on the outer circles of the Maoist fury, and saw even from there the intensity of its inner fire. That must have had a searing impact on him, and given him a resilience which is stressed in his official biography to this day. It also gave him an ability to observe ruthless procedures with equanimity – something that stood him in good stead when he was to observe the fall of his colleagues Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang years later. Mao was the greatest teacher and practitioner of the adage that in Chinese politics the winner takes all. In that sense, and perhaps only in that sense, Xi is a modern-day Maoist.

In Western politics, we seek signs of agency in our elite political leaders, moments that help to reveal their inner convictions – or lack of them. One of the main clues is their choice of which party to serve early in their careers. There are other moments along the way when they make choices, or betray inclinations, beliefs and ideas. In the one-party system in China, the choice is simple for anyone interested in organised politics – to join the Communist Party. The real question is why people want to get involved in politics at all, especially those from Xi’s background. Politicians in the Party seem to have little choice over their actions. However, from his biography, we know of two key features which demonstrate Xi’s free will. The first is the sheer number of attempts he made, ten in all, to join the Party before he was finally accepted in 1973. The second was his shift in the early 1980s from a military career to one in the civilian sphere. Once more, this seems to have been a personal choice. He worked from 1978 to 1982 as the secretary of Geng Biao, a member of the Central Military Commission and a key military figure. That should have set him up for a stellar career in the army, but he took the more elongated route through civilian, provincial administration and Party affairs from 1982 onwards. That involved once more leaving the confines of Beijing and heading to provincial China, first to Hebei around the capital, and then, from 1985, to Fujian. Military careers always carried status and influence in China, but they were never going to deliver major political clout. That Xi took this route might suggest that, even as early as this, he had a strategic vision of one day becoming an elite political figure. It certainly betrays an interest in the political realm and indicates some level of ambition.

In the years Xi was in the south-eastern coastal province of Fujian, it would have been difficult to imagine him having an easy route to Beijing and central leadership. Fujian was one of the most outward-looking provinces, and was starting to engage with Taiwanese businesses because of its proximity to the thriving capitalist and technologically advanced economy of the de facto independent island. Xi’s 16 years here from 1985 form the backbone of his career before central leadership. It was here that he married Peng Liyuan, the famous singer and lieutenant general in the People’s Liberation Army. Peng was his second wife, his first marriage having ended in divorce after his wife had moved to take up a diplomatic posting, accompanying her father to the UK. Peng is an important factor in Xi’s development: firstly because until 2007 her profile was far higher than his (she was the star of China Central Television’s annual New Year performance for many years), and secondly because his marriage to her was further demonstration that he was a member of the elite. Since 2007, she has figured increasingly as a source of background influence, possibly the first time since Mao that a top leader’s spouse has been accorded a prominent public role. However, unlike the wife of Mao, the demagogue and leftist activist Jiang Qing, Peng’s role has been far more benign.

The final position Xi took in Fujian, from 2000 to 2002, was as governor. Prior to this, in the late 1990s he completed a doctorate at Tsinghua University in law in the Marxism–Leninism Study Department. He also managed to survive one of the most extensive corruption scandals when a Fujian businessman, Lai Changxing, almost single-handedly managed to seduce every significant local leader with cash, sex or other inducements as part of a multi-billion-dollar smuggling racket. The fallout from the scandal led to Lai fleeing to Canada (before being extradited back to China over a decade later), and the disciplining of a whole generation of Fujian-based leaders. Based on Xi’s official biography, and on statements he made at the time, he seems to have avoided the traps set for him. That is interesting in itself: the area was booming for much of the time he was there, making inducements almost irresistible to elite leaders and their personal networks. Again, was it a driving ambition that led Xi to be very cautious about his involvement with business networks? He certainly spoke as though he were someone with a clear divide in his head between the Party as a political entity and the commercial world developing around it. Perhaps more meaningfully, he also managed to keep his immediate family out of local business dealings. His sisters and his elder brother were uninvolved with any major companies in the areas where he worked. This was something that other elite leaders proved unable or unwilling to do (family ties, in a society orientated towards family networks, are the hardest to resist), and led to the fall of many of them.

Xi’s first major promotion was in 2002, to the dynamic coastal province of Zhejiang, where he served in the top Party slot for five years. Around this time, he started to produce a blog, ‘New Sayings from Zhejiang’, about issues in the region – if not directly written by him, then ghostwritten with his close guidance. This was done under a pseudonym. His work in Zhejiang was relatively business-friendly, but not spectacular. He encouraged foreign investors to come in greater numbers to the mostly private sector-dominated area, and was present when Jack Ma started to develop a small internet start-up which eventually morphed into the mammoth that is Alibaba today. In the middle of the same decade, when speculation started about who might be Hu Jintao’s successor, Xi’s name figured as one among a set of younger, ambitious leaders – and not, perhaps, as the most compelling. It was therefore by no means a given that during the build-up to 2007 and the 17th Party Congress later that year that Xi would emerge in pole position.

The one significant clue that he might be on track for a major promotion came in 2007 with his brief tenure in Shanghai, the most dynamic of Chinese places, after the felling of Chen Liangyu, the Party head there, for corruption connected with the running of pension funds. As it had been for Jiang Zemin two decades previously, Shanghai proved to be a good stepping stone before going on to higher things. As a result of this period, there was little surprise when he emerged in October that year as the fifth member of the Politburo Standing Committee and the highest-ranked new entrant. Xi was clearly the favoured successor now.

Being the designated successor is a double-edged sword in modern Chinese politics. One issue is simply that there have never been clear rules about succession. Mao went through three successors, two of them meeting very sticky ends, before his final one, Hua Guofeng, succeeded in briefly replacing him. But how could anyone replace the irreplaceable?

By 1980 the position of Chairman of the Party, which Mao had occupied since the 1940s, was simply abolished. Hua rapidly faded into insignificance, eclipsed by the more experienced and formidable operator Deng. Deng himself fared little better in finding a worthy replacement, with another two falling by the wayside before finally, in Jiang Zemin, he found an unlikely but reliable Party leader. Between Jiang and Hu there was a relatively clean changeover – at least on the surface. But Jiang maintained active links to the Party’s elite management, both formally and informally, well into Hu’s decade in power. Some would argue he never stopped meddling. For Xi, therefore, the simple fact that he occupied prime position in 2007 meant little. The responsibilities he was given, too, were symbolically high, but nowhere near as demanding as those of the younger leader elevated alongside him, Li Keqiang. While Li had to deal with issues arising from intractable headaches like the management of welfare and health, Xi’s main function was to chair the committee arranging the 2008 Olympics, head the Party School and busy himself with Party matters. The one conclusion he seems to have drawn from observing the very high failure rate of his predecessors in this dreaded ‘favoured successor’ slot was the importance of keeping a very low profile. Like Hu in the period from 1993 to 2002, he made a virtue of saying very little. Even his prolific blogging and writing ceased. The sole mo...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. XI’s Story
• 2. XI Jinping as Party Man
• 3. XI Jinping’s Values?
• 4. XI Jinping and Global China
• 5. XI and Political Reform
• 6. XI Jinping Thought
• Postscript: What Happens to Lucky Men When the Luck Runs Out?
• Suggested Reading
• Index
• eCopyright