By
Evan Osnos
How Xi Jinping, an unremarkable provincial administrator, became China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao.
In anticipation of New Year’s Eve,
2014, Xi Jinping, the President of China and the General Secretary of
the Chinese Communist Party, permitted a camera crew to come into his
office and record a message to the people. As a teen-ager, Xi had been
sent to work on a farm; he was so delicate that other laborers rated him
a six on a ten-point scale, “not even as high as the women,” he said
later, with some embarrassment. Now, at sixty-one, Xi was five feet
eleven, taller than any Chinese leader in nearly four decades, with a
rich baritone and a confident heft. When he received a guest, he stood
still, long arms slack, hair pomaded, a portrait of take-it-or-leave-it
composure that induced his visitor to cross the room in pursuit of a
handshake.
 |
| File photo taken in 1988 shows Xi Jinping (front),
then secretary of the Ningde Prefecture Committee of the Communist Party
of China (CPC), participates in farm work during his investigation in
the countryside. (Xinhua) |
Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, read his
annual New Year’s greeting from a lectern in an antiseptic reception
hall. Xi, who took office in November, 2012, has associated himself with
an earthier generation of Communists, a military caste that emphasized
“hard work and plain living.” He delivered his New Year’s message at his
desk. Behind him, bookshelves held photographs that depicted him as
Commander-in-Chief and family man. In one picture, he was wearing Army
fatigues and a fur hat, visiting soldiers in a snowfield; in another, he
was strolling with his wife and daughter, and escorting his father, Xi
Zhongxun, a hallowed revolutionary, in a wheelchair. The shelves also
held matching sets of books. Xi’s classroom education was interrupted
for nearly a decade by the Cultural Revolution, and he has the
autodidact’s habit of announcing his literary credentials. He often
quotes from Chinese classics, and in an interview with the Russian press
last year he volunteered that he had read Krylov, Pushkin, Gogol,
Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Nekrasov, Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy,
Chekhov, and Sholokhov. When he visited France, he mentioned that he had
read Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Saint-Simon, Fourier,
Sartre, and twelve others. In his New Year’s remarks, Xi oscillated
between socialist slogans (“Wave high the sword against corruption”) and
catchphrases from Chinese social media (“I would like to click the
thumbs-up button for our great people”). He vowed to fight poverty,
improve the rule of law, and hold fast to history. When he listed the
achievements of the past year, he praised the creation of a holiday
dedicated to the Second World War: “Victory Day of the Chinese People’s
War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.”
Xi
is the sixth man to rule the People’s Republic of China, and the first
who was born after the revolution, in 1949. He sits atop a pyramid of
eighty-seven million members of the Communist Party, an organization
larger than the population of Germany. The Party no longer reaches into
every corner of Chinese life, as it did in the nineteen-seventies, but
Xi nevertheless presides over an economy that, by one measure, recently
surpassed the American economy in size; he holds ultimate authority over
every general, judge, editor, and state-company C.E.O. As Lenin
ordained, in 1902, “For the center . . . to actually direct the
orchestra, it needs to know who plays violin and where, who plays a
false note and why.”
Xi’s New Year’s message was broadcast on state television and radio channels at 6:30 p.m.,
just before the evening news. A few hours later, the news veered
sharply out of his control. In Shanghai, a large holiday crowd had
gathered to celebrate on the Bund, the promenade beside the Huangpu
River, with splendid views of the skyline. The crowd was growing faster
than the space could handle. Around 11:30 p.m., the
police sent hundreds of extra officers to keep order, but it was too
late; a stairway was jammed, and people shouted and pushed. A stampede
ensued. In all, thirty-six people suffocated or were trampled to death.
The
disaster occurred in one of China’s most modern and prosperous places,
and the public was appalled. In the days that followed, the Shanghai
government held a memorial for the victims, and encouraged people to
move on; Internet censors struck down discussion of who was responsible;
police interrogated Web users who posted criticisms of the state. When
relatives of the victims visited the site of the stampede, police
watched them closely, and then erected metal barriers to render it
unreachable. Caixin, an investigative media organization, revealed that,
during the stampede, local officials in charge of the neighborhood were
enjoying a banquet of sushi and sake, at the government’s expense, in a
private room at the Empty Cicada, a luxury restaurant nearby. This was
awkward news, because one of the President’s first diktats had been
“Eight Rules” for public servants, to eliminate extravagance and
corruption. Among other things, the campaign called on officials to
confine themselves to “four dishes and one soup.” (Eventually, eleven
officials were punished for misusing funds and for failing to prevent a
risk to the public.)
A
few weeks after the incident in Shanghai, I paid a call on a longtime
editor in Beijing, whose job gives him a view into the workings of the
Party. When I arrived at his apartment, his kids were in raucous control
of the living room, so we retreated to his bedroom to talk. When I
asked him how President Xi was doing, he mentioned the banquet at the
Empty Cicada. He thought it pointed to a problem that is much deeper
than a few high-living bureaucrats. “The central government issued an
order absolutely forbidding them to dine out on public funds. And they
did it anyway!” he said. “What this tells you is that local officials
are finding their ways of responding to change. There is a saying: ‘When
a rule is imposed up high, there is a way to get around it below.’ ”
The struggle between an emperor and his bureaucracy follows a classic
pattern in Chinese politics, and it rarely ends well for the emperor.
But the editor was betting on Xi. “He’s not afraid of Heaven or Earth.
And he is, as we say, round on the outside and square on the inside; he
looks flexible, but inside he is very hard.”
Before
Xi took power, he was described, in China and abroad, as an
unremarkable provincial administrator, a fan of American pop culture
(“The Godfather,” “Saving Private Ryan”) who cared more about business
than about politics, and was selected mainly because he had alienated
fewer peers than his competitors. It was an incomplete portrait. He had
spent more than three decades in public life, but Chinese politics had
exposed him to limited scrutiny. At a press conference, a local reporter
once asked Xi to rate his performance: “Would you give yourself a score
of a hundred—or a score of ninety?” (Neither, Xi said; a high number
would look “boastful,” and a low number would reflect “low
self-esteem.”)
But, a quarter of the way through
his ten-year term, he has emerged as the most authoritarian leader
since Chairman Mao. In the name of protection and purity, he has
investigated tens of thousands of his countrymen, on charges ranging
from corruption to leaking state secrets and inciting the overthrow of
the state. He has acquired or created ten titles for himself, including
not only head of state and head of the military but also leader of the
Party’s most powerful committees—on foreign policy, Taiwan, and the
economy. He has installed himself as the head of new bodies overseeing
the Internet, government restructuring, national security, and military
reform, and he has effectively taken over the courts, the police, and
the secret police. “He’s at the center of everything,” Gary Locke, the
former American Ambassador to Beijing, told me.
In
the Chinese Communist Party, you campaign after you get the job, not
before, and in building public support and honing a message Xi has
revealed a powerful desire for transformation. He calls on China to
pursue the Chinese Dream: the “great rejuvenation of the nation,” a
mixture of prosperity, unity, and strength. He has proposed at least
sixty social and economic changes, ranging from relaxing the one-child
policy to eliminating camps for “reëducation through labor” and
curtailing state monopolies. He has sought prestige abroad; on his first
foreign trip (to Moscow), he was accompanied by his wife, a celebrity
soprano named Peng Liyuan, who inspired lavish coverage of China’s first
modern Presidential couple. Peng soon appeared on Vanity Fair’s Best-Dressed List.
After Mao, China encouraged the image of a “collective Presidency” over
the importance of individual leaders. Xi has revised that approach, and
his government, using old and new tools, has enlarged his image. In the
spirit of Mao’s Little Red Book, publishers have produced eight volumes
of Xi’s speeches and writings; the most recent, titled “The Remarks of
Xi Jinping,” dissects his utterances, ranks his favorite phrases, and
explains his cultural references. A study of the People’s Daily
found that, by his second anniversary in office, Xi was appearing in
the paper more than twice as often as his predecessor at the same point.
He stars in a series of cartoons aimed at young people, beginning with
“How to Make a Leader,” which describes him, despite his family
pedigree, as a symbol of meritocracy—“one of the secrets of the China
miracle.” The state news agency has taken the unprecedented step of
adopting a nickname for the General Secretary: Xi Dada—roughly, Big
Uncle Xi. In January, the Ministry of Defense released oil paintings
depicting him in heroic poses; thousands of art students applying to the
Beijing University of Technology had been judged on their ability to
sketch his likeness. The Beijing Evening News reported that one applicant admired the President so much that “she had to work hard to stop her hands from trembling.”
 |
| File photo shows Xi Jinping (R, rear) with his
father Xi Zhongxun (R, front), his wife (L, front) and his daughter (C,
front). (Xinhua) |
To
outsiders, Xi has been a fitful subject. Bookstores in Hong Kong, which
are insulated from mainland control, offer portraits of varying
quality—the most reliable include “The New Biography of Xi Jinping,” by
Liang Jian, and “China’s Future,” by Wu Ming—but most are written at a
remove, under pseudonyms. The clearest account of Xi’s life and
influences comes from his own words and decisions, scattered throughout a
long climb to power.
Kevin Rudd, the former
Prime Minister of Australia, a Mandarin speaker who has talked with Xi
at length over the years, told me, “What he says is what he thinks. My
experience of him is that there’s not a lot of artifice.”
In
a leadership known for grooming colorless apparatchiks, Xi projects an
image of manly vigor. He mocks “eggheads” and praises the “team spirit
of a group of dogs eating a lion.” In a meeting in March, 2013, he told
the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, “We are similar in character,”
though Xi is less inclined toward bare-chested machismo. Xi admires Song
Jiang, a fictional outlaw from “Water Margin,” a fourteenth-century
Chinese classic, for his ability to “unite capable people.” Neither
brilliant nor handsome, Song Jiang led a band of heroic rebels. In a
famous passage, he speaks of the Xunyang River: “I shall have my revenge
some day / And dye red with blood the Xunyang’s flow.”
Xi
describes his essential project as a rescue: he must save the People’s
Republic and the Communist Party before they are swamped by corruption;
environmental pollution; unrest in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and other
regions; and the pressures imposed by an economy that is growing more
slowly than at any time since 1990 (though still at about seven per
cent, the fastest pace of any major country). “The tasks our Party faces
in reform, development, and stability are more onerous than ever, and
the conflicts, dangers, and challenges are more numerous than ever,” Xi
told the Politburo, in October. In 2014, the government arrested nearly a
thousand members of civil society, more than in any year since the
mid-nineteen-nineties, following the Tiananmen Square massacre,
according to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a Hong Kong-based advocacy
group.
Xi unambiguously opposes American
democratic notions. In 2011 and 2012, he spent several days with
Vice-President Joe Biden, his official counterpart at the time, in China
and the United States. Biden told me that Xi asked him why the U.S. put
“so much emphasis on human rights.” Biden replied to Xi, “No President
of the United States could represent the United States were he not
committed to human rights,” and went on, “If you don’t understand this,
you can’t deal with us. President Barack Obama would not be able to stay
in power if he did not speak of it. So look at it as a political
imperative. It doesn’t make us better or worse. It’s who we are. You
make your decisions. We’ll make ours.”
In Xi’s
early months, supporters in the West speculated that he wanted to
silence hard-line critics, and would open up later, perhaps in his
second term, which begins in 2017. That view has largely disappeared.
Henry Paulson, the former Treasury Secretary, whose upcoming book,
“Dealing with China,” describes a decade of contact with Xi, told me,
“He has been very forthright and candid—privately and publicly—about the
fact that the Chinese are rejecting Western values and multiparty
democracy.” He added, “To Westerners, it seems very incongruous to be,
on the one hand, so committed to fostering more competition and
market-driven flexibility in the economy and, on the other hand, to be
seeking more control in the political sphere, the media, and the
Internet. But that’s the key: he sees a strong Party as essential to
stability, and the only institution that’s strong enough to help him
accomplish his other goals.”
In his
determination to gain control and protect the Party, Xi may have
generated a different kind of threat: he has pried apart internal fault
lines and shaken the equilibrium that for a generation marked the
nation’s rise. Before Xi took power, top officials presumed that they
were protected. Yu Hua, the novelist, told me, “As China grew, what
really came to matter were the ‘unwritten rules.’ When the real rules
weren’t specific enough or clear enough, when policies and laws lagged
behind reality, you always relied on the unwritten rules.” They dictated
everything from how much to tip a surgeon to how far an N.G.O. could go
before it was suppressed. “The unwritten rules have been broken,” Yu
said. “This is how it should be, of course, but laws haven’t arrived
yet.”
 |
| File photo shows Xi Jinping carries his daughter
with a bicycle in Fuzhou, capital of southeast China's Fujian Province.
(Xinhua) |
The
Communist Party dedicated itself to a classless society but organized
itself in a rigid hierarchy, and Xi started life near the top. He was
born in Beijing in 1953, the third of four children. His father, Xi
Zhongxun, China’s propaganda minister at the time, had been fomenting
revolution since the age of fourteen, when he and his classmates tried
to poison a teacher whom they considered a counterrevolutionary. He was
sent to jail, where he joined the Communist Party, and eventually he
became a high-ranking commander, which plunged him into the Party’s
internal feuds. In 1935, a rival faction accused Xi of disloyalty and
ordered him to be buried alive, but Mao defused the crisis. At a Party
meeting in February, 1952, Mao stated that the “suppression of
counterrevolutionaries” required, on average, the execution of one
person for every one thousand to two thousand citizens. Xi Zhongxun
endorsed “severe suppression and punishment,” but in his area “killing
was relatively lower,” according to his official biography.
Xi
Jinping grew up with his father’s stories. “He talked about how he
joined the revolution, and he’d say, ‘You will certainly make revolution
in the future,’ ” Xi recalled in a 2004 interview with the Xi’an Evening News,
a state-run paper. “He’d explain what revolution is. We heard so much
of this that our ears got calluses.” In six decades of politics, his
father had seen or deployed every tactic. At dinner with the elder Xi in
1980, David Lampton, a China specialist at the School of Advanced
International Studies at Johns Hopkins, marvelled that he could toast
dozens of guests, over glasses of Maotai, with no visible effects. “It
became apparent that he was drinking water,” Lampton said.
When
Xi Jinping was five, his father was promoted to Vice-Premier, and the
son often visited him at Zhongnanhai, the secluded compound for top
leaders. Xi was admitted to the exclusive August 1st School, named for
the date of a famous Communist victory. The school, which occupied the
former palace of a Qing Dynasty prince, was nicknamed the lingxiu yaolan—the
“cradle of leaders.” The students formed a small, close-knit élite;
they lived in the same compounds, summered at the same retreats, and
shared a sense of noblesse oblige. For centuries before the People’s
Republic, an evolving list of élite clans combined wealth and politics.
Some sons handled business; others pursued high office. Winners changed
over time, and, when Communist leaders prevailed, in 1949, they acquired
the mantle. “The common language used to describe this was that they
had ‘won over tianxia’—‘all under Heaven,’ ” Yang Guobin, a
sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “They believed
they had a natural claim to leadership. They owned it. And their
children thought, naturally, they themselves would be, and should be,
the future owners.” As the historian Mi Hedu observes in his 1993 book,
“The Red Guard Generation,” students at the August 1st School “compared
one another on the basis of whose father had a higher rank, whose father
rode in a better car. Some would say, ‘Obey whoever’s father has the
highest position.’ ” When the Cultural Revolution began, in 1966,
Beijing students who were zilaihong (“born red”) promoted a
slogan: “If the father is a hero, the son is also a hero; if the father
is a reactionary, the son is a bastard.” Red Guards sought to cleanse
the capital of opposition, to make it “as pure and clean as crystal,”
they said. From late August to late September, 1966, nearly two thousand
people were killed in Beijing, and at least forty-nine hundred
historical sites were damaged or destroyed, according to Yiching Wu, the
author of “The Cultural Revolution at the Margins.”
But
Xi Jinping did not fit cleanly into the role of either aggressor or
victim. In 1962, his father was accused of supporting a novel that Mao
opposed, and was sent to work in a factory; his mother, Qi Xin, was
assigned to hard labor on a farm. In January, 1967, after Mao encouraged
students to target “class enemies,” a group of young people dragged Xi
Zhongxun before a crowd. Among other charges, he was accused of having
gazed at West Berlin through binoculars during a visit to East Germany
years earlier. He was detained in a military garrison, where he passed
the years by walking in circles, he said later—ten thousand laps, and
then ten thousand walking backward. The son was too young to be an
official Red Guard, and his father’s status made him undesirable.
Moreover, being born red was becoming a liability. Élite academies were
accused of being xiao baota—“little treasure pagodas”—and shut
down. Xi and the sons of other targeted officials stayed together,
getting into street fights and swiping books from shuttered libraries.
Later, Xi described that period as a dystopian collapse of control. He
was detained “three or four times” by groups of Red Guards, and forced
to denounce his father. In 2000, he told the journalist Yang Xiaohuai
about being captured by a group loyal to the wife of the head of China’s
secret police:
I was only fourteen. The Red Guards asked, “How serious do you yourself think your crimes are?”
“You can estimate it yourselves. Is it enough to execute me?”
“We can execute you a hundred times.”
To
my mind there was no difference between being executed a hundred times
or once, so why be afraid of a hundred times? The Red Guards wanted to
scare me, saying that now I was to feel the democratic dictatorship of
the people, and that I only had five minutes left. But in the end, they
told me, instead, to read quotations from Chairman Mao every day until
late at night.
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| 1985: Xi Jinping, then Party chief of Zhengding County, Hebei Province, visits San Francisco in the United States. Xinhua |
In December, 1968,
in a bid to regain control, Mao ordered the Red Guards and other
students to the countryside, to be “reëducated by the poor and
lower-middle-class peasants.” Élite families sent their children to
regions that had allies or family, and Xi went to his father’s old
stronghold in Shaanxi. He was assigned to Liangjiahe, a village flanked
by yellow cliffs. “The intensity of the labor shocked me,” Xi recalled
in a 2004 television interview. To avoid work, he took up smoking—nobody
bothered a man smoking—and lingered in the bathroom. After three
months, he fled to Beijing, but he was arrested and returned to the
village. In what later became the centerpiece of his official narrative,
Xi was reborn. A recent state-news-service article offers the
mythology: “Xi lived in a cave dwelling with villagers, slept on a kang,
a traditional Chinese bed made of bricks and clay, endured flea bites,
carried manure, built dams and repaired roads.” It leaves out some
brutal details. At one point, he received a letter informing him that
his older half-sister Xi Heping had died. The Australian journalist John
Garnaut, the author of an upcoming book on the rise of Xi and his
cohort, said, “It was suicide. Close associates have said to me, on the
record, that after a decade of persecution she hanged herself from a
shower rail.”
Xi chose to join the Communist
Party’s Youth League. Because of his father’s status, his application
was rejected seven times, by his count. After Xi befriended a local
official, he was accepted. In January, 1974, he gained full Party
membership and became secretary of the village. His drive to join the
Party baffled some of his peers. A longtime friend who became a
professor later told an American diplomat that he felt “betrayed” by
Xi’s ambition to “join the system.” According to a U.S. diplomatic cable
recounting his views, many in Xi’s élite cohort were desperate to
escape politics; they dated, drank, and read Western literature. They
were “trying to catch up for lost years by having fun,” the professor
said. He eventually concluded that Xi was “exceptionally ambitious,” and
knew that he would “not be special” outside China, so he “chose to
survive by becoming redder than the red.” After all, Yang Guobin told
me, referring to the sons of the former leaders, “the sense of ownership
did not die. A sense of pride and superiority persisted, and there was
some confidence that their fathers’ adversity would be temporary and
sooner or later they would make a comeback. That’s exactly what
happened.”
The
following year, Xi enrolled at Tsinghua University as a
“worker-peasant-soldier” student (applicants who were admitted on the
basis of political merit rather than test scores). That spring, Xi
Zhongxun was rehabilitated, after sixteen years of persecution. When the
family reunited, he could not recognize his grown sons. His faith never
wavered. In November, 1976, he wrote to Hua Guofeng, the head of the
Party, asking for reassignment, in order to “devote the rest of my life
to the Party and strive to do more for the people.” He signed it, “Xi
Zhongxun, a Follower of Chairman Mao and a Party Member Who Has Not
Regained Admission to Regular Party Activities.”
Xi
Jinping’s pedigree had exposed him to a brutal politics—purges,
retribution, rehabilitation—and he drew blunt lessons from it. In a 2000
interview with the journalist Chen Peng, of the Beijing-based Chinese Times,
Xi said, “People who have little experience with power, those who have
been far away from it, tend to regard these things as mysterious and
novel. But I look past the superficial things: the power and the flowers
and the glory and the applause. I see the detention houses, the
fickleness of human relationships. I understand politics on a deeper
level.” The Cultural Revolution and his years in Yan’an, the region
where he was sent as a teen-ager, had created him. “Yan’an is the
starting point of my life,” he said in 2007. “Many of the fundamental
ideas and qualities I have today were formed in Yan’an.” Rudd, the
former Australian Prime Minister, told me, “The bottom line in any
understanding of who Xi Jinping is must begin with his dedication to the
Party as an institution—despite the fact that through his personal
life, and his political life, he has experienced the best of the Party
and the worst of the Party.”
Xi’s
siblings scattered: his brother and a sister went into business in Hong
Kong, the other sister reportedly settled in Canada. But Xi stayed and,
year by year, invested more deeply in the Party. After graduating, in
1979, he took a coveted job as an aide to Geng Biao, a senior defense
official whom Xi’s father called “my closest comrade-in-arms” from the
revolution. Xi wore a military uniform and made valuable connections at
Party headquarters. Not long after college, he married Ke Xiaoming, the
cosmopolitan daughter of China’s Ambassador to Britain. But they fought
“almost every day,” according to the professor, who lived across the
hall. He told the diplomat that the couple divorced when Ke decided to
move to England and Xi stayed behind.
China’s
revolutionaries were aging, and the Party needed to groom new leaders.
Xi told the professor that going to the provinces was the “only path to
central power.” Staying at Party headquarters in Beijing would narrow
his network and invite resentment from lesser-born peers. In 1982,
shortly before Xi turned thirty, he asked to be sent back to the
countryside, and was assigned to a horse-cart county in Hebei Province.
He wanted to be the county secretary—the boss—but the provincial chief
resented privileged offspring from Party headquarters and made Xi the
No. 2. It was the Chinese equivalent of trading an executive suite at
the Pentagon for a mid-level post in rural Virginia.
Within
a year, though, Xi was promoted, and he honed his political skills. He
gave perks to retired cadres who could shape his reputation; he arranged
for them to receive priority at doctors’ offices; when he bought the
county’s first imported car, he donated it to the “veteran-cadre
office,” and used an old jeep for himself. He retained his green
Army-issue trousers to convey humility, and he learned the value of
political theatrics: at times, “if you don’t bang on the table, it’s not
frightening enough, and people won’t take it seriously,” he told a
Chinese interviewer in 2003. He experimented with market economics, by
allowing farmers to use more land for raising animals instead of growing
grain for the state, and he pushed splashy local projects, including
the construction of a television studio based on the classic novel “A
Dream of Red Mansions.”
In 1985, he spent two
weeks in Iowa as part of an agricultural delegation. In the town of
Muscatine, he stayed with Eleanor and Thomas Dvorchak. “The boys had
gone off to college, so there were some spare bedrooms,” Eleanor told
me. Xi slept in a room with football-themed wallpaper and “Star Trek”
action figures. “He was looking out the window, and it seemed like he
was saying, ‘Oh, my God,’ and I thought, What’s so unusual? It’s just a
split-level,” she said. Xi did not introduce himself as a Communist
Party secretary; his business card identified him as the head of the
Shijiazhuang Feed Association. In 2012, on a trip to the U.S. before
becoming top leader, he returned to Muscatine, to see Dvorchak and
others, trailed by the world press. She said, “No one in their right
mind would ever think that that guy who stayed in my house would become
the President. I don’t care what country you’re talking about.”
By
1985, Xi was ready for another promotion, but the provincial Party head
blocked him again, so he moved to the southern province of Fujian,
where one of his father’s friends was the Party secretary, and could
help him. Not long after he arrived, he met Liao Wanlong, a Taiwanese
businessman, who recalled, “He was tall and stocky, and he looked a
little dopey.” Liao, who has visited Xi repeatedly in the decades since,
told me, “He appeared to be guileless, honest. He came from the north
and he didn’t understand the south well.” Liao went on, “He would speak
only if he really had something to say, and he didn’t make casual
promises. He would think everything through before opening his mouth. He
rarely talked about his family, because he had a difficult past and a
disappointing marriage.” Xi didn’t have a questing mind, but he excelled
at managing his image and his relationships; he was now meeting foreign
investors, so he stopped wearing Army fatigues and adopted a wardrobe
of Western suits. Liao said, “Not everyone could get an audience with
him; he would screen those who wanted to meet him. He was a good judge
of people.”
The
following year, when Xi was thirty-three, a friend introduced him to
Peng Liyuan, who, at twenty-four, was already one of China’s most famous
opera and folk singers. Xi told her that he didn’t watch television,
she recalled in a 2007 interview. “What kind of songs do you sing?” he
asked. Peng thought that he looked “uncultured and much older than his
age,” but he asked her questions about singing technique, which she took
as a sign of intelligence. Xi later said that he decided within forty
minutes to ask her to marry him. They married the following year, and in
1989, after the crackdown on student demonstrators, Peng was among the
military singers who were sent to Tiananmen Square to serenade the
troops. (Images of that scene, along with information about Peng’s
private life and her commercial dealings, have been largely expunged
from the Web.) In 1992, they had a daughter. As it became clear that Xi
would be a top leader, Peng gave up the diva gowns and elaborate hairdos
in favor of pants suits and the occasional military uniform. Fans still
mobbed her, while he stood patiently to the side, but for the most part
she stopped performing and turned her attention to activism around
H.I.V., tobacco control, and women’s education. For years, Xi and Peng
spent most of their time apart. But, in the flurry of attention around
Big Uncle Xi, the state-run media has promoted a pop song entitled “Xi
Dada Loves Peng Mama,” which includes the line “Men should learn from Xi
and women should learn from Peng.”
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| 1983: Xi Jinping works in Zhengding County, Hebei Province. Xinhua |
The posting
to the south put Xi closer to his father. Since 1978, his father had
served in neighboring Guangdong, home to China’s experiments with the
free market, and the elder Xi had become a zealous believer in economic
reform as the answer to poverty. It was a risky position: at a Politburo
meeting in 1987, the Old Guard attacked the liberal standard-bearer, Hu
Yaobang. Xi’s father was the only senior official who spoke in his
defense. “What are you guys doing here? Don’t repeat what Mao did to
us,” he said, according to Richard Baum’s 1994 chronicle of élite
politics, “Burying Mao.” But Xi lost and was stripped of power for the
last time. He was allowed to live in comfortable obscurity until his
death, in 2002, and is remembered fondly as “a man of principle, not of
strategy,” as the editor in Beijing put it to me.
His
son avoided overly controversial reforms as he rose through the ranks.
“My approach is to heat a pot with a small, continuous fire, pouring in
cold water to keep it from boiling over,” he said. In 1989, a local
propaganda official, Kang Yanping, submitted a proposal for a TV
miniseries promoting political reform, but Xi replied with skepticism.
According to “China’s Future,” he asked, “Is there a source for the
opinion? Is it a reasonable point?” The show, which Xi predicted would
leave people “discouraged,” was not produced. He also paid special
attention to cultivating local military units; he upgraded equipment,
raised subsidies for soldiers’ living expenses, and found jobs for
retiring officers. He liked to say, “To meet the Army’s needs, nothing
is excessive.”
Xi prosecuted
corruption at some moments and ignored it at others. A Chinese executive
told the U.S. Embassy in Beijing that Xi was considered “Mr. Clean” for
turning down a bribe, and yet, for the many years that Xi worked in
Fujian, the Yuanhua Group, one of China’s largest corrupt enterprises,
continued smuggling billions of dollars’ worth of oil, cars, cigarettes,
and appliances into China, with the help of the Fujian military and
police. Xi also found a way to live with Chen Kai, a local tycoon who
ran casinos and brothels in the center of town, protected by the police
chief. Later, Chen was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death, and
fifty government officials were prosecuted for accepting bribes from
him. Xi was never linked to the cases, but they left a stain on his
tenure. “Sometimes I have posted colleagues wrongly,” he said in 2000.
“Some were posted wrongly because I thought they were better than they
actually were, others because I thought they were worse than they
actually were.”
Xi
proved adept at navigating internal feuds and alliances. After he took
over the economically vibrant province of Zhejiang, in 2002, he created
policies intended to promote private businesses. He encouraged taxi
services to buy from Geely, the car company that later bought Volvo. He
soothed conservatives, in part by reciting socialist incantations. “The
private economy has become an exotic flower in the garden of socialism
with Chinese characteristics,” he declared. In 2007, he encountered a
prime opportunity to show his political skills: a corruption scandal in
Shanghai was implicating associates of Jiang Zemin, the powerful former
President, who served from 1989 to 2002. Xi was sent to Shanghai to take
over. He projected toughness to the public without alienating Jiang. He
rejected the villa that had been arranged for him, announcing that it
would be better used as a retirement home for veteran comrades.
His
timing was fortunate: a few months later, senior Party officials were
choosing the next generation of top leaders. Xi was expected to lose to
Li Keqiang, a comrade who had no revolutionary family pedigree, and had
postgraduate degrees in law and economics from Peking University. Since
2002, the highest ranks of Chinese politics had been dominated by men
who elbowed their way in on the basis of academic or technocratic merit.
President Hu’s father ran a tea shop, and the Premier, Wen Jiabao, was
the son of a teacher, but Chen Yun, the late economic czar, had advised
his peers that born reds, now known as “second-generation reds,” or
princelings, would make more reliable stewards of the Party’s future.
One princeling told a Western diplomat, “The feeling among us is: ‘Hu
Jintao, Wen Jiabao, your fathers were selling shoelaces while our
fathers were dying for this revolution.’ ” In private, some princelings
referred to the President and the Premier as huoji—“hired
hands.” In October, 2007, Xi was unveiled as the likely heir apparent.
It was not entirely a compliment. “Party leaders prefer weak successors,
so they can rule behind the scenes,” Ho Pin, the founder of Mingjing
News, an overseas Chinese site, said. Xi’s rise had been so abrupt, in
the eyes of the general public, that people joked, “Who is Xi Jinping?
He’s Peng Liyuan’s husband.”
Xi was tested by a
pageant of dysfunction that erupted in the run-up to his début as
General Secretary, in 2012. In February, Wang Lijun, a former police
chief, tried to defect to the U.S. and accused the family of his former
patron, Bo Xilai, the Party secretary of Chongqing, of murder and
embezzlement. Party leaders feared that Bo might protect himself with
the security services at his command, disrupt the transition of power,
and tear the Party apart. In September, Ling Jihua, the chief of staff
of the outgoing President, was abruptly demoted, and he was later
accused of trying to cover up the death of his son, who had crashed a
black Ferrari while accompanied by two women.
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Xi Jinping is married to Peng Liyuan, the syrup-voiced megastar/
www.dailymail |
Beset
by crises, Xi suddenly disappeared. On September 4, 2012, he cancelled a
meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and visits with other
dignitaries. As the days passed, lurid rumors emerged, ranging from a
grave illness to an assassination attempt. When he reappeared, on
September 19th, he told American officials that he had injured his back.
Analysts of Chinese politics still raise the subject of Xi’s
disappearance in the belief that a fuller explanation of why he vanished
might illuminate the depth, or fragility, of his support. In dozens of
conversations this winter, scholars, officials, journalists, and
executives told me that they suspect he did have a health problem, and
also reasons to exploit it. They speculate that Xi, in effect, went on
strike; he wanted to install key allies, and remove opponents, before
taking power, but Party elders ordered him to wait. A former
intelligence official told me, “Xi basically says, ‘O.K., fuck you,
let’s see you find someone else for this job. I’m going to disappear for
two weeks and miss the Secretary of State.’ And that’s what he did. It
caused a stir, and they went running and said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa.’ ” The
handoff went ahead as planned. On November 15, 2012, Xi became General
Secretary.
Xi
headed a Politburo Standing Committee of seven men: four were
considered princelings by birth or marriage, a larger ratio than in any
Politburo in the history of the People’s Republic. Western politicians
often note that Xi has the habits of a retail pol: comfort on the rope
line, gentle questions for every visitor, homey anecdotes. On a trip to
Los Angeles, he told students that he likes to swim, read, and watch
sports on television, but rarely has time. “To borrow a title from an
American film, it’s like ‘Mission: Impossible,’ ” he said. But Chinese
observers tend to mention something else: his guizuqi, or “air
of nobility.” It can come off as a reassuring link to the past or, at
times, as a distance from his peers. In a meeting at the Great Hall of
the People last year, Party officials were chatting and glad-handing
during a lengthy break, but Xi never budged. “It went on for hours, and
he sat there, staring straight ahead,” a foreign attendee told me. “He
never wandered down from the podium to say, ‘How’s it going in
Ningxia?’ ”
Xi believed that there was a grave
threat to China from within. According to U.S. diplomats, Xi’s friend
the professor described Xi as “repulsed by the all-encompassing
commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveaux
riches, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect,
and such ‘moral evils’ as drugs and prostitution.” If he ever became
China’s top leader, the professor had predicted, “he would likely
aggressively attempt to address these evils, perhaps at the expense of
the new moneyed class.” Though princelings and their siblings had
profited comfortably from China’s rise (Xi’s sister Qi Qiaoqiao is
reported to have large corporate and real-estate assets), the
revolutionary families considered their gains appropriate, and they
blamed the hired hands for allowing corruption and extravagance, which
stirred up public rage and threatened the Party’s future.
The first step to a solution was to reëstablish control. The
“collective Presidency,” which spread power across the Standing
Committee, had constrained Hu Jintao so thoroughly that he was nicknamed
the Woman with Bound Feet. Xi surrounded himself with a shadow cabinet
that was defined less by a single ideology than by school ties and
political reliability. Members included Liu He, a childhood playmate who
had become a reform-minded economist, and Liu Yuan, a hawkish general
and the son of former President Liu Shaoqi. The most important was Wang
Qishan, a friend for decades, who was placed in charge of the Central
Commission on Discipline and Inspection, the agency that launched the
vast anticorruption campaign.
The
Party had long cultivated an image of virtuous unanimity. But, during
the next two years, Wang’s investigators, who were granted broad powers
to detain and interrogate, attacked agencies that might counter Xi’s
authority, accusing them of conspiracies and abuses. They brought
corruption charges against officials at the state-planning and
state-assets commissions, which protect the privileges of large
government-run monopolies. They arrested China’s security chief, Zhou
Yongkang, a former oil baron with the jowls of an Easter Island statue,
who had built the police and military into a personal kingdom that
received more funding each year for domestic spying and policing than it
did for foreign defense. They reached into the ranks of the military,
where flamboyant corruption was not only upsetting the
public—pedestrians had learned to watch out for luxury sedans with
military license plates, which careered around Beijing with impunity—but
also undermining China’s national defense. When police searched homes
belonging to the family of Lieutenant General Gu Junshan, a senior
logistics chief, they removed four truckloads of wine, art, cash, and
other luxuries. According to a diplomat in Beijing, Gu’s furnishings
included a gold replica of China’s first aircraft carrier. “When
questioned about it, he said it was a sign of patriotism,” the diplomat
said.
By the end of 2014, the Party had
announced the punishment of more than a hundred thousand officials on
corruption charges. Many foreign observers asked if Xi’s crusade was
truly intended to stamp out corruption or if it was a tool to attack his
enemies. It was not simply one or the other: corruption had become so
threatening to the Party’s legitimacy that only the most isolated leader
could have avoided forcing it back to a more manageable level, but
railing against corruption was also a proven instrument for political
consolidation, and at the highest levels Xi has deployed it largely
against his opponents. Geremie Barme, the historian who heads the
Australian Centre on China in the World, analyzed the forty-eight most
high-profile arrests, and discovered that none of them were
second-generation reds. “I don’t call it an anticorruption campaign,” a
Western diplomat told me. “This is grinding trench warfare.”
Shortly
after taking over, Xi asked, “Why did the Soviet Communist Party
collapse?” and declared, “It’s a profound lesson for us.” Chinese
scholars had studied that puzzle from dozens of angles, but Xi wanted
more. “In 2009, he commissioned a long study of the Soviet Union from
somebody who works in the policy-research office,” the diplomat in
Beijing told me. “It concluded that the rot started under Brezhnev. In
the paper, the guy cited a joke: Brezhnev brings his mother to Moscow.
He proudly shows her the state apartments at the Kremlin, his Zil
limousine, and the life of luxury he now lives. ‘Well, what do you
think, Mama,’ says Brezhnev. ‘You’ll never have to worry about a thing,
ever again.’ ‘I’m so proud of you, Leonid Ilyich,’ says Mama, ‘but what
happens if the Communists find out?’ Xi loved the story.” Xi reserved
special scorn for Gorbachev, for failing to defend the Party against its
opponents, and told his colleagues, “Nobody was man enough to stand up
and resist.”
The year after Xi took office,
cadres were required to watch a six-part documentary on the Soviet
Union’s collapse, which showed violent scenes of unrest and described an
American conspiracy to topple Communism through “peaceful evolution”:
the steady infiltration of subversive Western political ideas. Ever
since the early aughts, when “color revolutions” erupted in the former
Soviet bloc, Chinese Communists have cited the risk of contagion as a
reason to constrict political life. That fear was heightened by a surge
of unrest in Tibet in 2008, in Xinjiang in 2009, and across the Arab
world in 2011. Last September, when pro-democracy protests erupted in
Hong Kong, an opinion piece in the Global Times, a state-run
daily, accused the National Endowment for Democracy and the C.I.A. of
being “black hands” behind the unrest, intent on “stimulating Taiwanese
independence, Xinjiang independence, and Tibetan independence.” (The
U.S. denied involvement.)
Xi’s government has no
place for loyal opposition. When he launched the anticorruption
campaign, activists—such as the lawyer Xu Zhiyong, who had served as a
local legislator in Beijing—joined in, calling on officials to disclose
their incomes. But Xu and many others were arrested. (He was later
sentenced to four years in prison for “gathering crowds to disrupt
public order.”) One of Xu’s former colleagues, Teng Biao, told me, “For
the government, ‘peaceful evolution’ was not just a slogan. It was real.
The influence of Western states was becoming more obvious and more
powerful.” Teng was at a conference in Germany soon after Xu and another
colleague were arrested. “People advised me not to return to China, or
I’d be arrested, too,” Teng said. He is now a visiting scholar at
Harvard Law School.
A prominent editor in Beijing
told me that Chinese philanthropists have been warned, “You can’t give
money to this N.G.O. or that N.G.O.—basically all N.G.O.s.” In December,
the Committee to Protect Journalists counted forty-four reporters in
Chinese jails, more than in any other country. Well-known human-rights
lawyers—Pu Zhiqiang, Ding Jiaxi, Xia Lin—have been jailed. Earlier this
month, Human Rights Watch called this the harshest suppression of
dissent in a decade.
Although Vladimir Putin has
suffocated Russian civil society and neutered the press, Moscow stores
still carry books that are critical of him, and a few long-suffering
blogs still find ways to attack him. Xi is less tolerant. In February,
2014, Yiu Mantin, a seventy-nine-year-old editor at Hong Kong’s Morning
Bell Press, who had planned to release a biography critical of Xi, by
the exiled writer Yu Jie, was arrested during a visit to the mainland.
He had received a phone call warning him not to proceed with
publication. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, on charges of
smuggling seven cans of paint.
For
years, Chinese intellectuals distinguished between words and actions:
Western political ideas could be discussed in China as long as nobody
tried to enact them. In 2011, China’s education minister, Yuan Guiren,
extolled the benefits of exchanges with foreign countries. “Whether
they’re rich or poor, socialist or capitalist, as long as they’re
beneficial to our development we can learn from all of them,” he told
the Jinghua Times, a state newspaper. But in January Yuan told a
conference, “Young teachers and students are key targets of
infiltration by enemy forces.” He said, “We must, by no means, allow
into our classrooms material that propagates Western values.” An article
on the Web site of Seeking Truth, an official Party journal,
warned against professors who “blacken China’s name,” and it singled out
the law professor He Weifang by name. When I spoke to He, a few days
later, he said, “I’ve always been unpopular with conservatives, but
recently the situation has become more serious. The political standpoint
of this new slate of leaders isn’t like that of the Hu or Jiang era.
They’re more restraining. They’re not as willing to permit an active
discussion.”
Sealing
China off from Western ideas poses some practical problems. The Party
has announced “rule of law” reforms intended to strengthen top-down
control over the legal system and shield courts from local interference.
The professor said, “Many colleagues working on civil law and that sort
of thing have a large portion of their lectures about German law or
French law. So, if you want to stop Western values from spreading in
Chinese universities, one thing you’d have to do is close down the law
schools and make sure they never exist again.” Xi, for his part, sees no
contradiction, because preservation of the Party comes before
preservation of the law. In January, he said that China must “nurture a
legal corps loyal to the Party, loyal to the country, loyal to the
people, and loyal to the law.” Echoing Mao, he added, “Insure that the
handle of the knife is firmly in the hand of the Party and the people.”
Xi’s
wariness of Western influence is reflected in his foreign policy. On a
personal level, he expresses warm memories of Iowa, and he sent his
daughter, Xi Mingze, to Harvard. (She graduated last year, under a
pseudonym, and has returned to China.) But Xi has also expressed an
essentialist view of national characteristics such that, in his telling,
China’s history and social makeup render it unfit for multiparty
democracy or a monarchy or any other non-Communist system. “We
considered them, tried them, but none worked,” he told an audience at
the College of Europe, in Bruges, last spring. Adopting an alternative,
he said, “might even lead to catastrophic consequences.” On his watch,
state-run media have accentuated the threat of “peaceful evolution,” and
have accused American companies, including Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel,
of being “warriors” for the U.S. government.
As
for a broad diplomatic vision, Chinese leaders since Deng Xiaoping have
adhered to a principle known as “Hide your strength, bide your time.”
Xi has effectively replaced that concept with declarations of China’s
arrival. In Paris last year, he invoked Napoleon’s remark that China was
“a sleeping lion,” and said that the lion “has already awakened, but
this is a peaceful, pleasant, and civilized lion.” He told the Politburo
in December that he intends to “make China’s voice heard, and inject
more Chinese elements into international rules.” As alternatives to the
Washington-based World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Xi’s
government has established the New Development Bank, the Silk Road
infrastructure fund, and the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, which,
together, intend to amass two hundred and forty billion dollars in
capital. Xi has been far bolder than his predecessors in asserting
Chinese control over airspace and land, sending an oil rig into
contested waters, and erecting buildings, helipads, and other facilities
on reefs that are claimed by multiple nations. He has also taken
advantage of Putin’s growing economic isolation; Xi has met with Putin
more than with any other foreign leader, and, last May, as Russia faced
new sanctions over the annexation of Crimea, Xi and Putin agreed on a
four-hundred-billion-dollar deal to supply gas to China at rates that
favor Beijing. According to the prominent editor, Xi has told people
that he was impressed by Putin’s seizure of Crimea—“He got a large piece
of land and resources” and boosted his poll numbers at home. But, as
war in Ukraine has dragged on, Xi has become less complimentary of
Putin.
No diplomatic relationship matters more
to China’s future than its dealings with the United States, and Xi has
urged the U.S. to adopt a “new type of great-power relationship”—to
regard China as an equal and to acknowledge its claims to contested
islands and other interests. (The Obama Administration has declined to
adopt the phrase.) Xi and Obama have met, at length, five times.
American officials describe the relationship as occasionally candid but
not close. They have “brutally frank exchanges on difficult issues, and
it doesn’t upset the apple cart,” a senior Administration official told
me. “So it’s different from the era of Hu Jintao, where there was very
little exchange.” Hu almost never departed from his notes, and American
counterparts wondered how much he believed his talking points. “Xi is
reading what I’m confident Xi believes,” the official said, though their
engagements remain stilted: “There’s still a cadence that is very
difficult to extract yourself from in these exchanges. . . . We want to
have a conversation.”
For
years, American military leaders worried that there was a growing risk
of an accidental clash between China and the U.S., in part because
Beijing protested U.S. policies by declining meetings between senior
commanders. In 2011, Mike Mullen, then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs,
visited Xi in Beijing, and appealed to his military experience, telling
him, as he recalled to me, “I just need you to stop cutting off
military relationships as step one, every time you get ticked off.” That
has improved. In Beijing last November, Xi and Obama spent five hours
at dinner and meetings and announced coöperation on climate change, a
high-tech free-trade deal that China had previously resisted, and two
military agreements to encourage communication between forces operating
near each other in the South China and East China Seas. Mullen, who has
met Xi again since their initial encounter, is encouraged: “They still
get ticked off, they take steps, but they don’t cut it off.”
As
China ejects Western ideas, Xi is trying to fill that void with an
affirmative set of ideas to offer at home and abroad. Recently, I rode
the No. 1 subway line eastbound, beneath the Avenue of Eternal
Peace—under Party headquarters, the Central Propaganda Department, and
the Ministries of Commerce and Public Security—and got off the train at
the Second Ring Road, where the old City Wall once stood. Near the
station, at a Starbucks, I met Zhang Lifan, a well-known historian. At
sixty-four, he defies the usual rumpled stereotype of the liberal
intelligentsia; he is tall, with elegant hints of gray hair, and he wore
a black mandarin-collar jacket and a winter cap covered in smooth black
fur. Zhang grew up around politics; his father, a banker before the
revolution, served as a minister in the early years of Mao’s government.
I asked him what message Xi hoped to promote from China around the
world. He said, “Ever since Mao’s day, and the beginning of reform and
opening up, we all talk about a ‘crisis of faith,’ ” the sense that
rapid growth and political turmoil have cut China off from its moral
history. “He is trying to solve that problem, so that there can be
another new ideology.”
Zhang writes about
politics, and he is occasionally visited by police who remind him to
avoid sensitive subjects. “Sometimes, they will pass by and say it
through the closed front door,” Zhang said. He commented, “They tried to
stop me from coming today. They followed me here.” He indicated a slim
young man in a windbreaker, watching us from a nearby table. In remote
areas, where police are unaccustomed to the presence of foreigners,
authorities often try to prevent people from meeting reporters. But, in a
decade of writing about China, this was the first time I’d encountered
that situation in the capital. I suggested we postpone our discussion.
He shook his head. In a stage whisper, he said, “What I say and what I
write are the same. There’s no difference.”
The
most surprising thing about the era of Xi Jinping is the decision to
close off the margins—those minor mutinies and indulgences that used to
be tolerated as a way to avoid driving China’s most prosperous and
well-educated citizens abroad. For years, the government tacitly allowed
people to gain access to virtual private networks, or V.P.N.s, which
allow users to reach Web sites that are blocked in China. The risks
seemed manageable; most Chinese users had less interest in politics than
in reaching a celebrity’s Instagram feed (Instagram, like Facebook,
Twitter, Bloomberg, Reuters, and the Times, is blocked).
Keeping them open, the theory went, allowed sophisticated users to get
what they wanted or needed—for instance, researchers accessing Google
Scholar, or businesses doing transactions—while preventing the masses
from employing technology that worries the Party. But on January 23rd,
while I was in Beijing, the government abruptly blocked the V.P.N.s, and
state media reiterated that they were illegal. Overnight, it became
radically more difficult to reach anything on the Internet outside
China. Before the comments were shut down on the Web site Computer News,
twelve thousand people left their views. “What are you afraid of?” one
asked. “Big step toward becoming a new North Korea,” another wrote.
Another wrote: “One more advertisement for emigration.”
A
decade ago, the Chinese Internet was alive with debate, confession,
humor, and discovery. Month by month, it is becoming more sterilized and
self-contained. To the degree that China’s connection to the outside
world matters, the digital links are deteriorating. Voice-over-Internet
calls, viral videos, podcasts—the minor accessories of contemporary
digital life—are less reachable abroad than they were a year ago. It’s
an astonishing thing to observe in a rising superpower. How many
countries in 2015 have an Internet connection to the world that is worse
than it was a year ago?
The
General Secretary, in his capacity as Big Uncle Xi, has taken to
offering advice on nonpolitical matters: last fall, he lamented an
overly “sensual” trend in society. (In response, Chinese auto executives
stopped having lightly clad models lounge around vehicles at car
shows.) In January, he urged people to get more sleep, “however
enthusiastic you may be about the job,” saying that he goes to bed
before midnight. Online, people joked that it seemed implausible: since
taking office, Xi has acquired heavy bags under his eyes and a look of
near-constant irritation.
For a generation, the
Communist Party forged a political consensus built on economic growth
and legal ambiguity. Liberal activists and corrupt bureaucrats learned
to skirt (or flout) legal boundaries, because the Party objected only
intermittently. Today, Xi has indicated that consensus, beyond the Party
élite, is superfluous—or, at least, less reliable than a hard boundary
between enemies and friends.
It is difficult to
know precisely how much support Xi enjoys. Private pollsters are not
allowed to explicitly measure his public support, but Victor Yuan, the
president of Horizon Research Consultancy Group, a Beijing polling firm,
told me, “We’ve done some indirect research, and his support seems to
be around eighty per cent. It comes from two areas: one is the
anticorruption policy and the other is foreign policy. The area where
it’s unclear is the economy. People say they’ll have to wait and see.”
China’s
economy is likely to be Xi’s greatest obstacle. After economic growth
of, on average, nearly ten per cent a year, for more than three decades,
the Party expected growth to slow to a sustainable pace of around seven
per cent, but it could fall more sharply. China remains the world’s
largest manufacturer, with four trillion dollars in foreign-exchange
reserves (a sum equivalent to the world’s fourth-largest economy). In
November, 2013, the Party announced plans to reinvigorate competition by
expanding the role of private banks, allowing the market (instead of
bureaucrats) to decide where water, oil, and other precious resources
are directed, and forcing state firms to give up larger dividends and
compete with private businesses. Last spring, China abolished
registered-capital and other requirements for new companies, and in
November it allowed foreign investors to trade shares directly on the
Shanghai stock market for the first time. “A fair judgment is that Xi’s
government has achieved more progress, in more areas, in the past
eighteen months than the Hu government did in its entire second term,”
Arthur Kroeber, a longtime Beijing-based economist at Gavekal
Dragonomics, a research firm, told me. And yet, Kroeber added, “my
confidence level is only slightly above fifty per cent” that the reforms
will be enough to head off a recession.
The risks to China’s economy have rarely been more visible. The
workforce is aging more quickly than in other countries (because of the
one-child policy), and businesses are borrowing money more rapidly than
they are earning it. David Kelly, a co-founder of China Policy, a
Beijing-based research and advisory firm, said, “The turning point in
the economy really was about four, five years ago, and now you see the
classical problem of the declining productivity of capital. For every
dollar you invest, you’re getting far less bang for your buck.” The
growth of demand for energy and raw materials has slowed, more houses
and malls are empty, and nervous Chinese savers are sending money
overseas, to protect it in the event of a crisis. Some factories have
not paid wages, and in the last quarter of 2014 workers held strikes, or
other forms of protest, at three times the rate of the same period a
year earlier.
Xi’s ability to avoid an economic
crisis depends partly on whether he has the political strength to
prevail over state firms, local governments, and other powerful
interests. In his meetings with Rudd, the former Australian Prime
Minister, Xi mentioned his father’s frustrated attempts to achieve
market-oriented reforms. “Xi Jinping is legitimately proud of his
father,” Rudd said, adding, “His father had a record of real achievement
and was, frankly, a person who paid a huge political and personal price
for being a dedicated Party man and a dedicated economic reformer.”
Historically,
the Party has never perceived a contradiction between political
crackdown and economic reform. In 2005, Premier Wen Jiabao met with a
delegation from the U.S. Congress, and one member, citing a professor
who had recently been fired for political reasons, asked the Premier
why. Wen was baffled by the inquiry; the professor was a “small
problem,” he said. “I don’t know the person you spoke of, but as Premier
I have 1.3 billion people on my mind.”
To
maintain economic growth, China is straining to promote innovation, but
by enforcing a political chill on Chinese campuses Xi risks suppressing
precisely the disruptive thinking that the country needs for the
future. At times, politics prevails over rational calculations. In 2014,
after China had spent years investing in science and technology, the
share of its economy devoted to research and development surpassed
Europe’s. But, when the government announced the recipients of grants
for social-science research, seven of the top ten projects were
dedicated to analyzing Xi’s speeches (officially known as “General
Secretary Xi’s Series of Important Speeches”) or his signature slogan:
the Chinese Dream.
The era of
Xi Jinping has defied the assumption that China’s fitful opening to the
world is too critical and productive to stall. The Party today perceives
an array of threats that, in the view of He Weifang, the law professor,
will only increase in the years ahead. Before the Web, the professor
said, “there really weren’t very many people who were able to access
information from outside, so in Deng Xiaoping’s era the Party could
afford to be a lot more open.” But now, if the Internet were
unrestricted, “I believe it would bring in things that the leaders would
consider very dangerous.”
Like many others I
met this winter, He Weifang worries that the Party is narrowing the
range of acceptable adaptation to the point that it risks uncontrollable
change. I asked him what he thinks the Party will be like in ten or
fifteen years. “I think, as intellectuals, we must do everything we can
to promote a peaceful transformation of the Party—to encourage it to
become a ‘leftist party’ in the European sense, a kind of
social-democratic party.” That, he said, would help its members better
respect a true system of law and political competition, including
freedom of the press and freedom of thought. “If they refuse even these
basic changes, then I believe China will undergo another revolution.”
It
is a dramatic prediction—and an oddly commonplace one these days. Zhang
Lifan, the historian I saw at Starbucks, said, in full view of his
minder, “In front of a lot of princeling friends, I’ve said that, if the
Communist Party can’t take sufficient political reform in five or ten
years, it could miss the chance entirely. As scholars, we always say
it’s better to have reform than revolution, but in Chinese history this
cycle repeats itself. Mao said we have to get rid of the cycle, but
right now we’re still in it. This is very worrying.”
Two
months after the events of New Year’s Eve, the Party again confronted a
collision between its instinct for control and the complexity of
Chinese society. For years, the government had downplayed the severity
of environmental pollution, describing it as an unavoidable cost of
growth. But, year by year, the middle class was becoming less
accommodating; in polls, urban citizens described pollution as their
leading concern, and, using smartphones, they compared daily pollution
levels to the standards set by the World Health Organization. After a
surge of smog in 2013, the government intensified efforts to consolidate
power plants, close small polluters, and tighten state control. Last
year, it declared a “war against pollution,” but conceded that Beijing
will not likely achieve healthy air before 2030. In a moment of candor,
the mayor pronounced the city “unlivable.”
In
February, Chinese video sites posted a privately funded documentary,
titled “Under the Dome,” in which Chai Jing, a former state-television
reporter, described her growing alarm at the risks that air pollution
poses to her infant daughter. It was a sophisticated production: Chai,
in fashionable faded jeans and a white blouse, delivered a fast-paced, TED-style
talk to a rapt studio audience, unspooling grim statistics and scenes
in which bureaucrats admitted that powerful companies and agencies had
rendered them incapable of protecting public health. In spirit, the film
was consistent with the official “war on corruption,” and state-run
media responded with a coördinated array of flattering coverage.
The
film raced across social media, and by the end of the first week it had
been viewed two hundred million times—a level usually reserved for
pop-music videos rather than dense, two-hour documentaries. The
following weekend, the authorities ordered video sites to withdraw the
film, and news organizations took down their coverage. As quickly as it
had appeared, the film vanished from the Chinese Web—a phenomenon
undone.
In
the era of Xi Jinping, the public had proved, again, to be an
unpredictable partner. It was a lesson that Xi absorbed long ago. “The
people elevated me to this position so that I’d listen to them and
benefit them,” he said in 2000. “But, in the face of all these opinions
and comments, I had to learn to enjoy having my errors pointed out to
me, but not to be swayed too much by that. Just because so-and-so says
something, I’m not going to start weighing every cost and benefit. I’m
not going to lose my appetite over it.” ♦
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