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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
'Kerry Brown's Xi is the perfect primer for understanding Xi Jinping's status as China's greatest ruler since Mao and as this century's least assailable statesman' John Keay, author of China: A History 'A valuable primer for anyone looking to get up to speed on Xi Jinping's rise to global power' Jeff Wasserstrom, Guardian 'Offers a nuanced and thorough explanation of Xi's China and why the Communist Party, for all its flaws, has long life in it' Oliver Farry, Irish Times Although Xi Jinping came to power a decade ago, he remains an enigmatic figure in the West. His priority has always been to keep Chinese society as stable as possible, steering a course through a period of astounding economic growth, while ensuring that nothing challenges the political status quo. But with unrest stirring in Hong Kong, reports of human rights abuses taking place in the Xinjiang region and, devastatingly, the outbreak of a virus that would change the world, suddenly understanding Xi's China is more important than ever before. In this short and timely book, academic and author Kerry Brown examines the complexities behind the man, explaining the impact that his rule is already having on the West. But who is Xi really, and what is his vision for China's future? And, crucially, what does that mean for the rest of the world?
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To Andrew Beale, my first teacher of Chinese, who lives with the consequences every day.
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Contents
Preface
Imagine that you stop someone on the street in Europe or the US and ask them to name the most powerful person in the world. They might say the US president, or the founders of Facebook or Amazon. The more eclectic might suggest the Pope, or the owner of a news empire, like Rupert Murdoch.
In recent years, more and more people might say the current leader of China, Xi Jinping. As recognition of this, in 2017, the Economist placed Xi directly next to the then American President Donald Trump, arguing that the former had become more powerful than the latter. Despite this, few feel they really know what sort of a person and politician Xi is, nor that they understand much about the country he leads.
People believe Xi is powerful for three main reasons. The first, and most obvious, is that the economic and military capability of the People’s Republic has come from the margins in the 1980s to being at the global forefront by the late 2010s. Barring disaster, some time before 2030, Xi’s country is expected to overtake the US and become the world’s largest economy. Proof of how much this rattled x the world’s uncontested superpower at the time was that, after years of dismissing China’s hopes of ever getting to such a position, Trump became fixated on this new great competitor. This was certainly not a comfortable place for China to occupy – but in many ways being viewed so closely and jealously by Washington was the highest form of flattery for Beijing. The fact that the world’s most powerful nation felt threatened by China showed that the nation mattered. Xi’s country was no longer in the margins.
The second reason is that Xi himself seems to exemplify power. It exudes from him almost like a physical force. Since his rise to the head of the Communist Party in 2012, a body that enjoys a monopoly of organised political control in the country, he has cleared away all possible internal competition. Evidence of his desire for control is everywhere, and sometimes shocking in its detail. With the use of new technology and new messaging, and with China on the cusp of being the greatest global nation, Xi symbolises this ambition in the flesh. He speaks and acts like a leader with endless confidence. Even if this is an act, it is an effective one.
But the third reason is about the context of that power. Questioned, tested and often even humiliated in their own political environments, leaders of democracies in the West might look at Xi’s position and, perhaps, feel the slightest tinge of envy. With control of the party he leads, Xi has levers over xi the media, the military, business and practically every other part of society that other leaders could only dream of. He leads the country as a skilled conductor leads an orchestra, where the obedient players are all on message and there is no sign of dissent.
This capacity, however, was not built overnight. Xi is powerful, but much of that power is contextual. A huge amount of it derives not from him but from the political party he leads. He has also had the luck to inherit leadership of the Communist Party and the country at a time when a number of different developments have come together. Now, after decades of sacrifice and effort, is the time of feasting. Technology, the economy and the confused situation of the outside world have created a vast historic opportunity in China’s favour. The Communist Party was brought to power by Mao in 1949 and, after some disastrous adventures along the way, made stronger and sustainable by Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. All of these leaders have contributed significantly to the position that Xi is now in, and to his good fortune. Xi’s power did not come from nowhere.
What has perhaps most unsettled Western commentators is not so much China’s prominence but the way it has developed more quickly than anyone ever expected. The country has always been acknowledged by the rest of the world as being important. But half a century ago, in the 1970s, Maoist xii China was introspective, diplomatically isolated, economically undeveloped, largely rural and regarded as a place that would always struggle just to survive. Today, China looks like another country. The strongest link between these periods is the party, the entity that now has 95 million members led by Xi. It alone provides the common point between these very different eras. To work out how these two Chinas are part of the same story, showing the same ambition, one has to start with the role of the party, and understand Xi’s role within it. Xi Jinping and the Communist Party need to be seen as inseparable entities, Using unique Chinese sources, some of which have never been properly analysed in the English language before, this book attempts to do that. It also shows how extraordinary the party has been as a vehicle for Chinese modernisation and nationalism, and how formidable Xi has proved as the director of these forces.
Make no bones about it, because of the dramatic new situation China is in, Xi is possibly the one leader out of the current global heads of state that will have the greatest impact on the present and the future of the world and its development. The mere fact that he is in charge of a fifth of humanity is enough to justify this claim. But it is also merited by the fact that his country now stands on the cusp of finally achieving modernity on Chinese terms. This is a wholly new story, never seen in our times. xiii
While Xi is the symbol of these forces of national rejuvenation and ambition, we should not get carried away and start to regard him as their creator. Chinese people desire better quality of life regardless of what their current political leaders say. Part of Xi’s effectiveness has been in crafting messages and policies domestically that speak to the growing middle class and their hopes and ambitions in ways that keep them onside. Failure to see this factor clearly has been one of the key reasons why many outside China have dismissed him merely as a dictator and autocrat. He is a far more complex leader than that, even if elements of his leadership style do fall under those descriptions. The paradox of Xi Jinping is that in many ways he as an individual person does not count – rather it is the body he represents, the Communist Party of China, with its history, its sense of mission, its complete control over all organised political life in China and its view of humanity, time and social life that is important. As the leader of this body, Xi matters. Conveying his achievements and politics in ways that properly acknowledge this balance between the individual and the group they lead, and therefore have power through, is crucial.
Whatever one thinks of Xi and the system he operates in – something this book will try to explain – one thing is irrefutable. The decisions he is making and the direction his country goes in will have a massive impact on the global economy, on climate change, security and human development. Everyone xiv who cares about these things, wherever they happen to be, needs to know about Xi and have an interest in who he is, what he is doing and why. To understand our world today, it is vital to know about the leader of the world’s most influential economy, one that is deeply integrated into global supply chains that reach into our homes, one that will have a decisive impact on whether humanity is able to conquer climate change and clean up its environment and one whose leadership is shaping the most fundamental geopolitical balancing between East and West seen in modern times. For those who are interested in the affairs of the modern world, understanding Xi is crucial.
CHAPTER ONE
Xi Jinping: The Enigma of Chinese Power
Two decades ago, I was a British diplomat serving in Beijing. During an earlier stay, I had become aware of the leadership compound that lay beside the vast Forbidden City in the heart of the capital but had never managed to set foot in the place. However, during the visit of a senior British politician around the turn of the millennium, I was invited to accompany them to this hallowed place. The experience was disorientating. Driving through the chaotic and crushing traffic in the city centre, our embassy car swept into a side gate. It was as though we had disappeared into another world. Peace reigned. Beyond the security guards at the entrance, there was no one in sight. Classical buildings stood by tranquil lakes. The grass looked as though it had been cut by scissors. Everything was still, calm – the opposite of the metropolis, one of the largest 2 and most congested in the world, we had left outside. The place exuded an intangible sense of power.
In modern China, power is largely seen as something real, which certain people possess and others don’t, but which has an air of mystery about it. One of the numerous ‘givens’ for Western journalists covering Chinese elite politics over the past few decades is that those at the top of the ruling Communist Party of China have an abundance of it. There are not many of these people. The assumption is that they are laden with vast surfeits of this thing called ‘power’; they can run riot with it, annexing everything around them at their individual will. But is this really the case? Does ‘power’ have such a common currency and such consistent characteristics? Two of the finest historians of the modern country’s events, Fred Teiwes and Warren Sun, went to great lengths in their meticulous account of the final years of Mao’s rule to say that, while everyone can agree that he did have massive authority, ‘things were more complicated’.1
One source of confusion about structures of power in China is the idea that leaders today are little different from the emperors who led the country during its long imperial history until 1912. Like them, Mao, Deng and Xi are similar to modern gods, ruling with absolute authority over their subjects, enjoying an almost semi-divine status. It is questionable whether Chinese emperors did in fact have such powers. 3 The vast majority of their subjects probably spent their lives completely oblivious as to who was reigning over them. But the China that Xi Jinping lives in and rules today is not the same as the Chinas that existed before. Ironically, for all the claims about the great antiquity of Chinese history, the People’s Republic of China is not yet a hundred years old. It is a young state. Places such as the United Kingdom, France and even the United States and Australia can make claims to some sort of cohesive national narrative going back at least 150 years, and in some cases much further. Their governance structures and administrations are often much better established than those of the People’s Republic in Beijing, which only took form in 1949. While the concept of ‘China’ is, on the surface, a very ancient one – and there certainly is overlap between the geographical reach of predecessor states and the current one (particularly the expansionist Qing era, 1644–1912) – one could claim that much of the country we see today has been created since the Second World War, and in many cases even more recently. Power is moulded both by what it is directed at and what it is intended to have influence over. Like water, it changes its shape depending on what it strikes against. Xi Jinping’s powers are therefore different to those of China’s leaders prior to 1949 because the place he exerts power over did not exist then.
Even after 1949, each core leader has had bespoke styles and kinds of power, as much because of the changing economic 4 and political situation of their country, as anything to do with them personally. Mao Zedong, who ruled from 1949–76, was the great founder, a figure of God-like proportions. His successor, Deng Xiaoping, who was leader from 1978–89, was more prosaic and strategic – history will probably judge him as being much more effective than Mao in creating sustainable outcomes. After Deng’s era came Jiang Zemin, who ruled as party head from 1989 to 2002. He presented a more extrovert, oft-mocked leadership style, despite the fact that with his slippery, often buffoonish character he stabilised the country after the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising and recommitted to play a role in the global economy through finally joining the World Trade Organization in 2001. Hu Jintao, the faceless, egoless successor to Jiang, mastered the art of making China a vast factory for economic growth, quadrupling the size of its GDP over the decade he was in office from 2002 to 2012, an unrivalled achievement in modern history. After all of these leaders came Xi. He has been talked of, by no less a figure than President Obama, as the leader who has most quickly and effectively consolidated his position since the time of Mao. What links these different figures is that they worked within the Communist tradition of governance. Maybe Xi is the most powerful of them all. But this is because China has greater significance as a country now than it did in the past. It is not because Xi has some kind of magic quality. The reasons 5 for his power are very prosaic – China has more money, more technology, more military equipment than ever before, and this is in comparison to a West that is weakening. There is nothing mysterious in any of this.
Xi and his colleagues certainly see themselves as occupying a phase in a continuous project that started in 1949, one where their actions are only possible because of the achievements of their predecessors. Xi himself has made it clear that the idea of repudiating Mao will not happen, at least under his watch. For Xi, without the Chairman, there would be no China as it exists today, in pole position to achieve its dreams of modernity and to overtake the US to become the world’s largest economy within the next decade. If Xi is the most powerful leader of the country since Mao, this is because of the systems and structures, and achievements, that arose from the hard work of his predecessors. He himself doesn’t deny this. He will see the country achieve things that Mao dreamt of but could never realise – his country having a navy with more vessels than the US, one that is able to speak back as an equal to American presidents, one that has eradicated absolute poverty. This sense of belonging to a great tradition of Communist Party leadership since 1949 in China, therefore, is crucial in understanding Xi as a political figure.
Xi’s power also exists to serve a purpose. This is not about his own individual aims. It is about the great objective of the 6 Communist Party to build a strong, rich country. This transcends specific leaders, and particular eras. The Communist Party is an atheist organisation. But that doesn’t mean it has no faith. Belief in the almost semi-mystical entity of ‘China’ with its spiritual import, its cultural richness and human vastness is the great overarching creed that has prevailed since 1949, and it has roots that extend far further back than this. Making this China powerful, strong and central in world affairs once more, as it had been in the distant past, is the key mission. Xi is a servant of that greater mission, almost in the same way the Pope leads the Catholic Church in its mission to deliver humanity to the Kingdom of Heaven. The main difference is that for Xi’s faith, that kingdom will be found on this earth. Of all the sources of Xi’s power, this one is the most potent.
The nature of the leadership he practises needs to be interpreted as serving these larger, longer-term aims related to faith in the great nation. If we want to describe Xi as an autocrat, it is because he is serving autocratic aims. There must be total fidelity to the great cause of making China great again. This is a jealous objective, and one that does not permit any vagueness nor any lack of commitment. Xi’s leadership style can be seen as almost designed to recognise this. The autocratic cause creates the leadership style, not the other way around. This is a crucial issue, if one truly wants to understand what is happening in China today. 7
On more mundane levels, Xi’s powers also need to be seen as circumscribed and limited. The Communist Party of China does not merely have a strong guiding, nationalist faith, but also a strong identity and ethos. Most of this was created long before Xi even became a member in 1974. To succeed in it at any level means adhering to this pre-determined set of rules and customs. You become as the party wants you, rather than you making the party become like you. As scholar Zheng Yongnian pointed out, contemporary China does indeed have an emperor – but it is in the form of the organisation of the Communist Party, rather than a human individual.2
In terms of the context of Xi’s power, and how one can compare him to predecessors like Mao, we have to recognise that the country that he rules over today has radically transformed from the one that existed only four decades ago. Socially, culturally, economically and in its physical appearance, it is almost a different country. Change itself is the great constant of modern China – change in terms of how people live, what work they do and how fast this change has occurred. The sole constant is the fact that the Communist Party has continued to have a monopoly on power. Beyond that, everything else seems to have been remodelled.
Even an outsider like myself can testify to this. In the mid-1990s I lived in a fairly typical provincial city in China for two years. It had no high-rise buildings, was served by 8 often pockmarked roads and its central area was dominated by a charming, chaotic and ramshackle old city where temples nestled beside shops, merchants’ houses and tombstone sellers. Returning to this place in the early 2000s after a few years’ absence, I was wholly unable to find my way around. Literally nothing remained to orientate me. A vast, shiny new airport had been built, as had a new museum about ten times the size of the old one, with huge halls displaying dinosaurs, furnished with interactive, hi-tech teaching aids. New civic buildings dominated one part of the city. There were skyscrapers everywhere, glittering in the sun. The roads were pristine, with glitzy, expensive imported cars driving along them. Only after much searching could I find at least one of the old temples, turning the corner of a huge new boulevard running south through where the old city once was. There it stood, almost stranded in a sea of change, its doors and courtyard recognisable. I found this strangely moving and reassuring. But after gazing at it for a while, I realised that even this place had experienced an extensive makeover.
This is not a unique incidence. Change has infected every part of China. It means that the kinds of tasks and the sorts of objectives the leadership – by which I mean the institution rather than specific personalities – must fulfil have also changed. And yet, as we will see, a choice has been made by Xi and those around him, deep in the party, to maintain this 9 almost old-fashioned, highly unified leadership model. It is as though the Communist Party were like that former temple I recognised in among the sea of change the day I revisited my old home – a focal point to orientate and reassure people that they have not strayed on to a totally different planet. In a country undergoing this extent of transformation, and with the impact of all its technological advances, the commitment to a single, authoritative centralising figure has remained the default. In Xi’s China, the party is not back to the future, but back to the past. In every other aspect of Chinese life, the reverse is true, with things becoming more complex, diverse and renewed by the day. To opt for a leadership like this has a simple logic: in a world where everything else is pervaded by change, transformation and transition, the party and the party alone is the great bastion of stability and permanence. To coin a phrase, in the kingdom of change, the changeless one is King!
How deliberate a construct is the Xi political persona, bearing in mind the context of leadership customs and the party’s custodianship of a strong, enduring identity and ethos? Acknowledging this is not to the denigration of Xi’s individual political skills; far from it. In February 2018, James Fallows wrote in the Atlantic that Xi is an autocrat, not a reformer; but while much of the Western world seems to be consumed by fears that they are seeing the rise of yet another terrifying Asian dictator, there is little recognition that when dealing with 10 a potential opponent, a good place to start is by recognising their strengths.3 At a dinner in London some years back, an American sitting next to me airily declared that, of course, ‘Xi Jinping is evil.’ It was hard to work out what they meant by that, beyond seeking an easy way to consign him to a pigeonhole from which he could be easily dismissed. Xi’s political convictions might be considered problematic, along with the policies his government has implemented that have affected minorities, such as the population in Xinjiang. These are often profoundly concerning and hard to understand. But merely dismissing Xi Jinping’s success as a leader means one is not seeing him clearly enough to fully engage with the challenges he and his country pose. Xi is a problem for the world not because he is some old-style Communist dictator playing by the rule book of Stalin and Mao, but because he is an effective leader of a modernised economy, a modernising military and a powerful, modern state. Dismissing him with a lazy label helps no one.
That he has succeeded in a political system which is deeply disliked by many in the West, means that, in today’s world, even a bald statement asserting that Xi is a hugely effective and talented leader is likely to bring massive opprobrium upon the head of whoever makes such an assessment. At a time of deep divisions between left and right in America, hard attitudes and policies towards China are one of the few things that unites both sides. Republican Mario Rubio in the US has called 11 China a ‘genocidal regime’,4 while in the same year, President Joe Biden said that the country is a ‘threat to democratic way of life’.5 In Europe, too, the country has moved from being seen as a partner to a ‘systemic rival’ – a phrase used by the European Union in 2019.6 There are even darker and murkier issues of potential xenophobia about Western uneasiness towards such a culturally different power becoming predominant for the first time in modern history. As Covid-19 spread across the world from China in 2020, the lamentable incidences of people of Chinese heritage being abused and attacked in the UK, US and Australia increased rapidly.7 The combination of these attitudes created an often toxic brew. It also raises uncomfortable questions about how much the response to China’s new prominence is about the country itself, and how much is about the already existing fears, prejudices and obsessions of those observing and witnessing this new power.
In this chaotic and confusing situation, we can see evidence of Xi’s political skills – things he did well regardless of our views of the system he works in. He managed to emerge from the messy transition period between him and his predecessor Hu Jintao with enough space around him to build what he wanted. Unlike Hu, whose stint in power was reportedly blighted by the persistent interference of the man he had succeeded, Jiang Zemin, Xi seemed to have his hands on all the levers of power from the word go. He was head of the party 12 and the military from November 2012 and became president in March 2013 – things Hu had to wait a year or two for in the succession a decade before. He has had an obedient and capable group of colleagues around him, people such as Li Keqiang and the formidable Wang Qishan, who have offered no distraction from the leadership persona that he wanted to construct. The former had no power base of his own, while the latter was already too old to pose much of a long-term threat. By focussing on anti-corruption and building up rule by law to protect commercial rights while ceding no ground to political opponents, Xi was able to discipline the greatest threat to him – contenders in the party and its high-level leadership who felt they, not Xi, should have the top spot. Most importantly, with concepts like the ‘China Dream’, an idea issued by the party in 2012 to refer to the vision of the country being powerful and rich in the next decade, and Xi’s key foreign policy idea, the Belt and Road Initiative (all of which will be explained in more detail later), he has been able to craft a narrative that grants meaning and purpose to the context of his leadership and explains how it serves in delivering the great overarching political vision described above – the creation of a powerful, great China. The country now has vast wealth and a new capacity, accrued since the time of Deng Xiaopeng in the 1980s. It has the economic capital to be able to take decisive action today. These financial gains were not for their own sake, but 13 for something more. Xi may well be the lucky man who found himself in the right place at the right time, when the country not only has a nationalist vision, but also has the means to make this a reality as never before.
No matter where a politician works, or which environment they are in, making the most of good fortune and opportunities is a key ability. Just like a football player on a pitch who has the chance at a shot at goal, the difference between a good player and a great one is how many of these opportunities are converted to goals. Xi is well known as a keen football fan. Despite the terrible record of the Chinese national football team, at one point in 2011, immediately before coming to power, he spoke of the three Chinese dreams: for the country to compete once again in the World Cup finals (its only other participation took place in 2002), to host the World Cup and to be World Cup winners.8 He has shown that, like the football stars he so admires, and successful politicians everywhere, he knows how to use that luck. He is a supreme opportunist, a convertor of chances into goals. What differentiates him from other contemporary national leaders is the sheer scale of the opportunity he has been given.
Xi has had his fair share of luck since 2012. There were a few years when it seemed that everything was going his way. The world was distracted by turmoil in the Middle East and Russia’s annexation of the Crimea. The US was being consumed by culture wars between left and right, which 14 culminated in the brutal 2016 presidential campaign that pitted Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton. Europe was in a seemingly perpetual crisis as it fought first with the fallout of the 2009 Eurozone crisis and then the rise of populist political parties in countries such as Italy, France and Germany. The terrorist group ISIS was looming as the biggest security threat since 9/11. But in 2015, when the central Chinese government fumbled the response to a collapse in the Shanghai Stock Exchange, impoverishing the all-important middle class who were the main holders of accounts in the country, it seemed that Xi’s luck was starting to run out. The 2017 election of Donald Trump to the White House and the start of his administration’s sustained pushback on China resulted in a trade war and the imposition of tariffs; and then the catastrophic Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020 proved Xi’s greatest test yet. As the pandemic took hold, the first signs did not augur well. Xi effectively disappeared in late January 2020. As journalist Jamil Anderlini put it in the Financial Times, the pandemic was China’s Chernobyl, the mismanagement of which in the mid-1980s by the government of the Soviet Union presaged the country’s demise. In February 2020, the Wall Street Journal published an article declaring that China was ‘the sick person of Asia’ because of the woes facing it.*
15And then the pandemic spread throughout the rest of the world. It was no longer a rerun of the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak of almost two decades earlier that had been restricted to Asia. By April, countries in Europe, America, Australia and elsewhere were starting to become overwhelmed by infections. Around the same time that China, after strict lockdowns and social controls, managed to get on top of the spread of the infection, other nations began to buckle under the strain. Impositions of orders to restrict the free movement of people and shut down society meant that much of the world started to look just as China had. The one difference was that other nations, with their delayed lockdowns, hesitancy to enforce the use of face masks and fierce internal arguments between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, appeared to be far more incompetent. As transmission rates soared, and deaths tragically rose, China itself became more like an oasis of calm. Residents in the city of Wuhan, where the crisis had started, may initially have been furious at their own leaders. But this frustration was soon replaced by bewildered gratitude, as they saw a US president downplay the disease and then promptly contract it, before trying to prove he was healthy by emerging from hospital while still infectious, to parade up and down in a car to small crowds. The chaos didn’t end there. The British prime minister who had told the public the disease was nothing to worry about, and shaken hands with 16 Covid-19 patients in a hospital, was himself hospitalised by the disease. Compared to this, Chinese leaders seemed the acme of prudence and competence.
