Xi Jinping's wife Peng Liyuan, a popular folk singer nine years his junior, was much more famous than he was when they met recently. 1986 Photo: THOMAS PETER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Party insiders describe Xi Jinping as a micromanager. His micromanaging style has fed up many bureaucrats — and despite promises to institutionalize governance, he exerts personal influence over how policy is made and implemented — but his disciplinarians provide a formidable check on dissent.
'When Loyalty “This is the main critical measure for officials, no one dares to say anything,” said one official. «Even if the great leader's instructions are vague and confusing as to what to do.»
The recent disappearance of two senior ministers highlights some of the clear consequences of Xi Jinping's heavy-handed leadership. In July, Qin Gang was suddenly replaced as Foreign Minister without explanation. Meanwhile, Defense Minister Li Shangfu has not been seen publicly since August, and some news reports suggest he is under investigation. Chinese officials have not officially explained what happened to them.
While details in both cases are scant, what is known is that both Qin and Li were handpicked by Xi Jinping, raising questions about the Chinese leader's judgment and ability to select honest and qualified officials to staff his administration. Their disappearances also reflect how China's «black box» policies have become even more opaque under Xi Jinping, who has concentrated decision-making within a small circle of leadership and places great emphasis on secrecy.
At the same time, Xi outwardly demonstrates the strength and atmosphere of unity of the Communist Party. While mass protests against his Covid policies in late 2022 and concerns about China's sluggish economic recovery from the pandemic indicate some erosion of public confidence, Xi remains firmly in control. His allies occupy all the important leadership positions, such as Prime Minister Li Qiang, who is a close confidant of Xi Jinping and who met Rishi Sunak last month. The party continues to urge members to uphold the authority of Xi Jinping as its “core” leader. State media are filled with hagiographic images of Xi Jinping, in which he praises China's achievements, from fighting poverty to promoting global development.
He is also seen as a firm commander of rivals — a leader who has silenced dissent and brought order to Xinjiang and Hong Kong. But the battle for hearts and minds is far from over.
Resentment simmers among Uyghurs and Hong Kong residents. Efforts to spread the Chinese language among non-Han ethnic groups have caused resentment among communities long considered by the party to be model minorities, such as the Mongolian Chinese. And saber-rattling against Taiwan has further fueled anti-Chinese sentiment and prompted the United States and other democracies to strengthen ties with Taipei. Xi Jinping's efforts to modernize the military and use force in territorial disputes have also heightened regional tensions and increased the likelihood of armed conflict.
Despite the backlash, Xi Jinping has shown no signs of giving up. By staking his legitimacy on the promise of a strong and united China, he must achieve his goal. He continues efforts to modernize the People's Liberation Army (PLA), with Chinese officials and state media frequently boasting that a modernized PLA could easily capture Taiwan — «within three days,» one official said — thanks to overwhelming superiority in troops and technology .
But the public bravado belies the caution that Chinese strategists often express privately about the prospect of forced annexation. Some say the PLA's goal for now is to keep Taiwan from declaring formal independence, a move that China would consider a casus belli.
Even by Beijing's own estimates, seizing Taiwan is no easy task. It will consist of three main stages: weakening Taiwan's defenses through aerial bombing, missile attacks and naval blockades; airborne assaults; and started battles in Taiwan itself. Each stage will be fraught with difficulties, including rough seas in the Taiwan Strait, a limited number of beaches suitable for landing, and the logistical challenges of transporting and defending a large invasion force across many miles of open water.
The exact role, What role the US might play in a direct conflict is unclear. Some analysts say Xi Jinping's military modernization appears to have shifted the balance in China's favor in the Western Pacific, with Beijing developing new weapons such as long-range missiles capable of deterring American forces.
“Ultimately, the fate of Taiwan will depend on how the US-China strategic competition plays out,” says Lee Hsi-ming, a retired Taiwanese admiral. The critical question is whether the Communist Party will use force to realize its vision of a united China, a decision that — in the current circumstances — will be made by one man.
“Beijing prefers peaceful unification and military means are the last resort, but we cannot know exactly what Xi is thinking,” Li warns. “Never say never.”
Xi Jinping's upbringing sheds some light on his approach. His father, Xi Zhongxun, a revolutionary and high-ranking official, was purged by the leadership in 1962 for allegedly leading an anti-Party clique seeking to seize power. The worst was after the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, when Xi was 13 years old. In the early years of that turbulent decade, he was imprisoned three or four times, and the Red Guards threatened to execute him, he recalled decades later.
Xi Zhongxun, pictured here in 1987, died in 2012 at the age of 88. Photo: Xinhua/Eyevine
'Because I was stubborn and unwilling to be bullied, I insulted the rebel group,” Xi told a state-run magazine in 2000. “They blamed me for everything bad; they thought I was a leader.»
It taught Xi the brutality of politics—and what it means to be in power. “People who have little contact with power, who are far from it, always see these things as mysterious and new,” he said. “But what I see is not just superficial things… I see… how people can blow hot and cold. I understand politics on a deeper level.”
His first wife, Ke Xiaoming, is the daughter of the former Chinese ambassador to the UK. But the couple separated and argued “almost every day,” according to a longtime friend, who said Xi Jinping and his wife divorced when he refused to travel to England with her. Official biographies of Xi Jinping say nothing about the marriage.
This second marriage strengthened Xi's military ties and added some glamor to his staid image. Peng Liyuan, a popular folk singer nine years his junior, was much more famous than when they met as friends in late 1986.
Peng put on military pants to test how much her partner valued appearance, but he surprised her. Instead of the usual question about her latest hits, he asked an almost academic question about how one can perform vocal music.
“I'm very sorry, I watch very little TV. What songs did you perform? — Xi asked later.
When they married in September 1987, everything went off without much fanfare. As Xi Jinping's national profile grew in the 2000s, Peng became his champion, praising him in interviews as a loving husband and loving father to their daughter and Mingze's only child. She took on a limited role in politics, becoming a member of a government advisory body and a goodwill ambassador for HIV/AIDS prevention. In elite circles, she often presented herself as the face of the family, even speaking on behalf of her husband in private conversations.
Xi Jinping rides a bicycle with a young Mingze in 2012, just months before he became president Photo: Xinhua/Eyevine
According to Xi Jinping himself, and according to those who knew him, ambition led him not to wealth, but to power. “Being involved in politics means not dreaming of wealth,” he once said.
As head of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping appointed himself head of committees that oversaw key areas including economics and finance, national security, foreign affairs, legal affairs and internet policy. He appointed close confidants and trusted associates to key positions, and weakened the position of rivals by promoting them to positions of little authority or changing their portfolios to separate them from their power base. In some cases, Xi Jinping has neutralized potential opponents by subjecting their aides and supporters to disciplinary investigations.
People familiar with the matter describe a careful and thorough process in which Xi asked trusted disciplinary inspectors to quietly prepare dossiers—often running hundreds of pages—on senior officials he wanted to undermine. Xi Jinping would also authorize investigations into officials' close associates to disrupt their political networks and neutralize any hidden threat they pose.
Even Wang Qishan, one of Xi Jinping's oldest friends and the party's anti-corruption specialist. chief from 2012 to 2017, was quite achievable. In recent years, party investigators have vetted some of Wang's associates and, in some cases, prosecuted them.
Meanwhile, access to Xi has become harder to come by. He once told foreign dignitaries that he did not have a cell phone, which meant that most people, with the exception of his closest advisers, could only contact him through carefully vetted meetings, phone calls and written statements.
When Xi Jinping first vowed to clean up the party in 2012, many officials thought he was following a well-worn playbook: pursue a short, sharp campaign to consolidate power in the name of fighting graft. But Xi Jinping unleashed a real bloodbath. In the decade since Xi took power, the party has punished more than 4.6 million people. In 2021 alone, some 627,000 people were punished for disciplinary violations — almost four times more than in 2012, the last year of Hu Jintao's rule.
Hu Jintao served as China's president for ten years, and Xi served five years as his vice president before taking office . Photo: GO CHAI HIN/AFP/Getty Images
“Corruption is a cancer of society,” he told senior officials of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) in 2013. “If corruption worsens, the party and the nation will eventually be destroyed.”
This year, Xi Jinping has continued his long-standing disciplinary crackdown, allegedly purging corrupt and negligent officials in China's medical, financial and sports industries, and even some of the very security officials tasked with enforcing party discipline.
But myth-making has been an equally important component of Xi Jinping's quest for dominance — his public image is clearly a priority.
“I have many hobbies, the biggest of which is reading. Reading has become a way of life for me,” Xi told reporters in 2013, weeks after becoming president, after checking the names of eight Russian writers, including Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, whose works he said , he read.
Two months later, Xi Jinping charmed the Greek prime minister by declaring that he had read many works of Greek philosophers as a teenager. When Xi Jinping visited France the following year, he boasted that he had read Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Sartre and more than a dozen other writers. State media have celebrated Xi Jinping as an erudite leader, publishing lists of his favorite books and exhorting citizens to emulate his love of learning.
The quick publicity campaign has caused awe among Xi Jinping's allies, who are descendants of the revolutionary leaders. and high-ranking officials are known. Many of them concluded that Xi's outlandish claims of literary prowess betrayed a deep insecurity about his lack of formal education—especially in contrast to Mao, who wrote poetry.
“Xi is an uncultured man. He was basically just a primary school student,” one prince who knew Xi for decades told me. «He's very sensitive to it.»
Few, if anyone, and perhaps even Xi himself, know how long he wants to remain in power. He also did not explain when or how he would name an heir. Xi Jinping may have a timetable in mind, but changing circumstances may force him to rethink those plans. The uncertainty keeps the party elite on edge, helping Xi maintain control and buying him time to evaluate potential successors.
Since becoming party chief in 2012, Xi Jinping has gained personal influence unseen since the days of Mao. He described himself as the party's «core» leader and greatest living theorist, guaranteeing that he would remain China's pre-eminent politician until he died or, as party insiders put it, «went to Marx.» He abolished presidential term limits and rolled back retirement rules honed by his predecessors, undoing the most important political reforms of the post-Mao era.
Xi inspects the army barracks in Hong Kong, where he maintains order — and where resentment simmers. Photo: DALE DE LA REY/AFP via Getty Images
When Xi embarked on a whirlwind tour of Italy, Monaco and France in early 2019, his hosts greeted him with ceremonial receptions and state banquets, a lavish spectacle designed to boost his image as a statesman. However, some observers were struck by his unusual gait.
Television footage showed Xi Jinping limping slightly as he inspected security and took in local sights. At a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron in Nice, Xi Jinping grabbed a chair with both hands to sit on it. The images sparked much speculation on Twitter and overseas Chinese media, with theories ranging from muscle strains to gout. Elsewhere, in private chats on social media, some Chinese scientists also gossiped about the president's health. A retired political science professor from Beijing told me: “Everyone said little, but there was a silent understanding.”
During a 2020 speech in Shenzhen that was broadcast live, Xi repeatedly coughed and stopped to take a drink, prompting state television to back away from him and show it to viewers instead — an episode that sparked further discussion online.
Like many authoritarian one-party states, China lacks clear procedures for filling unplanned vacancies in top positions. The risk is that Xi's party may be so driven by his personality that few of his potential successors will be able to effectively govern it in his absence.
Xi has promised to build a system that can overcome China's feudal past and restore it fame and secure his place among the greatest statesmen of history. But his new Communist Party began to resemble in some ways the imperial bureaucracies of the past—larger and better organized, but no less authoritarian, rigid, and plagued by succession problems.
Just like the leaders. died and their rule ended throughout Chinese antiquity, Xi Jinping may have become the only point of failure in his Chinese dream. Whether Xi Jinping's Party can hold on without its core leader may be a question that only time can answer.
An abridged excerpt from The Party of One: The Rise of Xi Jinping and the Future of China's Superpower by Chun Han Wong to be published October 24 (Little, Brown, £25); order your copy at books.telegraph.co.uk
Illustrations by Justin Metz
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