To Western eyes, Chinese President Xi Jinping may appear as the embodiment of tyrannical one-man rule, and for good reason.
Since taking leadership of the Chinese Communist Party a decade ago, he mothballed a power-sharing arrangement among party factions, transforming one of the world’s largest political organisations into a unified whole in which his words, thoughts and visage are everywhere. Speaking in 2016, he used a phrase once uttered by Mao Zedong in describing the party as China’s “east, west, south, north and center.” He may as well have been speaking of himself.
Mr. Xi now stands ready to assume an unprecedented third five-year term as supreme leader during the Communist Party Congress, which begins on Oct. 16.
His ability to amass so much unquestioned power has proved unexpected, even unwelcome, to some. It was widely assumed, with good reason, that China was too complex, too vast and too capitalist to avoid some form of political pluralism. Surely social media, a rising middle class and general modernisation would lead to that. Instead, Mr. Xi has taken China in the opposite direction, and seems able to extend his tentacles even beyond China’s borders.
But how could this have happened with such relative ease, without bloodshed? It surely cannot be just through the whim of one man.
For all the fixation on Mr. Xi, in the end his life, purpose and politics are not really about him. They are about the Communist Party. There is indeed an autocrat who rules modern China, but it is the party that Mr. Xi serves, not the man. And in a strange way, he is as much a captive of the party as everyone else.
His place in Chinese history rests on whether he can ensure that party rule endures long after his departure so that it can fulfill the party’s fundamental aim: restoring China to its ancient role as a great nation worthy of its Chinese name, “Zhongguo,” “the central country.”
This mission has been in the making ever since the depredations China suffered at the hands of Western nations in the 19th and 20th centuries, followed by the collapse of Chinese imperial rule in 1912 and Japan’s savage wartime invasion. The Communist Party picked up the pieces of a broken nation. Mr. Xi’s power derives from the party’s nationalist goal of wiping away those past shames, restoring China’s strength and control over “lost” territories like Taiwan. Revanchism may drive President Vladimir Putin of Russia, but it is the lifeblood of the Chinese Communist Party.
Mr. Xi is the son of a former elite leader, Xi Zhongxun, and learned from him at least one lesson: Keep faith in the party no matter how it treats you.
Caught up in one of the purges of the Mao era, Mr. Xi’s father was under house arrest for years, politically rehabilitated only after Mao died. During the Cultural Revolution, Maoist student militants ransacked the family’s home; one of Mr. Xi’s sisters died in the mayhem. Paraded publicly as an enemy of the people, his own mother was forced to denounce him. Mr. Xi eventually spent seven years exiled to the countryside as part of Mao’s exhortation to “learn from the peasants.”
Although hardened by the experience, Mr. Xi kept faith. A friend of his during those troubled times recalled a young man with an aura of destiny, a Communist “princeling” who regarded party leadership as his birthright and had his “eyes on the prize,” according to a classified 2009 report compiled by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Convinced that only the party could restore China’s strength, Mr. Xi was not corruptible by material gain, his old friend said. The question was whether he would succumb to the intoxication of power.
By the time he took over in 2012, China’s capitalist transition was complete, but new problems had emerged. The decade under his predecessor, Hu Jintao, was one of missed opportunity, the grand mission of national restoration seemingly forgotten. Corrupt local officials governed their turf like petty tyrants, and protests raged over government heavy-handedness, rampant corruption, poor labor conditions and colossal pollution.
The anti-corruption campaigns that dominated Mr. Xi’s first few years in power were often seen as cover for eliminating opponents. But he was primarily motivated by a larger mission to make the party more efficient and restore its image.
It is striking how little meaningful pushback he has encountered. Formidable as Mao was, even he encountered opposition to his destructive utopian policies. Deng Xiaoping faced resistance to his market reforms and Jiang Zemin contended with forces that wanted even greater reform. But with Mr. Xi, there has been almost no party dissent apart from occasional rumors of internal grumbling and some lower-level defections.
Part of the reason is the potency of the nationalist mission, which appeals to Chinese citizens far more than the cold logic of Marxism-Leninism. The displays of patriotic pride during the Beijing Winter Olympics last February were sincere, as were feelings of wounded anger when the United States and others blamed China for the pandemic. Even Chinese who may be averse to Communist Party rule still love their country.
Mr. Xi has been lucky to be able to build on the progress of his forbears. But he has been skillful, too. The internet could have threatened centralised authoritarian rule, but Mr. Xi’s government has used algorithms, face recognition and mass electronic surveillance to more pervasively assert party power. A technology backwater for much of the 20th century, China now has the world’s most advanced techno-autocracy.
The remarkable muscularity of Mr. Xi’s style is not all about him or his personal aims, ambitions or ego (while he may certainly have these). China is strong again; Mr. Xi’s one responsibility is not to foul that up. And that’s why his leadership is so risk-averse, and dissenters are so energetically crushed. The systematic repression in Xinjiang is the most extreme manifestation of his obsession with preserving stability, even at the risk of international criticism and domestic suffering. The same goes for his uncompromising zero-COVID policy.
These and other examples of discipline and control are akin to the directives of a commander preparing for the final climactic battle before victory — China’s restoration as a great power, perhaps even overtaking the United States as the world’s largest economy someday — can be realised. Mr. Xi and his party colleagues know that a single misstep could ruin everything.
Someday, of course, Mr. Xi will be gone. But his leadership ethos — the vast project of building up the current Chinese leader’s public persona, protecting it from all threats and keeping a laser focus on making China strong, respected, even feared — will remain. Too much has already been invested in it.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Kerry Brown is director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London, and author of several books on Chinese politics. He is a former British foreign service officer.