Xi Jinping has been making a difference and promises to make more of it. In what is certainly an unmistakable progression toward developing a cult of personality quite similar to the Great Helmsman Mao Zedong, the current Chinese leader remains unfazed by the criticism of his policies in the West. In simple terms, Xi couldn’t care less.
That is the theme which emerges from this rather dispassionate biography of the Chinese leader by Kerry Brown, who two decades ago served as a British diplomat in Beijing and has since remained an astute observer of Chinese politics. He makes it a point to stress, in so many words, that Xi has arrived on the scene determined to make an impression on the world for China. In effect, Xi’s preoccupation with his country is a throwback -- that is the core message in this work -- to the old idea of the country being the Middle Kingdom. Read that as the centre of the world. Observe Brown’s succinct statement: “He is a strong leader, the message goes, for a strong country.”
Which takes the reader back to the overall concept of political leadership in a communist system. In the now defunct Soviet Union, the growth of leadership was fundamentally based on the many stages politicians needed to go through before reaching the centre of power in Moscow. Much a similar, perhaps more, system underpins the Chinese system today.
Like all his predecessors, Xi is the product of a structure which puts politicians through a number of tests before they can be given the keys to central authority. To be sure, along the way, ambitious politicians in China have often had to edge past their rivals, with ramifications which left those defeated in the race to the top either licking their wounds or brushed out of politics altogether.
Xi Jinping’s place is among the triumphant. Through ambition and force of personality, he has let the world know that he will be there, in charge of his country, for a long time yet. He has done away with term limits in office, a rule which was applied to and followed by Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and others.
With Xi, the likelihood now is that he will be in power till advanced age catches up with him and has him go the way of all flesh or, given that he commits mistakes, he is removed by other powerful men in the party. Since 2012, though, Xi has exercised steady leadership, a period which has seen China rise to unprecedented heights of power and influence around the globe.
Beijing’s clout has expanded remarkably with Xi holding office. Chinese economic assistance to countries in Asia and Africa, though concerning for politicians in those countries and elsewhere, is a sign that Beijing is willing to go all the way in pushing its frontiers and capture as much territory of influence as it can. Xi’s clear goal, which is one his people identify with, is to bring China to a position where it is ready to engage with such powers as the United States. Under Xi, Chinese endeavours toward equalling and then overtaking the US as the world’s foremost economic power must not be ignored.
Add to that Beijing’s growing, indeed assertive role, in its relations with the outside world. The fury with which China lashed out at Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan and the military manoeuvres it resorted to around Taiwan in clearly intimidating manner is an indication of the deliberate indifference with which Xi and those who govern with him regard the fears generated worldwide by such exercises.
Kerry Brown’s work made it into the public domain before the Pelosi affair took place. Nevertheless, the single-minded approach to China’s position Xi has demonstrated since assuming unquestioned power reflects the no-nonsense attitude of the current leadership in its projection of Chinese strategy in these times. Brown demonstrates Xi’s rise to the top through the various levels of the leadership he exercised prior to making it to Beijing.
Xi’s political aspirations took embryonic shape in 1998 in Shaanxi, where an autobiographical fragment, Son of the Yellow Earth, was a peek into his view of the social circumstances around him. Brown puts it thus: “The fleas, dirt and poverty hugely affected him.” And yet Xi himself had this to pen into the fragment: “As a servant of the people, my root is in the plateau of northern Shaanxi.”
Xi Jinping applied, successfully, to pursue engineering studies at Beijing Tsinghua University. His departure from Shaanxi would take him to Fujian and then Zhejiang, signs of the increasingly prominent role he was playing in both the party and government. His rise in Fujian and Zhejiang did not, however, lead to a snapping of links with Shaanxi, for the villagers he had known made it a point to visit him.
His links with the proletariat were to keep him focused on the issues as he saw them. The rise to power was remarkable too from another aspect. His father Xi Zhongxun, a party functionary, came under a cloud in the era of the Cultural Revolution. The son, a careful operator, escaped the ravages of the times.
Kerry Brown’s work is a refreshing departure from the general run of books on non-Western politics where the tendency has often been a condemnation, almost always denigration, of leaders in the communist pantheon. In Brown’s analysis, Xi comes through as a ruthless yet pragmatic political leader whose sole concern is a projection of Chinese power in the world, through expanding its economic base and reshaping its diplomacy.
Xi’s purpose, as Brown notes, is to inform the world that on his watch China will achieve modernity on its own terms through keeping its political stability in place. On Xi’s watch, Beijing has entered the space age and landed spacecraft on Mars. Half a dozen Chinese universities have entered the global top 50; Beijing’s 40,000-kilometre high-speed rail is more than the kilometres put together in such rail by the rest of the world.
The human rights issues are there. Authoritarianism continues to be the reality. But beyond these is the clear sense of purpose Xi Jinping has brought into his ambitions for China. Opposition to him in the party is absent, which leaves him free to shape the country in his mould.
Xi Jinping, in a very broad sense, is continuity exemplified of the idea of China first enunciated by Mao Zedong. China is the centre of the global political universe. And Xi has been doing the re-engineering of it for the past decade. He is not about to call it a day.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.
