Chinese President Xi Jinping just managed to secure himself Mao-like power

His name was written into the constitution, which gives him a new level of authority.

(This article is 5 years old)

By Zeeshan Aleem@ZeeshanAleem  Updated Oct 25, 2017, 12:53pm EDT

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/10/24/16533526/china-xi-jinping-constitution-chinese-congress-mao

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Chinese President Xi Jinping has just accomplished something Donald Trump could only dream of: getting himself written into his party's constitution.

The Chinese Communist Party has voted to put Xi into the same pantheon as Communist Party legends Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, paving the way for him to lead the country into the indefinite future. It also means that he will have new power to expand his crackdown on dissent at home, pursue aggressive military moves in the South China Sea, and ensure that much of the Chinese economy remains under de facto state control.

Xi’s elevation happened on Tuesday, during the last day of the party’s congress, a weeklong event that occurs once every five years as a way for the party to fill key leadership slots and set national policy priorities.

More than 2,300 delegates voted unanimously to enshrine “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” into the party’s constitution. The addition of that phrase — which some analysts joke is as unwieldy in Chinese as it is in English — effectively means that Xi’s vision for China is officially part of state doctrine.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian of China at the University of California Irvine, says it’s premature to say whether Xi’s level of power should be compared directly to Mao, the founder of modern China, or Deng, the iconic reformer who opened up China’s economy to the world in the 1980s and helped pave the path to its meteoric rise today.

“It’s better to focus on the fact that he’s in the same league as those two,” Wasserstrom told me.

Xi is poised to become very, very powerful

The Chinese Communist Party has only added only one leader, Mao, to the constitution while he was alive. The party added Deng’s name and vision for China to the constitution after he died in 1997. No other Chinese leaders have had their name added to the constitution.

Experts say that Xi’s addition to the constitution gives him a vast political mandate and means he could be in power longer than most Chinese presidents. The recent norm in China is for the president to take on two five-year terms. Xi is currently beginning his second five-year term, but now it’s more likely that he could potentially end up taking on a third or fourth term.

Alternatively, Xi could step down after his second term but still hold sway over the direction of the country. Damien Ma, a fellow at the Paulson Institute, a nonpartisan Chicago think tank, told me, “Xi could certainly adopt the Deng model where he may not hold formal posts but clearly has huge influence over all major party decisions.”

And Xi’s prospects of holding power for an extended period of time grew even stronger on Wednesday, when the Communist Party revealed the five new members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the most senior decision-making body in the party. As the Washington Post notes, in a break from recent tradition, none of those new members appear young enough to be a successor to Xi when he completes his term in 2022. That absence of an obvious heir could be yet another sign that Xi will hold the reins for longer than 10 years.

Xi wants to make China great again. That’s going to be easier now.

So what is Xi’s vision? We got a taste of it during his whopping 3.5-hour-long opening speech at the beginning of the Congress last week, during which he heralded a “new era” in Chinese political life and repeatedly boasted of China’s reemergence as a “great power” in the world.

Xi spoke about reforming state-owned companies, but didn't suggest that he intended to privatize them as part of a bid to make China into a more conventional free market economy.

As the New York Times noted, Xi said the word “market” only 19 times, compared to 24 times by his predecessor Hu Jintao at the previous congress in 2012, and 51 times by then-President Jiang Zemin at the 1997 congress.

Julian Gewirtz, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School studying Chinese history and politics, told me after the speech that Xi emphasized “that he is strongly committed to the distinctive Chinese hybrid system in economics and party-led system in politics.”

Xi also championed China’s growing influence on the world stage, celebrating the country’s increasing control of the disputed South China Sea under his first term and calling for efforts to make the Chinese military more powerful. He described China as a country that wasn’t looking to pick fights but would unapologetically defend its national interests.

As he spoke of his country’s growing stature, Xi made it clear that China wasn’t trying to mimic or replace Western powers. He said that China is “blazing a new trail” for developing nations to follow.

“Under his reign, there is no more hope of convergence,” François Godement, director of the China-Asia program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told the Washington Post. In other words: Under Xi, China is not simply going to morph into a Western-style liberal democracy as it grows wealthier.

And Xi signaled that he would continue to crack down on any signs of dissent. Under his rule, Chinese authorities have restricted the ability of citizens to criticize the government online and hit NGOs with suffocating government regulations. During his speech, Xi suggested there was more to come — pledging enhanced internet censorship to “clearly oppose and resist the whole range of erroneous viewpoints.”

“The trend line is away from opening up — it’s increasingly tough to be a human rights lawyer, a feminist activist, an NGO worker,” Wasserstrom said.

While it’s impossible to predict exactly how long Xi will end up staying in power, one thing has become clear: China’s president has just been given quite a bit more power to lead the world’s biggest country.

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/10/24/16533526/china-xi-jinping-constitution-chinese-congress-mao

3 events that shaped Xi Jinping’s worldview

 What Xi learned from the Soviet Union, the US, and the Arab Spring.

By Jonathan Guyer@mideastXmidwestjonathan.guyer@vox.com  Oct 15, 2022, 8:00am EDT

https://www.vox.com/world/23403324/xi-jinping-china-worldview-soviet-union-arab-spring

Xi Jinping delivers a speech at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, in 2012.

 Feng Li/Getty Images

When Xi Jinping was elected general secretary of the Chinese Community Party in 2012, one of the first things he did was take his senior colleagues to the National Museum in Tiananmen Square.

The seven new top leaders of China walked through the “Road to Revival” exhibition, a fairly straightforward nationalist history of the country, from the first Opium War in 1840 through the present.

There, Xi delivered a speech about the Chinese dream in which he set forward the goal of “achieving the great revival of the Chinese nation.”

As Xi is poised to take on a third term as China’s president this week at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the highly symbolic museum stroll is worth recalling: it shows how much Xi is shaped by history.

Xi has become increasingly authoritarian — consolidating power, imprisoning dissenters, and now taking a third term, unprecedented since Mao Zedong.

Many of the most aggressive voices about China in the US have painted Xi as inflexible. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called him a totalitarian, and Trump’s National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien likened Xi to Stalin. Even those who have worked closely with Xi have come to see him driven by ideology. This week, former Australian prime minister and China expert Kevin Rudd described Xi as a “true believer.”

We may risk misunderstanding Xi, however, if we don’t consider the evidence that he is a pragmatist, who is drawing on the centralized power of the state to apply clear lessons from home and abroad. China’s own modern history and Xi’s experiences living through it likely present the major referents of Xi’s worldview and his priorities, but there are three other moments that have come to inform his worldview as president.

Three historical moments

No historical event haunts Xi and the Chinese leadership more than the Soviet Union’s collapse. “It’s hard to overstate how obsessed they are with the Soviet Union,” historian David Shambaugh has said.

A month into his first term in December 2012, Xi delivered a private speech to party leaders in Guangdong province with “deeply profound” learnings from the USSR’s downfall, with a focus on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s missteps. A summary of those remarks was later circulated. “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered,” Xi said, according to the summary. The lessons he took from the collapse: Retain tight control of the military, don’t make reforms that undermine the party’s power, and make no unforced errors.

“Finally, all it took was one quiet word from Gorbachev to declare the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party, and a great party was gone,” Xi reportedly said. “In the end, nobody was a real man, nobody came out to resist.”

Performers in the role of rescue workers gather around a Communist Party flag during a gala show ahead of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing on June 28, 2021. 

Ng Han Guan/AP

Another major historical moment that has informed Xi’s thinking is the United States’ war on terror that was launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Xi perhaps saw the ease with which the US perpetuated bad policies worldwide and at home. The US did face a credible terrorism threat, but Washington’s response was a massive overextension of power: invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan; deepening extrajudicial policies that meant close collaboration with autocratic Arab and Muslim countries; and advancing surveillance policies, including a misguided dragnet of Muslims, Arabs, and other minorities inside the US and long-term detentions in Guantanamo Bay.

The lesson Xi apparently took from America’s global war on terror wasn’t that overextension and hubris would lead to decline. Xi, instead, has seemed to grasp that he could get away with brazen expressions of power, so long as they were framed as counterterrorism.

China, before Xi ascended to the top of the party, took on many of the worst tenets of the war on terror, its rhetoric and policies, to clamp down on the country’s Muslim communities in the province of Xinjiang. The mass detention and relocation of Uyghurs in Xinjiang has been called a genocide.

Though these policies began in the early 2000s, Xi has accelerated them and come to be associated with them. As Gulzira Auelkhan, a Uyghur who survived the camps, has said, “In the camp, guards openly said it was Xi Jinping’s policy. … We had to publicly thank him for everything.” Or as Xi has put it, “The facts have abundantly demonstrated that our national minority work has been a success.”

Third, recent political uprisings have informed Xi’s thinking. Top of mind are the color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan (former Soviet states) in the early 2000s and the Arab revolutions in 2011 that spread across the Middle East and North Africa and toppled dictators.

It’s led to a major emphasis on the Chinese state’s stability.

One way to ensure that is to eliminate the corruption within the party and the Chinese government — for Xi, the rot at the top of the undemocratic regimes exposed their own vulnerability to citizens. Anti-corruption campaigns have been a key component of Xi’s rule, and a way to avoid the fate of leaders like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who over his 29 years in office was known for his expensive tailored suits and decadent lifestyle that appeared at the expense of his increasingly impoverished nation.

The Arab Spring occurred before Xi took office, but its ongoing protests and counterrevolution were still present in 2012 and may have informed the crackdown on Chinese party corruption, including the fall from grace of party honcho Bo Xilai.

Learning from China’s history

The crack-up of the Soviet Union, America’s war on terror, and the fall of autocratic regimes elsewhere are certainly instructive for Xi.

But John Delury, a historian at Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies in Seoul, emphasized that Xi’s main references come from within China. He did take the core members of his party to the history museum, after all.

The museum itself offers important clues for how Xi thinks. “It’s an orthodox lesson of essentially modern Chinese history, which is the century of humiliation,” Delury told me. The museum tells the story of the Qing Dynasty — “China let itself become weak, the system became weak. And ‘We got whooped by these European powers and then by the Japanese. And we can never let that happen again,’” he said.

That account is well-known in China, but, Delury says, “It does tell us a little bit about Xi’s instincts.”

It’s less clear what Xi has gathered about the histories of succession among China’s leaders. There is much speculation but little clarity about who might follow Xi as president after his third term — or perhaps even another. The party is changing the constitution to extend his presidency, and we don’t yet know when that term will end or what comes next.

“From the beginning, from 1921 when the CCP was founded, there are very few examples of a smooth, orderly transition of supreme power,” Delury said. “It’s a mess.”

As Delury put it, “Xi Jinping would know this history.”

https://www.vox.com/world/23403324/xi-jinping-china-worldview-soviet-union-arab-spring