Who Is Xi? Andrew J
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Who Is Xi? Andrew J. Nathan More than halfway through his five- Xi Jinping of an “all- under- heaven,” a vast world year term as president of China and that their fathers conquered under general secretary of the Chinese Com- Mao’s leadership. Their parents came munist Party—expected to be the first from poor rural villages and rose to of at least two—Xi Jinping’s widening rule an empire. The second generation crackdown on civil society and promo- is privileged to live in a country that has tion of a cult of personality have disap- “stood up” and is globally respected pointed many observers, both Chinese and feared. They do not propose to be and foreign, who saw him as destined the generation that “loses the empire.” by family heritage and life experience It is this logic that drives Liu Yuan, to be a liberal reformer. Many thought the son of former president Liu Shaoqi, Xi must have come to understand the whom Mao purged and sent to a mis- dangers of Party dictatorship from the erable death, to support Xi in reviving experiences of his family under Mao’s Maoist ideas and symbolism; and the rule. His father, Xi Zhongxun (1913– same logic has moved the offspring of 2002), was almost executed in an inner- many of Mao’s other prominent victims Party conflict in 1935, was purged in to form groups that celebrate Mao’s another struggle in 1962, was “dragged legacy, like the Beijing Association of out” and tortured during the Cultural the Sons and Daughters of Yan’an and Revolution, and was eased into retire- the Beijing Association to Promote the ment after another Party confrontation Culture of the Founders of the Nation. in 1987. During the Cultural Revolu- The princelings seem to invest literal tion, one of Xi Jinping’s half- sisters biological meaning in the “bloodline was tormented to the point that she theory” of political purity that was committed suicide. Jinping himself, as popular among elite- offspring Red the offspring of a “capitalist roader,” Guards during the Cultural Revolu- was “sent down to the countryside” to tion: “If the father was a hero the son labor alongside the peasants. The hard- is a real man, if the father was a coun- ships were so daunting that he report- terrevolutionary the son is a bad egg” edly tried to escape, but was caught and (laozi yingxiong erzi haohan, laozi fan- sent back. dong erzi huaidan). They see no irony No wonder, then, that both father and in cheering Xi Jinping’s attack on cor- son showed a commitment to reformist rupt bureaucrats although Mao purged causes throughout their careers. Under their own fathers as “capitalist roaders Deng Xiaoping, the elder Xi pioneered in power.” Mao’s purges they excuse the open-door reforms in the southern as a mistake. But they see today’s bu- province of Guangdong and played an reaucrats as flocking to serve the Party important part in founding the Special because it is in power and not because Economic Zone of Shenzhen. In 1987 they inherited a spirit of revolutionary he stood alone among Politburo mem- sacrifice from their forebears. Such op- bers in refusing to vote for the purge of tected Xi by sending him to a job in a as Agnès Andrésy points out in her portunists are worms eating away at the liberal Party leader Hu Yaobang. provincial factory safely away from the book on Xi, form most of China’s top the legacy of revolution. The younger Xi made his career as an political storms in Beijing. When the leadership today as well as a large sec- The legacy is threatened by other unpretentious, pragmatic, pro- growth Cultural Revolution broke out a few tion of its business elite. Deng Xiaoping forces as well. Xi holds office at a time manager at first in the countryside and years later and Red Guards “dragged in 1981 declared that Mao’s contribu- when the regime has to confront a se- later in Fujian, Zhejiang, and Shanghai, out” Xi from this factory job to subject tions outweighed his errors by (in a ries of daunting challenges that have three of China’s provincial units that him to the physical abuse and denun- Chinese cliché) “a ratio of 7 to 3.” But all reached critical stages at once. It were most open to the outside world. ciation called “struggle,” the biography in practice Deng abandoned just about must manage a slowing economy; mol- In the final leg of his climb to power says that Mao’s premier Zhou Enlai everything Mao stood for. Contrary to lify millions of laid-off workers; shift he was chosen in preference to a rival had Xi imprisoned in a military bar- the Western consensus that Deng saved demand from export markets to do- leader, Bo Xilai, who had promoted racks near Beijing as a way of protect- the system after Mao nearly wrecked it, mestic consumption; whip underper- Cultural Revolution–style policies in ing him. These stories have doubtless Xi and many other red aristocrats feel forming giant state- owned enterprises the megacity of Chongqing. been massaged to show Mao as Xi that it was Deng who came close to de- into shape; dispel a huge overhang of For all these reasons, once Xi ac- wants him to be shown. But they are stroying Mao’s legacy. bad bank loans and nonperforming in- ceded to top office he was widely ex- grounded in historical reality and help Their reverence for Mao is different vestments; ameliorate climate change pected to pursue political liberalization to explain the complexity of Xi’s rela- from the simple nostalgia of former and environmental devastation that and market reform. Instead he has re- tionship to Mao’s legacy. As Xi said Red Guards and sent-down youth who are irritating the new middle class; and instated many of the most dangerous years later, “If Mao had not saved my hazily remember a period of adolescent downsize and upgrade the military. features of Mao’s rule: personal dicta- father’s life, I would not be here today.” idealism. Rather, as the pro- democracy Internationally, Chinese policymakers torship, enforced ideological confor- thinker Li Weidong writes in a much- see themselves as forced to respond mity, and arbitrary persecution. discussed online essay, “The ‘Road assertively to growing pressure from The key to this paradox is Xi’s seem- Xi’s respect for Mao is not a personal of Red Empire’ That Cannot Be Tra- the United States, Japan, and various ingly incongruous veneration of Mao. eccentricity. It is shared by many of the versed,” the children of the founding Southeast Asian regimes that are try- Xi’s view of Mao emerges in the offi- hereditary Communist aristocrats who, elite see themselves as the inheritors ing to resist China’s legitimate defense cial biography of his father compiled by of its interests in such places as Taiwan, Party scholars, whose first volume was the Senkaku islands, and the South published when Xi was close to achiev- BOOKS AND ARTICLES DRAWN ON FOR THIS ESSAY China Sea. ing supreme power and whose second came out after he had become Party Xi Zhongxun zhuan Zoubutong de general secretary and state president. [Biography of Xi Zhongxun] “hongse diguo zhilu” Any leader who confronts so many Describing the elder Xi’s near execu- by the Editorial Committee for [The “Road of Red Empire” big problems needs a lot of power, and tion in 1935, the book says that Mao the Biography of Xi Zhongxun. That Cannot Be Traversed] Mao provides a model of how such saved his life, ordering his release with Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian an article by Li Weidong. power can be wielded. Xi Jinping leads the remark that heads are not like scal- chubanshe, two volumes, Available at the Party, state, and military hierar- lions: if you cut them off they will not 1,283 pp. (2013) www.letscorp.net/archives/56290 chies by virtue of his chairmanship of grow back. Mao then promoted Xi’s ca- each. But his two immediate prede- reer as an official in Yan’an and as a top Xi Jinping: cessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, bureaucrat in Beijing after 1949. Red China, the Next Generation China’s Future exercised these roles within a system With respect to Xi’s purge in 1962, by Agnès Andrésy. by David Shambaugh. of collective leadership, in which each the biography blames Mao’s secret University Press of America, Polity, 203 pp., member of the Politburo Standing police chief, Kang Sheng, rather than 157 pp., $60.00 $59.95; $19.95 (paper) Committee took charge of a particu- Mao himself, and claims that Mao pro- lar policy or institution and guided it 8 The New York Review Nathan_08_13.indd 8 4/14/16 10:37 AM without much interference from other or giving one. The propaganda agen- relationship appears to be boringly also to reaffirm its loyalty to the Party senior officials. cies labor to generate a huggable image conventional; even in rumor- drenched and to him personally. The overarching This model does not produce leader- of “Daddy Xi,” and Xi appears to be Beijing nothing has surfaced to suggest purpose of reform is to keep the Chi- ship sufficiently decisive to satisfy Xi genuinely popular among the public, that he is a sexual hedonist like Mao. nese Communist Party in power. and his supporters. So Xi has sidelined although this is changing as the econ- (Nor has the rumor mill produced al- Xi’s stated goal is for China to achieve the other members of the Politburo omy slows.3 But his anticorruption legations that Xi is personally corrupt, “a moderately prosperous society” Standing Committee, except for the campaign affecting a great many peo- although Bloomberg News found that (xiaokang shehui) by the hundredth propaganda chief Liu Yunshan and the ple has ground on, leading intellectual his older sister and her husband have anniversary of the Party’s founding in anticorruption watchdog Wang Qis- and official elites to read his expression made a lot of money.4) 2021, and “a socialist modernized soci- han.