‘Untouchable’: How Xi Jinping became more powerful than Mao Zedong

The first day of the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party last week happened to be the anniversary of an event that took place more than a millennium earlier.

It was the date 1332 years ago that the empress dowager ascended the throne as the Empress Regnant Wu Zhou of Zhao. It was the first and last time that a woman ruled China.

IllustrationCredit: Dionne Gain

But that’s not the reason all references to the anniversary were censored from China’s internet. That moment of history was banned because some citizens were pointing out the anniversary “as a sly reference to President Xi Jinping declaring himself emperor”, explains the eminent Australian sinologist Geremie Barme.

“It’s so obscure that nobody really takes it seriously – but even that has to be scrubbed, 1300-years-old though it may be.”

It was not a surprise when the party congress endorsed Xi for a third five-year term. He’d prevailed on the party to rewrite the constitution to remove the two-term limit. It was unanimous – 2296 delegates all of a single mind, apparently.

But the completeness of Xi’s consolidation of power last week was not expected by most observers. He removed from the inner sanctum of power, the seven-member standing committee of the politburo, anyone with any independent standing or power base. None of the party’s factions will be represented other than Xi’s own.

Former Chinese top leader Hu Jintao was unexpectedly led out of the closing ceremony of a major meeting of China’s ruling Communist Party on Saturday.

Kevin Rudd’s pithy summary? “The bottom line is Xi is numero uno, due and tres. All else is detail.”

The most sensational moment of the Party Congress was when two men physically removed from the Great Hall of the People a former president, Hu Jintao, Xi’s immediate predecessor.

The 79-year-old former paramount leader was sitting calmly at Xi’s left hand one moment and was being manhandled out of his seat the next. One of the two men who removed him is the head of Xi’s personal security unit. Xi sat watching, unconcerned. The event was censored across China’s media. Party outlets told the outside world that Hu had been feeling unwell.

The China-watching community is in a frenzy of speculation – was Xi purging the former leader in the most humiliating manner possible, or was it a genuine health scare?

“No one knows,” says Barme. Whatever the explanation, the main point of the event is that “it shows everyone what these cold-hearted party men are like – everyone can see the way Hu’s treated, the dismissive way Xi deals with it”.

He points out the moment when Hu pauses on the way out, apparently to appeal for help to the outgoing premier, Li Keqiang, seated on the other side of Xi. The old man touches Li on the shoulder: “Hu is obviously frail, but Li, who was one of his proteges, and the second most powerful man in China, doesn’t even turn to look at him, he’s frozen. That moment shows men without empathy, without humanity, without basic civility.” Only one person moved to help, and he was pulled back by his coat tails.

Barme tempers his sympathy by noting that Hu was once, as party secretary of Tibet, nicknamed the “Butcher of Lhasa” for his brutal repression of the Tibetans: “When you start to feel sympathy for that thug, you know you’re in trouble.”

Outside China, most of the coverage has remarked that Xi now commands more power than anyone since the founder of the People’s Republic himself, the so-called “great helmsman”, Mao Zedong.

Barme flatly contradicts this. “Xi has outdone Mao,” says the New Zealand-based publisher of chinaheritage.net and former head of ANU’s Australian Centre for China in the World. “He has more titles and more power than Mao.”

The new politburo standing committee under Xi comprises “a secretary of his, some advisers and some buddies, all flunkeys, or courtiers and viziers at best. Xi has purged China of the factional style of politics that has existed literally for 2200 years.

“At no point – except for the year 1966 arguably – did Mao ever have absolute power. Even at the height of Mao’s power, he couldn’t get rid of the people he needed to run the country. On his right hand he had the army and the technocrats and the rightists and on the left he had the people he’d promoted in the Cultural Revolution.

“Mao didn’t even want to get rid of them all – he was a thinker, a philosopher, a poet who didn’t want to be dragged down with the business of running the country.”

The fearfulness and hypersensitivity with which Chinese officialdom treats Xi is spreading even into the West. Two German journalists have just published a book titled Xi Jinping: The Most Powerful Man in the World.

In their preface, they relate that the German edition of the book was scheduled to be discussed in two workshops at Confucius Institutes in Germany. But a few days before the event, authors Stefan Aust and Adrian Geiges received phone calls from the heads of the institutes to tell them the workshops were cancelled. They’d had orders from their Chinese partner universities: “You can no longer talk about Xi Jinping the way you talk about any ordinary person,” the head of one of the German institutes explained. “He is meant to be untouchable and non-negotiable from now on.”

With any realistic discussion censored into oblivion, some Chinese commentators are reverting to the ancient manner of critique through satire. Barme has translated some examples of poetic praise of the new emperor, written anonymously, that were in circulation in China last week.

For instance: “You who are busy with: 10,000 weighty matters each day, long-suffering one bad habits die hard and overworked to the point of illness done too often can be habit-forming shouldering heavy responsibilities speeding through the skies powerful and unconstrained staving off disaster and helping the poor dispelling the evil and ousting the heterodox, you who eliminate rheumatism cold sweats strengthen the yang and invigorate the spleen the brain who are good for the liver stomach pain relieving and cough repressing, and able to cure constipation.”

Barme observes: “Chinese commentary can be so amusing, and so spot on.”

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