Grappling with China’s big little rocket man
We need to think about Xi Jinping, who rules China in the manner that Kim Jong-un rules North Korea.
The dictator of China is described in this book as “the most powerful man in the world”.
That description has long been commonly made of the President of the United States. Is it time to shift the appellation? The very fact that the idea is even plausible is a sign of the times.
We need to think about Xi Jinping, who rules China in the manner that Kim Jong-un (aka Little Rocket Man), rules North Korea.
There is the same cult of personality, program of systematic indoctrination in the “thought” of the supreme leader, systematic surveillance and repression of any hint of criticism or dissent and hazy, utopian vision called the “China Dream”, which is supposed to govern the thinking and aspirations of all citizens.
There is also “wolf warrior diplomacy”, aggressive military posturing, direct threats of military action against peaceful, democratic and self-governing Taiwan, support for Vladimir Putin’s destructive and irrational war against Ukraine and a manic, repressive “zero-tolerance” anti-Covid campaign within China itself. All these things underscore the fact that the regime that planted its foot on the throat of Hong Kong over the past couple of years is a growing danger to the region and the world. Xi might now be dubbed Big Rocket Man.
This is a deep and disturbing regression even from the time of Jiang Zemin or Deng Xiaoping, though All Under Heaven know their regimes were far from perfect. But they, by and large, kept their manner of rule to themselves. Xi is seeking to impose it on the rest of us and calling upon the whole Chinese diaspora to rally behind him and his “China Dream”. His militarisation of the South China Sea, crushing of the people of Hong Kong and military live-fire exercises around the coasts of Taiwan show why we have to think hard and urgently, collectively and consequentially, about this man and his purposes.
Stefan Aust is the former editor-in-chief of Germany’s leading news magazine Der Spiegel. Adrian Geiges is the longstanding Beijing correspondent of the well-credentialed weekly magazine Stern. What they have set out to do in this book is a kind of general profile of Xi Jinping. It’s partly biography, partly political and economic analysis. Its chief use will be to enable a wider global readership to grapple with the psychology, formation and political career of the Chinese dictator.
Their book has 13 chapters. It’s worth listing them here in order to show the core concerns and themes of the book. Each chapter has a main title and a subtitle, with the latter conveying the gist of the chapter’s message. 1: Who cares if a sack of rice falls over in China? Since the emergence of Covid-19, we all know that we should. 2. Xi Jinping’s family background: The Formative Years. From Chinese nightmare to Chinese dream. 3. A Colourful Character in a Uniform Crowd. Xi Jinping, husband of a folk singer. 4. The Fight Against Corruption. Stalin as role model. 5. Persecuted by Mao – Revered Like Mao. Xi’s relationship with China’s towering father figure. 6. Confucianism and Communism. How to combine what does not belong together. 7. From 5G to TikTok. Xi Jinping’s China: between a bright digital future and an Orwellian surveillance state. 8. The Dalai Lama and the Uyghurs. How friends of the Xi family became their enemies. 9. Xi for Future. The eco-president. 10. The New Silk Road. Xi’s path to global power. 11. Peace as Part of China’s DNA? The trade war and the troubled relationship with the US. 12. Why Xi Jinping fears Hong Kong and Taiwan. The other, democratic China. 13. Will the Whole World Benefit From the Chinese Dream? (90)
The chapters are uneven in the depth and rigour of their analysis. The authors are clearly not scholars versed in the subject. Their sources are far too often superficial or second-hand. There is too much reliance on two German figures as interviewees: Sigmar Gabriel (former German vice-chancellor, foreign minister and minister of the environment) and Jorg Wuttke (president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China).
Indicative of the skin-deep expertise of the authors is their statement that the biography of Mao Zedong by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (2005), is the best, most thorough and most authoritative biography of the tyrant. It isn’t. That accolade rightly belongs to Mao: The Real Story, by Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine (2012), of which Aust and Geiges appear oblivious.
The same might be said of numerous other areas pertinent to an assessment of who Xi Jinping is and how China is governed. They cite various newspaper or magazine stories about the dire environmental problems in China, but seem unacquainted with the serious scholarship on the subject, from Vaclav Smil, Judith Shapiro and Elizabeth Economy to Mark Elvin.
They cite standard but out-of-date estimates for China’s economic growth, while plainly having no serious grasp of the underpinnings of China’s economic “miracle” or of the institutional failings that Xi is attempting to address by Marxist-Leninist means and which render entirely possible, in the near future, the grinding to a halt of the growth that has led to the Communist Party’s and Xi’s extraordinary recent hubris. They cite none of the first-rate critical assessments of China’s macro-economic settings and mercantilism that have been available for four or five years now.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the book is the ambivalence the authors exhibit in their net assessment of Xi’s manner of rule. They seem unable to decide whether he is a benign visionary presiding over an innovative and promising social experiment, or a deluded Neo-Maoist imposing his newfangled version of the Little Red Book of Cultural Revolution notoriety on a vastly more prosperous and sophisticated China than that tyrannised over by Mao in the 1960s.
They contrast its apparent decisiveness and technological prowess (notably, its new, very fast trains) with the perceived sclerosis and laziness of Germany or the West more generally. But they don’t offer any sophisticated assessment of what Wen Jiabao, former Chinese premier, called an unbalanced and unsustainable economic development model. There is no net assessment of China’s strategic culture or military buildup. In short, there is a lot that isn’t done in this book that a serious biography of Xi should include.
Nonetheless, for a general readership – those relying on newspapers, magazines or the web – it is at least a thought-provoking start. A more scholarly biography might only be read by specialists or diplomats and would thus be lost on those who most need better to understand the basics. It can be supplemented in due course by fact-checking, updates and, for those with the need or desire to delve deeper, by finding and reading the first-class scholarship on China that is available.
This should start, right now, with John Fitzgerald’s Cadre Country (2022), a pearl of a book on the Party’s domination of China. For economic background, Carl Minzner’sEnd of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival is Undermining Its Rise (2018) and on China’s strategic culture, Ralph D. Sawyer’s Ancient Chinese Warfare (2002) are strongly recommended. By all means start with Aust and Geiges – but keep going.
Paul Monk is the author of Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2005), The West in a Nutshell (2009) and, most recently, The Three Graces: Companionship, Discretion, Passion (2022) – a book of love poetry.
Xi Jinping: The Most Powerful Man in the World
How Australian artists found creative and sexual liberation abroad
For Australian expat painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Paris was a liberal city where they could escape the ‘stuffy moralism’ of England.
Serving the Stasi: a memoir of disturbing family secrets
Imagine growing up in a family in East Germany, in the 1960s and ’70s, in which your father works for the Stasi on secret missions in the West that he will not talk about. Your mother won’t talk about them either. Then the past breaks open.