Xi’s aggressive intent for China and the world — in his own words
Xi Jinping’s imagined ‘tianxia’ – China presiding over ‘all under Heaven’ – would constitute an enormous regression. None of us should want any part of it – least of all those of us who live in liberal democracies.
This new book on China’s leadership was so eagerly awaited that the first print run sold out within a few weeks. It warrants very close reading now, not least in Australia, over which the long shadow of Xi Jinping looms.
It isn’t a forbiddingly large or mind-bogglingly dense book. It is well-structured and clearly laid out, with an introduction, seven clearly delineated chapters and a conclusion which sums up the book’s core findings. It ought to be required reading for anyone responsible for analysing and reporting on China and high priority reading for anyone seeking to develop or maintain a responsible and informed opinion about where China is heading and what Xi’s vision is for China and the world.
The authors are authoritative: Steve Tsang has for ten years been director of the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. He was born in Hong Kong, in 1959; took his BA at Hong Kong University in 1981 and his DPhil from St Antony’s College, Oxford, in 1986. His career since then has centred on politics and governance in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the foreign and security policies of China and Taiwan, and peace and security in East Asia.
Olivia Cheung, his co-author, is a research fellow at SOAS, was a Swire Scholar and Rhodes scholar at Oxford and is an emerging specialist in factional politics within the PRC.
Their book relies, and reflects, upon the actual statements and writings of Xi Jinping. These are set within an analytical framework showing how the Communist Party has evolved since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, and, more particularly, how Xi has repudiated the tentative and incomplete political reforms brought in during the “reform and opening” era (1978-2012) to assert not only personalised and all-encompassing authority over the party, but totalised party control over the country.
What might be called the “North Koreanisation” of China – an unchallengeable supreme leader whose thoughts on everything under the sun are to be drilled into the minds of every citizen of the country – was slowly put in place by Xi between 2012 and 2017, formulated as party doctrine at the 19th Party Congress in 2017, then cemented at the 20th Party Congress in late 2022.
It’s for real now.
The Political Thought of Xi Jinping lays all this out for us. Chapter 3, titled The Party Leads Everything, spells out both doctrine and practice in this regard. Xi proclaimed from the podium in 2017: ‘The party, the state, the military, the civilians and the education sector; east, west, south, north and centre – the party leads everything.” Over the year that followed, Xi dismantled the modest but sensible political reforms put in place in the 1980s by Zhao Ziyang, which had to some extent separated the party from the state. There is, now, no “state” separate from the party.
Asserting the complete and intrusive dominance of the Party Centre (with all its lines of authority gathered into his own hands), Xi has insisted that the narrative of China’s history, all the way back, must be a propagandist one dictated by the Party Centre; that the private sector must look to the Party Centre and embedded party cells for guidance as to its own business; that all Chinese, including the Chinese diaspora (some sixty million people around the world) and ethnic minorities, must be indoctrinated on a daily basis to work for his “China Dream” and unwaveringly support the party.
Not only that, but China will, by mid-century, resume its historical and natural position as the leading power in the world and be the guide to all nations, “all under Heaven”. Tsang and Cheung spend some time delineating this vision. It’s broadly speaking what British communist Martin Jacques had in mind, in his 2009 book When China Rules the World. But this isn’t a left-wing outsider prognosticating. This is Xi Jinping’s imperial vision in his own words.
Tsang and Cheung show that Xi has designated United States as the enemy of everything he stands for and has systematically defined the whole set of liberal and universal principles and laws and rights that have defined and advanced modernisation as being “anti-China”. He fully intends to rule indefinitely and has declined to nominate any heir apparent, which makes his system inherently unstable. But then the party has always suffocated any real or potential opposition, making its own dictatorship over China a gigantic protection racket: “Overthrow us and chaos will ensue!”
Our authors make clear that Xi aspires to global predominance, in a world made safe for dictatorships and is seeking to expand China’s (which is to say the party’s) influence in UN bodies and the Bretton Woods institutions that have undergirded the global order for eighty years, with a view to reshaping the international financial order in China’s interest.
He does not plan to take over the burden the US has shouldered for decades of buttressing global security or providing markets to developing countries.
Xi’s imagined “tianxia” – China presiding over “all under Heaven” – would constitute an enormous regression. None of us, least of all those of us who live in liberal democracies, should want any part of it. Read this book to grasp why.
Paul Monk is the author of Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2023) and Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018) among other books.
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