Welcome to Xi Jinping’s world

The big question now for China is whether it will proceed down a track to 21st century totalitarianism.

A man walks past a poster of Xi Jinping in Beijing ahead of the national congress that starts today. Picture: AFP

China is changing rapidly — but not in the direction most people in Western countries had expected.

The big question now is not whether China will become democratic — earlier tentative steps towards choosing village and township leaders have stalled — but whether it will proceed down its present track towards pioneering a hi-tech 21st-century form of totalitarianism and, if so, how many other nations and their leaders it will attract to follow its model.

The mid-20th-century rituals that form the public face of the Communist Party as it meets from today for its 19th five-yearly national congress will not readily provide glimpses of such profound change.

For the party’s recent history did not prepare even its own 89 million members for its thrust in this direction. Xi has constantly underlined his legitimacy as deriving from the “red gene” that he urges others also to inherit — that of the party’s founders, and in his case strengthened by the “red blood” in his veins derived from his party-elder father Xi Zhongxun.

Deng Xiaoping saved the Communist Party from imploding when the death of Mao Zedong ended the catastrophic Cultural Revolution, by launching the “reform and opening” era. Then the responsiveness of the People’s Liberation Army, the party’s army, prevented the protests of 1989 from triggering a downfall that would have echoed that of its Sov­iet communist cousin.

The economic reforms continued after that, at a steady pace, under a kind of collective leadership. All that was missing, many outside and some Chinese thinkers inside, perceived, was political reform.

Xi Jinping, who five years ago took over the top job in China, general secretary of the party, was expected to keep things jogging along in the same consensual direction. How wrong they were.

A strong clue came in one of his first speeches as general secretary, when Xi described Mao’s revolutionary era and Deng’s economic transformation as “the two irrefutables”, on a par.

He stressed that the first 30 years of the People’s Republic, under Mao — who unleashed the Anti Rightist Movement, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which together killed tens of millions — should not be viewed as inferior to the second, modernising 30 years.

Since then Xi has all but completed a rapid political restructuring of China, with the prime goal of making the party and thus the nation, including its economy, more directly responsive to his personal leadership.

Tighter control is the key to achieving this — with hi-tech tools providing the cutting edge, transforming the internet into an inward-facing as much as an outward-facing instrument, with a remarkable capacity to look inside individuals, households and other groups, to learn what they are doing and thinking.

He is rolling out a dual system of micro-management to control the real and the virtual lives of all China’s 1.4 billion residents: “grid management” by which information on groups of about 200 families is assessed by a grid manager, through 24-hour surveillance, including by arrays of CCTV cameras — the ultimate 21st-century Neighbourhood Watch; by the constant monitoring of online activities by “net police” and their outsourced deputies; and by social credit, a new system that evaluates the trustworthiness of every citizen according to comprehensive digital financial, legal, social and other records.

Xi chairs six “leading small groups”, semi-formal commissions that determine national policy on key issues ranging from the internet and cyber security to economic reform. Other such groups are led by close allies he appoints.

The Politburo Standing Committee that he also chairs had in recent decades become a collegiate group bringing together different talents and party factions, reducing the disadvantages of trying to run such a massive country centrally without a federal structure.

Now it has become more of a rubber-stamp for decisions already made by Xi’s commissions.

Xi is reorganising and modernising the PLA, becoming commander-in-chief of the Joint Battle Command he ­established. He is focusing on making it “ready to fight”, as it has not fought externally since the costly incursion into Vietnam in 1979.

He is ensuring the legal system is responsive to party direction, launching a fierce attack on lawyers who represent people accused of religious or political “thought crimes” or of protesting against land being taken by officials, with hundreds losing their licences to practice or being jailed for up to a dozen years.

Chief Justice Zhou Qiang insisted earlier this year: “We should absolutely resist erroneous influence from the West — constitutional democracy, separation of powers and independence of the judiciary.”

He has told China’s media: “Your surname is party.”

Xi has developed the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection into the most powerful and most feared single agency in China, enforcing political orthodoxy and purging corrupt and ineffective cadres.

He is now broadening and making permanent the CCDI’s campaign by extending its remit to a Supervisory Commission that will encompass all officialdom in the country, including state businesses.

The combination of Xi’s progressive remaking of China’s institutions, and of the CCDI’s success, has sidelined the formerly powerful roles of party factions, that in a fluid and usually concealed way formerly required individuals, interests, regions and institutions to be balanced by the leadership.

While a “princeling” himself by virtue of his father’s party roles, Xi does not bind himself to backing others who have “red blood”.

In fact, there is no sector or interest group to which Xi feels indebted, or where he lacks the leverage he needs to exercise control.

That includes China’s now massive private sector, which is driving the country’s — and the world’s — economic growth. Businesses, like all organisations in the country including religious, sports and other social groups, are now being required to contain party committees, so that despite their private ownership they, too, have a line of accountability through the party hierarchy up to Xi.

The most powerful entrepreneurs are kept on the shortest leash. Those who appear to challenge Xi’s authority in any way, even indirectly through favours they may have provided to potential rivals, or sensitive information about leaders’ wealth to which they are privy, may simply disappear from public view.

This year, they have included Wu Xiaohui, the chairman of the massive Anbang Insurance Group, and Xiao Jianhua, whose Tomorrow Group placed plaintive adverts after he was abducted mysteriously from his luxury apartment in Hong Kong saying he had “always loved his country”. The whereabouts of both billionaires remains unknown.

Two of the richest men in China, Wanda Group chief Wang Jianlin and Fosun Group founder Guo Guangchang, have been forced publicly to acknowledge party-state direction after powerful regulators began to move in on them, over their international ambitions.

“Wanda,” pledged Wang, his head metaphorically bowed, “will respond to the state’s call, and has decided to keep its main investment within China. Companies have to follow the trend of national economic development” in which “deleveraging and inventory reduction are the main tone”.

For now, BAT — the online giants Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent — are riding high in Xi’s esteem, but their principals Robin Li, Jack Ma and Pony Ma, exceptionally brilliant operators, are only too well aware of the delicate balancing act required.

They need both to stick close to, and attentive to, the party’s commanding heights while leaving sufficient distance so that Xi does not start feeling they are becoming too presumptuous.

And what of the economy overall? Arthur Kroeber, author of China’s Economy and co-founder of Gavekal Dragonomics, says that here also, many observers have misread the signs and failed to follow the rapid change in China’s priorities under Xi.

He says: “China is now a ‘post-reform’ economy, in which policymakers care less about reforming the economic structure and more about delivering a stable, high rate of growth, maintaining state control of key assets and economic levers, and upgrading the nation’s technological capacities.”

For Xi, risks remain, largely those facing any leader with almost untrammelled power — of reaching too far, for instance by building a personality cult, still widely detested in China since the latter days of Mao.

But his centralisation of power and tightening of controls have not yet eroded his popularity among the broad population, for whom China is still providing rising living standards, gaining appropriate global respect and, if too slowly, nevertheless starting to grapple with pollution.

Xi is a fit 64. He may well stay at the top for another 10 years.

From this party congress onwards, as Kroeber says, “This is the China we will need to live with for the next five years.”

Xi’s China. And increasingly, Xi’s world, too.