Xi Jinping’s powers already exceed those of China’s historic emperors

Xi Jinping’s rise in power parallels China’s growing influence across the world.

Souvenirs of China, including plates bearing the likeness of Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping, on display at a market stall in Beijing. Picture: Getty Images

Xi Jinping has been widely dubbed China’s emperor, following news that the constitution will be changed to remove the limit of two five-year terms for presidents and vice-presidents.

But in truth his pervasive powers — whose essence comes from being general secretary of the Communist Party of China, with his second crucial role as chairman of the central military commission — already exceed considerably those of China’s historic emperors.

Xi has been in power since 2012, and the presidency grants him the protocol status to travel the world to extend China’s influence in accord with its enormous and still growing economic clout.

As an apparently fit 64-year-old, he may well lead the country through a further three five-year terms, to 2032, or perhaps even beyond. US President Donald Trump is already 71.

This would see Xi become the world’s senior statesman, his span in office far exceeding most peers. Fifteen years ago, for example, ­George W. Bush was in power in the US, Tony Blair in Britain, Megawati Sukarnoputri in Indonesia, Atal Bihari Vajpayee in India, and Jacques Chirac in France.

Xi benefited from coming to power just as China — through an enormous and continuing stimulus program, whose cost in debt terms remains intensely troubling — had come seemingly unscathed through the global financial crisis, which undermined US and more broadly Western economies, economic institutions and global prestige. China also has gained comparative international traction from the distracted second term of Barack Obama and the travails of Trump.

The CPC is on the verge of achieving a core aim, of doubling the economy in the decade to 2020, if it can maintain its fast growth trot of 6.5 per cent until then — albeit at the collateral cost of increasing the debt mountain.

Xi has maintained China’s level of economic openness — its fundamental difference from its communist cousin the Soviet Union, which collapsed 28 years ago — while also strengthening the role of state-owned giants in controlling most of the upstream of the economy, including the finance, infrastructure, resources, transport and media sectors.

 

Unlike the Soviet Union, he and the People’s Republic of China founded by his political hero Mao Zedong are today widely lauded by other leaders and institutions. That includes the Catholic Church, arguably the world’s second most powerful organisation after the CPC.

While the Vatican under Pope John Paul II played a core role in undermining the Soviet empire, today’s Pope Francis is promoting a diplomatic move to come to an accommodation with Beijing over the status of the church in China.

Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, said recently: “Right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the church are the Chinese … There is a positive national conscience” in China.

He praised Beijing, saying in China “the economy does not dominate politics, as happens in the United States. And in defending the Paris Climate Accord, he said China is assuming a moral leadership others abandoned.”

While Britain’s Margaret Thatcher was another leader deemed responsible for the downfall of the Soviets, in contrast today one of her successors as a Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, has recently taken on as his prime role the boosting of Chinese investment in Britain, especially in infrastructure.

World leaders are counting on Beijing to continue to lead the way in driving global economic growth. It is unlikely but not impossible that in time China could replace the US in the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Bishop Sorondo said: “You cannot think that the China of today is the China of John Paul II, or Cold War Russia.” Indeed, its Communist Party has proven considerably more successful at adapting rapidly to changing technologies as well as to economic realities.

It has exchanged a former Marxist focus on ownership of businesses and other organisations for one of influence and accountability. About 95 per cent of Chinese private companies, and more than 70 per cent of foreign-owned firms operating there, have party branches inside them.

The great new economic powers in China are BAT — Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent — privately owned companies whose continued success relies on them remaining strongly aligned with Xi’s aims, and which host large party ­branches. They have been licensed to drive China’s commercial uptake of new internet technologies and to take them to the world in the shape of retail platforms, social media, search engines, online retail finance and much more.

Under Xi, the internet in China has been transformed into an incomparable tool of party control, with every post and communication immediately able to be tracked to each sender and receiver.

Xi also has tackled as a reform priority the People’s Liberation Army — which is the CPC’s army, not that of the Chinese state. He has restructured its command centres and is in the process of reducing its size while modernising its weaponry.

The South China Sea is now — with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations largely in line — mostly under the PLA’s authority. Its bases are constructed on islets, enabling China to “break through”, as Beijing sees it, the constricting US-led surveillance along the line of islands between the Chinese coast and the deep Pacific. China also is thrusting into the Indian Ocean, with new ports in Sri Lanka and Pakistan and further man-made islets on the way in the Maldives.

Xi has introduced catchwords and phrases to summon support for his ambitious global and domestic programs, including “the Chinese dream”, “Belt and Road Initiative” and — one strictly for the cadres — the phrase that vaulted him into the party’s constitution alongside Mao, “Xi Jinping Thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era”.

The emphasis is on the new era. This is not, as long supposed by many Western observers, one in which China would slowly shift towards democracy or the rule of law. Instead, Xi has presided over a toughening of controls within China. In one nationwide strike he ordered the arrest of 200 human rights lawyers and their staff, many since jailed for a decade, and remained unmoved as Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, the leading advocate for greater freedoms within China, died agonisingly of liver cancer while in custody. Large numbers of workers who were deemed diduan (low class) were rounded up in big cities including Beijing, their dwellings razed, and expelled shortly before Christmas.

But this has not attracted significant interest internationally, even from rights activists in Western countries, who continue to accord China “progressive” status in part because of its continuing, unwavering communist rule.

Instead Xi largely is lauded overseas, receiving kudos from autocrats such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, The Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and from the leaders of most “Belt and Road” countries between China and Europe, as well as from many developing nations in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, and from Greece and eastern European countries.

He is praised as an economic globalist by the corporate leaders who gather annually at Davos in Switzerland, where he received tumultuous applause for his keynote speech 14 months ago.

As a result, he has advanced and expanded opportunistically his program of outreach to the world — to the extent that China is moving beyond merely denying the universal applicability of the “universal human rights” and values, to seeking to replace them with core values espoused by the CPC, with “materialism” in the shape of living standards to the fore, besides non-interference in others’ domestic affairs.

Xi has a soft spot, in so far as such an implacable leader can have one, for Australia, having visited every state.

While China’s diplomats and media respond publicly to rhetorical criticisms from Canberra, with the current legislation intended to reduce Chinese influence-building perceived as untoward, Beijing is likely to retain under Xi its overall take — that China’s longer-term construction of closer relations with this important Western outpost in Asia remains on track.

Beijing’s assiduous courting of opinion leaders has been effective, and Australian universities — more than a quarter of them hosting Confucius Institutes — and schools, state governments and the business world continue in many ways to privilege China over other international relationships.

The growing Chinese population in Australia also remains largely on side, with its information channels — both traditional and social media — dominated by sources from China.

The economic relationship, crucial to both sides, remains intact and growing in a way that is unlikely to be disrupted despite the fears cast by businesspeople glancing at the sanctions unofficially imposed by Beijing on South Korea when it began to deploy an anti-missile system that was alleged to be able to scope China’s military as well as North Korea’s.

China has proven willing to deploy such “sharp power” — with mixed results against South Korea, whose economy increased its growth rate last year — although “soft power”, cultural attraction, so far has largely eluded it because the party insists on retaining control, which limits the appeal beyond its own borders, and even within them.

What is the program that Xi wishes to take to the world? His favoured phrases such as “shared common destiny” defy extended analysis, leaving power and influence as the residual qualities.

But Xi is not “power mad” for himself. He sincerely believes the party, of which he has inherited from his politician father “red genes”, encapsulates all that is best in the past, present and future of China, which itself comprises the world’s highest and most enduring civilisation. And he has the unique experience and bloodline to embody the party.

This thinking does not conceive of China or Chinese people having a significant existence beyond the party and its leader. He has assiduously, and initially at considerable risk, removed every rival from the scene — using the party’s disciplinary commission, which has in the name of attacking corruption also purged dissent, which is viewed as fostering disloyalty.

Next week’s annual session of the 2300 delegates of the National People’s Congress or parliament will establish a National Supervisory Commission that will extend to every government worker at every level, from teachers and rubbish collectors to economists and security guards, similar powers deployed aggressively by the party commission.

A new section will be written accordingly into the national constitution on “the structure of the state”.

At the top, Xi sits supreme, now effectively unaccountable. He personally guides every key policy area via his chairmanship of a half-dozen “leading small groups” whose fellow members he selects.

With the upgrading of the role of national president, the authority of the premier — today Li Keqiang — as head of the state machinery, parallel to but subservient to the party machine, is likely to be downgraded.

Issues surrounding the succession are postponed, for a decade or more, likely making the ultimate transition more difficult and dangerous for the party, which has thrown all its own credibility and authority in with that of Xi personally. If he trips at some stage, so does the party.

Xi is mostly popular, although China’s emerging well-educated and travelled generation will never embrace a leader in the way their grandparents did Mao.

Indeed, the party itself outlaws it, saying in article 10, section 6 of its own constitution: “The party proscribes all forms of personality cult. It shall be ensured that the activities of party leaders are subject to oversight by the party and the people …”

Typically, lone leaders become prone to sycophancy and poor advice, and are tempted into overreach, although China’s party central relentlessly surveys the population to avoid being thus caught out.

And while China has built an ever widening circle of admirers, it still lacks true friends at the strategic level. Its only formal ally is North Korea, whose “Supreme Leader”, Kim Jong-un, Xi deeply distrusts.

It remains essentially a “lonely rising power”, as leading Chinese security analyst Zhu Feng describes his own country.

But during his indefinite rule Xi will preside over events that will awe the world, including the 70th anniversary next year of the People’s Republic and the centenary in 2021 of the party.

He will open the Winter Olympics in Beijing in 2022, having played a prominent role in guiding the success of the Summer Games in 2008.

But to his chagrin, one personal goal is almost certain to elude even Xi’s enormous capacity to roll over rivals — victory, perhaps even qualification for, the World Cup of his favourite sport, soccer.