Donald Trump has vouched for Xi Jinping’s grip on power amid rumours of disquiet

Amid reports Xi Jinping faced a rare rebuke at a secretive meeting with CCP leaders, Donald Trump insisted he was in no danger of losing his dictatorship.

Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang, left, was removed from his post by Xi Jinping.

Donald Trump has vouched for Xi Jinping’s continuing grip on power in Beijing amid reports the supreme Chinese leader faced rare criticism at a secretive conference of Chinese Communist Party leaders.

Amid rumours of disquiet about Xi’s performance, the former US president, who met Xi Jinping a handful of times as US president, said he expected Xi’s recent critics to be “executed within 24 hours”.

“I know him very well. He’s in no danger whatsoever. The people that suggested it will probably be executed within the next 24 hours,” Mr Trump said on Wednesday (Thursday AEST), when asked by radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt whether he thought Xi was in “danger of losing his dictatorship”.

The question was prompted by a report by senior Nikkei Asia journalist and China-watcher Katsuji Nakazaw, who on Tuesday reported that “a group of retired party elders reprimanded the top leader in ways they had not until now”.

“Xi later expressed his frustration to his closest aides, according to the information gathered,” the journalist added in an article that posited “signs of turmoil in Chinese domestic politics”

It’s a tradition of Chinese Communist Party leadership, past and present, to meet each year at the seaside resort of Beidaihe, Hebei Province, to privately discuss political and economic developments.

“The conclave had a significantly different feel from the previous 10 Beidaihe meetings that have taken place since Xi became general secretary of the party in 2012,” Nakjazaw’s sources said.

Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in 2017. Picture: AFP

It was the first Beidaihe retreat to be held without former President Jiang Zemin, who died aged 96 last November, and Xi‘s immediate predecessor, Hu Jintao, now 80, who has rarely been seen since he was scandalously booted out of the Great Hall of the People at the CCP’s national congress last October.

“The gist of the message was that if the political, economic and social turmoil continues without any effective countermeasures being taken, the party could lose public support, posing a threat to its rule,” the report said.

Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CCP since 2012 and president of China since 2013, has had a challenging few years, having imposed severe Covid-19 lockdowns that crushed economic growth at home, at the same time as having to manage a west, led by the US, more determined and unified to thwart Beijing’s designs on Taiwan.

Last week Beijing announced President Xi would not attend the G20 leaders meeting due to begin this Saturday in New Delhi, instead sending his premier Li Qiang, marking the first time any Chinese leader has missed the influential summit of the leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies.

The G20 no show will also follow the sudden sacking of Qin Gang, a political ally of Xi’s, who was suddenly removed as foreign minister in July after disappearing from public life, and hasn’t been seen publicly since.

Gordan Chang, a US China expert, on Wednesday highlighted “rumours” on Chinese social media that Qin Gang had been “executed”. “Whether the reports are true or not — I tend to think they are not — there appears to be severe infighting at the top of the CCP,” he said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Dimon Liu, a Washington-based China analyst, also pointed to what she described as “the wholesale purge of generals in the PLA’s Rocket Force program, and the sudden disappearance in April, and the delayed announcement of the death of the commander of the Central Guards Unit”.

“All point to things not going well for Xi … Power struggle is a feature, not a bug, of the PRC’s Leninist system,” she told The Australian in an interview.

Mr Trump said Xi Jinping wouldn’t seek to dominate what it sees as a wayward democratic province, Taiwan, if he were re-elected president next year, a race in which he’s the frontrunner to receive the GOP nomination.

“You don’t have to worry about Taiwan. If I’m president, Taiwan will never happen, meaning China will never go into Taiwan if I’m president, not even a chance,” he said in the interview.