Rumour mill is misreading the tea leaves: Xi Jinping is still in charge and not going anywhere
As Anthony Albanese flies towards his fourth meeting as Prime Minister with Xi Jinping, rumours about China’s paramount leader are swirling, like clouds around the government’s Boeing 737 Business Jet.
These include that Xi is being cornered by hard-line political rivals, that a “reform” group is preparing to take power with a liberal agenda, and even that the communist dynasty is entering its final days – perhaps due to the buffeting by Donald Trump, just as biblical trumpeting caused the walls of Jericho to collapse.
Albanese will have been briefed that these largely social-media-spread rumours owe more to their creators’ and likers’ wishful thinking than to established facts.
Top-table governance in China has not been so opaque for centuries, so it’s unwise to rule out leadership change absolutely. But most indicators point to Xi maintaining, for years to come, extraordinary control over his Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Republic of China that has become its fully-owned subsidiary.
Albanese will carry with him, wishes of his own – that Beijing can be a dependable partner even as Washington is appearing unpredictable, that China’s economic appetite can maintain Australia’s prosperity.
Xi told the Australian parliament a decade ago, as the China Australia Free Trade Agreement was being concluded, that “the friendship between the Chinese and Australian people … will be as strong and everlasting as the majestic Uluru rock in Central Australia and the Great Wall in northern China”.
Nevertheless, CHAFTA was to be discarded effectively by Beijing for political reasons a few years later, and replaced by commercial coercion – while the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement is now also under attack from Trump.
But today Xi again holds out high expectations for Australia becoming a kind of model of a Western country fit for purpose, including being safe for his party.
Influential Chinese commentator Hu Xijin has noted that “Australia is the first US ally to make a clear change in its attitude towards China after a fierce conflict since the US defined China as its No.1 strategic competitor.” The China Daily has editorialised in praise of “the strategic autonomy the Albanese government has displayed”.
What Xi wants of Australia is of considerable importance, starting with “stabilisation” – no rocking of boats, especially no critical public discourse – which also comprises Albanese’s framing of his government’s own PRC policy.
In the PRC, however, weiwen (stability maintenance) carries an undertone of suppression.
Australia’s leading politicians of both main parties are determinedly pursuing such stabilising “discipline” through refraining from criticism of the PRC, its leaders or its ruling party, in order to safeguard exports from resumed politically directed bans, and increasingly also in order to prevent the threatened loss of marginal seats due to claims China-origin voters will punish such critiques.
At the same time, Beijing’s ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, recently lambasted in The Australian Western nations’ “Cold War mentality … peddling notions such as the ‘China collapse’ ” – the latter being part of the program of “smears and containment” that China, “always a promoter of world peace”, must suffer.
At the core target of such China-collapse theories, naturally, stands the figure whom the CCP has designated its “core” leader.
Xi is now just 72, compared with Trump’s 79. Xi’s influential father died aged 88, and his mother remains alive aged 98. But it’s not only such “red genes” – which he has exalted as qualifying party-royalty comrades for continuing power – that point to his sustained strength. His three roles – in order of significance, general secretary of the party, chairman of the Central Military Commission, and lastly state President – now have no term limits. He has not named nor even hinted at a successor, so as to avoid appearing a lame duck.
Leadership rumours have always swirled in China, since imperial dynastic days. And two party leaders during the communist dynasty have indeed lost power – Hua Guofeng, who had been named by Mao Zedong as his successor, and Hu Yaobang, who was blamed for weakness in the face of late 1980s student protests.
Both, however, were taken down by Deng Xiaoping, who had emerged as the most powerful post-Mao leader. No Deng equivalent remains.
Xi has purged all factions, while “party elders” such as Hu Jintao – escorted humiliatingly from the stage at the last party congress – and Wen Jiabao, both aged 82, as well as Zhu Rongji, 96, and Shanghai-clique leader Zeng Qinghong, 86, are today more paper tigers than powerbrokers.
These elders retain no more capacity to regain top power in the CCP – or to appoint a new leader – than Joe Biden does in the US Democratic Party.
Such rumours of Xi’s downfall mostly emanate from a few main sources. They include the Falun Gong religious movement, which is labelled an “evil cult” by the CCP, and which has consequently devoted its considerable resources to attacking the party, and the many fissiparous dissident groups and individuals in exile, who often latch on to any reading of party-document tea leaves that might indicate welcome change at home.
The sources of downfall rumours also include many among the Chinese people who have chosen to shift overseas for lifestyle reasons, as well as foreign commentators who cannot accept that a communist power can truly challenge the West. Such groups would like to believe either that the CCP’s days in control are numbered, or that a well-disposed group of “reformers” is waiting in the wings to replace Xi’s hardline corps of Leninist cadres.
The tea leaves that are now excitedly being read and circulated on social media are not new. They include that Xi has “disappeared” from public sight for a while, including failing to attend the recent BRICS summit of leaders aligned with China and Russia – the two dubbed by Xi “friends of steel” – in Rio de Janeiro, with Indonesia now joining. But this meeting’s agenda was detail-laden, best dealt with by his Premier Li Qiang, and Xi continued to hold phone talks with foreign leaders and, more importantly, to lead in Beijing the drafting of a key report on financial planning.
Xi does not perceive himself as accountable to the Chinese public or media, let alone to foreigners – his sole “report” is to the party that he controls palpably. The highly respected China Media Project team recently concluded, after assessing key domestic media coverage, that “for now, at least in the headlines, China’s most powerful leader in generations looks just fine.”
The removal of senior officials – especially in the People’s Liberation Army, and including many deemed “Xi loyalists” – has also been adduced as a sign of Xi’s declining authority. Over the past year, for instance, three members of the peak grouping, the Central Military Commission, have been purged, leaving just five including Xi himself.
But through his 12½ years in power, Xi has constantly churned through institutions and top cadres, targeting what he perceives as incompetence, personal disloyalty, or corruption – to which the military, with its massive new “modernisation” procurements, is naturally prone.
Xi says China brings “valuable stability and certainty” in a “turbulent world”. But as a Leninist, he covets transformative change and champions struggle, or douzheng.
Like many authoritarian leaders, he is restless, anxious that his orders aren’t being minutely followed. He feels little loyalty to those who might feel loyal to him. His management style is to keep everyone on their toes, including those who owe everything to his favour, displacing and creating agencies, especially shifting responsibilities from state to party bodies.
Leading Australian China analyst John Fitzgerald says that Xi holds power through his formal roles but not, as Mao and Deng, by dint of personality. Thus it is possible that actors are emerging within the party who have built independent capacity.
Probably, he says, they do not seek to replace Xi – which would still make him, to adapt a famous phrase Australian Sinologist Geremie Barme, the chairman of not-quite-everything. “But whatever is happening,” says Fitzgerald, “it’s unlikely to change policy.”
And what if Xi’s party – which has never sought to legitimise its absolute rule through elections – loses what legitimacy it has built through China’s march towards prosperity in recent decades?
The CCP so successfully courted – through economic opportunity – China’s middle class after its then-alienated student generation took to the streets in 1989, that it soon became the party’s strongest source of support.
Now that is fast dissipating, as middle class savings – all placed in real estate as the sharemarkets increasingly seemed loaded towards cadres’ insider information – have sunk between 20 and 50 per cent in the last three years, and as Xi’s controls have dampened dreams of a more carefree, cosmopolitan future. Beijing has become less multicultural than almost any other capital in Asia.
Many young people, especially, are as a consequence said to be opting out of economic and social life – lying flat, tang ping.
However, as the German Sinologist Andreas Fulda says, the Chinese people “have no meaningful influence over the way China is governed”.
And the powers of state surveillance have reached heights of ubiquity – both online, where all Chinese-owned platforms from WeChat to TikTok are fully accountable to the party’s controllers, and in the “real world”, where the grid-management system employs supervisors to watch over each neighbourhood of about 250 households throughout the nation, aided by almost ubiquitous CCTV cameras. Such surveillance is naturally most intense among those closest to Xi, to peak power.
Ideological uniformity is shaped by Xi’s Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, which must be studied at every educational institution from kindergarten to postgraduates, and at almost every workplace.
And the party seeks, as British China expert Charles Parton says, to export “elements of its systems and values” – including, naturally, to Australia, and even as economic, demographic and social cracks grow wider at home.
Albanese will not be exposed to such cracks on his six-day visit, but may sense that even on their fourth meeting, Xi covets awe not rapport.
Rowan Callick is an industry fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute and an expert associate at the ANU’s National Security College
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