Xi Jinping in a hurry to make China great again

Xi Jinping led members of the standing committee of the politburo on a visit to Yan'an on Thursday. Picture: Xinhua

When I moved to Beijing in early January 2020, the cult of Xi Jinping was already long established.

China’s leader, presented by his propagandists as a strict but loving father figure, was ubiquitous. It was a strange night if “Xi Dada” didn’t lead at least the first 10 minutes of CCTV’s nightly broadcast. Often the tribute to the leader could fill up most of the hour.

The Xi cult reached megalomaniacal dimensions long ago, but still it grows. China’s diplomats last week brawled in the streets of Manchester to defend his honour. Beijing’s propaganda department continues to turn out gluttonous tributes to mark the beginning of his second decade in power.

There were some funny moments in the more than 7000-word ode cooked up by Xinhua, which took up the first four pages of Wednesday’s China Daily: “Xi is open to diverse opinions and even criticism … A tough man in the face of challenges and crises, Xi also has a tender side. He wrote letters replying to American people, including young students …”

Despite its unintentional mock comic register – “(Xi) read Das Kapital three times; his reflections on the book filled 18 notebooks” – the Xinhua piece was deadly serious.

The propaganda team are reflecting Beijing orthodoxy when they write: “Xi has provided answers to the questions of China, of the world, of the people and of the times.”

It is now official party dogma that Xi is – in the words of the peerless Australian Sinologist Geremie Barme – “the communist party’s great reconciler”, a leader who has resolved all the policy issues that have bedevilled modern China.

With such a vision, it makes total sense that Xi’s comrades updated their party’s constitution at the recent national congress to enshrine their total loyalty.

The revised communist party constitution – the political lodestar for its 96 million members – declares that all party members must “firmly uphold the authority and centralised, unified leadership of the Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core”.

With that momentous passage of party-speak, China is formally a one-person dictatorship.

Xi’s new seven-member standing committee of the politburo are manifestations of his supreme power. Each is stacked with loyalists and aides.

Hong Kong’s stockmarket greeted the new team with a record plunge as holdout investors accepted there was no “saviour premier” coming to the rescue.

The most searing assessment of China’s post-party congress trajectory was delivered in, of all places, the German business press.

Joerg Wuttke, the president of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, told The Market NZZ it was time to seriously reassess China.

“Many observers have thought until today that although the party calls itself communist, it is basically pursuing a form of Manchester Capitalism. That is over,” said the Beijing-based Wuttke.

As if to underline the point, Xi on Thursday led his new standing committee on a pilgrimage to the revolutionary site of Yan’an, home of some of Mao’s early purges and now a “red tourist” site. Nearby is the cave in which Xi lived for seven years during a later stage of Mao’s maniacal rule.

Wuttke, who has lived in Beijing for 40 years, worries “the echo chamber” around Xi “is getting even denser than it already was” and that “ideology is once again taking precedence over the interests of the economy”.

He says too many outside China are still to come to terms with the reality that Xi is preparing to rule for a decade or more. He adds a gloomy historical comparison.

“The party leadership shows a similar self-confidence as Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Just as imperial Germany rubbed up against England back then, China is rubbing up against America today,” says Wuttke.

“One could say that Xi Jinping is a man in a hurry: He wants to go down in the history books as the statesman who re-established China as a great power.”