‘Core leader’ Xi appears triumphant and anxious
EVEN in a moment of triumph, China’s president, Xi Jinping, exudes anxiety. Since the Communist Party gave Xi the exalted title of “core leader” last week, it has built a fervent campaign to rally the country around him. The symbolic boost has underscored Xi’s dominance of the party elite, raising the chances that he will get his way in a reshuffle of its top ranks next year.
But this victory at the top for Xi has been laced with warnings in official documents and speeches about risks facing China and the party: a slowing economy distorted by excessive debt and unneeded industrial output, worries that corruption could rebound, bureaucratic inertia frustrating central policies, and international tensions.
Xi appears politically indomitable, but officials suggest he and other leaders are alarmed by broader, long-term dangers and by the party’s ability to weather them. Both considerations underpinned the leadership’s decision to go along with raising his status.
“Maintaining a sense of peril is a part of the traditions of the Communist Party,” said Wang Wen, a professor at Renmin University in Beijing who has met Xi. “But his sense of peril goes deeper than recent leaders’.”
“He’s seen the Arab Spring and the crisis of power across the Middle East and northern Africa, and he’s discussed that several times, and he’s also seen the lessons from Soviet history,” Wang said. “Establishing him as the core is to set the tune that the central leader must have authority.”
For Xi, 63, the son of a revolutionary veteran who revered Mao, fear of risk- ing the Communist Party’s hold on power is especially heartfelt.
He enjoys mastery over the elite, but he has expressed frustration about a lack of control at the grass roots. That paradoxical combination explains why his power can appear both commanding and brittle, even after four years as national leader. And it is likely to magnify his drive for control, even if he enters a second term as president in 2017 surrounded by officials he has hand-picked, several experts said.
“Many of the party’s policies can’t get implemented,” Deng Maosheng, who helped draft the decision that raised Xi’s status, told reporters in Beijing on Monday. Some cities and provinces had acted like “independent kingdoms”, scoffing at central policies, he said.
“We must strengthen centralised and united leadership at the centre,” Deng added. “If we don’t, we can’t solve the problems that we’re confronting.”
In the days after his elevation to “core” status, Xi has moved quickly to keep positioning his allies for promotion into the party’s top ranks next year, when nearly half the 25 members of the decision-making Politburo are to retire.
On Monday, Cai Qi, an official who served under Xi in the province of Zhejiang, was appointed acting mayor of Beijing. Cai, who most recently served as a senior official on the National Security Commission founded by Xi, appears likely to become the city’s party chief – a more powerful post than mayor – after the current one retires in the next year.
That does not mean that all posts will be stacked with Xi’s longtime friends. The decision that elevated him to “core” also emphasised “democratic centralism” – giving all senior officials a say – and said they should come from the “five lakes and four seas”, meaning from varied backgrounds.
“The clear benefit for Xi will be in filling these positions, which does not mean filling them with a ready-made faction,” said Frederick C Teiwes, an emeritus professor at the University of Sydney in Australia who has long studied elite politics in China.
“He will draw on a wide variety of constituencies,” Teiwes said by email. “These will obviously include people he knows well and trusts, and others with primary connections elsewhere will adjust their loyalties and in some sense become ‘Xi’s people’.”
The campaign to promote Xi’s new status has signalled that firm loyalty to him will be essential for advancement. Other officials promoted recently ardently supported his elevation, even before the decision by the party’s Central Committee last week. Since then, more officials have declared their “absolute loyalty” to Xi in speeches reported by party-run newspapers.
But adulation of Xi has been accompanied by an undercurrent of frustration that his plans have repeatedly run into obstacles, impeding efforts to tame threats to party control.
The decision last week summed up those risks as the “Four Big Ordeals”: maintaining power, managing the country’s exposure to the international economy, coping with market changes and navigating an uncertain external environment.
A day after Xi’s new title was announced, he brought together senior officials to discuss the health of the economy. Cheap credit has shored up growth, but lending has reached levels that worry many economists. On Tuesday, he warned officials that there “must not be any slackening or lagging” in pushing through change.
Above all, Xi worries about obstacles that could prevent China from shifting toward slower but more sustainable growth, and from turning his anticorruption crackdown into lasting improvements in government, several experts said. Xi considers those obstacles, rather than any potential rivals in the top leadership, his biggest threat, said Zheng Yongnian, a professor at the National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute who often meets Chinese officials.
“Without delivery, his agenda is in trouble,” Zheng said. “People are very realistic. Today you are popular, tomorrow you may not be.”
Maintaining a sense of peril is a part of the traditions of the Communist Party. But his sense of peril goes deeper than recent leaders’