Xi’s rise crushes political reform predictions

Beijing, March 12: China’s Xi Jinping strode onto the leadership stage in 2012 to sunny predictions that he would usher in a new era of political reform. But after a stunning power grab, all bets are off.

His path surprised allies and adversaries alike, culminating in Sunday’s historic vote by the Chinese parliament to abolish presidential term limits.

Few had expected that the leader — whose own family suffered under the chaotic rule of Mao Zedong — would one day overthrow the system of orderly succession put in place to prevent the return of another all- powerful strongman.

Quite the opposite: in a 2013 op- ed in the New York Times, journalist Nicholas Kristof wrote Xi would “spearhead a resurgence of economic reform, and probably some political easing as well.”

“Mao’s body be hauled out of Tiananmen... And Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize- winning writer, will be released from prison.”

But Mao’s embalmed body is still there, while last year Liu became the first laureate to die in captivity since the Nazis ruled Germany.

Kristoff was far from the only one to get it wrong: many journalists, politicians and analysts in China and abroad had high expectations for the will leader who had come of age in the Cultural Revolution and sent his daughter to Harvard.

But “Xi the reformer was as much a chimera as Hu ( Jintao) the reformer or Deng ( Xiaoping) the reformer,” Kerry Brown, director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London, told AFP, referring to China’s past leadership.

“A construct of our imaginations that was never going to happen.”

When Xi became Communist Party chief in 2012, China’s future looked quite different: social media had vastly increased the room for public debate, the economy was liberalising, lawyers were fighting back against government abuses of power, and the southern village of Wukan had forced authorities to allow a democratic election.

In the years since, there has been a dramatic about- face: China’s internet, its private businesses, its human rights defenders, and Wukan have all been crushed in Xi’s tightening grip on power.

“There was a lot of wishful thinking and there was a lot of complacency that the West was such a light on a hill,” said David Kelly, director of research at Beijing- based consultancy China Policy.

But the thinking was different in Beijing: “after the Great Financial Crisis... China could say it was the last man standing and the West had demonstrated a failure of its institutions.”

When Xi took office, he may have been forced to accept some compromises to his authoritarian vision “because he not yet consolidated assets,” Kelly said.

At the time, Xi seemed to be respecting the norms of leadership transition, said Daniel Piccuta, a retired US diplomat and political affairs consultant who was once a top US embassy official in Beijing.

“Back then, I had little reason to predict Xi’s successful attempt to ‘ adjust’ the timing on the next orderly transition of leadership.”

Few in China coming either.

When he was appointed party secretary of Shanghai in 2007, he was a “compromise candidate” who the party’s elders hoped to “co- opt”, according to a US embassy analysis written at the time.

He “was an easy candidate for most in the Politburo to accept,” wrote the American diplomat, citing the opinions of mainland Chinese scholars.

“The reason they picked Xi is because they thought he was a very mediocre person,” said political analyst Willy Lam. “He was a team player.” They were proven wrong as Xi launched an anti- corruption campaign that punished one million officials and felled top politicians who posed a threat to him, sending a clear message to any potential adversaries. saw had his Xi