Confident Xi throws weight around

Xi Jinping, the most ambitious Chinese leader since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, has outlined his extravagant ideas about the future. China today is “standing tall and firm,” ready to take centre stage in the world. In fact, this week he told the 2,300 delegates at the 19th Communist Party congress in Beijing that China will play “an important role in the history of humankind.” As he sees it, China is triumphantly emerging into a new era, under his direction.

His system combines a market-driven economy with iron control of the civil service and a careful watch over all media, the internet in particular. He’s convinced that this can work in undeveloped countries as it has for China, if they follow China’s example.

He believes that the dark days for China are over, the days when foreign imperialists dominated. He came to power announcing in 2012 that he wanted to take his country on The Road of Rejuvenation, reviving China’s power and influence. He encouraged the feeling of aggrieved nationalism among the people. Xi himself is the sort of nationalist who believes his side will rise only if others fall.

He’s dead set against imperialism except when the empire in question is China. He has no sympathy for the democratic yearnings of Hong Kong, which he suppresses. He huffed and puffed with self-righteous anger when Donald Trump tried to open friendly relations with Taiwan. Xi considers Taiwan part of China forever, even though its inhabitants might prefer an independent course. Xi also wants to bring into China’s sphere of influence several nearby states that are separate only in theory. A joke among the Vietnamese says their coastline depicts a spine bent under the weight of China.

Those who read Xi’s speeches are aware that his personality contains an almost Trumpian degree of self-regard. He ran a ferocious campaign against the notorious corruption that burdened financial affairs and government operations. In the process, his government’s prosecutors drove out of office, if not to jail, many of his potential rivals. He considers that these now forgotten enemies were involved in “political conspiracies.”

Since 2012, he has purged rivals and their allies, gained immense control over the military, and taken charge of the economy. Meanwhile, China is a growing force overseas. Its first foreign military base is being built in the Republic of Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa. Typically, Xi takes credit for the military and everything else. He directly controls the courts, the schools, the censored media, and even mass housing. In the first five years of his presidency (he expects to get a second five-year term) more than 60 million Chinese have moved above the poverty line. He’s relocated them from poor farm villages to towns where they can find jobs in the quasi-capitalist industries developed under the most entrepreneurial of his predecessors, Deng Xiaoping.

A few years ago, China had a generation of “human rights lawyers,” including some who learned democratic ideas while being educated abroad. Most of them have since been jailed. Xi believes they often fail to act as “patriots” — a word he defines as “loyal to the state.” In July, the death in jail of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and pro-democracy campaigner, became a symbol of the Xi administration’s harshness; the government refused to let him leave China to seek treatment of his liver cancer.

Xi, essentially China’s dictator, runs a tight administrative state. He sits on every important committee in the government, to make sure the other members agree with him and don’t succumb to what he calls “erroneous” thinking.

On the other hand, Xi shows at least the beginnings of tolerance when dealing with China’s infamous campaign against the Falun Gong.

A vastly popular form of meditation and moral philosophy, Falun Gong poses no practical danger to the government. But in the 1990s, the Communist Party began to see it as a threat. They worried about its size (the state’s estimate was 70 million), and its utter freedom from state connections or subsidy. Moreover, its spiritual teachings were mysterious. It appeared that many in the government found it annoying that a huge constituency was thinking deeply about something other than communism.

So a national police crackdown and propaganda campaign began. Websites even mentioning Falun Gong were wiped out. Many thousands of practitioners were imprisoned in forced labour camps. According to human rights groups, some 2,000 died in custody. It was said that many were killed to supply China’s organ-transplant industry.

Xi doesn’t mention Falun Gong in his speeches but he favours traditional Chinese religion because it could enrich China’s culture. And he’s fired some of the police most guilty of outrageous behaviour to the practitioners. While he’s not proposing to make China a democracy, he’s now confident enough to break the pointless laws an earlier administration introduced.