RI SE OF THE XI - MAN
Throughout Xi Jinping’s first term, he was the constant companion by his side. The diminutive, bespectacled official accompanied him everywhere, from Gujarat to California, and in China he was known as the brains behind Xi’s major campaigns, from the ‘ Chinese Dream’ at home to ‘ One Belt, One Road’ abroad. On October 25, Wang Huning finally stepped out of the shadows, taking his place as the fifth- ranked leader on the Communist Party’s most important body, the seven- member politburo standing committee. In his role, Wang will be in charge of ideology— and ensuring that the party’s mandates are enforced throughout the system.
With his academic background— he was earlier dean of Shanghai’s elite Fudan University— Wang is rare among Chinese officials in leaving a long paper trail spelling out his ideas on governance. He wrote prolifically until the mid1990s, when then leader Jiang Zemin drafted him into the powerful party central research office, its brains trust. Wang has proved so invaluable that he was a key ideological figure for two of Xi’s predecessors, Jiang and Hu Jintao. Under Xi, his profile has grown even bigger.
Much of Wang’s writings analyse China’s political system, and how it differs from the West. Wang is a strong critic of Western democracy and argues that they are democracies only in name, citing how he sees vested interests dominate US politics. He argues China should follow its own model with strong, centralised leadership. Wang is a strong defender of China’s hybrid system of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, which Xi has now adapted as his eponymous “thought” for “a new era”, enshrined in the party constitution. “Where there is no central authority or where the central authority is in decline,” he once wrote, “the nation will be in a divided and chaotic state.”
Wang appears to situate India’s political system as being fundamentally different from the West, and to some degree, as a hybrid between Western liberal democracy and China’s civilisational state, drawing from its own long history of unique political thought. In his 1994 book, Life of Politics, he writes that he has studied Indian philosophical texts in detail. He studied Indian philosophy, he wrote, driven by the desire “to know how they think differently from us, especially in logic and philosophy”. “I can now understand they have a unique way of thinking,” Wang concludes.
Many of Wang’s writings focus on the challenges of governance. In his book on ‘ administrative ecology’, he contrasts governance styles in different countries and what drives administrators in assessing the needs of citizens. In the US, UK and Japan, he suggests “safety” is the top priority while in India, it is “respect”. “Individual needs can be affected by multiple factors like social traditions, economic relations, political activities, religious ideologies, moral creeds,” he writes. Trust in government, he says, ultimately depends on whether or not it fills its basic pledge to govern the people— a lesson the Party needed to heed.
Jude Blanchette, a scholar at The Conference Board’s China Centre for Economics and Business in Beijing, notes that in the post- 1989 period, Wang and other scholars advocated the need for political stability to underpin economic development and strongly pushed back against calls for political decentralisation to accompany Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms. As Wang put it, “The formation of democratic institutions requires the existence of specific historical, social and cultural conditions. Until these conditions are mature, political power should be directed towards the development of these conditions.” He even expressed fears of China “being split into 30 dukedoms and 2,000 rival principalities” because of decentralisation.
As Blanchette says, “The legacy of Wang’s neo- authoritarianism and its cousin, neo- conservatism, lives on today under the reign of Xi Jinping.” Xi has certainly strengthened the control of party central, from state- owned enterprises to the provinces. But it is to be noted that for those expecting a Mao- style “cult of Xi”, Wang was also a strong critic of the excesses of Maoism. The Cultural Revolution, he concluded, was nothing but “a political catastrophe”.
Wang Huning will be ensuring the party’s mandates are enforced throughout the system