China’s most powerful man steps on TN soil
When the Chinese President Xi Jinping calmly walked down the ladder from the Air China special aircraft- that looked more like a sky ship- at the old Meenambakkam airport here on Friday for the twoday informal summit with the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi at the coastal Pallava heritage site of Mamallapuram, there was lot more to the Confucian ideal of completeness.
Arguably the most powerful and quietly assertive personality leading China, Xi Jinping, even modest in the smiles he flashes, is both a world leader,-as important if not more than the American Presidentand a political project in the making, underpinned by what the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg once termed as “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.
The once 'cave-dweller' and now general secretary of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping who succeeded Hu Jintao to that post in 2012 and then became President in 2013, his dream is to make China “thoroughly modern socialist” state by the year 2050, still 30 years away for the Communist Republic of China which recently celebrated its 70th anniversary.
In October 2017, Xi was reelected as general secretary at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. Almost two years later, in October 2019, Xi is in Tamil Nadu today, to possibly rediscover and explore China's “Kancheepuram route” to South Asia, as scholars unravel the ancient trade ties, going beyond just the story of Bodhi Dharma taking Buddhism from here to China. For the simple reason, it is Confucianism that is still the bedrock of Chinese life.
Xi Jinping is already being compared to the great revolutionary leader
Chairman Mao Zedong and the later pragmatic leader Deng Xioping who had plunged headlong into pathbreaking economic reforms in the 1980s', for his political sagacity and vision. None can forget Deng's famous quip: It does not matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches the mice. And with China recently amending its Constitution to remove the two five-year term limitation on the post of the President, analysts say, this beholds the possibility of Xi Jinping “being President for life”.
But in what until recently was a closed society as China, Xi Jinping has come up the political ladder in the incredibly hard way. That is perhaps one reason why his work in two volumes - 'Xi Jinping - The Governance of China'termed by a scholar the 'Big white book' in contrast to Mao's 'Little Red book'-, that spells out his vision for the growth and development of China by modified form of Socialism-, is catching the attention of western elites and leaders at International book fairs.
Xi's book, as gleaned from various sources, is essentially a collection of his articles, speeches, lectures and letters. Mr. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, in an article titled 'From the Little Red Book to the Big White one' (Times Literary Supplement, May 15, 2018), says that while Mao in his work took pains to explain
the basic concepts of Marxism to the poor masses, the tool for their socialist revolution, “Xi ignores class struggle” and instead focuses on notions like 'Clash of Civilizations' and 'cloud based computing', at least in the first volume of his work.
One underlying motive engine to the Chinese quietly but rapidly transforming itself into a global economic power, while retaining its rigid communist party and state apparatus, is that “it is poised to regain its stature as a great country.” Interestingly, the RSS, the ideological compass of BJPruled India is also seeing a role for a 'new India' in a similar language, even if Sanskrit is not Mandarin.
In a profile on the Chinese President, the BBC says that Xi Jinping, born in 1953 in Beijing, is the son of a revolutionary veteran Xi Zhongxun, “one of the Communist party's founding fathers and a vice-premier.”
In the Communist party hierarchy, Xi may have been born with a silver spoon, yet “in a household steeped in communist ideals of equality and personal austerity” as another life sketch on him points out. But everything turned topsy-turvy for him when “his father was purged in 1962 prior to the Cultural Revolution and imprisoned,” says that report.
It was then Xi Jinping suffered the ignominy of being sent to the countryside for
“re-education and hard labour in a remote and poor village of Liangjiahe for seven years.” Despite this having a big impact on his later life, Xi Jinping converted a crisis into an opportunity by “embracing” the Communist party. Membership was denied to him several times, until the Comrades accepted him in 1974. From then, he “worked hard to rise to the top”, playing several roles at different places including being the party chief of Shanghai, China's financial hub, the BBC adds.
An anecdote from that Chinese version of 'Van Vaas' for Xi Jinping in 1969, may be in order here. Sent with 15 other teenagers to Yellow Hills in 'Shaanxi Province' as part of Mao's campaign, “to toughen up educated urban youth during the chaotic Cultural Revolution”, as another account describes it, Xi had to put up with “fleas and hard labour”. He worked on a farm, but was castigated by fellow workers as “incompetent”. His work was not even rated “as high as the women.”
Xi spent seven years there, “sleeping on a brick bed and ate raw grain gruel”, records 'The New Yorker'. And Barbara Demick and David Pierson wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “for nearly seven years, Xi Jinping lived there, making a cave his home. A thin quilt spread on bricks was his bed, a bucket was his toilet. Dinners were a porridge of millet and raw grain.” 'The Times' in an article by Leo Lewis in November 2012, speaks of how the Liangjiahe villagers recalled Xi as a “gangly bookworm who eventually earned their respect. They said Xi spent his days working in the fields and his evenings reading by the light of a kerosene lamp. They said he was a passionate reader who became annoyed if anyone touched his books.”
A chemical engineering graduate from The Tsinghua University, Xi Jinping is married to the famous folk singer in China, Peng Liyuan. They have a daughter Xi Mingze, a student of Harvard University. The Xis' are today a celebrity couple, a profile hardly seen about Chinese Presidents in the past.
In pursuing the economic reforms and his vision for China including the 'one belt, one road trade project', China's continued dominance in the South China Sea, one thing that is mentioned in almost all accounts on Xi Jinping is the manner in which he cracked down on corruption both within the government and the Chinese Communist party. “He has punished more than a million, including both highranking and low-ranking party officials,” says the BBC profile.
Combating corruption is seen as a way of doing away with one's political opponents, but it is also political consolidation for the ruler and stifling dissent, as seen now in the latest protests in Hong Kong, point out observers. But at the end of the day, as of now, Xi Jinping is a star on the ascendant, can talk tough to USA on trade tariffs, even while embarrassing India with the 'Pakistan card', in top-level UN forums on issues like Kashmir. Whether Xi's second informal summit with Prime Minister Modi will help 'reset' India-China ties remains to be seen.