New leader, new mood for China
Xi, expected to take helm this week, said to have strong military ties
BEIJING — On one of his many visits abroad in recent years, Xi Jinping, the presumptive new leader of China, met in 2009 with local Chinese residents in Mexico City, where, in a relaxed atmosphere, he indirectly criticized the United States.
“There are a few foreigners, with full bellies, who have nothing better to do than try to point fingers at our country,” Xi said, according to a tape broadcast on Hong Kong television. “China does not export revolution, hunger, poverty, nor does China cause you any headaches. Just what else do you want?”
Xi, who is set to be elevated to the top post of the Chinese Communist Party at the 18th Party Congress, scheduled to begin Thursday — only two days after the U.S. election — will take the helm of a more confident China than the U.S. has ever known.
He will be assuming supreme power in China at a time when relations between the two countries are adrift, sullied by suspicions over a clash of interests in Asia and by frequent attacks on China in the U.S. presidential campaign.
In the last four months, China has forged an aggressive, more nationalistic posture in Asia that may set the tone for Xi’s expected decade-long tenure, analysts and diplomats say, pushing against U.S. allies, particularly Japan, for what China considers its territorial imperatives.
The son of a revolutionary general, Xi, 59, boasts far closer ties to China’s fastgrowing military than the departing leader, Hu Jintao, had when he took office.
As Xi rose through the ranks of the Communist Party, he made the most of parallel posts in the People’s Liberation Army, deeply familiarizing himself with the inner workings of the armed forces.
Even if Xi does not immediately become head of the crucial Central Military Commission as well as party leader, he will almost certainly do so within two years, giving him at least eight years as the direct overseer of the military.
This combination of political power as head of the Communist Party and good relations with a more robust military could make Xi a formidable leader for Washington to contend with, analysts and diplomats in China and the U.S. say.
“The basic question is whether Xi will suspend the drift in the U.S.-China relationship and take concrete steps to put it on a more positive footing — or will he put it on a different, more confrontational track?” said Christopher Johnson, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and, until recently, a China analyst at the CIA.
The answer appears to lie somewhere in between.
In a speech in Washington in February, Xi said that China and the U.S. should forge a “new type of relationship between major countries in the 21st century.”
Xi offered little specificity beyond respect for each side’s “core interests and major concerns,” “increasing mutual understanding and strategic trust” and “enhancing cooperation and coordination in international affairs.”
But essentially, said Jin Canrong, a professor at the School of International Studies at Renmin University in Beijing, Xi was challenging the global leadership of the U.S. by suggesting that Washington needs to make room for China’s rising power.
“China should shoulder some responsibility for the United States and the United States should share power with China,” Jin said.
“The United States elites won’t like it,” he added, “but they will have to” accept it.
Jin predicted that the Chinese economy would continue to grow at a much faster pace than America’s. “That fact will change their minds,” Jin said of U.S. attitudes toward sharing power with China.
One of the big changes from the past decade, when China’s foreign policy was focused on securing raw materials from abroad for its soaring domestic economy, will be a stronger emphasis on building up the military to protect China’s interests in Asia and expand its reach abroad.
Xi is perfectly positioned to take on that role.
“The PLA considers he is their man,” said Jin, the professor at Renmin University.
Xi will be in charge of a military whose budget almost certainly will grow at a pace with the economy, or even faster.
The People’s Liberation Army is awaiting an array of sophisticated weaponry now under development, including space and longrange missiles capable of use against U.S. aircraft carriers in the Pacific and Indian oceans.
The question is how it plans to exploit them.
“There are voices in China saying that now that the military has the capacity, they should use them,” said Phillip Saunders, director of the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at the National Defense University in Washington.
Even before his watch begins, many see the stiffer hand of Xi in disputes in the South China Sea with the Philippines and Vietnam and in the East China Sea with Japan.
Chinese officials and commentators have alluded recently to what they see as the need for Japan to distance itself from the U.S., even forgo the mutual defense treaty with Washington.
When Xi met with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in Beijing in September, he delivered “an earful,” and left the unmistakable message that the U.S. should stay out of the way in the standoff between Japan and China over claims to the disputed islands.
Many see that as a harbinger of an effort by Xi over the next decade to increase the power and presence of China in Asia, a region where the U.S. has held the upper hand since the end of World War II.