While extending China’s power globally, the president has kept himself cloaked in mystery
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskOutside observers are acutely sensitive to such absences. Over the past few days a prolonged stretch with no public sightings of Mr Xi again triggered wild rumours about his political welfare: on September 27th he put paid to them by visiting an exhibition highlighting the Communist Party’s achievements under his rule. But in 2012 those withdrawals from diplomatic appointments felt different. It was two weeks before Mr Xi resurfaced.
Mr Xi has turned sand banks in the South China Sea into fortresses, threatened Taiwan with military exercises near the island’s coast and increased the deployment of nukes to keep America at bay. He has beefed up China’s global power, using its economic heft in a battle for political influence with the West, which he scoffs at as being chaotic and in decline.
Those optimists a decade ago included Chinese people familiar with the party’s inner workings. One of them was Li Rui, who had served as a deputy minister and as Mao’s personal secretary in the 1950s, had later spent nine years in jail for criticising Mao and who had been restored to high office in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping. After his retirement he remained an outspoken advocate of economic and political reforms until his death in 2019.
In 2011, the year before Mr Xi took power, Joe Biden—then America’s vice-president under Barack Obama—went to China to meet Mr Xi, who by then was vice-president of his country, too . Mr Biden was accompanied by Evan Medeiros, who was the National Security Council’s China director. There was “very little that we knew” about Mr Xi, recalls Mr Medeiros. Mr Biden tried to build a rapport with China’s future leader: they awkwardly played a little basketball together during a visit to a school.
He was right to sense danger. China had been changing dramatically in the few years previously. A large home-owning middle class had emerged within the previous decade or two. With the rapid growth of private enterprise, the party’s grassroots presence had withered: by then most urbanites felt little connection with it. Social media had just emerged as a tool for communication; smartphone ownership was surging. Across China people were using these technologies to share grievances.
, or princeling. The word is most commonly applied to the offspring of leaders, especially the children of Communist China’s founders. Members of this group enjoy political advantage. Among the first 600 or so promising young officials identified by the Young Cadres Bureau in the early 1980s, about 5% were princelings. In the Politburo Standing Committee that Mr Xi took charge of in 2012, the majority were.
Mr Xi is no Maoist. He wants to bring private entrepreneurs to heel but not eliminate them, as Mao did—their contribution to the economy is too valuable to be dispensed with. Unlike Mao, who was happy to wreck party structures in pursuit of Utopian goals, Mr Xi wants to strengthen the country’s political and economic framework, keeping the party firmly in control.
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