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Asian Affairs
ISSN: 0306-8374 (Print) 1477-1500 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/raaf20
THE POWERS OF XI JINPING
Kerry Brown
To cite this article: Kerry Brown (2017) THE POWERS OF XI JINPING, Asian Affairs, 48:1, 17-26,
DOI: 10.1080/03068374.2016.1267435
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THE POWERS OF XI JINPING
KERRY BROWN
Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Insti-
tute at King’s College, London. He is also an associate fellow on the Asia Pro-
gramme at Chatham House. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Asian
Affairs journal. This article is an edited version of a lecture he gave to the
Society on 8 November 2016. Email: Kerry.Brown01@googlemail.com
The nature and extent of the powers of the Chinese president and the
Party Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party have become one of
the most discussed issues in the last four years since Xi Jinping’s ascen-
sion to these posts at the end of 2012. Portrayed in his first year in office
on the front of the Economist as a modern-day Qianlong, one of the
great emperors from the high point of China’s imperial past, he has
been called by not less a peer than President Obama “the most powerful
leader modern China has seen since Mao Zedong”. Others have named
him “the Chairman of everything”for his proclivity for setting up
impressive-sounding leading groups from whence major policies are
announced. As the anti-corruption struggle he has spearheaded has
gone on, outlasting every other similar move in modern Chinese
history, some have even granted him the ultimate accolade –afigure
who is as powerful as, if not more powerful than, the founding father
of the regime, Mao Zedong.
For someone in power in a time of peace who has so far only had four
years of real top-level leadership experience, it is an astonishing thing
to hear Xi talked of this way. Mao Zedong was present when the Com-
munist Party of China held its first congress in July 1921, attended by
only 13 people. He was a local leader in its years of harshest banishment
and victimisation, surviving the purge where over 5,000 of his tiny strug-
gling party were slaughtered in 1927. He manipulated his dominant pos-
ition over an era in which China was exposed to one of the most terrible
wars in human history, against the Japanese –one which saw 20 million
of his compatriots slaughtered. From the ashes of this experience, he
guided the Party to victory in the Civil War against the Nationalists, emer-
ging victorious and establishing the People’s Republic in 1949.
© 2017 The Royal Society for Asian Affairs
Asian Affairs, 2017
Vol. XLVIII, no. I, 17–26, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03068374.2016.1267435
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How can Xi’s record and the legitimacy that flows from it be compared to
this sort to story? Comparing the two is like trying to find parity between
two things in different orders –electric current, for instance, in a modern
machine, and water in a medieval mill. For sure, they both produce mech-
anical power. And obviously, the former is much stronger than the latter.
But in view of the wholly different contexts in which these forms of
energy operated, is it really that meaningful to say one is clearly stronger
than the other? The very strongest claim one might make is that they are
part of a continuum of the same thing –and as I will argue, the only mean-
ingful commonality is the very obvious thing that links them –the cur-
rency they have in common despite the vast difference in the ages in
which they operated –and that is the organisation they lead –the Com-
munist Party of China.
Thinking about Xi without considering this organisation –the Party –is
nonsensical. He is there because he is its servant. He has worked within it
all his life since his late teens. It was an organisation he spent his child-
hood interacting with, through the role his father had as a high-level gov-
ernment official in the Propaganda Department. It was the organisation
that placed his father under house arrest for almost two decades, and
which exiled him to the rural part of China for a decade from 1968. Xi
himself applied to join the Party ten times before he was finally success-
ful. But from the day in which he became a member in 1973 he has been
working within, through, and under the Party. This would not be true of
Mao, who in many ways was always threatening to be larger than this
organisation he did so much to mould and bring to power.
Instead of asking who is Xi, what does he stand for, what does he believe
in, it is best to take a step back and ask what is the Party he belongs to,
what does it stand for, what does it believe in? The Communist Party
operates in China like a corporate body, a person. It has an identity, a
culture, a discourse, a world within a world. It has proved a hard entity
to conceptualise. What precisely is it?
In the summer of 2014, in Copenhagen, I took part in a small seminar
with one of the current members of the Standing Committee of the
Party –the organisation that stands at the summit of party management,
with seven members. Liu Yunshan is unique in the current elite leader-
ship. Unlike his six other colleagues he has never occupied senior leader-
ship positions at provincial level. His whole career has been in the
thought management and propaganda apparatus. In that sense he is the
defender of the faith in contemporary China –someone who enforces
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the messages sent to the Party’s members through its media. For him, that
June day, the question he had was a simple one. What did we, as so-called
external specialists, think the Party was? Some suggested it was “frag-
mented authoritarian”. This produced bewilderment on his part. “We
are neither fragmented nor authoritarian”he barked. We tried again.
“Consultative Leninist”, someone else said. Others came up in increasing
desperation with models used in Western discourse on the Party. None
passed muster.
Mr Liu enlightened us all that day. The Party, he said, is a repository of
the hopes and aspirations of the Chinese people. It is the expression of the
cultural, social and political values of Chinese society, a force with a his-
toric mission to deliver China to a moment of historic rectification, when
the century of humiliation from the First Opium War after 1839 would be
rectified and China return to its place at the centre of world affairs. It is, he
said emphatically, and with some disdain, not like a political party in the
West. Our language was misleading. It was not really a party at all, with
their limitations and carefully delineated locations on the political spec-
trum. The Party was able to embrace the left and the right, the high
and the low. It was, although he did not say as much, almost like a
world within a world.
Early in the history of the Party in China, before it even came to power,
Western analysts did refer to it as like a state within a state. That was
largely because it was a subterfuge, a victimised entity back then, and
had to create its own support structures, and protective walls. In 1927
it acquired an armed wing. In the 1930s under Mao its ideology differen-
tiated itself increasingly from that of the bigger brother, the Party in the
Soviet Union. For them, revolution from the urban proletariat made
sense. But in China, only two per cent of the 1937 population resided
in cities and worked in factories. The Chinese form of Marxism
became agrarian. And because of this it acquired a sui generis nature: a
rule, in many ways, to itself.
The ways in which the Communist Party found itself victor in a civil war
and in charge of a government and a country from 1949 caused immense
dislocations within it. From a revolutionary entity, it had to become a
governing one. But under Mao it never quite lost the zealous desire for
social mobilisation and change. Mao sponsored 19 mass movements, cul-
minating in the Cultural Revolution launched half a century ago this year,
and labelled by the great Chinese writer Ba Jin as “a spiritual holocaust”.
Maoist politics were to take an immense toll on society. The Party
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remarkably became the victim of perhaps its key founder, with its elite
leadership decimated. The state within a state had become dominant
over a vast society. Its history became the modern history of the
country it was in charge of. But this separation and exclusion has never
quite left the organisation.
What is the Communist Party in the 21
st
century? Finding the right model
for it has proved challenging. Unlike the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, it has –so far –not been swept away by economic and social
change within the country over which it exercises a monopoly on organ-
ised political power. Even so, it has yet to reach the 74-year mark that the
USSR’s leading party did before it succumbed, in 1991. That point, for
the People’s Republic, comes in 2024. After that point, if it survives, it
will be a record breaker. But the Communist Party has always been differ-
ent from that of Russia. This exceptionalism percolates into other areas of
the Chinese psyche –from culture, to history.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Party in the era after 1978, when
the Maoist parameters of class struggle and Utopian social goals were
eschewed to embrace the free market, foreign capital and entrepreneuri-
alism, is the ways in which it has become a stupendous money-making
machine. An entity preaching the virtues of dictatorship of the proletariat,
the mass line, the dominance of socialism, had, by the mid 2000s, become
perhaps the most phenomenal wealth-creation organisation the world has
ever seen. Chinese GDP rose from 300 USD per capita in 1980 to 7,000
by 2016. The Chinese economy posted double-digit growth rates
throughout the two decades from 1978 up to 2001. But this was only
the introit to an era after entry to the World Trade Organisation when
things went truly ballistic. Far from being overwhelmed by foreign com-
petition and the rigours of the global marketplace, once China joined in
November 2001 it ushered in an era of unparalleled productivity. The
Chinese economy quadrupled in size over the next two decades –an
even more extraordinary achievement when one remembers that in
2008 the developed world experienced its worst contraction since the
Great Depression over 70 years before.
The impact of this on Chinese society, culture and attitudes was immense.
It seemed to those whose visits to China over this era were separated by
even a few months that whole cities were either rebuilt, or simply created
from scratch. Visits to old haunts were often accompanied by confusion
and disorienting feelings. At one point, Shanghai had more cranes than
the rest of the world put together, putting up 2,000 tower blocks over
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20 stories high. In the era under Party Secretary Hu Jintao China became a
place of big statistics and eye-watering dynamism. But it also became a
place where the Party mission was muted by the phenomenal temptations
offered not by serving the people and Marxism-Leninism, but by material
enrichment. The Party’s ethical basis had never been that deeply thought
out. It had always appealed to a hybrid of nationalism, fear and the utili-
tarianism of ends justifying means. But under Hu, officials experienced
daily schizophrenia, where their powers over immense projects with
multi-billion dollar budgets cut against their modest wages and their
superficial allegiance to creating a brave new world of equality and
equity. From the early 1980s when China’s Gini co-efficient (a statistical
measure of income inequality) was relatively low, it exploded by the late
noughties to levels usually associated with Latin America.
One writer called this era “the Fat Years”: a time of incredible decadence,
when newly emerged billionaires literally had so much money they could
paper their walls with it. One Chinese businessman even took to travel-
ling abroad and chucking wad-loads of dollars out of his car to the
“poor oppressed of the developed West”. China’s“peaceful rise”as it
was referred to from 2005 was also the time of the Party’s being
swamped in material excess. Corruption became endemic. “When
Chinese officials are not corrupt”, one farmer acidly commented at the
time, “everyone else regards them with suspicion, and wonders what is
wrong with them.”Disdain for the Maoist era became de rigeur.“It is
true we were all equal back then”, another commented, “we had an
equal share of nothing.”Deng Xiaoping, already departed a decade
before, the architect of the policies that had led to this era of ambition,
had said to get rich is glorious. Under Hu, the glorious era reached its
apogee, reflected in the cynical comment of one of the winners of a
Chinese reality TV show that “I would rather be weeping in a BMW
than laughing on a bike”.
There was a cost to this –the collapse of trust and faith in the Party itself.
Networks within the Partywide universe appeared –elite families, differ-
ent factional groups, regional clusterings. All of them seemed to be on the
take. Reports in the Western press associated the family of the Premier
Wen Jiabao at the time with billion-dollar amounts being off-loaded
from state enterprises into the hands of private groups, where they van-
ished. Capital flow out of the country shot up. Sectors like telecoms,
energy, housing and even entertainment became like fiefdoms. Mao
Zedong had complained of “mountain-hold”mentality –shantouzhuyi.
The unified, unifying Party looked more like a coalition of business
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networks, wholly jettisoning its founding mission, to stick up for the great
mass of the people.
In this context, the Xi phenomenon has a historic logic. With double-digit
growth, in the end few weren’t able to at least get some benefits from the
exploding economy. But by 2012, growth was starting to dry up. The new
Premier Li Keqiang urged in 2013 that the country had to rebalance its
model –seek growth within, through rising services and consumption,
wean itself off export-oriented manufacturing for foreign markets, with
their fickle rates of demand, but start to service the “spaces of growth”
within the country –creating an indigenous finance sector, goods for
the domestic market, and accelerating urbanisation. Xi’s new political
order needed to do something urgently about equity and efficiency –
the gross imbalances between the rich and the poor, and the ways in
which the Party was seen as just another vested interest on the take,
had to be addressed. In essence, the Party had to start sounding, and
acting, like it had a belief system and a moral order –even if it was creat-
ing this as much from scratch as the cities that were being thrown up
across the country which were appearing from nowhere.
This was not Xi Jinping’s decision. It was the decision of a group of leaders
of which Xi was one member. But for a significant and evidently influential
cohort of elites over the period 2011 to 2012 when the so-called fifth-gen-
eration leadership transition was happening, the evidence of a Party whose
moral compass was badly damaged accumulated. The business associate of
the wife of one member of the politburo, a British man, ended up murdered
in late 2011. Only three months later the son of another died in a car crash
in Beijing. He was naked, with two other semi-naked Tibetan women in the
car, and, most damaging of all, the car he was in was a Ferrari worth tens of
thousands of pounds. Accusations of politicians being linked to vast over-
seas funds appeared in the foreign and, sometimes, domestic press. With
growth rates falling, the Party was faced with a perfect storm –its funda-
mental pillar of legitimacy based on at least materially enriching the
majority of the people likely to be eroded in the years ahead. Unsurpris-
ingly, austerity politics was on the cards.
This makes the value of the ‘Xi package’to the Party in this era of poten-
tial crisis very clear. Xi was not a member of the super elite. In some
senses he is B-grader –a member of a secondary-level family, not one
of the grand clans. More importantly, he had maintained, even in the
fat years, an almost primitive belief in the moral mission of the Party,
and in the need for it to focus solely on politics, and keep away from
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big-ticket money-making. In this context, the Party found him –rather
than he found the Party. It needed someone with almost a naïve, visceral
faith in its function, its purpose and its so-called historic mission. It did
not want someone with a sophisticated, complex view of its role in the
world. It wanted a period of back to basics, led by someone who acted
and spoke like they believed that.
In Xi’s words over the last three decades as a provincial and national
leader, the Party has figured in ways which are at odds perhaps with
most outside understanding of it. In 1991, when a mid-ranking official
in Fujian province, south-east China, he had stated to the official
Xinhua news agency that people should go into politics to serve, not to
make money –precisely the opposite of what in fact seemed to be hap-
pening at the time. Even as a central leader in the period after 2007, he
had defended the idea of the Party having a unified historic narrative.
There was no such thing as two periods –one prior to 1978 in the era
of Mao, and the other after when Deng created Reform and Opening
Up. Instead, Xi bridged the two by saying that the earlier period was
the inevitable basis for the latter one. The two were integral parts of
one story.
In that story, the Communist Party figured firstly as a kind of epistemic
community –a body which, through experiment, challenge, strife, and
sometimes colossal failure –had accrued immense knowledge, about
development, about how to lift people from poverty, about how to main-
tain unity, something which the benighted Soviet Union Party had failed
to do. Added to this was a sense that the Party occupied a privileged place
in society, where its role was to strategise, control the overall story of the
development of the country, articulate grand visions and final outcomes,
while all other bodies and institutions, from the government, to the army,
to those in permitted civil society, hovered around it, following in the
story that it was telling.
More remarkably, for a country which many proclaimed was unideologi-
cal, or ideological only in the sense that it had embraced the most red-
blooded form of capitalism, Xi consistently urged a return to its ideologi-
cal roots. Faith in Marxism-Leninism mattered. It wasn’t a game. People
had to be indoctrinated. The 88 million members of the Party, with their
2000 plus Party schools across the country, had to be inculcated with a
new ideological and moral mission. There indoctrination mattered. This
was clearly not about the content or inner conviction of the ideology.
Asking most Party officials whether they believed in the various doctrines
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of Socialism with Chinese characteristics elicited the same befuddled
look that one gets when quizzing the average Catholic about papal infall-
ibility, or an Anglican about refined elements of the mystery of the Holy
Trinity. For them, the key thing was that the Party was, in the end, a faith
community. And ideological unity and discipline had a functional value.
We believe in these things, Xi simply explained at one point, because
they have worked. So we have to carry on believing in them. As Deng
said in an earlier era, Marxism had a utility in China, it created simplify-
ing adherence and fidelity where there might, if relaxation happened, be
the dreaded instability and chaos. It was the fact that people within the
Party, on the surface at least, believed a closed set of ideas in common,
not what they believed, that mattered.
The Party under Xi is finally the network of networks –the only entity
that lifts China outside the highly tribal, almost nodal social structure
that figures like the father of modern Chinese sociology, the great Fei
Xiaotong, noted. For him, writing in 1947, Chinese society was an over-
whelmingly agrarian one, one where everyone knew everyone else,
where contracts and laws were unnecessary because you only ever
dealt with people with physical propinquity to you. It was, using Fei’s
elegant phrase, a society of elastic bonds, with the individual, selfish,
all-controlling, sitting at the centre. Even in the second decade of the
21
st
century, in a survey in 2014, people were asked which they trusted
strongly –neighbours, friends, class mates. All of these only received
20 per cent ratings. Over 80 per cent trusted family strongly. There is
even a name for this feeling of family connectedness in Chinese –
renqing. Chinese society remains one where family is the emperor.
For the Party, however, with its modernisation commitment, this has
always been a problem. Throughout its history, it has tried to erode the
primacy of the family. In the Cultural Revolution, families were deliber-
ately set against themselves. In successive campaigns through the Deng,
Jiang and Hu era, family links have been attacked, quizzed and interro-
gated. And yet, it was the strength of super-elite family networks in the
Hu era which were linked to immense larceny and control of specific
state enterprises that was causing the most problems –the Wens, Lis,
Zhus and Jiangs. Even Mao Zedong’s granddaughter figured on a list
of super-rich, and his great great grandson appeared as a member of
the central government consultative body.
The Communist Party figuring as a meritocracy, waging war against
members who have a sense of entitlement because of family connections,
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is, strangely enough, one area of commonality before and after the year
zero of 1978. But as Mao himself was often to complain, Chinese
society has proved hard to reform, even after the most searing experience
of revolution and the dislocation it causes. The simple fact is that even the
current anti-corruption onslaught on family and other clans to create a
society “ruled by law, not by men”has proved very challenging.
To us, in the 21
st
century, the Communist Party of China, Xi Jinping’s
Communist Party of China, matters because it is the great exception.
Modernisation theory implies that eventually, after a certain level of
economic growth, countries will evolve into multi-party systems. That,
at least, is what happened in South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, other Asian
tigers which started from similar levels of poverty and used similar
methods to those of China to generate wealth. But the CPC seems to
stand today ready to buck this trend, focused under Xi on the era up to
the centennial of the Party’s establishment in 2021 when it will preside
over a middle-income country, but one still promulgating the mass line,
the dictatorship of the proletariat, and what Xi himself called the “Four
Comprehensives”. The simple fact is that the longer the Party’s grand
experiment goes on, the more it threatens to disrupt so many of the
assumptions of political science theory. Proving that one can have high
wealth levels, high education levels, and a high standard of development
and yet maintaining the one-party structure offends the universalising
predisposition of most theorists, who assume that at some point, some-
thing has to give, and pluralism, public choice, some kind of participation
in decision-making has to enter the equation.
Looking solely at Xi as a political figure, wondering at his power and its
reach, means being seduced by the symptoms of a system, rather than
truly understanding their underlying causes. Xi has only ever spoken in
a context where he is within, working for, a party of the Party, its
servant if you like. And without an understanding of that institutional
context, his powers make no sense.
And there is a problem in all of this. Chinese politics now looks rough and
brutal. Those on Xi’s side who profess loyalty and fidelity are fine. The
slightest heresy and one enters what the Buddhists called the 18 circles of
hell. Phones are cut off. Social connections die. Your family are no longer
protected. In the most networked society on earth, hell is when the net-
works collapse around you and you are on your own. Plenty of the dis-
loyal in China are getting that treatment now. Xi himself has proved a
very political figure. GDP growth and economic performance are no
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longer the pure objectives for action. It is about grander things –delivery
finally of the great dream of a nation which is powerful, strong, and has its
status restored to it after the nightmare of modernity from 1840 onwards.
For the first time, China has the upper hand. Its tomorrow is looking
brighter than those of the West. To accompany this vision, Xi’s language
differs from the technocratic, dry, staccato rattling of statistics and econ-
omic ‘truths’beloved of his predecessors. He speaks of visions, ambi-
tions, goals, with more mention of classical Chinese poets than Mao or
Marx. One of the most striking images he has deployed over the last
two years is that of the two centennial goals –that of 2021 when the
Party celebrates its hundredth anniversary in existence by delivering a
middle-income country in China, and one in 2049, when the People’s
Republic celebrates its great moment of one hundred years of power by
delivering Democracy with Chinese characteristics.
That’s the promise. And the future has always been the space for imagin-
ations, visions, hopes in the hard years since 1949 when there was, often,
so much present suffering. Tomorrow was always the cure for the harsh
present day, even if it wasn’t going to arrive for a long time. Mao talked
of ten thousand years, betraying his poetic temperament. Deng, more pro-
saically, promised good times in a century. For Jiang and Hu, it was
decades away. But for Xi, the good times being promised are imminent
–just a few years down the line. 2021 is five years hence. What will
the moment which he has been so avidly promising look like when it
arrives –how will it feel for Chinese people? Will it have been worth
the hard, long, often bitter journey to get there?
We don’t know in the end what Chinese people will feel when they finally
reach that moment, any more than Xi does. For him, of course, the best
thing would be to have a grateful public who finally learn, as Orwell
said, that they love the Party, and they cannot live without it. But there
is another sobering final place –a country who, when the future that
was always dangled before them finally arrives, realise that they no
longer need the CPC, and that their pathways into deeper modernity
can be undertaken without it. This was always the great paradox of the
Communist system –that it promised a Utopian future where it itself
would one day need to disappear from view. The greatest paradox of con-
temporary China and of the powers of Xi Jinping is that if he is truly
powerful, if he can really achieve what he has promised through the
Party –then he is the person who will see this remarkable social force
finally fade from view.
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