The thoughts of Chairman Xi

There aren’t many 21st Century leaders who lived in a cave and laboured as a farmer before clawing their way to power.

Five decades ago, as the chaos of the Cultural Revolution engulfed Beijing, the 15-year-old Xi Jinping embarked on a harsh rural life amid the yellow canyons and mountains of inland China.

The region where Xi farmed was a bastion of the Communists during the civil war. Yan’an came to call itself “the holy land of the Chinese revolution”.

Now President Xi Jinping’s second five-year term as leader will be confirmed at the Chinese Communist Party Congress. He leads a confident, rising superpower, but one which jealously polices what is said about its leaders.

Xi’s own story has been sanitised and while much of rural China has seen breakneck urbanisation, the village where he grew up is now a pilgrimage destination for the Communist Party faithful.

In 1968 Mao had decreed that millions of young people should move from the cities to the countryside to learn from the hard life of the peasants.

Xi says he did learn, and that the ideas and qualities which define him today were formed in his early cave life. “I’m forever a son of the yellow earth,” he likes to say. “I left my heart in Liangjiahe. Liangjiahe made me.

“When I arrived at 15, I was anxious and confused. When I left at 22, my life goals were firm and I was filled with confidence.”

Back then everyone studied Chairman Mao’s famous little red book. Now the thoughts of Chairman Xi are posted on huge red hoardings and there is a museum in his honour. It extols the good deeds he did for his fellow villagers but all trace of true personality has been expunged in a story so saintly it is hard to work out what is real.

In his first five years in office, Xi Jinping has built a personality cult. At its core is the image of a man of the people. He has toured back-alley homes, ducking through washing lines. He has talked in earthy prose, telling students that life is like a shirt with buttons where you have to get the first few right or all the rest will be wrong. He has queued in a downmarket steamed-bun shop and paid for his own lunch.

But it is his early exile from home and family, a political outcast in a cave, that is the heart of Xi’s creation myth.

“People who have little experience with power… tend to regard it as mysterious and novel. But I look past the superficial things - the power and the flowers and the glory and the applause. I see the detention houses, the fickleness of human relationships. I understand politics on a deeper level.”

The young Xi had already lived two lives by the time he arrived in the cave. During his early childhood, his father was a hero of the communist revolution and Xi enjoyed a privileged and cloistered upbringing as a “red princeling”.

A 2009 American diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks - and based on a briefing from a close friend of Xi’s - said the first 10 years of his life were the most formative.

“The most permanent influences shaping Xi's worldview were his ‘princeling’ pedigree and time growing up with families of first-generation Communist Party revolutionaries in Beijing's exclusive residential compounds.”

But all of that was shattered in the maelstrom that an increasingly paranoid and vengeful Chairman Mao inflicted on the party elite in the 1960s. Xi’s father was first purged and then jailed, and his family humiliated. One of his sisters died, possibly driven to suicide. By the time he was 13, Xi’s formal schooling ended as classes across Beijing were suspended so that students could criticise, beat and even murder their teachers.

Without parents or friends to protect him from the Red Guards dispensing the summary justice of the Cultural Revolution on the streets, the teenage Xi lived his second Beijing life, dodging death threats and detention. Much later, he recalled an encounter in a conversation with a reporter.

“I was only 14. The Red Guards asked, ‘How serious do you yourself think your crimes are?’

“I said, ‘You can estimate it yourselves. Is it enough to execute me?’

“‘We can execute you a hundred times,’ they replied.

“To my mind there was no difference between being executed a hundred times or once.”

Supremely pragmatic, a realist, with his "eyes on the prize" from early adulthood.

This was how Xi’s friend described him in the 2009 diplomatic cable. Unlike many youths who "made up for lost time by having fun", Xi was exceptionally ambitious and focused. After the Cultural Revolution, he "chose to survive by becoming redder than the red”.

By the time Xi was 25, his father had been politically rehabilitated and sent to run Guangdong, the vast province next door to Hong Kong, which would become the powerhouse of China’s economic rise. The elder Xi advanced his son’s career through his patronage network, and according to his friend, Xi quickly learned to build his own.

“He carefully laid out a career plan that would maximise his opportunities to rise to the top levels of the Party hierarchy, first becoming a PLA [army] officer in the late 1970s and then serving in a variety of provincial leadership positions, progressively rising through the ranks. He had promotion... in mind from day one."

Xi took the traumas of his early life and the solitude of the cave with him. His friend said his reserve, a certain distant quality, contributed to the failure of his first marriage to the daughter of a senior diplomat.

But it clearly contributed to the success of his political career. Until he reached the very top, his defining achievement was to have risen with barely a trace.

The only time he drew attention to himself was when he married his current wife, a celebrity singer. For many years the public joked: "Who is Xi Jinping? He is Peng Liyuan's husband.”

One reporter for state media whose task was to cover Xi as a mid-career provincial leader told me he was “always very boring and forgettable. He didn’t want to get any kind of bad record.”

Having watched as his outspoken father was victimised by Mao, Xi deferred to power and was careful to avoid making enemies. Even in his 40s and 50s as a very senior Party leader, he was always competent, never showy.

One astute insider described him as “a needle concealed in silk floss”.

Eleanor Dvorchak hosted him on an agricultural research trip to Muscatine, Iowa, in 1985. He slept in her son’s room with Star Trek posters on the wall. “He was humble,” she told reporters when he went back to Iowa in 2012 just before becoming China’s top leader. “No-one in their right mind would ever think that guy who stayed in my house would become the president. I don’t care what country you’re talking about.”

Everyone was taken in. When he became Communist Party leader in 2012, Xi Jinping was the compromise choice.

Few inside or outside China guessed at what was coming next - five years of political shock and awe.

“He who rules by virtue is like the North Star,” Xi said, quoting the ancient philosopher Confucius. “It maintains its place, and the multitude of stars pay homage.”

He issued edicts on the appropriate number of dishes for lunching public officials and even decreed office measurements for each rank in the hierarchy. Xi returned to his roots in the cave village to rub shoulders with ordinary farmers and make an unspoken point about the contrast between his own life story and a corrupt elite.

But Xi, now 64, has always belonged to the elite. In the years before he took power, some of his relatives had become enormously wealthy, though there is no evidence that he sought to promote the business interests of his family.

According to his friend’s account, in the American diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks: “Xi knows how very corrupt China is and is repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialisation of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveau riche, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect, and such ‘moral evils’ as drugs and prostitution.”

Zhou Yongkang had been a Party member for half a century. Where Xi started life as one of the cloistered red elite in Beijing, Zhou’s family were hard-pressed beet farmers who fished for eels to supplement their income. Their eldest son had brought the family honour by going to university and becoming an oil engineer.

He’d risen to run China’s biggest oil company and then a province of 80 million people. He’d crowned his career with a seat at the Party’s top table and control of the security system. Together it made for a formidable patronage network.

By the time Zhou appeared in court, Xi had painstakingly torn that network apart - his investigators interrogating everyone from office staff to drivers and cooks.

Only months before Zhou’s court appearance, one of his business cronies had been executed for running a mafia which resorted to intimidation and murder. But the Party rarely executes its own. Zhou was sentenced to life in prison.

No wonder China is alert to sudden disappearances. In January 2017 a 45-year-old billionaire with connections to many top families vanished from his luxury Hong Kong apartment, accompanied by several unidentified men.

Xiao Jianhua has not been seen since but is believed to be in custody in mainland China - a warning to others that money, connections and a Canadian passport are not enough to protect you from the long arm of Xi.

Six months later came the purge of a politician the billionaire knew well, a man many had tipped to rise to the very top leadership in the coming Congress reshuffle. Bribes, abuse of power, exchange of money for sex, leaking Party secrets - the charge sheet against Sun Zhengcai was familiar. But five years into Xi’s rule, it reinforces the impression that the Party’s corruption problem is systemic and enduring.

On the other side of the world another well-connected billionaire had already said exactly that.

In recent months, from the safety of a Manhattan penthouse, Guo Wengui has made regular YouTube broadcasts alleging that the anti-corruption chief Wang Qishan – effectively Xi’s right-hand man - is himself corrupt. The only person Guo has been careful not to target is Xi himself.

The trouble started when wags on Chinese social media spotted a similarity between a photo of Xi Jinping strolling with Barack Obama and a classic image of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger.

From then on, China’s internet censors have waged war on the bear. There was the meme of Pooh gripping the hoof of his friend Eeyore alongside a photo of Xi grimly shaking hands with the Japanese prime minister. Then a picture of Winnie the Pooh in a toy truck appeared online just after Xi had inspected troops from an open-top car.

Former US President Bill Clinton once joked that China’s bid to censor the internet was like “nailing Jell-o to the wall”.

But for Xi as for the Communist Party, ridicule feels dangerous. In April this year there was no sense of humour when a man was sentenced to two years in jail for “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble” after an online reference to Steamed Bun Xi, a popular epithet for the Chinese leader after his famous lunch in the steamed-bun restaurant.

“The internet has grown into an ideological battlefield, and whoever controls the tool will win the war,” warn Party-controlled media.

Xi has a different vision - of a China, rich, united and strong under a disciplined one-party narrative. Wherever ideas are formed and transmitted, he has worked to recapture control.

When he toured the Beijing headquarters of state TV, a giant screen behind him flashed the message “absolute loyalty” and "our surname is the Party".

On university campuses, Party leadership is being “enhanced” and academic textbooks scoured of Western influence. Private companies are eagerly announcing internal Communist Party cells, with even Shanghai’s Disney Resort enthusing that “some really good ideas come from the Party committee”.

Cyberspace has seen an even fiercer clampdown. Xi took office in 2012, a year after the internet had played a key role in sparking the Arab Spring. He resolved it would never be allowed to spread protest in China, fearing a repeat of 1989, when the Party sent troops into Tiananmen Square to crush a student democracy movement.

Even when travelling abroad, many Chinese citizens now remain behind the Great Firewall as their service providers enforce Party censorship.

Until now the firewall has had small cracks, with those determined to access alternative sources of information able to do so via a virtual private network (VPN), a tunnelling device to the world beyond the reach of China’s censors.

There on Western social media they can find a very different perspective on China.

In his second term, Xi intends to take full control of the VPN tools that allow “negative energy” to evade his censors.

Relying on mobile phone data and facial recognition, all enhanced by a massive investment in artificial intelligence and big data management, Xi hopes to command an internal security system unimaginable to his revolutionary or imperial forebears.

Another formative chapter for Xi came with the collapse of communism in the Soviet bloc. His assessment was that Moscow had lost its sense of purpose when it renounced its revolutionary history.

In a speech to his own Party comrades shortly after taking office, he warned: “Proportionally, the Soviet Communist Party had more members than we do, but nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.”

Xi’s resistance to the seductive power of liberal values has been ferocious. He has reached back beyond Marxism to China’s deepest sense of self, quoting an 11th Century Chinese statesman Su Shi: "The most dangerous situation for a country is when apparently everything seems fine, but hidden danger lurks. If one only sits back to watch, the situation will worsen to the point of no return.”

“If our people cannot uphold the moral values that have been formed and developed on our own soil, and instead indiscriminately and blindly parrot Western moral values, then it will be necessary to genuinely question whether we will lose our independent ethos as a country and a people,” said Xi.

A nation of active citizens is Xi’s nightmare. Christians, Muslims, labour activists, bloggers, reporters, feminists, and lawyers have been jailed for speaking or acting on their convictions. In some cases, they have also been paraded in televised confessions, recanting their beliefs and echoing the Party line that they allowed themselves to become pawns of China’s enemies in the West. Rebranding some expressions of conscience as a threat to national security is central to Xi’s politics.

Just as Xu Zhiyong, the champion of citizens’ rights, was about to be arrested, the Party circulated an internal document which became known as the “seven don’t speaks”, outlawing discussion of universal values, press freedom, civil rights and independent courts.

“Shoes don’t have to be identical but just to fit the wearer,” Xi told one audience.

“The gene of traditional Chinese culture is deeply planted in the mentality of modern Chinese.”

He wants his citizens to identify with “the motherland, the Chinese nation or race, Chinese culture, and the Chinese socialist road”. He calls these the “four identifications” and has distilled them into two key slogans - the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and the Chinese dream.

From banners hung above roads and stations, to TV documentaries, online animations and mobile apps, these slogans are everywhere.

For centuries China’s emperors strived to balance the principles of hard and soft power - they called it force and virtue - exercising absolute authority over subjects, while acknowledging a duty of care.

In celebrating China’s communist history, Xi has been careful to balance reverence for Chairman Mao with equal deference to the economic reformer who succeeded him, Deng Xiaoping. Xi talks about Marxism and he talks about markets. But the essence of his “Chinese dream” slogan is clear - “the dream of a strong nation”.

Different dreams - like Xu Zhiyong’s vision of shared civic identity - are dangerous.

The activist was released in July after completing his four-year sentence. He has not been contactable since.

“It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.”

So said the late Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew of China’s rise.

On becoming leader in 2012, Xi set China’s eyes on the prize.

By the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party - 2021 - China would become “moderately prosperous”. By the 100th anniversary of the communists coming to power - 2049 - it would be a “fully developed, rich, and powerful” nation.

China’s economy may soon be 40% larger than that of the US, measured in “purchasing power parity”. By 2049, it may be three times as large.

The past four decades have been an extraordinary journey not just for China but for the man who leads it. Xi was still a teenage cave-dweller reading by the light of a kerosene lamp when a US president met Chairman Mao in 1972.

Richard Nixon had argued: “Taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbours.”

When the door to the West inched open a decade later, some princelings of Xi’s generation took the opportunity to leave.

But Xi had already set a different course, and according to the account by his friend in the Wikileaks cable, he knew he would “not be special” outside.

Xi is self-assured in encounters with foreigners. He once observed of those who lecture China on human rights: "There are some bored foreigners, with full stomachs, who have nothing better to do than point fingers at us.

“First, China doesn't export revolution; second, China doesn't export hunger and poverty; third, China doesn't come and cause you headaches. What more is there to be said?”