By TIPP EDITORIAL BOARD, TIPP Insights

The man was expected to be the most liberal Communist Party leader in China’s history; he has turned out to be anything but.

Personality

Xi Jinping, the son of Xi Zhongxun, a Chinese revolutionary hero and vice premier, is considered by many to be a “princeling.” But, his childhood is not a tale of constant privilege. Mao targeted his father during the Cultural Revolution and deposed him from office. Xi, a teenager then, was exiled to the countryside, where he hauled grains and slept in cave houses as part of Mao’s down to the countryside movement. The experience toughened up the young boy from an elite political family.

But, those harsh days did not turn the youngster against the party or the revered leader. It may not be wrong to believe that President Xi Jinping’s appreciation for strict order and intolerance of challenges to authority stems from those days, as must his relentless drive to achieve his goals.

Sighting his ties to his father, one of the world’s largest political organizations – the Communist Party of China (CCP), with close to 96.7 million members – rejected his membership application many times. But Xi Jinping persevered until his membership was approved.

Keeping a low profile, he experienced the working of the party from the ground up – no mean feat considering the CCP, despite its structure being a largely opaque organization cemented on loyalty and personal relations. Once his father’s name was cleared following Mao Zedong’s death, nothing could stop the ambitious young party worker from rising through the ranks.

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Xi Jinping started his political career in the 1970s as a village party boss. It took him three and half decades to reach the CCP’s highest decision-making body – Politburo Standing Committee – in 2007. At the next National Party Congress in 2012, he succeeded Hu Jintao as the President of the People’s Republic of China.

Policy

From the get-go, the new leader made his mark felt even as he promised to continue the path of economic growth. But his brand of ultra-nationalism was evident from the start. Referring to his plans as the “Chinese Dream,” he said, “We’ll continue to strive for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. This grave responsibility is for the well-being of the people.”

A push marked the first five years in office for poverty alleviation and sweeping structural reforms. Justifying his crackdown on corruption, Xi said, “We must do what we must, and punish those who deserve it. If we didn’t dare offend hundreds of thousands of corrupt officials, we would have offended 1.3 billion people.”

He was unanimously handed a second term in 2017, where he proclaimed his intention to “strive for the great success of socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era.”

This time, President Xi intensified his crackdown on independent media and academic freedoms. Crushing civil society movements, especially in Beijing-controlled Hong Kong and the island of Taiwan, brought him international condemnation.

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Undeterred, the Chinese leader took an aggressive foreign policy stance, often making relations worse with China’s near and far neighbors and significant trade partners like America. While the international community termed his ambitious Belt and Road Initiative a ‘debt trap,’ it bought him accolades from within the party.

The Chinese President brushed off allegations of human rights violations amounting to genocide in the Xinjiang province and upped the reunification rhetoric on Taiwan. Despite Beijing’s fraught relations on the international stage, President Xi stuck to his remarks made at the beginning of the second term, “China will not close its door to the world; we will only become more and more open” – until the Covid-19 outbreak, that stemmed from Wuhan, changed the course.

China opted for a “zero-covid” policy as the epicenter of the first outbreak. Like in many countries, travel restrictions, lockdowns, and mandatory health checks were imposed. But, wanting to stay “in control” of the pandemic, such draconian measures are still in place three years later. President Xi’s government has used the pandemic as a ruse to cut off much of China from the rest of the world. The leader’s first international trip to attend the SCO summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, even led to rumors of a coup.

But that was merely wishful thinking on the part of a disillusioned few. President Xi’s successful effort to change the constitution, ending the two-terms in office stipulation, has displeased many. If events progress as expected, he will be given a third term in office in the coming days.

President Xi’s past decade in office has seen him purge his opponents in the name of corruption, and more than 600,000 Chinese have applied for asylum abroad. His aggressive foreign policy and ‘historic claims’ have destabilized the South China sea, heightened tensions in the Taiwan Strait, and fuelled an arms race among his neighbors.

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What his third term will mean for China, its “zero-covid” policy, and the rest of the world is anyone’s guess. For, despite his decade in office, as the leader of the most populous country in the world, President Xi Jinping remains an enigma.

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