Current Affairs

Xi Jinping is one tough nut to crack. The inscrutable leader who demonstrates no emotion and has no equity in any emotional outcome challenges anybody who has to face him. Behind the veneer are life lessons of being an outsider within the establishment, but he can also be characterised as being an insider. The poverty he experienced in his journey empowers Xi to make formulaic arguments that at one stage can be very Mao and on the other imperial. 

As said Xi Jinping is an outsider who finds himself on the inside of power. But to understand Xi is to argue that he has always been an insider whose earliest days were privileged within Mao’s establishment, where his father faced adversity, imprisonment and humiliation for a slight against Mao. Xi was also cast out, alienated and abandoned in the countryside, impoverished he learnt to manage himself and become a man of the people without becoming one of the people.

A princeling among the masses he was steeped in alienation, his go to argument in his teenage years was Maoism, Confucius and fables that he learnt in Beijing and recanted to the illiterate farmworkers. Xi’s ideological foundations came from the poverty of his existence in a landscape that was ideologically, physically and economically difficult. His roots were very much within the indoctrinated ideology of Maoist argument that underpinned Xi’s understanding of his own impoverished existence. The missive was Xi’s belief that he was sent to be among the people and rather than regress Xi looked to the ideology of the state to understand the harshness of his living conditions. 

It is more of an argument that Xi Jinping has known how far you can fall without the establishment providing a safety net. Unlike Trump the ideological battleground that Xi inhabits is from an argument of alienation, hard knocks and exile. It was very much the exile from his family that alienated and made Xi impervious to the arguments that could prove a challenge. The ideological stance Xi has taken is more about a paternalistic authoritarianism where the establishment manages the welfare of the masses and in return the masses are economically rewarded through the states directives. 

Deng brought growth to the state through liberalising the economy, his reward was that the state grew ten percent year on year throughout the 1990s’ to the early 2000s. The state has grown ten fold from the time that Mao instructed the intellectuals to return to the countryside, but the argument has always been whether the state itself should be liberalised. The fear of the CCP leadership was whether the ideology of the state and its apparatus could contend or withstand the liberalism that came with economic liberalism and economic growth.

The leaderships worst fears were realised when students, academics and intellectuals demanded the liberalism of the regime, this of course ended with the massacre in Tiananeman Square, both a centre of establishment power and ideology. The lessons learnt was that reform itself and economic growth enabled the state to manage the masses and at the same time underpinned the ideological foundations of the state.

But the economic reforms also brought corruption, iniquity and inequality, which to a degree has been centre stage to Xi Jinping’s dominance of the party, military and state security apparatus. On the one hand Xi argues that he is rooting out corruption and on the other he in installing his own cadre. This argument of anti-corruption has enabled Xi to dominate the political landscape and has inflated Xi’s standing and kept officials guessing and fearful and kept members of the politburo uncertain and obedient, underpinning Xi’s dominance of the party.

The argument that China has hit back against US sanctions was a lesson learnt from Trump’s first administration, where Trump placed one hundred percent tariffs and a block on technology transfers to the Chinese state, but where Trump expected no retaliation, there has been a re-charging of the ideological impression that the US could be challenged by the Chinese states determination to couple rare earth within the state apparatus. Trump’s response was to increase tariffs, but there are a number of arguments underpinning the Chinese states response, which has it foundations in the ideological arguments found in the states intellectual elite. 

Mao declared that the US was a “paper tiger that appeared threatening but was in fact weak and brittle.” And Xi Jinping ideology feeds on the alienation of the Chinese state from Western values and subversion of political thought that repressed pro-Western arguments within the proletariat and at the same time fed into Xi’s support base, which viewed the West as decadent and likely to decline through its own liberalising reforms. 

The Chinese media argues that the US has been diagnosed with “hegemonic anxiety,’ where the US is unable to manage the loss of its dominance in the economic, military and ideological landscape and cannot cope with the new multi-polar reality. But it is also Xi’s determination to build resilience by building on the high tech sector of the economy. According to Bloomberg, out of the thirteen critical technologies that are going to power the world economy in the coming years, China leads the world economy in twelve of these technologies.

But there is a suspicion among the Chinese state and Xi himself of the United States, it is probably best to look at academic and advisor to Xi, Wang who “admires American energy purpose and resourcefulness.” He argued that “America was modern and endlessly self-inventing itself and its greatest assets were its technology and management skills. Though the argument is Wang’s it is impossible that the insight could have been made without the agreement of Xi. Wang felt the US had “chasms in society [-] racial prejudice, vast inequalities of wealth, decaying inner cities, crime, drug addiction and social permissiveness,” which proved the United States decadence.

It has been this understanding of America that has led to directives by the Chinese state that has underpinned its 2012 Declaration Number 9, that deviation from orthodoxy included constitutional democracy, universal values, civil society, neo-liberalism, historical nihilism and Western journalism. This was followed by the national security commission in 2014, National Security Law -”Crimes against the state,” followed by the National Intelligence Law, Counter Espionage Law, Counter Terrorism Law, Cyber Security Law and a law governing foreign non-government organisations, which are all repressive mechanisms aimed to focus power on Xi Jinping, security forces and the politburo.  

Bao Tong a fierce critic of Xi Jinping until he died in 2022, argued that “the dictatorship was overseeing a series of fiefdoms controlled over by a mighty figure.” Carl Mizner sees it more as “counter information – stripping the party down to its Leninist core of political and social core. […] re-wiring it for neither revolution nor reform, but for a disciplined march toward technological, industrial and military might to enhance China’s geopolitical position.”

It is very much in Xi Jinping’s DNA to manage a state that outstrips the US dominance militarily, politically and economically. He is putting into practice the arguments of Deng’s foreign policy argument that “China should bide it’s time to develop [it’s] economy [and] hide its capabilities” Xi thinks the time has come to confront US military, economic and political liberalism. Xi Jinping argue that China is now in a multi-polar world with the US economically, militarily and politically and that the state should have parity with the US on the world stage as China has caught up with American power and influence geopolitically.