President Xi Jinping has always been a deliberate person. Although he was born Red (the child of first-generation communist leaders in China), unlike other “Princelings” who amassed great fortunes since the 1980s or who wielded influence in the corridors of the Capital, Xi Jinping made his way up the ladder by sacrifice. Along the way, he learned lessons.
In 1962, he watched his father, Xi Zhongxun, fall from his perch on the “mountain-top” of the Communist hierarchy to the lowly position of a factory manager in Luoyang, simply because he had chosen the wrong side in the political struggle between Mao and the others. Xi Jinping learned never to reveal his cards. Silence was his companion during the long journey to the Summit. It was to serve him well in 2012 when the Party had to choose between him and the flamboyant and charismatic Bo Xilai, who had said too much that was uncomfortable to the others.
During the Cultural Revolution in 1966, for his father’s “sins”, he was expelled from school and banished to inhospitable Shaanxi province to do hard labour. Xi Jinping made the best of a bad deal in exile. He earned respect by working alongside villagers doing whatever was necessary to survive, including participating in the ‘criticism sessions’ against his own father, Xi Zhongxun, who had once been the supremo in North Western China in the early 1950s. He was strengthened in adversity.
When the Princelings returned to Beijing in the early 1980s, relieved that the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution was over at last and eager to regain their life of power and privilege, Xi Jinping volunteered to return to the grass-roots in Hebei province in 1982 after just three years as the Secretary to Defence Minister Geng Biao. When asked why he did so, he said the experience he so gained formed the basis for all his later work.
In a rare interview to the ZhongHua ErNu (Chinese media) in the year 2000, Xi Jinping said, “you should not be afraid of difficulties and challenges when you prepare yourself thoroughly. Politics is both unsafe and risky, and wilfulness is no passable road… Once you have gone into politics, it is like crossing a river. No matter how many obstacles you meet, there is only one way, and that is onwards.” He followed his own advice in his ascent to the Summit, and having attained it, he has held that position against all manner of challenges. He is General Secretary of the Communist Party, President of the People’s Republic, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, and Commander-in-Chief of the Army. It is mandatory to study and apply his Thought in all work in China today.
COVID-19 is the “blue moon”. It has destroyed economies, devastated communities, and derailed personal goals. When the battle is won, questions will be posed to and answers demanded of leaders, by people everywhere. It will test the compact between the leaders and their people. The Chinese leadership has begun to tackle two challenges—the revival of China’s economy and the return of the work-force to the production lines and offices in the world’s second largest economy, and the handling of diplomatic work when feelings everywhere are running high against the Chinese. The Politburo and its Standing Committee have met thrice in April to deal with these questions. China is preparing for an economic slow-down amidst fundamental changes to its external environment.
President Xi may, possibly, be quietly preparing for another contingency. A challenge to his authority. Buried in the media reporting on the recent meetings that the leadership has held, is the phrase, “Stability is the big picture”. The regime uses such phrases when it senses a threat.
Some recent news bears close watching. The first being the sudden removal of China’s Vice Minister of Public Security, Sun Lijun, allegedly for violating “party discipline and law” just weeks after he was hand-picked to tackle the pandemic in Wuhan and to ensure that social order was preserved. Then, the appointment of Tang Yijun, a loyalist from Zhejiang days, as the new Justice Minister, and the sudden removal of Fu Zhenghua, who was earlier Sun Lijun’s colleague in the Ministry of Public Security. Radio Free Asia has reported of high-level security reviews held in the third week of April on the need for greater security monitoring of top leaders. More significantly, it is reported that a new Small Leading Group, innocuously titled the “Safe China Construction Coordinating Small Group”, had been established last month. It is chaired by China’s law & order supremo, Guo Shengkun, and consists of the Ministers of both Public and State Security, the President of the Supreme Court, the Procurator General, the senior leadership of the police and the PLA, and the new Justice Minister. According to Xinhua News Agency, its priority is to “prevent and crack down on activities that endanger the political security of the country.”
Till date, 1989 is the only instance in Communist China where ‘political security’ was threatened, when the people briefly took the law into their own hands. No two situations are ever identical, but the one that China now finds itself in might just bear some semblance to the second half of the 1980s. After ten years of political predictability and economic development following the devastation of the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping may have been forgiven for assuming that this progress was too precious for the long-suffering Chinese people to forgo for any reasons. However, a faltering economy, hyper-inflation, erosion of bank deposits, and loss of jobs had created a desperate “tinder-box” like situation by early 1989. The demise of much admired former General Secretary, Hu Yaobang, on 15 April, 1989, ignited it. Public resentment burst forth threatening the stability of the regime itself. People came out on to the streets in spontaneous demonstrations never seen before in Communist China. Resentful adversaries in the Party tried to seize the moment. The rest, as they say, in history. The Tiananmen Incident of 1989 almost toppled Deng and it was only his use of military force that brought China back from the brink. Since then, the watch-word has been “stability”. At all costs and at any price. Between 1989 and 2020, China has been through other economic crises—during the “Asian flu” of 1998 and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008—but collective leadership kept factionalism under control and below the surface while the Party tackled the economic fall-out and managed public anger.
This time, on the surface, the Party might look united, but many are resentful of President Xi Jinping. The new leading group that he has set up has probably been tasked to see that the mistakes of 1989 are not repeated. He is laying plans. In the first chapter of Sun Zi’s famous treatise The Art of War, titled “Laying Plans”, strategy is determined by five conditions. The first of them is to keep the ‘Moral Law’ on your side in a crisis. Xi was trying to do just that. The leadership meetings are focussed on restoring jobs and reviving prosperity. He recognizes the critical need to keep his people close to him. In his own words: “When you are close to the grass-roots and close to the people, no storms from any corner of the world can blow you down or make you surrender.” (From the interview with ZhongHua ErNu)
But it is never possible to predict what a people might do when they are aggrieved. Just in case the Moral Law doesn’t hold, it might end up as a matter of state security.
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