In contrast to his predecessor, Hu Jintao, who always seemed to be reciting an officially approved text, the stocky, 59-year-old Xi seemed to speak with genuine personal feeling of what needs to be done in this nation of 1.3 billion people.
He talked of people's desire for a better life, for better jobs, education and health care – and for less pollution. He flashed his chubby smile unlike the ever dour Hu. His slightly bearlike stance contrasted with the ramrod backs of the Communist Party elite standing with him on the stage in the cavernous Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
There was even an impromptu element in an unexplained hour's delay in starting this final event of the week-long Communist Party Congress which has installed the country's new leadership.
Some observers with long memories of the old Soviet Union compared it to the early appearance of Mikhail Gorbachev as he sought to move the USSR towards a more relaxed and responsible system. But any comparison with Gorbachev would be an anathema to Xi and his colleagues – Gorbachev is a dirty name in China as the man who relaxed the Party's grip and brought disaster down upon it.
On the one hand, its leaders acknowledge the major challenges facing them but, on the other, they are extremely reluctant to alter the power structure or the reliance of economic growth which have produced many of these problems. Meanwhile they indulge in backstairs politicking worthy of any Western party.
They fear that political reform would bring the whole edifice tumbling down, Gorbachev style. They stress Party unity above all, particularly since the drama surrounding the fall of the maverick politician, Bo Xilai, who crashed to earth this year accused of crimes, corruption and womanising after the mysterious death of the British businessman, Neil Heywood, in his southwestern fiefdom of Chongqing – but whose real sin was to have emerged as a challenger to the consensus machine that runs the People's Republic.
The bureaucracy and powerful vested interests, especially in the huge state sector of the economy, oppose reform that could affect their privileged positions. Popular protests, running to some 150,000 a year, have been met by an expansion of spending on state security, now larger than the military budget. Media are tightly controlled and censors patrol the internet.
While individual liberties have greatly increased, anybody who tries to organise political opposition is likely to end up in jail, as in the case of the Nobel Peave Prize winner, Liu Xiabao who is serving 11 years for having organised a petition in favour of democracy. Xi may smile for the cameras but this remains an iron-fisted regime which has control in all forms at its heart.
Yet, outside the serried ranks of delegates in the Great Hall of the People, everyday life in Beijing and across China went on last week in a way that takes as little account as possible of the ruling autocracy. Rather than Communism or Confucianism, the "ism" that rules in today's China is materialism. Having had a terrible 30 years under Mao, the Chinese have grasped the opportunities of market-led economic reform with both hands.
Fees from Chinese students boost university funding in Britain, Australia and the United States; Chinese leaders may extol the riches of their country's culture and civilisation but they often send their children to study abroad – Xi Jinping's daughter is at Harvard under a pseudonym and Bo Xilai's son also studied there after having gone through Harrow School and Oxford.
The disjunction between the opaque, hermetically-sealed one-party system and this rapidly evolving society is the main challenge for the regime. For all his apparent normalness on Thursday, Xi's steady rise through the ranks of the provincial bureaucracy to power at the centre as Communist General is symptomatic of how things actually work in China.
This is not the meritocracy which China boosters proclaim as being superior to messy Western democracy. You only move up the ladder in China if you belong to the Party, and that covers only 6 per cent of the population. How you rise certainly depends on your performance, but also on your contacts.
Xi is the son of a revolutionary general who was purged in the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 – the young Xi was "sent down" to the countryside where he lived in a cave and looked after pigs. When his father was rehabilitated as Deng Xiaoping launched economic reform at the end of the 1970s, the son worked for a prominent general and then rose through administrative and Party posts in booming coastal provinces.
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