FEATURES / Inside the mind of Xi
‘I would like to visit China,’ Pope Francis told reporters on the flight back to Rome after his tour of the Asia-Pacific. But what if he and China’s leader met? What does Xi Jinping believe in? / By MICHAEL SHERIDAN
In thrall to the ancients
IT’S EASY TO MOCK the pretensions of dictators. Their empty theories and mindless slogans are often just a mask for greed, violence and the lust for power. But the Chinese leader’s ambitions are loftier than that.
In writing my biography of this enigmatic Marxist-Leninist, I discovered time and again that he puts ancient concepts of Chinese civilisation, even its traditional reverence for ancestors, at the core of his politics. Here he is, speaking to a group of elite “red families” gathered recently to commemorate the 120th anniversary of the birth of Deng Xiaoping, the patriarch of economic reform:
PHOTO: ALAMY/UTCON COLLECTION
“In the new era and new journey, we must adhere to maintaining integrity and innovation, not forget our ancestors, always walk the right path and be good at blazing new trails,” he intoned. “Opening up new frontiers in the Sinicisation and modernisation of Marxism is the solemn historical responsibility of contemporary Chinese Communists.”
His audience sat obediently silent at green baize tables, having heard it all before, but this time Xi added a human touch, speaking of their duty to “constantly comfort the older generation of revolutionaries with new achievements and accomplishments”.
The key words here are “Sinicisation” and “older generation”. Making Marxism Chinese is Xi’s common cause with the “Sinicisation” of religions: in each case the supremacy of Chinese characteristics is never in doubt. Both the Kremlin and the Vatican have taken note.
Xi Jinping (left) and his brother Xi Yuanping with their father Xi Zhongxun in 1958
according to Taoist scholars, it is also auspiciously sited near an invisible “dragon line”. The “dragon line” is a geomantic marker. It runs to the sea from the Qinling Mountains, which divide the country into north and south, and are known as the “dragon vein” of China. From the dim past, Chinese emperors believed that their earthly powers were linked to natural forces. The superstitious believed that a dragon line must be unbroken or a dynasty will fall.
And it turns out that Xi Jinping has time and again broken off from his duties governing 1.35 billion people to order the demolition of buildings that break the perfection of the Qinling chain, while his minions evict farmers and tear down their homes to ensure a clean sweep around his father’s memorial. That tells us that even if Xi is the ruler of a modern technostate, his mind is very, very
Xi has little in common with Putin beyond their
Xi’s career shows that he believes in lineage, a creed shared by the hereditary Communists in the room, all of whom owed their wealth and power to the victory of their forebears in the revolution of 1949. Hundreds of miles south of Beijing, there rises a monument to Xi’s father, the veteran cadre Xi Zhongxun, on a great earthen mound crowned by a granite statue of a man who sits dispensing wisdom like a sage of old. Pilgrims climb more than 100 steps under the watch of surveillance cameras and guards to lay flowers and pay homage. Xi’s father died in 2002, but work on the memorial to house his ashes lasted a decade. It is grander than many an imperial tomb.
shared loathing of representative democracy
The strangest aspect of the shrine is not its gargantuan scale but its location. To be sure, it is near the rural birthplace of Xi Zhongxun in the dry “yellow earth” of central China but,
old. It also marks a return to the dynastic principle, a contrast with the two giants of Chinese Communism before him. Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic, left orders for a plain funeral (only to be ignored by his comrades, who placed him in a giant mausoleum on Tiananmen Square). Few Chinese could name Mao’s father, while his children played no great part in politics. As for Deng Xiaoping, the reformer and lifelong atheist commemorated by Xi last month, his ashes were scattered in the East China Sea from an air force plane. He has no tomb.
I call Xi the “Red Emperor” because nobody since Mao has accumulated so much pomp. Deng never wore the triple crown as head of the party, the state and the military, relying only on the third of these and on raw power. Xi holds all three posts, probably for life. That makes him the most consequential Chinese leader of this century. So rival intelligence agencies have scoured the sources for clues to what he thinks.
THE AMERICANS found an informant code- named “the professor” (he was the son of Mao’s first minister of labour) who remembered that the young Xi Jinping was curious about Tibetan Buddhism, traditional Chinese Taoism, esoteric folk religions and the practice of qi gong, a discipline of mind and body which devotees say maximises energy and wellbeing.
There is no evidence that Xi has interested himself in Christian teaching. He has treated the religion as an administrative and political matter to be resolved by imposing control on worship within approved churches and negotiating a diplomatic accord with the Vatican. While Mao exalted the peasant uprising of the Taiping “Heavenly Kingdom” during the nineteenth century as a precursor to revolution, today’s party theorists see its Christian origins as proof of the chaos inflicted on China by an alien doctrine exploited by imperialist powers. Nothing in Xi’s curriculum vitae indicates that he is capable of a more sophisticated analysis of the movement.
He had little formal education after his early years. As a child, Xi attended an elite kindergarten in the former imperial gardens and received a grounding in literacy, mathematics and the Chinese classics, with their mesmerising cosmic cycles of rise and fall, change and decay, triumph and disaster. This turned out to be a good life lesson.
The rest of his youth was destroyed by Mao’s Cultural Revolution. His father was purged, his high school was taken over by Red Guards, he was beaten and humiliated, then expelled to labour in the remote countryside, where he lived in a cave. Today’s myth-making tells of a teenage Xi arriving in a far-flung village with a suitcase full of books by Marx and Engels plus a collection of Ming dynasty folk tales with titles such as Scholar Tang Gains a Wife after One Smile.
The message is more important than the truth. It is that Chinese values and Marxism run together through his political formation. In later years Xi claimed to have read widely, citing Shakespeare, Hemingway and the
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