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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 4 | THE TABLET | 21 SEPTEMBER 2024 For more features, news, analysis and comment, visit www.thetablet.co.uk
page 5
CHRISTOPHER HOWSE’S NOTEBOOK Soviet novelist Mikhail Sholokhov among his favourites. Eventually, Mao relented and the Xi family got back to Beijing. But Xi had lost precious years at school and only qualified for university through a special scheme for “worker- peasantsoldier” students. His degree in chemical engineering was heavier on Marxist studies than science and we only have “the professor’s” word as to his curiosity about religions, a subject on which he has kept silent. That doesn’t mean that Xi has no beliefs. Throughout his rise to power he depended on mentors and academics to provide intellectual ballast. He found a key mentor when family influence got him his first job, as a junior private secretary to China’s defence supremo, Geng Biao, in 1979. I was given a declassified US document detailing how Geng told the Americans that Russia could not be trusted, that the tsars had stolen Chinese land and that Stalin had been China’s only friend. The later Soviet leaders, complained Geng, wanted to make his country a mere granary for the socialist bloc and to station troops and naval units on its soil. Anyone tempted to believe that Xi and Vladimir Putin truly enjoy a friendship with “no limits” can be reassured that the Chinese leader was schooled in bleak reality and has little in common with Putin beyond their shared loathing for representative democracy. Xi’s model from Russia is Stalin. While he does not talk about the Soviet dictator very much, he copies his mindset of purges, selfisolation and distrust of all foreigners. In that, he is abetted by his court theologian, an opportunist academic named Wang Huning who has got to the top by composing the “thought” of three Chinese leaders. WANG’S MASTERWORK is Xi Jinping Thought, a corpus of wisdom which rivals Stalin in sheer wordiness and is dutifully spouted by otherwise intelligent people who cite the master for guidance on everything from vaccination to ship-building. It has little to say about spirituality except to underline the “excellence” of Chinese civilisation and to emphasise the submission of believers to the requirements of the state. If there is a religion in all this, it is conform ity. Xi himself says that Chinese culture is characterised by an instinct towards collective behaviour, a sweeping assertion that would be condemned as a stereotype if it came from a foreign scholar, and which is in any case false. China has a rich and pluralist inheritance. It absorbed Confucianism, the teachings of Buddha, the Jesuit missions, the philosophy of the French and American Revolutions and the emergence of modern democratic thought. It will outlast the doctrines of Marx, Lenin – and of Xi Jinping. Michael Sheridan is the author of The Gate to China: A New History of the People’s Republic and Hong Kong (William Collins). His new biography of Xi Jinping, The Red Emperor, is published by Headline at £25 (Tablet price £22.50). I find the king’s head on the new first-class stamps a little reminiscent of Franco’s I’ VE HAD my first slice of Christmas pudding of the season. I usually like to get it in before the austerities of Advent, but this year it was as early as the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on 14 September. The pud came from Messrs Marks & Spencer. Although it was billed as having been maturing a twelvemonth, the packaging says it will be “best before” 25 February 2025, a week before the beginning of Lent. Why? The taste was pleasing, which used not to be the case with shop-bought Christmas puddings. M&S has a policy of pricing its Christmas puddings at the same per ounce whether you buy a thumping great basinful for the whole Cratchit family or a thimble suitable for pensioners like me unsure whether they can afford to heat it up. In the strange double life that we live around metric weights and measures, it weighed a pound but said it was 454 grams. That cost £7. I can’t tell whether that is expensive or not. You can scarcely get two cups of coffee for £7 and the last time I bought someone a pint it was more than £7. I should have asked him whether he would have preferred a Christmas pudding instead. Instead of suet the pudding contains vegetable fats and is advertised as suitable for vegetarians. So I think it should be halal. But I doubt many Muslims would be tucking in. Christmas marks the birth of Jesus, recognised as a prophet in Islam. But he is certainly not recognised as God made man, and in any case I don’t think most Muslims celebrate prophets’ birthdays. I know that Father Christmas is an annual sight in Isfahan, thanks to the Armenian community there, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t travel to Iran these days, out of fear. Still, cultural cross-currents can be surprising. Around Christmas I used to get a card from the London bureau of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. Inside it said “Season’s Greetings”, though it didn’t mention which season it was. JAMES BETTLEY is an architectural historian to whom we owe thanks all round. Recently he splendidly updated and amplified the two volumes for Suffolk in the Pevsner series, The Buildings of England. Now he has turned his eyes to churches that were used by Church of England congregations in Europe and parts of North Africa, mainly 1815-1914. In Catholic Spain, Protestant churches were unwelcome. The first to be opened was in Seville, on Guy Fawkes day 1871 in part of an old convent in the Plaza del Museo, which has since been demolished. In the Canary Islands plans were drawn up in the 1890s for an Anglican church to be known as St George’s. A foundation stone was laid in time for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, but the church was opened only in 1905 and consecrated by the Bishop of Sierra Leone in 1914. By the 1980s the golden days of Anglican overwintering were over and it was time to sell up. The church is in the middle of Santa Cruz, and was bought by the Catholic diocese of Tenerife. After restoration work it reopened as San Jorge in time for an ecumenical service on the bicentenary of Nelson’s unsuccessful attempt to take the city in 1797, when he lost his arm. HURRY NOW and make a massive killing in the investment market. On 7 October, first-class stamps go up 30p to £1.65. If you buy them before then, you’ ll see a 22 per cent return overnight in their value, with no tax to pay. If you sensibly send Christmas cards second-class, it won’t work for them, as they are staying at 85p. Last year, many cards took weeks to arrive, so real meanies waited till they received a card before reciprocating, hiding behind the general latent interval. Actually, I find the king’s head on the new first-class stamps a little reminiscent of Franco’s on old Spanish definitive issues, not because they bear any facial resemblance, but because they both combed their hair before the engraver struck, producing a similar air, or “jizz” as birdwatchers call it. But what joy it would bring your friends in 2025 to receive a letter or card from you, while the postal service lasts, speeding under the impulsion of a first-class stamp, and (for the thoughtful shopper) all at 2024 prices. Christopher Howse is an assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph For more features, news, analysis and comment, visit www.thetablet.co.uk 21 SEPTEMBER 2024 | THE TABLET | 5

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

4 | THE TABLET | 21 SEPTEMBER 2024

For more features, news, analysis and comment, visit www.thetablet.co.uk

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