The Politics of the Core Leader in China: Culture, Institution, Legitimacy, and Power

"The other book I’ve chosen, The Politics of the Core Leader in China, is by Xuezhi Guo. His main argument is that in Chinese politics, from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping, there’s an enduring tendency to gravitate towards one core leader. From what Willy Lam has said and what I have said, we are talking a lot about collective leadership under Deng Xiaoping and how important it is. What Xuezhi Guo says is that collective leadership is actually an abnormality. You have collective leadership only when the top leader fails to really consolidate power. If you have collective leadership, it is not because Deng Xiaoping put in those norms, and people abide by those norms because they don’t want the atrocities of the Mao era to recur and you have collective leadership as a party consensus. He challenges that view. He says that you have collective leadership because the person who has the title of the top party leader failed to consolidate power successfully, so that you have different factions competing with each other. Elsewhere in Chinese political culture, with Confucianism and Legalism and ancient political thought, looking up at one core leader is what supplies stability. The emperor, the wise sage—he can maintain order. So, Guo argues, Xi Jinping being able to concentrate power and now being formally at the top of the party actually has a lot of cultural legitimacy—because Chinese political culture really supports the idea of having one core leader. It’s a good point. Xi Jinping Thought—which is simply Xi Jinping’s political vision—is now in the process of being formally elevated into China’s state ideology. He argues that the origins of socialism with Chinese characteristics aren’t only in Marx or the Soviet Union but in China’s 5000+ years of excellent history. He is always trying to backdate his own political vision and socialism with Chinese characteristics, to ancient Chinese history . He even said that when the Chinese Communist Party waged a revolution and founded the PRC, the reason why it was so well received by the people of China—which is contradicted by the many campaigns to supress ‘counterrevolutionaries’ and unleash terror in the population—is because socialism merged seamlessly with traditional Chinese culture. So Xi revived ideological research in China, the study of Chinese poems , idiom, and so on. The idea that he is representing something much older—that there is a consensus that transcends the political regimes that China has gone through—is a main theme. Xi says that as Chinese people, we need cultural self-confidence, which is deeper and more enduring than any other sort of self-confidence. And where do we get that? From ancient Chinese history that merges seamlessly with socialism into the brand of ideology that he is now putting forward. Xi Jinping has never studied abroad. Even his education level in China is questionable, even though, formally, he has a PhD. But he has distinguished himself as the Chinese leader who has travelled the most, spending the highest number of days outside China—at least before COVID. Even during the COVID lockdown, he had a very busy schedule, video calling different political leaders around the world. That suggests that he is comfortable conversing with dignitaries around the world, in selling his own agenda. But he focuses on the developing world much more than the developed world, and he is clearly a lot more comfortable and welcome there. He basically supported Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The way that he’s going about things really cuts into what are seen as core values in the West. This decoupling—at least rhetorically or ideologically—between China and the Western world is going to keep happening because I don’t see Xi Jinping pulling back. The way he has allied with Putin and condoned what has happened in Ukraine is seen as unacceptable in this part of the world, but to him it’s about building a new world order. This is in the last chapter of the book that Steve Tsang and I wrote . “Xi Jinping Thought is a whole package of ideas, with the goal that China must be made great again” Xi Jinping believes that China needs to guide the world to build a new world order, and this new world order is branded ‘ tianxia ,’ a Chinese term meaning ‘all under heaven.’ This is not the same tianxia that was in place as a world order in ancient Asia; it is tianxia as Xi Jinping himself imagines it to be—his romantic interpretation of a world order that used to be the world order of ancient East Asia. In the tianxia world order as Xi Jinping believes it to be, it is hierarchical, but importantly, China doesn’t need to use force or use coercion, although China would have the capacity to do so. Strong army: necessary! Strong military: necessary! But China doesn’t need to use it because other countries genuinely admire and like China. They look up to Chinese civilisation. They look up to China as a good example that they can learn from. Frankly, I don’t think anyone in the West is too serious about learning from China. But there are developing countries that Xi Jinping has really tried to get to learn from China. The Chinese Communist Party is literally funding and writing curriculums for schools that train political parties in Africa, and inviting political elites, especially from developing countries, to come to Beijing to study in party schools or Chinese universities that have curriculum programs for them to learn about how the CCP rules China. There’s pride there. There’s the sense that in order to build up this new world order— where all under heaven admire China and see China as the centre—you need the support of the developing world. So Xi Jinping is definitely a lot more comfortable with that part of the world than with the US."