Xi Jinping: The Hidden Agendas of China’s Ruler for Life

"Yes, it opens by talking about COVID protests in China. China imposed a very draconian lockdown that was also quite arbitrary. It really made people’s lives very difficult for three years. In 2022, there were spontaneous demonstrations, beginning in November, on at least 70 campuses in China, mostly university or vocational higher education campuses. There were also protests in the streets and people were carrying angry messages. A lot of them protested with blank white A4 paper because they didn’t want to get in trouble. Eventually, some people did criticise zero-COVID or were directly critical of Xi saying things like ‘Down with Xi Jinping.’ Willy Lam’s book argues that Xi Jinping’s government and Xi himself have lost the trust of the people. In his first two terms, Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign was genuinely popular. There were government-sponsored TV programmes that glorified the campaign that people watched as entertainment. A hypothetical official from an imaginary province is very corrupt, and then this hardworking, diligent, anti-corruption team comes in to bring him down and restore order. Now, I think, with the anti-corruption campaign still going on strongly today, it’s very hard to convince people that it’s effective or it’s just about anti-corruption. Also, we have Xi Jinping’s policy failures, and his inability to attend to what the people really want, increasingly coming to the surface. Xi Jinping wants to style himself not only as a strongman who can control the powerful political elites, but as leader who is also close to the people—someone who is down to earth and can actually deliver. The zero-COVID policy, and the resentment that it has generated, failed on that. Willy Lam’s book starts with that. The book is about what he calls ‘political liberalisation’ after Mao—from Deng Xiaoping to his two successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Under them, he argues, it was a trajectory of liberalisation. The term ‘liberalisation’ might sound confusing in a one-party context. I would probably use the term institutionalisation. I think that’s better and less confusing. What Lam really means is that it is more collective rule, as opposed to one-man rule. Also, there is greater accountability and greater visibility on what’s going on. Chinese politics was becoming less of a black box. Xi Jinping reversed a lot of that. “The party needs to penetrate and lead everything and everyone else in China” In the book, Will Lam goes through these major trends. Under Deng Xiaoping, it was the beginning of putting institutions above individuals, which is exactly what Mao didn’t do. Mao put himself above institutions, hence the dramatic abuse of power that led to the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution . Both had huge casualties with the whole of China involved in political infighting. After the death of Mao, Deng Xiaoping came to power and his reforms were very much about putting institutions ahead of individuals and putting checks on power. It’s things like term limits and age limits. The idea that the top party leader can be in power for only two terms came from Deng Xiaoping. If you want to get to the top of the party, you need to prove your meritocratic credentials. It can’t just be that you’re someone’s friend or somebody likes you—you have to work your way up the ranks. It is also in this context that my Factional-Ideological Conflicts book on factions competing with each other for influence comes in. The party is no longer about one man: it’s about institutions, about norms. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms—which were about putting together a collective leadership—is what Willy Lam describes as the first major trend of political liberalisation in post-Mao China. What is significant is that although Deng Xiaoping made himself an exception and broke a lot of those norms by staying in power behind the scenes, those norms were binding on many important party elites. After Deng Xiaoping was gone, Jiang Zemin, who was much weaker than Deng Xiaoping, largely followed those norms, and Hu Jintao, who was much weaker than Jiang Zemin, observed them scrupulously and even introduced new norms to reinforce them. Jiang Zemin pushed hard for China to join the World Trade Organisation. That happened in 2001. Throughout the negotiations, there was signalling that China was sincere about becoming a much more market-oriented economy. The planned features of the economy would gradually be reduced. The joining of the WTO was significant because there were factions in the party that didn’t believe in market reform and didn’t want China to merge with the rest of the world. By putting China into that organisation, Jiang Zemin was signalling very strongly that he bought into market reform and that there would be no turning back of the clock. Then, he introduced a concept called the ‘three represents’. The party represents the people, it represents advanced cultural forces, it represents…whatever. It’s all very boring and jargonistic, so forget about the details. What is important is that after Jiang introduced the theory of the three represents, he used it as a rationale to justify admitting private businessmen to the Chinese Communist Party. That was important because since the economic reform and opening up that started under Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s, there had been some private businesspeople joining the party off and on. Then, in 1989, there was the Tiananmen Square massacre . There were pro-democracy protests and the party sent in the army and killed a lot of people. It never revealed the number of fatalities and it’s still a taboo subject in China today. After that, Jiang Zemin—who had been installed by Deng Xiaoping as party leader—came out and said private businessmen could no longer join the party. He put that ban in place himself after the massacre. Then, in 2001, he lifted it. It showed that the Chinese Communist Party was committed to marketisation, to more private business. Obviously, it’s also about co-option. These are important, influential people. Rather than them being outside our organisation, it’s much better for them to be one of us, so we can influence them or use them to achieve our purposes. Willy Lam argues that this is a trend of political liberalisation, but I would say it’s more market reform continuing on its trajectory and a commitment to not turning back. What Hu Jintao did might actually be closest to what we think political liberalisation is. He pursued experiments of intraparty democracy. There was a greater formal role for consultation within the party. There were direct elections, where party members had a say in choosing leaders at their own level (there are five levels of administrative hierarchy in China, with party organs at each level). Hu Jintao’s intraparty democracy was about making the party itself more accountable. Party members had more say in deciding how to run the party. It also meant that Hu Jintao was submitting his own power to greater checks and balances. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Xi Jinping turned back the clock in many ways. The aim since Mao had been to have checks and balances, to prevent excessive concentration of power, and also, to make sure that leadership succession can be orderly—because a perennial problem for authoritarian regimes is: how do you ensure that the leadership succession doesn’t end up in massive political infighting that can bring down the regime? Institutionalisation under Deng Xiaoping was supposed to do that. Xi Jinping, with the abolition of the term limit for the presidency in 2018, the way in which he built up a personality cult and touted and centralised his power, undid that. In terms of China merging with the rest of the world, it’s interesting because Xi has said that China is still very much committed to economic globalisation, to the WTO, to the United Nations , to the International Monetary Fund and all sorts of international organisations. It would appear, at least on the surface, that he has continued that Jiang Zemin paradigm. But, in reality, he has moved further away from that by making China’s economy more insulated from the West. He pursues what he calls the ‘dual circulation strategy.’ It’s about making China more self-reliant when it comes to strategic industries and high tech, and being able to control its supply chains in its own hands to avoid external instability. It is about being much more selective and strategic with what kinds of foreign direct investment is allowed in China, rather than the Jiang Zemin paradigm of ‘the more foreign direct investment the better’. With Xi Jinping strengthening state-owned enterprises, it also shows that he is not interested in the market reform that Jiang Zemin seemed to have signalled. Finally, on Hu Jintao’s intraparty democracy reform, Xi Jinping has been emphasising hierarchy, and an anti-corruption campaign that is more about rectification. Clearly, he is not interested in letting the party elites hold him to account. It’s much more the other way around—not intraparty democracy, but strongman, top-down rule. That’s the opening of Willy Lam’s book. Xi has undone the good things from Deng Xiaoping’s reform era that Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao continued, and he has brought back a lot of quasi-Maoist tendencies into the CCP. Then, in the rest of the book, Lam looks at different policy areas under Xi Jinping to build up that case. Yes, he does. I think that’s important because he really isn’t just saying it because he needs a political slogan. Xi Jinping Thought is a whole package of ideas, with the goal that China must be made great again. To be great again, you need to unite around the party, and the party needs to unite around a leader. That one-ness, sameness, the party-centric nationalism—he believes in it. He also believes that China’s rise as a great power is irreversible as long as we stick with his programme of ‘party in charge, Xi in charge, everyone unites with the party.’ You stick with that, and the party will be invincible and lead to China rising. The decline of the US and the West, to him, is a historical trend that is inevitable. It’s about making it happen quicker with Xi in charge. I think he believes that because this is such a powerful idea, he can capture the whole Chinese population with it. Then the party is on strong ground because you have one way of thinking that unites all the people. This is a good moment to talk about something quite controversial, which is Xi’s treatment of the Uyghur Muslim minority population, especially in the remote Xinjiang province on the periphery of China. Many people use different terms to describe what is happening: a genocide, massive atrocities. Whatever term you use, what is quite clear is that it’s an extremely forceful campaign of assimilation, of making the Uyghur Muslim minority Chinese, making them one people, in the image of Xi Jinping Thought. As Steve Tsang and I argue in our book, Xi Jinping has put forward a new de facto social contract for the people. That social contract is that the party has to increase control over your life, especially if you are one of those categories that are identified as more problematic, like Uyghurs, religious believers, or private businesspeople. (Businesspeople have money, and that money is independent of the party, so they’re suspicious). If you’re in one of those categories, then the party needs to control you even tighter. But everyone else, the party controls as well, increasingly using technology for control. The most surveilled cities in China have have one CCTV camera for every two to six people. The Uyghurs are being controlled using a mobile phone app and other very sophisticated methods, as well as some that are not as sophisticated, including a party cadre going into their houses to assess their political loyalty. There are a Han Chinese uncle and auntie literally living with them in their house to assess them. This is not very technological, but he uses that, too. He rationalises all this by thinking, ‘I am reforming you. I’m reforming you to make you into a new, socialist person, so that when you accept that your new identity is a one-Chinese identity, you will have the opportunity to get rich and make your life better.’ We hear a lot about the suppression campaign against the Uyghurs here in the UK. What we hear less about is the background to it, which was an anti-poverty campaign that lasted for four or five years, beginning in the middle of Xi’s first term. The anti-poverty campaign’s professed goal was to eliminate absolute poverty. It was very ambitious. How do you eliminate poverty? Xi set a benchmark: there’s a poverty line for every province in China. If your income goes above that line, then absolute poverty is said to be eliminated. The actual implementation has been very rough. A lot of local leaders simply handed out cash to bring the province above the poverty line. “The whole idea is that you need to make the Uyghurs Chinese” Xinjiang, where there are massive atrocities going on, is arguably one of the places where the implementation of the anti-poverty campaign has been the most serious. It included a massive relocation effort, with a lot of Xinjiang people being sent to work in factories in other parts of China, in low-skilled jobs. It was all framed under the anti-poverty banner: This is about giving you a future, giving you skills, giving you income. That took place at the same time as those massive detention centres, and other very intrusive surveillance was happening. The Chinese Communist Party rejects the term ‘detention centres’ and calls them ‘vocational training centres.’ If we look at Xi Jinping’s speeches and official documents that are out there, we can get a sense of how thoroughgoing it was. There was an official document I was able to find online, saying things like, ‘We need to break the influence of religion in Uyghur households and Uyghur families.’ To do that, one major goal of the education bureau in Xinjiang was building boarding schools. The whole idea is that you need to make the Uyghurs Chinese and making them Chinese means that they need to not believe in what they believe in, because if they believe in that faith, they’ll be prone to extremism. Also, you need to make them grateful to the Chinese Communist Party, make them one of us, make them grateful to China. Hence, you send them elsewhere in China to work, so they’re more integrated. This is part of his social contract for ethnic minorities. That’s a good point. You’ll notice that among the books I gave you, I don’t really have a Xi Jinping biography. Kerry Brown touched on a bit of that in some of his chapters, tracing Xi Jinping’s background. But I really don’t think we can explain Xi’s agenda through what he himself has experienced, his growing-up story. Even his own father, a founding CCP member, was not popular within his generation. His father was much more liberal-leaning, so Xi Jinping doesn’t even act like his father. What we might understand from his background is that despite what he has gone through, he has always stuck with the party. During the Cultural Revolution, when his father was being wrongly accused and badly treated in Beijing, Xi Jinping was sent down to the countryside, to a mountainous area. He lived in a cave and worked with farmers, so it was a very hard life. Even in that context, he applied to join the party. He was rejected ten times because of his father’s difficult political background. The point is that he tried to join the party. And then, when he could leave that cave situation, it was because his father, having been wronged, was gradually restored to his former status. So, in Xi Jinping’s own career, he was wronged by the party, and his family was very wronged by the party. His half-sister committed suicide because of what happened to her. You might say that by going to a remote village, although he lived in very poor circumstances, he was shielded from the political turbulence in Beijing. But I think this is a side note, really. The main point that I see in his life is one which is really shaped by the party and bound by the party, and he hasn’t let go of the party."