Xi Jinping presents two faces to the world. Many see the man in charge of the world’s rising superpower as a dictator. Others see chronic vulnerability.
Mao he is not, but the prevailing narrative of Xi (pictured right) is that he has emerged as a strongman with the tools of repression in his grasp and a hunger for legacy. Around him, for all of China’s sparkly, 21st-century dynamism, the nastiness of an old-fashioned dictatorship abounds.
Freedom of speech and thought have crumbled in Xi’s fist. He has formulated new laws that could disband NGOs and puncture the already flaccid development of civil society. Five women are in detention and each face three years in prison for attempting to put up anti-sexual harassment posters on International Women’s Day.
The domestic security apparatus has been brought more tightly under Xi’s control and pumped up into a snorting, steroidal bully. Tortured confessions remain part of the criminal prosecution process. Court acquittals fell below 800 in 2014, putting the national conviction rate at a dictator-pleasing 99.93 per cent.
This concentration of power has required willpower and charisma. Xi’s two presidential predecessors, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, wouldn’t or couldn’t progress beyond their roles as representative pinnacles of a dictatorial system. But Xi, self-styled scourge of the corrupt and lightning consolidator of power, appears to have made personal autocracy a mission in itself.
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Day-to-day phenomena add furniture to the Xi-as-dictator scene. When the president appeared last week at the opening of China’s rubber-stamp parliament, he did so in defiance of internet reports that he had fallen victim to a coup. The rumours were outlandish and wrong but, critically, just plausible enough that we needed to see him, alive, in the Great Hall of The People to be 100 per cent sure it wasn’t true.
These oddities exist against a climate in which ordinary Chinese start building foreign bolt-holes for their families as soon as they have the money to do so and where the state propaganda machine still whirrs away in a permanent spasm of paranoia: Xi seems to sit on a throne of classic dictatorship clichés.
But others see it differently. To miss where Xi’s weaknesses lie is to miss the most interesting aspects of China’s development: it has gained its most centralising leader for decades at a point where the demands of the economy and society are tugging in more varied directions than ever. When a US official yesterday accused Britain of being too accommodating to China over our application to participate in the China-led Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, they hit on the reality of UK engagement with Xi: David Cameron’s government has decided that Xi is all-powerful and that there is more to be gained from playing along with him than testing his leadership fault-lines.
Britain — and the rest of the world — should start dealing with Xi in the context of a man whose power will be tested, repeatedly and harshly, at home and will soon face similar tests abroad. His state visit to the UK, scheduled for this year, will be Britain’s opportunity, whoever is in No 10, to show that it has recognised that absence of absolute power.
Xi’s greatest shortcoming as a dictator is that he is a leader with clear and demanding constituencies, both domestic and foreign. The annual state-of-the nation work report, issued last week, struck a distinctly appeasing note. This was not the strident tone of a leadership bellowing its terms but a series of whistles indicating what all China’s different constituencies will get at some point in the future.
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For all his strength, autocratic bent and accumulation of offices and titles, Xi is not strong enough to qualify as a dictator and has yet to clock up a single, recognisable father-of-the-nation achievement. Polarisation within the ruling elite has begun to show, the promised reforms that require real, bloody-minded force to push through are proving elusive and even Xi cannot order the deadly smog to clear from the skies of China’s cities.
Leo Lewis is Beijing bureau chief