# Xi Jinping ## Metadata * Author: [Richard McGregor](https://www.amazon.com/Richard-McGregor/e/B001K8BX5C/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1) * ASIN: B07VCH9HDJ * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07VCH9HDJ * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ) ## Highlights This paper will examine in detail two areas of policy that have dominated Xi’s rule. First, the anti-corruption campaign, as well as the Party’s relationship with the economy, particularly state and private business. Then it will look at a select number of countries and their response to the China challenge. — location: [148](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=148) ^ref-23963 --- If Xi, and whomever takes over from him eventually, does manage to sustain the system, China will have decisively rebuffed any notions that democracy is the sole system capable of building a successful, rich country. — location: [154](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=154) ^ref-29432 --- Struggling to push back against anti-market conservatives, Deng’s ‘southern tour’ was a pivotal moment that revitalised political support for the entrepreneurial economy. — location: [162](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=162) ^ref-11786 --- Xi’s southern tour was, in retrospect, more a ritualistic feint than a conscious signal that he was setting off on a steady-as-she-goes Dengist path of incremental market reforms for the economy. — location: [176](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=176) ^ref-26077 --- In the post-Mao era, however, the United States has by and large been, at least until Donald Trump’s election, the indispensable enabler of China’s rise. — location: [191](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=191) ^ref-12254 --- Biden and his advisers left China with an impression of Xi that has turned out to be right – that he would be tougher to deal with than Hu, more ambitious for his country and more assertive about prosecuting what he believed to be China’s interests. — location: [210](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=210) ^ref-59535 --- Xi made his position clear. He would be the reddest leader of all in his generation. Not only that, he expected all party members to follow in his footsteps. — location: [217](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=217) ^ref-58115 --- China studied intensely the collapse of the Soviet Union in its immediate aftermath. — location: [227](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=227) ^ref-34972 --- Xi was worried enough about the state of the Party to make everyone from top leaders to rank-and-file officials go back to class to learn the lessons of the Soviet fall again.12 — location: [229](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=229) ^ref-14671 --- But a six-part Chinese documentary about the collapse of the Soviet Union, which at Xi’s direction became required viewing for cadres, zeroed in on another factor – the ‘infiltration of subversive Western values’ and their role in Gorbachev’s ultimately unsuccessful economic reforms. — location: [232](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=232) ^ref-47307 --- Xi’s anxieties were accentuated by the manoeuvring of two rivals: Bo Xilai, the Chongqing party secretary, and Zhou Yongkang, in charge of internal security. — location: [244](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=244) ^ref-4871 --- The official media, quoting senior officials, said the pair had been conspiring to mount an internal coup to seize control of the Party, and effectively to prevent Xi from ascending to the top party post for which he had been groomed.16 — location: [250](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=250) ^ref-4161 --- Xi also started locking up the Party’s critics. Activist lawyers who had carved out a small space to protect citizens’ rights were rounded up, one by one, by state security. — location: [256](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=256) ^ref-2859 --- Xi set targets to eradicate poverty by 2021, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party in China. — location: [261](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=261) ^ref-19991 --- In October 2013, he raised the temperature on Taiwan, calling it a political issue that ‘cannot be passed on from generation to generation’.18 Soon after, China set about executing a long-held plan to build large military bases in the South China Sea. — location: [262](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=262) ^ref-38831 --- Xi, after all, had emerged as the compromise candidate at that year’s party congress. — location: [300](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=300) ^ref-50849 --- acceptable to both dominant groupings at the top – the ‘Shanghai Gang’ and its titular head, Jiang Zemin, and the clique clustered around the China Youth League, headed by Hu. — location: [302](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=302) ^ref-30826 --- According to one report, party elders settled on Xi because he was pliable and ‘lacked a power base’.22 — location: [303](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=303) ^ref-53073 --- Since late 2012, the authorities have investigated more than 2.7 million officials and punished more than 1.5 million others. They include seven at the top level (that is, at the level of the Politburo and the Cabinet), and about two-dozen high-ranking generals. Two senior officials have been sentenced to death.24 — location: [339](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=339) ^ref-25800 --- In other words, in cracking down on corruption, Xi might have won popular support but he also earned himself a bucketload of bitter enemies, all itching for revenge. — location: [350](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=350) ^ref-6591 --- Failing to fight graft, Xi said, could lead to ‘the collapse of the Party and the downfall of the state’.26 — location: [364](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=364) ^ref-27965 --- Before he was toppled, Sun was considered a potential rival to Xi. In an instant, he was gone. The following year, in 2018, Sun was sentenced to life imprisonment. — location: [394](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=394) ^ref-23578 --- The New York Times published a report related to the same topic, this time detailing how Xi’s family had begun unloading hundreds of millions of dollars of their investments.32 This remarkable story was anchored by an on-the-record confirmation from a Hong Kong-based Chinese financier, Xiao Jianhua, who had bought some of the assets. He said Xi’s sister and her husband were selling their stakes ‘for the family’. Xiao knew a great deal about senior Chinese leaders’ financial affairs, maybe too much. In January 2017, Xiao was abducted from his apartment at the Four Seasons, overlooking Hong Kong harbour, and transported back to China. He has not been heard from since. — location: [430](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=430) ^ref-52421 --- In August 2017, a group of 59 Chinese lawyers and legal scholars issued a joint letter to the National People’s Congress saying the rule of law ‘faced a crisis’. Anyone under investigation who had rights under the criminal law, they said, would find those same rights extinguished under the new supervision commission. ‘Is such logic (not) ridiculous?’ they wrote, adding that the misuse of power was inevitable.37 A more pithy critique was delivered by a well-known dissident, Gao Hongming. ‘Under the absolute leadership of the Party,’ Gao wrote, ‘the people are nothing; the state is nothing; the constitution is nothing; the law is nothing. The Chinese judicial system is [the] Communist Party.’38 — location: [473](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=473) ^ref-50188 --- As Henry Paulson, the former Goldman Sachs chief, erstwhile US treasury secretary and long-time China bull, said in a speech in November 2018: ‘I see more clearly than ever the prospect of an economic Iron Curtain – one that throws up new walls on each side and unmakes the global economy, as we have known it.’49 — location: [544](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=544) ^ref-45939 --- Numerous high-profile scholars used the 40th anniversary of economic reform to warn against the reinforcement of the state model. Wu Jinglian, 89, a pioneering market economist, said increasing state command of the economy would lead to ‘crony capitalism’ and revive memories of the 1950s, when the Party forced private companies to hand over their assets.50 — location: [549](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=549) ^ref-47459 --- The sharpest attack on Xi’s economic policies was delivered towards the end of 2018. In a speech initially posted on the internet before being taken down, Professor Xiang Songzuo of Renmin University said: ‘Since the beginning of the year … all kinds of ideological statements have been thrown around: statements like “private property will be eliminated”, “private ownership will eventually be abolished if not now”, “it’s time for the private enterprises to fade away”, or “all private companies should be turned over to their workers”. Then there was this high-profile study of Marx and the Communist Manifesto. Remember that line in the Communist Manifesto? Abolition of private property. What kind of signal do you think this sends to private entrepreneurs?’53 — location: [557](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=557) ^ref-10750 --- In 2018, the securities regulator followed up by issuing a new corporate governance code requiring listed firms, at home and abroad, to include in their internal guidelines an expansive role for the Party. Many Chinese companies listed in Hong Kong also wrote the Party’s role into their articles of association.62 — location: [628](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=628) ^ref-25644 --- ‘The same individual who is chairing a Party committee meeting on a Monday might well be chairing a board meeting later in the week,’ notes a 2018 report on Chinese corporate governance.63 — location: [635](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=635) ^ref-19728 --- officials have added a new talking point in meetings with foreigners, the concept of ‘competitive neutrality’. — location: [644](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=644) ^ref-17535 --- In the words of the top official overseeing big state companies, Chinese state firms were ‘independent market players’ responsible for their own operations and profitability and no different from enterprises with ‘other forms of ownership’.65 — location: [646](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=646) ^ref-55466 --- The Party’s overarching aim, though, has remained consistent: to ensure that the private sector, and individual entrepreneurs, do not become rival players in the political system in a way which threatens the single-party state. The Party wants economic growth, but not at the expense of tolerating and indeed nourishing any organised alternative centres of power. — location: [676](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=676) ^ref-30770 --- One recent survey by the Central Organisation Department, the Party’s personnel body, found that 68 per cent of China’s private companies had party bodies by 2016, and 70 per cent of foreign enterprises.71 — location: [683](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=683) ^ref-57379 --- One businessman, Chen Tianyong, posted a lengthy rant on social media, which he titled ‘An Entrepreneur’s Farewell Admonition’, explaining why he had left China. ‘China’s economy is like a giant ship heading to the precipice,’ he wrote in a posting that was later taken down. ‘Without fundamental changes, it’s inevitable that the ship will be wrecked and the passengers will die.’84 — location: [743](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=743) ^ref-59831 --- Shinzo Abe has pushed for more military spending and greater US engagement himself, in response to rising threats from China and North Korea. Likewise, Australia’s defence build-up and diplomatic agitation is as much a response to Beijing’s assertiveness as Washington’s weakness. — location: [785](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=785) ^ref-45989 --- When Chinese firm Midea proposed buying Kuka, a German robotics maker, in late 2016, Angela Merkel was annoyed to discover that the government had no mechanism to block the deal short of declaring it a national security threat. — location: [933](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=933) ^ref-16255 --- Once the shine comes off the Xi Jinping–Vladimir Putin relationship, there will be tensions with Russia, which is gradually being marginalised by China in Eurasia. — location: [1035](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=1035) ^ref-37720 --- Beijing cannot bully its way to superpower status without engendering a strong pushback from other countries, which is exactly what is happening. — location: [1070](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=1070) ^ref-59398 --- That even famous Chinese scholars have to guard their words about Xi so carefully is a reminder of the fear his power still strikes through the system. — location: [1092](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07VCH9HDJ&location=1092) ^ref-18468 ---