Xi Jinping Is Watching His Back
His rhetoric has taken a paranoid turn—and holing himself up in Beijing hasn’t helped.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s image may be all over the news these days, but in real life, Xi has all but vanished from the world stage. Hunkering down in Beijing for more than 700 days, Xi was a no-show at last year’s United Nations General Assembly, the G-20 summit in Rome, and the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland. Xi’s disappearing act is occurring at the same time he and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) face serious domestic headwinds, including rampant energy shortages, rising unemployment, and a real estate market teetering on the edge of collapse.
Times have clearly changed since before the COVID-19 pandemic when Xi confidently boasted about ushering in a new, China-centric global order. Xi’s refusal to go abroad clearly reflects his fervent desire to stay on top of any renewed coronavirus outbreaks, the second-order effects of which have paralyzed China’s industrial output. But the pandemic alone cannot explain Xi’s refusal to leave his seat of power—or to shelve, however temporarily, his grand international ambitions.
Instead, if Xi’s latest pronouncements are any indication, there is something else keeping him awake at night: growing fears about resistance to his rule from factions inside the CCP.
Put plainly, as China’s economy stumbles and its global standing tumbles, Xi is quickly realizing that after almost a decade in power, his demand for “absolute loyalty” within the CCP remains quixotic at best—and foolhardy at worst. And that is a major cause for concern less than 10 months before the CCP’s 20th Party Congress, when Xi is expected to assume a once-unthinkable third term as the party’s general secretary.
“If you’re soft, people will die in the end,” Xi warned this past November. Such vaguely ominous words hardly denote a leader’s confident grip on power, but they nevertheless featured prominently in Xi’s keynote address during the Sixth Plenum, a key gathering of CCP elites. It was during this meeting that Xi muscled through a historical resolution that upended decades of precedent limiting Chinese leaders to two five-year terms. In doing so, Xi effectively enshrined himself alongside Mao Zedong in the pantheon of great Chinese rulers. But, perhaps sensing disunity within the ranks, Xi bluntly warned that, “Cliques, gangs, and interest groups within the party will be resolutely investigated and punished.” On this front, Xi promised, “no mercy” for CCP officials who put themselves before party unity.
The simple explanation for Xi’s refusal to leave China and his recent, over-the-top loyalty push is that Xi recognizes he is increasingly vulnerable…..
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Continue reading this article at FDD, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
