Reading the flood of commentary about the major Communist Party gathering in Beijing, I keep seeing the point being made by highly intelligent analysts that Xi Jinping is now China’s most powerful leader since Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong), who died in 1976.
But I’d argue that Xi has far surpassed Mao and indeed any Chinese leader for at least a couple of hundred years. Xi has been able to meld the party, goverment, and military into a coherent whole as a result of his “military-civil fusion.” Mao never trusted his bureaucracy. The key to Mao’s power was his ability to whip up his people into mass movements such as the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution that started in 1966, which centered on Mao’s Little Red Book of propaganda against old elites.
Xi has other things going for him that Mao could only have dreamed of. His government is sitting on $3.1 trillion in foreign exchange reserves. That’s a staggering concentration of wealth. Mao’s China was a desperately poor place. When I arrived in 1979, I observed the citizens of Guangzhou (Canton) bicycling through the dark streets at night. There were no street lights. I went to communes where people were dressed in rags. The Chinese were also hungry–watching them eat in any public venue such as a train demonstrated that they were ravenous, seemingly all the time.
Aside from sheer wealth, Xi’s party-state is benefitting from a stunning surge in technology. It all hinges on a massive campaign of Intellectual Property theft, both through penetration of the world’s IT and computer systems and through old-fashioned human espionage. In Battlefield: Cyber–How China and Russia Are Undermining Our Democracy and National Security (pre-order here), co-author Mike McLaughlin and I describe how Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army penetrated Canada’s Nortel over an incredible 15-year period and stole the technology that allowed Huawei to become a dominant player in 5G wireless communications technology. The same pattern has been repeated in dozens of industries.
The West assumed, and I was among the consensus view, that the explosion of the Internet in China and the emergence of a middle class would mean that gradually the Chinese would demand greater political power and would voice their opinions. There were hints of this so-called “peaceful evolution” theory in the 1980s, culminating in the bloody crackdown at Tiananmen Square in 1989. (I had left China by that time.)
But we didn’t realize that Xi would be able to use the Internet, facial scanning, retina-scanning, DNA analytical equipment and other advanced (and mostly stolen) technologies to exert unprecedented control over a population of 1.4 billion. The use of health codes on people’s smart phones during the pandemic has allowed Xi’s regime to dramatically expand its control of the movements of each citizen. “The fact remains that the government now has a system that Mao Zedong could only have dreamed of, powered by data and algorithms, to monitor and control the people,” artist and dissident Ai Weiwei wrote today in the New York Times.
There is an expression in Chinese from the 14th century that goes like this, Tian gao, Huangdi yuan. It means, The heavens are high and the emperior is far away. For centuries, the Chinese living outside of Beijing or other capital cities have been able to enjoy a measure of independence. The emperor cannot control them completely from such a distance. But in sharp contrast, Xi can be in their faces every moment of every day. He commands the propaganda machine and has turned the Internet into a tool of repression. His AI systems can monitor what everyone is saying. The Chinese users of WeChat, the ubiquitous platform that handles email, food ordering, banking, dating and so many other functions, who forwarded images of a protest banner on a bridge recently were singled out and cut off from WeChat, ending their lives as they knew it. The power of the party-state is absolute.
To identify an emperor as powerful as Xi (and that is what he has become, a Marxist, hyper-nationalistic emperor), we would have to go back to the Ching (Qing) dynasty. The dynasty was weak and in disrepair when the British showed up in southern China in the 1840s wanting to sell opium to Chinese drug users. The British fought the Opium Wars against the Ching dynasty and won. As a result, they seized control of Hong Kong. The Portugese already had control of Macau. That began what the Chinese call their “century of humiliation” at the hands of foreign powers that ended with Mao’s rise to power in 1949.
To identify an emperor as powerful as Xi, we might be go back as far as Genghis Khan, who was a Mongol warrior who conquered China and much of Central Asia. I would defer to the experts on ancient Chinese history, but it seems to me we would have to go back hundreds of years to find an emperor as remotely as powerful as Xi Jinping has become. Xi Jinping has blown past Mao Tse-tung.
