Outsiders often struggle to understand a basic question, Who Is Xi Jinping? History teaches us many lessons about rapid ideological change in China and how profoundly the nation can be forced to shift gears.
I know because I lived through and reported on one such shift during my time in Hong Kong and Beijing from 1979 to 1982. Mao Tse-tung had prevailed over a China consumed with class struggle during the Cultural Revolution. Millions died because they were “capitalist roaders” or “against the revolutionary wind.” (Fan geming.) I met Chinese who told me their loved ones were denied treatment in hospitals because of their ideology–and died on the spot. A young man told me how he and fellow students had “struggled” their music teacher, forcing him to leap to his death from a building.
Mao died in September 1976 and appointed the hapless Hua Gua-feng as his successor. But behind the scenes, and no one knows precisely how it happened, Deng Xiao-ping consolidated power and became China’s supreme leader in 1978. He promptly started making policies that flew directly in Mao’s face. He signed a normalization of relations with the United States (the Great Satan) and launched the Four Modernizations. He said things like, “I don’t care if a cat is black or white–as long as it catches mice.” That was a non-ideological statement. He also said, “To get rich is glorious.”
I was a 27-year old correspondent for United Press International in Hong Kong, having arrived in January 1979, and part of my job was covering southern China. I wandered the streets of Canton (soon to be renamed Guangzhou) and saw how the Chinese were desperate for material goods–as basic as refrigerators, fans and bikes. They craved Western goods emblazoned with “Marlboro” or other prominent brand names. The world didn’t know whether the Chinese could or would pivot so completely and so quickly–but they did and I witnessed the beginning of one of the most powerful economic emergences in history. Such is the power of the emperor, and imperial history still plays a role in the Communist Party today.
For roughly 40 years, under Deng and his two successors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, the Chinese pursued wealth with a vengeance. A true private sector emerged in companies such as Alibaba. A legal system was allowed to take root with Chinese attorneys defending Chinese dissidents in Chinese courts. The high water mark of China’s reforms and openness to the outside world was the 2008 Olympics. The party took a step back from its totalitarian past and allowed a genuine blossoming of China’s economy and society.
We now know thanks to the work of Cai Xia, a former member of the party who grew disillusioned and found refuge in the West, that the Communist Party has a seemingly permanent debate inside itself about whether to pursue true engagement with the West and all that represents or whether Marxist-Leninist ideology is more important. Cai wrote in Foreign Affairs about how she navigated incredibly sensitive debates about htis in the party’s think tanks.
When Xi Jinping consolidated power as general secretary of the Communist Party in 2012 and then as president of the government in 2013, the outside world assumed he represented continuity. After all, we had essentially merged our two economies. Tourism and educational exchanges were booming. Many experts thought Xi would resume “reforms” and “market openings” as soon as he cleansed the party of a few corrupt officials.
But it’s clear today, as it has been for several years, that Xi is a hardliner, not a reformer, and a completely break with the previous 40 years. The entire world engaged with China in what we hoped would be a win-win engagement. China would be a “responsible stakeholder in the rules-based world order,” one State Department official predicted. That mean the U.S.-led world order.
Instead, Xi has reasserted Communist Party control over all aspects of Chinese society and turned foreign companies operating in China into sources of stolen technology and influence peddling in their own capitals. He has reasserted the party’s control over China’s once-private companies. He is attempting to recreate “the Chinese dream” of world dominance, which the Chinese once enjoyed.
A moment of truth was revealed when Xi visited Moscow in 2023 as part of his deepening relationship with Vladimir Putin. Departing from Moscow airport, Xi said on camera words to this effect, “What we are trying to achieve hasn’t been done in 100 years.”
Few in the West seem to have comprehended that. But as a student of history, I can tell you what Xi meant. The Ching dynasty fell in the early 1910s and ultimately allowed a Communist China to emerge. In Russia, the czars were toppled later in the same decade and the Bolsheviks took power. Long-established and powerful dynasties collapsed. The Communists did it.
The parallel today is that the United States has created the post-World War II order, seeking to spread both capitalism and democracy around the world, however imperfectly. That’s what Xi and Putin are trying to destroy and they are using every tool in their toolboxes to do it. The Chinese are far more powerful and are using Russia as their bad boy to provoke the West directly. The sooner we wake up to who Xi Jinping really is, the sooner we might be able to create a strategy to respond—which we have not yet done. We have not understood the power of a dramatic and historic swing in the emperor’s ideology.
