Obama Cites Dangers in Xi’s Consolidation of Power

At the beginning of the month, President Obama, in comments to the Business Roundtable in Washington, displayed his command of Chinese Communist Party politics. “He has consolidated power faster and more comprehensively than probably anybody since Deng Xiaoping,” he said of his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. “And everybody’s been impressed by his … clout inside of China after only a year and a half or two years.”

“There are dangers in that,” Obama then remarked.

Yes, there are, and it was important for the president to have said so, even if it was unusual for the leader of the free world to comment on the political standing of an authoritarian supremo.

Beijing was not particularly happy, of course. The Foreign Ministry sidestepped responding directly, but Chinese academics, regularly used to voice controversial government views, were not so diplomatic. The oft-quoted Jin Canrong of Renmin University in Beijing told the South China Morning Post that the words of the American leader were “careless.” Tao Wenzhao of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences put it this way to the same paper: “The president of the United States, even with some constraints, has great powers, yet you don’t see China giving comments on that issue.”

Maybe so, but Obama was right to point out troubling trends in the leadership of the Chinese state. Xi has been conducting a political purge, in the guise of an anti-corruption campaign, without precedent since the era of Mao Zedong, the willful founder of the People’s Republic of China.

Yet however the effort is categorized—purge or law enforcement effort—the result is a virtual reign of terror. Officials are “effectively on strike,” afraid to make decisions. Some are taking early retirement; others are committing suicide. The Chinese central government has been paralyzed for months.

Xi obviously means business. His latest target is Zhou Yongkang, the once-feared internal security czar, who stepped down in November 2012. State media announced his expulsion from the Communist Party over the weekend. At the same time, his case has been formally transferred to state prosecutors. It appears he will be charged with, among other crimes, taking bribes and leaking state secrets. The party said he “committed adultery with a number of women and traded his power for sex and money.”

Zhou has been called the biggest of the “tigers”—Xi Jinping’s code for corrupt officials—yet there are even larger beasts. Many are waiting to see if China’s leader will try to bring down his predecessors Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin.

There are indications that Xi is trying to defang both men by targeting their subordinates. The bold leader’s investigators are looking at the relatives of Ling Jihua, one of Hu’s closest associates, with the apparent goal of eventually jailing Ling himself.

And with the detention of Zhou, Xi has taken an important step in isolating Jiang from his vast patronage network. “Mr. Xi’s step-by-step destruction of Mr. Jiang’s three most dangerous protégés has been a display of cunning and decisiveness that has not been seen since Mao,” writes journalist John Garnaut, referring to Zhou and the now jailed Xu Caihou and Bo Xilai.

The eventual conviction of Zhou—there is no chance he will be found innocent as long as Xi rules China—suggests that the newish ruler is finally getting close to consolidating power, as Obama suggested in his candid remarks.

Yet by pushing party powerbrokers too hard, Xi is setting the scene for an all-out fight. “What Xi is doing is, to put it mildly, disliked by the establishment, particularly retired standing committee members,” said Steve Tsang of the University of Nottingham to Bloomberg News. “If Xi stumbles, the knives will be out for him.”

Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s successor and Jiang’s predecessor, reduced the cost of losing political struggles. Moreover, while Jiang and Hu ruled, powerbrokers maintained a rough balance among the party’s factions. Yet Xi, by upping the stakes, is giving his opponents incentive to fight to the end. With little or nothing to lose, they can push the political system beyond the edge.

Xi, by going for broke, has started a rumble, and in these circumstances he can rest only after vanquishing every adversary in sight. “In short, this is a very complicated and difficult fight,” said Hu Muying, a longtime friend of Xi’s, to Garnaut, the journalist. “It is a struggle of ‘You die, I live.’”

OG Image: Asia PacificChinaXi Jinping