Xi Jinping masters “The Art of the Stall”

(Image credit: SARAH MEYSSONNIER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

If Xi Jinping wrote a book about dealing with Donald Trump, it would probably focus on “exploiting the US president’s greatest weaknesses” – and then “using the time gained” to strengthen China’s position, says The New York Times. “The Art of the Stall” appears to have been Beijing’s strategy. Rather than yield to tariff threats, China played the “trump card” of its control of critical minerals, while kicking thornier disputes deep into the long grass of “framework” talks. As an exercise in cunning, it cannot be faulted.

The irony, says The Spectator, is that even as Xi basks in the admiration of Western strategists, his position at home is looking ever less secure. Two years ago, the dictatorial Communist Party leader “presumptuously declared his intention to rule until 2032”. Plenty of people are now prepared to bet against that outcome. Reading the runes of what is going on in the opaque world of Chinese politics is always difficult, but of late, China-watchers have “detected subtle changes”.

In the last two weeks of May, Xi seemingly disappeared from public view – and his once ubiquitous presence on the front cover of the “People’s Liberation Army Daily” has become much patchier. His power base also appears under threat. Prominent members of Xi’s “Fujian faction” – including the vice-chair of the Central Military Commission and a senior admiral – have been arrested or investigated, while “other Xi generals have been removed from their posts”. A 40-episode drama series, Time in the Northwest, was dropped by China’s main state broadcaster after just two episodes. The piece was “an unashamed glorification” of Xi’s family – in particular his father, Xi Zhongxun. A revolutionary who rose to power under Mao before being purged in the Cultural Revolution, he was rehabilitated under the reformist Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s.

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Unshakeable loyalty

Few people have shaped Xi, who was born in 1953, as much as his father, says The Economist. Which is why a new biography of Xi Zhongxun by the American scholar Joseph Torigian conveys such fascinating, and sometimes gruesome, insights. In The Party’s Interests Come First, Torigian shows that, throughout his life, “Xi has been loyal to two groups that demand absolute obedience: the party and the family”. Both were often strict, yet that never dented his loyalty. As a boy, Xi washed in his father’s bathwater and practised deference at every turn, having been taught that “children who did not respect their parents were doomed to fail as adults”. Even when Xi was in his mid-30s and a rising star in the party, the ordeals continued. Torigian relates how Xi Zhongxun – then in his 70s with rotten teeth – “extracted some half-masticated garlic ribs from his mouth and gave them to his son to finish”. Xi accepted “without hesitation or complaint”.

After the hardships the family had endured during the Cultural Revolution, this probably seemed tame. When Xi Zhongxun was kidnapped, held in solitary confinement and tortured, his family was forced to denounce him. One daughter committed suicide, while the teenaged Xi was branded a traitor and forced to wear a heavy steel cap in front of a baying crowd. “His mother joined in the jeering.” Shortly after, Xi was “sent down” to a desolate part of the country, where he lived in a cave.

Xi’s rise began when his father became governor of Guangdong province, a “Special Economic Zone”, under Deng. But expectations that he would become an economic reformer proved premature. “His experience of injustice has not taught him that arbitrary power is undesirable; only that it should be wielded less chaotically than it was under Mao, by someone wise like himself,” says The Economist.

Might his time be up? Similar rumours have circulated before and come to nothing, says The Spectator. But given “the dire problems facing China” and the “indifferent performance” of its autocratic leader, it’s quite plausible that “CCP elders are casting around” for a more liberal successor. “If so, the consequences for Taiwan, and US-China relations, could be dramatic – and possibly beneficial to both.”

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors (BSME) editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.