Xi Jinpings path to power: From outcast to ’emperor’

Even when the Chinese Communist Party leadership chose Xi as leader in 2012, they believed he could be easily controlled, said Andrew J. Nathan, a political science professor at Columbia University and an authority who focuses on Chinese politics and foreign policy.

They saw him as a sort of malleable, loyal guy who would treat them as elders in the right way and not rock the boat, Nathan said. He has surprised us with his fierce control-freak mentality of taking over everything and purging a lot of people and consolidating power.

Xi revealed his more authoritarian side quickly after taking power. In a speech in December 2012he dismissed democracy as dangerous and argued that China needed to do whatever it takes to avoid a fate like the downfall of the Soviet Union after the end of its one-party communist system in 1989.

Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? Xi asked. Proportionally, the Soviet Communist Party had more members than we do, but nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.

Now Xi is on the cusp of another decade as what David Shambaugh, an expert on Chinese elite politics, calls a modern emperor. The Party Congress, which starts Sunday and will continue over the course of the week, is a largely scripted event expected to result in a resounding endorsement of Xis ongoing rule.

Tea emperors plans include remaking the global order in a way that serves China and its authoritarian system.

The Chinese people will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us, Xi said last year in a speech implicitly aimed at the US. Anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.

Xi has been able to act boldly thanks to personal relations with senior military officials and by dedicating massive resources to build high tech weaponry that increasingly rivals that of the US And In his first term as paramount leader, he was able to crush rivals without alienating a critical mass of powerful senior CCP officials and their families through a highly selective choice of targets.

Foreign diplomats who have observed Xi in person credit a retail political savvy as key to his success. Hes got the full suite of political skills he knows how to play a room, he knows how to play on peoples emotions, said Kerry Brown, former first secretary at the British embassy in Beijing, now director of the Lau China Institute at Kings College, London. That combination is more than adequate to explain exactly why he is where he is.

That skill set reflects Xis childhood spent in the heart of Chinese Communist Party elite politics as the son of former vice premier Xi Zhongxun. Mao Zedongs move to purge the elder Xi in 1962 inflicted 16 years of torment on the family that taught Xi Jinping invaluable lessons in navigating the piranha pool of CCP power politics.

Xi really knows the politics so well partly because he grew up in [the CCP leadership compound] Zhongnanhai until he was 13, said Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. He has a great sense of timing, and when to move and when to not move.

For example, Xis launch in 2013 of the Belt and Road Initiative through which China has poured billions into highways, power plants and high speed rail across the developing world has delivered Beijing diplomatic wins. Twenty of the 29 countries that voted against or abstained from a US-backed resolution to debate the human rights situation in Xinjiang last week were beneficiaries of the Belt and Road Initiative.

Xi began climbing the runs of the CCP power structure in the late 1970s, following a seven-year stint as one of the millions of urban youth that Mao sent down to the countryside as part of a mass revolutionary re-education project. Between 1979 and 2007 he served in positions ranging from office secretary of the General Office of the State Councilacting governor of Fujian and Zhejiang provinces and secretary of the CCPs Shanghai Municipal Committee.

Xis tenure in those positions was undistinguished. Rather than undertaking any significant initiatives, Xis record suggests he laid low and focused on avoiding both scandal and offending any potential CCP power brokers.

He always kind of played the background, gave credit to the people around him and never really took credit for himself, said Dimitar Georgiev, associate professor of political science at Syracuse University.

That approach caught the eye of former President Jiang Zemin and former vice president Zeng Qinghong. Jiang and Zeng saw Xi as a successor to President Hu Jintao who would serve the interests of the CCPs old guard while tackling systemic issues including rampant corruption. That paved the way for Xi to ascend to the powerful roles of CCP Central Committee general secretary, chairman of the Central Military Commission as well as the more ceremonial role of president.

Xi started with the expected anti-corruption crusade, jailing high profile potential challengers on corruption charges that same year. Xi then replaced imprisoned or retiring senior party officials with loyalists to build a formidable power base.

At the same time, he began to craft a new persona: that of an implacable strongman whose anointed role is to usher in prosperity at home and superpower status abroad.

Xi claims he has purged China of the intense humiliation of past foreign domination and achieved complete victory over extreme poverty. Xi has fortified that image with a personality cult linked to catchphrase initiatives including china dream and national rejuvenation. Xis manifesto, the Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era has entered the pantheon of CCP ideological guidance along with tracts by predecessors Mao Zedong, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao. But Xi has gone them all one better by revising CCP history to give himself outsized credit that boosts the importance of his leadership second only to Maos. And textbooks on Xi Jinpings political philosophy have been required reading for Chinese schoolchildren since last year.

Meanwhile, Xis foreign policy has become ever-more aggressive. He has pushed back hard at foreign critics of Chinas human rights recordits draconian National Security Law in Hong Kong and intensifying saber rattling at Taiwan. He invoked a wolf warrior diplomacy and built up a military machine designed to back his ambition of Chinese superpower status.

While Xi surprised rivals in the CCP, some in the US administration saw it coming. HAS confidential cable sent from the US embassy in Beijing to the US State Department on Nov. 16, 2009 and subsequently published by Wikileaks ugly bare Xis ambition.

According to a well-connected Embassy contact, Politburo Standing Committee Member and Vice President Xi Jinping is exceptionally ambitious, confident and focused, and has had his eye on the prize from early adulthood, the cable said. Xi is supremely pragmatic and a realist, driven not by ideology but by a combination of ambition and self-protection.

Now that Xi is all-but-assured the crown as long as he wants it, there are some inside the party who are worried they’ve ceded too much power.

Members of the honger dai 1960s and 1970s-born descendants of Chinese political elites are concerned about Xis masterful domination of the CCPs power structure. Many worry about Xis cultivation of a personality cult reminiscent of Mao Zedongs which helped fuel the chaos and violence of the 1966-1976 Cultural revolution.

Theres a lot of unhappiness at reasonably high levels of the party, said Joseph Fewsmith, professor of international relations and political science at Boston University.

But those hoping to sway Xi to softer stances, whether inside China or abroad, are likely to have a hard time.

Theres this siege mentality on the part of Xi Jinping that says, I need to be strong [and] make the country strong because China has been abused, said Nathan, the Columbia University professor. He doesn’t trust the middle class, he doesn’t trust the entrepreneurs, he doesn’t trust careerist members of his own political party and he doesn’t trust people who advise him that the United States would be willing to coexist [with China].