Behind public persona, the real Xi Jinping is a guarded secret

BEIJING — One Sunday last month, China’s leader Xi Jinping travelled to a village in the mountains of Sichuan province.

He wore an olive overcoat with a fur collar, which he kept zipped up even when he entered an adobe house to meet with villagers. Around an indoor fire pit, he sat among a circle of people wearing traditional clothes of the Yi minority group.

“How did the Communist Party come into being?” he asked at one point as he extolled the virtues of socialism.

Without hesitating, he answered. “It was established to lead people to a happy life,” he said, and then he added:

“That’s what we should do forever.”

Mr Xi’s remark — specifically its open-ended pledge — suddenly resonates more deeply than before.

Barring the unexpected, delegates gathering this week for the annual National People’s Congress in Beijing will rubber-stamp constitutional changes that will enable Mr Xi to remain the country’s leader indefinitely by eliminating presidential term limits.

Mr Xi, who will turn 65 in June, has done more than any of his predecessors to create a public persona as an avuncular man of the people, even as he has manoeuvred behind the scenes with a ruthless ambition to dominate China’s inscrutable elite politics.

The government’s propaganda apparatus regularly depicts him as a firm yet adoring patriarch and a leader who fights poverty and corruption at home while building China’s prestige abroad as an emerging superpower.

Hagiography aside, what is striking is how little is known about Mr Xi’s biography as a leader, despite having held the country’s highest posts since 2012 — president, general secretary and commander in chief, among others.

Even the move to stay in power, announced Feb 25, caught many here by surprise.

It has shaken Chinese politics and stirred an unusual amount of rumblings, if not open dissent. In hindsight, though, scenes like the one in Sichuan have for years been building the foundation for Mr Xi’s elevation to a status unlike any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.

In one recent video shown on state television, he was depicted as the “arms, legs and heart” of the entire nation.

The script evoked the “family-state” ideal at the centre of Confucianism, showing a cutout of Mr Xi guiding a bicycle with a young girl behind him.

In the report from Sichuan, part of a 23-minute feature that appeared on state television two days later, not one but two villagers uttered the same refrain on the theme.

“He is like our parents,” each said.

Out of public view, Mr Xi’s deliberations and decisions unfold in utmost secrecy.

Leaks have all but ended in the Xi era, a reflection of fear as much as loyalty. Even a move that could profoundly reshape China’s destiny was opaque to all but the few who work closely under him in Zhongnanhai, the government compound beside the Forbidden City that is, for ordinary Chinese, an informational black hole.

“We know nothing about how this decision came about,” said Professor Kerry Brown of King’s College London and author of a 2016 biography, “CEO, China: The Rise of Xi Jinping.”

He and other experts described the extreme secrecy around China’s leader — even where Mr Xi lives is not broadly known — as symptomatic of an affliction that can often hobble autocratic leaders: living inside a closed bubble of self-affirmation, echoed by yes-men (all men, in his case).

“The reason it is hard to see inside,” Prof Brown said of Zhongnanhai, “is in part because it is hard to see out.”

The secrecy certainly contributes to the mystique of power in China, as elsewhere, but the closed and by all accounts small circle where decisions are made could also lay the foundation for challenges to his rule, especially if China faces unforeseen crises in the years ahead, experts say.

That could explain why the government seemed not to anticipate the opposition to removing the term limits, which sent the censors into overdrive last week, blocking mentions of words like “my emperor.”

The state news media has since played down the issue as if it were a small, routine matter.

“Chinese politicians value term limits and retirement rules as protection for their security against a leader who otherwise could ruin their careers at anytime,” Prof Susan Shirk from the University of California, San Diego, wrote in an essay titled “The Return to Personalistic Rule,” which appears in the April issue of “Journal of Democracy.”

“Although the odds of success for an elite rebellion may be low,” she went on, “the more autocratically a leader behaves, the more likely are other politicians to try to bring him down.”

It is difficult to measure popular opinion in China, but there seems to be little doubt that the country’s economic and political stability in recent years — bolstered by hagiographic coverage — has bolstered Mr Xi’s efforts to consolidate political power.

So has his campaign against corruption, which, according to Prof Shirk’s count, punished 20 members of the Central Committee or the Politburo and more than 100 generals or admirals.

The campaign has had the dual benefits of eliminating potential political rivals while delivering a populist message to ordinary Chinese sickened by the flaunting of wealth among the politically connected.

“The conventional theory is that the party hates him but the people love him,” said Mr Richard McGregor, the author of “The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers.”

In his book, Prof Brown writes that Mr Xi, unlike his predecessors, used his personal narrative to give himself “political validation” that proved useful as he rose through the ranks.

His father, Xi Zhongxun, was a military commander in the war against the Japanese and then in the civil war that brought the Communists to power.

He went on to become a senior government minister, working in the propaganda ministry when the younger Xi, the third of four children, was born in 1953.

Mr Xi grew up as a princeling of the new ruling elite, but in the fractious era that followed, his father fell out of favour, targeted for humiliation in the Cultural Revolution and imprisoned.

Mr Xi was also harassed — paraded by Mao’s Red Guards, with his mother forced to join in one public denunciation — before he was, at 16, “sent down” to toil in the countryside in the name of the revolution.

He spent seven years in Shaanxi province, but instead of recollecting the experience as a punishment, he has done as Mao evidently intended, describing it as a lesson that made him more confident and enlightened. He often describes himself as having been a farmer for those seven years.

“I am from the grassroots, too,” he told a group of farmers during a 2013 visit to Costa Rica in remarks shown in a documentary on his diplomatic travels that was broadcast in January. “I have a natural bond with the common people.”

In the same way, he uses his brief service in uniform — he worked on the general staff of the State Council and the Central Military Commission from 1979 to 1982 — to claim a military pedigree as well, though he was more of a staff officer than a foot soldier.

With commander in chief being one of his many titles, he often appears in fatigues when overseeing military parades, which have become more prominent as he has pressed ahead with a modernisation programme for the People’s Liberation Army.

Mr McGregor said Mr Xi’s predecessors were far less personable and charismatic, especially Mr Jiang Zemin and Mr Hu Jintao.

“He presents much better in public,” Mr McGregor said. “Hu Jintao was, by comparison, an automaton.” THE NEW YORK TIMES