A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel
Page 35
The leadership transition in China was scheduled to take place two days after the 2012 US presidential election, the outcome of which held potentially huge ramifications for China–US relations. Widely covered throughout China, the heated debate in the run-up to the election and the unpredictable outcome due to the closeness of opinion polls generated unprecedented interest among the Chinese public. Even though government censors restricted any online discussions of nominees Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to prevent comparisons between the US election and the imminent leadership transition in China, several media outlets in Hong Kong cited sources as saying that the Chinese leadership might adopt an internal multiple-candidate election for the Politburo and its Standing Committee as a way to resolve factional conflicts over the lineup.
Because I had already obtained what insiders called “a final list”—the result of the usual behind-the-scenes deal-making—I seriously doubted the speculation about a multi-candidate election. I published my list on Mingjing News and stated that all talk about a multi-party election was wishful thinking: “If the final outcome is different from what I have released, it proves that I’m wrong.”
On the morning of November 15, 2012, the newly “elected” Politburo Standing Committee members, all dressed in navy blue suits, with dyed black hair and tepid smiles, paraded to meet some four hundred Chinese and foreign reporters in the east wing of the Great Hall of the People. All the faces were on the list.
The Politburo Standing Committee would be reduced from nine members to seven. A smaller committee was deemed to be more efficient, by reducing the incidence of factional haggling over decision-making. The idea, which had been in discussion since 2011, prevailed after the Bo Xilai scandal. Zhou Yongkang’s seat controlled China’s law enforcement, judicial authorities, and national security, and had a budget bigger than that of China’s military. It was eliminated and his former responsibilities devolved to other Politburo members, whose decisions and recommendations would require final endorsement of the Standing Committee. The other function cut from the committee was propaganda. There were concerns about the damage its aggressive censorship activities had done to the reputation of the Standing Committee.
Insiders said the loss of two spots in the top decision-making body exacerbated the political bickering. In the end, all competing factions chose to resolve the debacle with a simple hard requirement—that of age. Younger candidates, such as the fifty-seven-year-old party chief of Guangdong, were excluded on the grounds that they still had time to compete in the next round five years later. Those approaching the retirement age of sixty-eight, such as Yu Zhengsheng, the former party chief of Shanghai, made it to the list with the excuse that “if he doesn’t join this year, he will not have another opportunity.” In the end, the seven-member leadership has an average age of 63.4 years compared with 62.1 years in 2007.
Backroom bickering aside, the spotlight was on fifty-eight-year-old Xi Jinping, who survived much behind-the-scenes political maneuvering, and was officially crowned the party general secretary—he will be made president in the spring of 2013 when the legislature convenes and charged with leading the world’s second-biggest economy for the next decade.
When describing Xi’s life, many preferred to compare Xi with Bo Xilai, who shared similar upbringings and work experience, though they landed in starkly different places—one leader of China, the other a prisoner number.
Xi was born into the family of a revolutionary veteran in June 1953 and is four years younger than Bo Xilai. His father, Xi Zhongxun, fought with Mao as a guerrilla in northwestern China, against the invading Japanese and the civil war Nationalists. He was appointed vice premier of China in the 1950s. Like Bo, Xi lived a sheltered life before the age of twelve, attending an elite school for children of senior leaders. But his life took a dramatic turn in 1962.
His father was put in charge of a book that chronicled the life of a former comrade who had been killed in battle in 1936. Because the book objectively mentioned another influential political figure purged by Mao, Kang Sheng, China’s intelligence chief accused him of using the book, excerpts of which had been published in several state-run newspapers and magazines, to attack Mao and subvert the party. Xi’s father was forced to undergo denunciations and was exiled in 1965 to the central province of Henan. His status was reduced to that of a deputy manager of a tractor factory. When the Cultural Revolution started, Red Guards found him, put him on a multi-city denunciation tour, and locked him up for nearly ten years in a Beijing prison. The Red Guards added another charge to his crimes—that of being a Western spy. The basis for the charge was that he had looked at West Berlin with a pair of binoculars when he toured the Berlin Wall during an official visit to East Germany in 1959.
Xi’s entire family was affected by his persecution by the Red Guards. Like Bo Xilai, Xi Jinping was excluded from many activities in school for being the son of a purged official. During the Cultural Revolution, he and other children of disgraced party officials roamed the streets after school, engaging in street fights. They were constant targets of the local public security bureau. At the age of fifteen, Xi Jinping joined thousands of young people who responded to Mao’s call to settle in the countryside. Initially, he reportedly returned to his father’s native village in Shaanxi province, but no relatives dared take him in. Xi and twelve others ended up in a village in the yellow hills of northern Shaanxi, where people lived in caves and electricity was a rare luxury. There was barely enough to eat.
Three months after he arrived in the village, all of his fellow “sent down” youths had deserted because they found it too hard to acclimate. Xi was miserably homesick and escaped by train to Beijing, where he was caught by the street committee for sneaking back to the city without approval. The public security bureau detained him for six months. By the time he was released, both of his sisters had left to become peasants in Inner Mongolia. His mother, a devoted Communist, insisted that he return to northern Shaanxi to complete his “reeducation.”
Upon his return from Beijing, villagers noticed that Xi had changed. He was determined to do well. “I ate a lot more bitterness than most people,” he recalled in a recent media interview. “I picked up smoking because a smoker was allowed to take a break from the harsh labor every now and then to puff on their cigarettes,” he said. “I would sometimes take longer toilet breaks so I could take a rest.” In the first few years, his elder sister in Inner Mongolia would frequently save money from her stipend to subsidize Xi’s food rations.
He began to thrive in the harsh conditions and joined the Communist Party, despite the rejection of his early attempts because of his father. He was appointed a village chief, the lowest in the party’s hierarchy, and taught his fellow villagers how to produce methane from compost for cooking and heating. Villagers remembered him as a quiet, humble person who hated political bickering. “When people had a conflict with each other, they would go to him, and he’d say, ‘Come back in two days,’” a peasant from Xi’s former village told the New York Times. “By then, the problem had usually resolved itself.”
His break came in December 1975 when Chinese universities, after lying vacant at the height of the Cultural Revolution, decided to recruit students who were workers, peasants, and soldiers. Recruitment standards would be based on the recommendations of local authorities, rather than academic merit. Through his family ties, Xi entered Qinghua University, China’s equivalent in educational standards and merit to MIT in the US. The morning before he left, villagers waited quietly outside his cave so they could say farewell. Many dropped work and accompanied him on the four-mile walk to the bus station. Xi said the scene made him cry, something he had not done for seven years.
“When I came to the land of the yellow hills at the age of fifteen, I was lost and confused,” he later told the Chinese media. “When I left seven years later, I had a clear goal in life and I was full of confidence. The experience has etched in my blood, instilling in me a firm belief, what I do fo
r people has to be practical.”
Xi obtained an undergraduate degree in chemistry. Later he returned to Qinghua to pursue a doctorate in Marxist theory and ideological education, making him one of the few Chinese leaders educated in the arts rather than engineering during the Hu Jintao era.
While Xi was studying at Qinghua, Mao died and two years later, Xi’s father was released, all charges against him were dropped, and he returned to Beijing. In the spring of 1979, Xi’s father was made governor of the southern province of Guangdong. On May 6 that year, more than 100,000 residents of Guangdong swarmed to the border with the then British colony of Hong Kong on rumors that the Hong Kong government would grant amnesty to illegal immigrants on the birthday of Queen Elizabeth II and that the Hong Kong border would be open for three days to allow Guangdong residents to enter.
There were scuffles at border checkpoints as border police tried to hold them back, telling them the rumor was untrue. Crowds broke through several entry points and by the end of the day, more than one hundred people were dead, either shot during the riots or drowned while trying to swim across to Hong Kong. There is no estimate of how many made it to Hong Kong to lead what they believed would be better lives. When Xi’s father learned about the tragedy, he was said to be shocked, but very sympathetic. Peasants in Guangdong eyed Hong Kong because farmers who had managed to get there earned a hundred times more than they did in the paddy fields. The incident reportedly motivated Xi’s father to spearhead a campaign to create China’s first special economic zones, first in Shenzhen, a city bordering Hong Kong, and then the whole Guangdong province, offering special concessions to foreign investors to open factories and help build China.
Xi was profoundly affected by his father’s liberal views and his reform initiatives, many of Xi Jinping’s supporters said. After graduation in 1979, he worked as a low-level official at the State Council and then as an officer in active service in the General Office of the Central Military Commission. During this time, he married the daughter of China’s former ambassador to Britain. In 1982, his wife wanted them to migrate to the UK, but Xi refused to leave China, and the pair divorced. In the same year, Xi and another princeling, Liu Yuan, the son of former president Liu Shaoqi, decided to leave Beijing and launch their political careers at the grassroots level.
Considering he had just spent seven years in one of the poorest regions in China, many of Xi’s friends failed to understand his decision. Power was in Beijing, and his father was at the pinnacle of his career—elected to the Politburo in 1982 and asked to head the Central Party Committee Secretariat. There was every reason for him to stay and take advantage of his father’s rising political clout. Xi’s friends said he wanted to escape his father’s shadow and create a path for himself, a move his father supported. Xi Jinping took up the post of deputy party chief in Zhengding County in nearby Hebei province, while Liu Yuan went to the central province of Henan. Bo Xilai followed their example two years later when he settled in Jin County near the city of Dalian.
Xi Jinping encountered much the same obstacles as Bo because of prejudiced local provincial leaders who were wary of his true motives. They believed that Xi was merely there to gain some political capital before moving to bigger things. Xi persisted and his achievement during that period included a project to help the local tourism industry by persuading a movie director to shoot a TV period drama in his county. Xi kept the sets constructed for the TV series as a tourist attraction after the movie, which was seen throughout the country, was over. He also won the hearts of local retired officials when he initiated programs to improve their living conditions.
With his own political savvy and his family connection, Xi rose quickly from this first government post and was quickly identified as one of the prospective leaders. In 1985, on his thirty-second birthday, Xi took the first of several posts in the coastal province of Fujian, adjacent to Guangdong. Due to Fujian’s close proximity to Taiwan, Xi supported the region’s free-market transformation and approved preferential policies to attract investment from Taiwan and actively promoted direct air and sea transportation between the two regions, which had ceased in 1949. Direct contact with Taiwan, which China claims to be part of its sovereign territory—a claim rejected by many in Taiwan as well as its main ally, the US—remains a problem tangled in diplomatic posturing and punctuated by sporadic military saber-rattling. The US keeps an aircraft carrier battle group based out of Japan in the event of military escalation.
In 1987, Xi Jinping met one of China’s most popular army folk singers, Peng Liyuan, whose smooth melodious rendition of a pro-party folk song “In the Field of Hope” at a New Year concert on state television made her a household name. The two were married after a few dates. Their wedding was simple—a meal with the attendance of a few colleagues. Friends say fans would mob Xi’s wife when they were out together and Xi would always stand aside quietly, even though he was already high up in the government. After Xi’s coronation, many commented on Weibo that China finally had the most glamorous-looking and popular first lady since Madame Mao and Wang Guangmei, the wife of Liu Shaoqi, who was president of China from 1959 to 1969.
Xi became the party chief of Ningde, a relatively poor region in Fujian province, in 1988. State media reported his first task there was to tackle widespread corruption. He was considered an amicable person, but lost his temper in public when he learned that several thousand local officials had seized public land to build private houses for themselves. He ordered an extensive investigation and ended up firing or demoting several hundred officials who were found to have violated land occupation rules. He was also said to have returned 600,000 yuan worth of “gifts” in the late 1980s, when he was Ningde’s district party chief. The revelation won Xi much praise.
In October 2002, Xi was transferred to China’s southeastern province of Zhejiang, home to the country’s most successful private enterprises, which have supplanted state-owned enterprises and generate 65 percent of Zhejiang’s GDP.
Unlike Bo Xilai, who painted Chongqing red in a dramatic display of his radical approach to the region’s social and economic problems, Xi’s steps were more steady and incremental. One of Xi’s most notable accomplishments in Zhejiang was related to his efforts to change the region’s economic structure from the rapid and rough labor-intensive expansion to a higher level of development, emphasizing concern for efficiency and the environment. Xi came up with a slogan: “Green mountains and clean rivers are more valuable than gold and silver.” Under his leadership, the provincial government invested billions of yuan on information technology, environmental, and infrastructural projects. Xi actively cultivated relations with private entrepreneurs, allowing them to participate in the decision-making process by appointing them to the local legislature. The central government under Hu Jintao had provided preferential financial policies toward state-run corporations and suppressed the growth of private enterprises. Xi’s experience in Zhejiang suggests that the balance can be expected to tilt toward private enterprises. Xi won praise from governors in other provinces by urging the prosperous entrepreneurs to invest in poorer provinces inland.
If there was one program that grabbed national attention, it was Xi’s clean-government initiative that encouraged the public to supervise the work of government officials, setting up a hotline for complaints and protecting the media’s investigative work on government corruption.
In 2008, a corruption scandal struck the heart of one of China’s largest cities, Shanghai. The city’s party chief was sentenced to eighteen years in prison for accepting bribes and abusing power. Under normal circumstances, the party chief of Shanghai has a guaranteed seat on the Politburo Standing Committee. There was wide speculation that President Hu Jintao would bring one of his allies as replacement, but he unexpectedly picked Xi to appease his critics. Xi’s modest approach and his nonfactional reputation made him an acceptable candidate for all sides, and he governed a province that was in close proximity to Shanghai and understood
the city’s particular needs as a gateway to China.
Seven months before the 17th Party Congress, when a “crown prince” would be designated, Xi was appointed party chief of Shanghai. President Hu planned to select his protégé, Li Keqiang, a fellow youth leaguer. However, on October 22, at the routine new leadership press conference, the public was surprised to see the shy-looking Xi Jinping—still better known as the husband of one of China’s most popular singers—ranked ahead of Li Keqiang. The ranking indicated that Xi would be head of the party and president, and Li the future prime minister. Xi’s heir-apparent status was sealed in 2010 when he was appointed vice president and vice chair of the party’s Central Military Commission, overseeing China’s vast standing army—whose main activities are road and bridge building, local engineering projects, and emergency natural disaster relief, such as filling sandbags to shore up the banks of flooding rivers.
Xi’s meteoric rise intrigued many analysts. In subsequent months, insiders revealed that former president Jiang Zemin and his friends had subverted Hu’s planned succession strategy and installed Xi to stem the influence of Hu and his youth leaguers. In addition, Xi also enjoyed broad support from the Politburo and many of the party’s old guard, who were friends of Xi’s father. Before the selection process started, President Hu Jintao conducted several straw polls and Xi’s name ranked at the top every time.