Vijay Gokhale: ‘We deal with China as a threat when it is a threat, and an opportunity when it is one’ | Explained News,The Indian Express
The 20th party congress of the Communist Party of China has confirmed Xi Jinping as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CCP) for a third five-year term. What does that mean for China — its politics, economy, military and its people? And for India and its neighbourhood?
It would be difficult for anybody to say they know Xi Jinping although he has been in politics for four decades. He has always stood below the radar and that is one of his strong points. A hallmark of his political career is that after the end of the Cultural Revolution, when many leaders were rehabilitated in Beijing, he chose to serve in provincial appointments and rural counties instead. That is where Xi stayed from 1983 until 2007 when he came to Beijing.
He cut his teeth at the grassroots of Chinese politics, he stayed away from overtly taking sides with any faction and therefore, when he came to Beijing in 2007, he came as a relatively unknown figure. But he was very much in the spotlight for five years during the second term of the then General Secretary of the Communist Party Hu Jintao. Again, during these five years, there was no misstep, he essentially stuck to the party line, showed loyalty to Jintao and contrasted his own actions with the actions of another rising star, Bo Xilai, also the son of one of Mao Zedong’s close aides. Bo eventually became so threatening to the party that when it came to choosing Jintao’s successor, Xi became the automatic candidate. Xi kept his personality hidden and it is only when he assumed the office of General Secretary in November 2012 that the various facets of his personality began to unfold.
If you think he has tried to control the party for consolidating personal power, then that is only a partial understanding of the man and the leader. We need to understand the context in which he assumed the top job. After 20 years of reform since 1990, many good things had happened in China, including spectacular economic growth and dramatic improvement in the lives of the people. But it was also becoming evident that the policies had a darker underside, essentially the weakening of ideology and discipline within the party as money power took over. Also, corruption rose with economic growth.
By 2012, although to the outside world China was performing spectacularly amid the global financial crisis, the Chinese leadership knew very well that deeply troubling developments would impact it politically as well. Assuming the top job in this situation, Xi was very well aware that these problems were likely to dilute the Communist party’s grip on power and eventually if the grip weakened beyond a point, the party itself would slip from power.
Therefore, the speech he gave in January 2013 within months of assuming power, comparing what happened to the Soviet Union in 1990 with the situation in China in 2012, is very important. He made two or three very critical points. The first was to point out that denying history would mean a rot in the party and that Nikita Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin was when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s real political authority began to weaken. If you could criticise Stalin, then the Soviet people asked why they could not criticise any other people.
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