Xi
Jinping: China's first 21st-century
leader By Kent Ewing
HONG KONG - China will soon have a new
leader, and the heady aroma of change is in the
air. Indeed, even though Xi Jinping does not
officially take all power over from President Hu
Jintao until March, his influence is already being
felt, and the signs of a positive shift in Chinese
politics are clearly evident.
Xi's more
open, down-to-earth and - one might even say -
likeable personality stand in sharp and refreshing
contrast to the distant, wooden persona projected
by Hu. Although Hu has been in office
since 2003, preceded by the
equally asocial Jiang Zemin, Xi may be China's
first genuine 21st-century president.
It's
long past time for a Chinese leader to drop the
traditionally stiff formality of officialdom and
reach out to the country's 1.3 billion people. Xi
is already doing that - and, unlike his
predecessors, he is using the Internet as a friend
rather than a foe.
With nearly 540 million
netizens, China ranks first in the world in
Internet users (the United States, at 245 million
users, is a distant second), and many more are
logging on across the nation every day. The rich
potential of the Internet as tool for
communication between the leadership and ordinary
citizens has been obvious for years, but Chinese
officials have by and large eschewed it like the
plague, no doubt fearing the freedom of expression
that is an inherent characteristic of life in
cyberspace.
After all, it has often been
citizen journalists on the Internet who have
revealed the dirty deeds of corrupt politicians
and bureaucrats who do their best to hide their
rampant malfeasance from the Chinese people.
That's one big reason the central government
continues to employ a sizeable army of censors
whose impossible job it is to block every dab and
dram of criticism aimed at China's leaders.
Xi, 59, shows no inclination to
decommission that army, but an anonymous microblog
that follows his travels and speeches - started
last month on Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of
Twitter - is nevertheless an interesting
development. No one knows who writes the blog and
posts the photos on it - some netizens have
speculated that the author is Xi himself - but it
is clear that it has government approval as it is
just about the only microblog about a Chinese
leader that is not censored.
In a
significant departure from the past, when Xi made
his first inspection tour of the country last
month following his appointment as president and
general secretary of the Communist Party, the best
place to read about his trip to southern Guangdong
province - itself a national symbol or innovation
and reform - was not traditional party mouthpieces
such as Xinhua and the People's Daily; rather, it
was the Weibo microblog, whose tone and style are
much more informal, personal and readable than any
state media account.
Devoid of the bloated
rhetoric of propaganda usually promulgated through
official channels, the blog chronicles Xi's five
days in Guangdong with descriptions and photos of
him meeting with ordinary people and calling for a
return to the economic principles of reform
embraced by former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping.
Deng used a tour of the province in 1992 to launch
policies that would open up China to the rest of
the world and set the stage for the economic
miracle that was to come.
It was brilliant
politics - emulating Deng's nation-changing tour
of the late 20th century but telling the story in
an entirely new, 21st-century form. Reviews were
overwhelmingly positive; the Xi blog's followers
now stand at more than 52,000 and counting.
This is new territory; no Chinese
president has ever had online "followers" before.
Neither has any previous Chinese leader
ever ordered his fellow politicos to stop wining,
dining and speechifying in such ostentatious and
prolix excess - another salutary way in which this
president-in-waiting has chosen to distinguish
himself.
One of Xi's first acts as the
party's new general secretary was to demand an end
to the lavish banquets and fawning red-carpet
treatment that have become the norm when
high-ranking authorities in the central government
visit the provinces. He set the new standard
himself in his tour of Guangdong by traveling with
a small entourage that did not cause traffic
snarls with its every movement, eating moderately
with his hosts and making a point of speaking with
ordinary people, not just local authorities who
are keen to flatter and impress.
In
another departure from convention, Xi has
complained about unnecessarily long and vacuous
speeches by party officials, telling them to
shorten their remarks and "avoid empty" talk. This
directive must have stung both Hu and Jiang - both
of whom tend to be long on party rhetoric but
short on substance in their public utterances.
Xi's glamorous wife, Peng Liyuan, a
talented folk singer who has gained iconic status
in the country through her regular performances at
the annual Lunar New Year's Gala on CCTV, will
also make her husband's presidency - at least
stylistically - very different from those of his
predecessors. In the past, wives of Chinese
leaders were rarely seen and never heard. Soon we
will have a Chinese first lady who, for most of
their lives together, has been far more famous
than her husband.
In the end, however,
let's hope that differences in style - refreshing
as they may be - are not all that Xi brings to
China's political scene. But it is easy to be
discouraged.
Yes, the new leader has
declared that he will crack down on China's
biggest problem - the culture of official
corruption that has soared in tandem with the
country's 30-year economic boom - but Hu made the
same emphatic vow; meanwhile, graft has continued
at increasingly obscene levels.
Witness
the dramatic downfall of former Chongqing party
boss Bo Xilai last year. For years, Bo ran
Chongqing, a sprawling municipality with a
population of over 33 million, as his own personal
fiefdom. It took the murder of a foreign national
by his wife and the betrayal of his police chief -
who failed in his attempt to defect to the US by
using evidence of Bo's crimes as bait - to finally
trip him up.
But how many more Bo Xilais
are out there?
Xi's early soundings
promise things are going to be different when he's
in power, but a report last year by Bloomberg does
not exactly inspire confidence. According to an
investigation by the financial news service, Xi
and his relatives have accumulated fortunes
totaling hundreds of millions of dollars during
his time in public office.
Another
investigation, by the New York Times, claimed that
the family of China's outgoing premier, Wen
Jiabao, has amassed at least US$2.7 billion in
assets while Wen has held high positions in the
central government.
Why would Xi want to
change a system that has brought great economic
spoils to him and his family in a country that
does not require public officials to declare their
assets? And, even if he wanted to deliver a
stymieing blow to corruption in China, why would
the rest of the party - rotten to the core - allow
him to do so?
Kent Ewing is a
Hong Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be
reached at kewing56@gmail.com Follow him on
Twitter: @KentEwing1
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