MCLC: Yu Jie on Xi Jinping

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: rowena he <rowenahe at gmail.com>
Subject: Yu Jie on Xi Jinping
***********************************************************

Source: Foreign Policy (2/13/12):
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/13/empty_suit

Empty Suit
By Yu Jie

Ten years ago, China's "crown prince," Hu Jintao, visited the United
States and was treated with the highest respect. Back then the Chinese
people, not to mention a large portion of Western political elites and
China experts, held extremely high hopes for his tenure. The U.S.
government wanted to win over Hu so it could press him to start political
reform as soon as possible.

Now, with Hu's reign coming to an end, the Chinese people have realized
that after Mao Zedong, no Chinese leader has been as hostile to the West
as President Hu. Instead of launching political reforms, he tried to use
the Chinese model of "crony capitalism" to compete with the Western
democratic system. And the state of human rights in China took a huge step
backward.

My own experience serves as proof. During the Jiang Zemin era from 1997 to
2002, I participated in many human rights activities, such as running the
Independent Chinese Pen Center <http://www.chinesepen.org/english/> with
Liu Xiaobo and sending out open letters, including one suggesting changing
Mao's mausoleum into a museum about the Cultural Revolution. Secret police
trailed me and tapped my phone, but they did so quietly, and with a sense
of integrity. In 2009, during the Hu era, I published a book about Premier
Wen Jiabao, claiming he wasn't a real reformer. That year, on the
anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, police used a table to block
my door and wouldn't let me leave my apartment. They acted brazenly and
without a sense of shame. In October 2010, after Liu was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize, they put me under house arrest and then kidnapped and
tortured me. One of the secret police warned me: "We could bury you alive
within half an hour." I believed him. In the Hu era, China has taken a big
step toward fascism.

We all fall in the same place we have fallen in the past. Now that Xi
Jinping is visiting the United States as the successor to the throne,
people are reprojecting the ardent hopes they had for Hu onto Xi. Will Xi
become China's Mikhail Gorbachev or its Boris Yeltsin?

Optimism pervades everywhere. Most surprising is the view of Lee Kuan Yew,
<http://china.blogs.time.com/2007/11/19/chinas_nelson_mandela/> the former
prime minister of Singapore, who met with Xi in 2007 and concluded: "I
would put him in the Nelson Mandela class of persons. A person with
enormous emotional stability who does not allow his personal misfortunes
or sufferings affect his judgment."

"Personal misfortunes?" That stunned me. Xi isn't any more like Mandela
than Adolf Hitler is like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Mandela spent 27
years in a dark prison for the cause of freedom and human rights. Those
are Mandela's "personal misfortunes." After getting out of jail, in the
spirit of forgiveness and benevolence, he transformed South Africa's
society into one where different ethnicities could settle their
differences. He was a man worthy of the honor of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Xi, the offspring of a high leader who temporarily fell from power, was
engulfed by one of Mao's political campaigns and sent to a poor village in
western China. Xi has never publicly questioned or criticized that period.
He said that period of "eating bitterness" only increased his loyalty to
the Communist Party.

Ever since the 1989 suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests, the
Chinese people no longer believe in the legality of the Communist Party.
Its ability to grow the economy has become the party's only selling point.
Even so, the growth we've seen hasn't been the "common prosperity" that is
the goal of communism, but rather a group of highly corrupt bureaucrats
monopolizing China's wealth and resources. The daughter of former Premier
Li Peng runs a major subsidy of China Power; his son is vice governor of
Shanxi, one of China's major coal-producing provinces. Examples abound.
Many high leaders' families do real estate development: Xi sister Xi
Qiaoqiao and her husband Deng Jiagui own a major real estate company named
Beijing Central People's Trust Real Estate Development Corporation Ltd.
They have the easiest method of doing business: Many local government
officials offer the company the best land in order to improve their
relationship with Xi Jinping.

People say Hu and Xi belong to different political factions. They say Hu
comes from the Communist Youth League and is therefore more populist,
whereas Xi, because he represents the "princelings" -- sons and daughters
of high officials -- works in service of the wealthier coastal provinces.
I think they're not that dissimilar. No matter if it's Hu or Xi, they're
still only representative of the few-hundred families who make up the
Chinese aristocracy. They are not in office thanks to a Western-style
election, but are the products of a black-box operation. They didn't rise
because they're clever and capable, but precisely because they're
mediocre. They are where they are today because they are harmless to the
special interest groups that run China.

Like Hu, if Xi has any special ability, it's his ability to balance
himself on a steel wire. Xi served in Hubei, Fujian, Zhejiang, and
Shanghai, among other places. Nowhere does he have any political
accomplishments worth praising, or any offenses worth condemning. No one
knows his real thoughts: He hides them even deeper than Hu did before he
became chairman. Unlike Bo Xilai, a fellow princeling who has been
conducting Mao-style politics in Chongqing, the city that he runs, Xi has
no edges or corners.
Xi's family background appeases China's senior statesmen: He's "their
man." Xi was in the army; the military and other powerful departments all
support him. Xi's father was a liberal, so the groups with reformist
aspirations preserve that fantasy in their hearts.

In today's China, where vested interests have solidified like concrete, at
most Xi is the country's "chief maintenance officer." As the Communist
Party's crisis of rule grows more serious by the day, China needs a
charismatic and farsighted leader. Xi is neither. The party's
talent-selection mechanism has already rotted -- they're no longer able to
produce people like Zhao Ziyang or Hu Yaobang, the type of excellent
leaders China had in the 1980s (both were deposed by former leader Deng
Xiaoping because they wanted to change the system).

They say Xi will rule us for a decade, but can this outwardly strong but
inwardly weak regime maintain itself for another 10 years? Economic
development cannot continue at this same speed. When Hu passes the power
to Xi, he will finally be able to breathe a big sigh of relief knowing
that he won't be the last king of a dynasty. Will Xi be able to say the
same?