Since 2013, through his anti-corruption campaign, his leadership has ensnared powerful figures from former Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang to a deputy director of the Ministry of State Security, and figures in provincial government and the state enterprise system.
Ideologically, he personally authored a statement after the Third Plenum in late 2013 that made the market ‘necessary’ rather than ‘preferential’ for reform. The themes of his first phase in power have been strengthening rule by law, enforcing higher standards of behaviour in the Chinese Communist Party, and focusing on reassuring China’s emerging middle class through stronger property rights and greater social equity.
His leadership has also seen a new purposefulness about managing China’s serious environmental issues, the highlight of this being the historic accord signed with the US in November 2014. Xi has been a tireless diplomat, explaining China’s role in the world in tours to Latin America, the US, Europe, Australia and within Asia. By establishing the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2015, he has even managed to steal some of the global economic management space from the dominance of the US.
But there is also a less positive side. A fierce crackdown on intellectuals who criticise the party’s style of rule has been ongoing since 2013. Lawyers like Xu Zhiyong, journalists like Gao Yu and feminist activists have all been detained, and in some cases handed draconian sentences. A White Paper on Tibet issued by the Chinese State Council in April 2015 was categorical in its assertion that Tibet’s current political status and management could not be changed, despite continuing self-immolations by protestors. Uyghur academic Ilham Tohti was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2014 on charges of ‘separatism’. On Hong Kong and Taiwan, Xi’s leadership is hard-line. He supports a very highly managed framework for direct elections for a Chief Executive for the former, and demands that political issues need to figure in the current debate with the latter, rather than pushed endlessly into the future.
China is, by the reckoning of its own leaders, in a period of tough transition. Growth is falling below 7 per cent. Healthcare and education are increasingly becoming focuses of government attention. The hunt for fast, diverse, sustainable growth is urgent. Xi Jinping is talked of as a Maoist figure: grabbing all the power to himself. But the political program and strategy since 2012 is better characterised as supporting one overriding objective: continuing stable and unchallenged rule by the Communist Party of China. As long as Xi Jinping is seen as promoting this, his position is secure. The party, not Xi, is the emperor of 21st Century China.
Kerry Brown is Director of the China Studies Centre and Professor of Chinese Politics at the University of Sydney. This article appeared in the most recent edition of the East Asia Forum Quarterly, ‘Leadership in the region‘.