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With the 20th Communist Party Congress set to give China’s mantle to Xi Jinping for the historic third term, the Chinese strongman can now legitimately cast himself as a 21st-century Mao. The third term will put him next only to the Great Helmsman.
One can comprehend Xi’s status among China’s communist pantheons by the fact that just four names have so far been anointed as “core” leaders — Mao Tse-tung, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Xi Jinping. With the third term almost within his grasp, Xi finds himself next only to Mao, leaving behind even Deng, the real architect of modern China in every sense of the word.
The world is approaching and analysing Xi’s return with great unease and anxiety. The concern surrounding his elevation is palpable. But is it the right way to look at the ongoing development in China? Far from it, the world should not be too unhappy with the return of Xi Jinping, more so in Mao’s mould.
The answer is obvious: If anything, Xi Jinping is more bad news for China and the Chinese people, and far less for the world — especially India. To put things in perspective, India lost the 1962 war not because Mao’s China stabbed it in its back, as Jawaharlal Nehru would say with much pain and anguish. It was “a stab from the front”, as MJ Akbar observed in Nehru: The Making of India. Nehru’s India lost because it refused to see the writing on the wall for more than a decade. India and China were at par, militarily as well as economically, till Mao breathed his last in the mid-1970s. It was Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin who sealed the Chinese superiority over India. So, today, if China wants to go back to and emulate Mao’s failed experiments, India should not be unhappy about it.
There are several reasons, apart from Mao’s insanity and personal insecurities, for the Great Helmsman’s utter failures and China’s immense sufferings. The foremost being his unchallenged authority at that time. Even when Mao was committing a series of monumental blunders in the name of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, no one stood up to counsel him otherwise. There was nobody who dared to convince him, forget about challenging him at that time.
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As Xi Jinping is set to enter his third term, he finds himself in a similar situation. Anyone who could have challenged him finds himself either jailed or thrown out of the Party on one pretext or the other — the most common being in the name of corruption. Today, his team is hand-picked with yes-men and loyalists. It is this reality that explains why Xi’s pet project — Border and Road Initiative — is foundering, and yet the course correction doesn’t seem to be coming. Xi’s China, just like Mao’s, is turning inwards and getting hyper-nationalistic, as its economy seems to be losing steam. China desperately needed Deng 2.0, but it instead seems to be getting Mao 2.0. Shouldn’t this be a cause of relief for India?
The other, more significant, reason why Xi’s third term is good news is the fact that Mao’s China and Deng’s China were fundamentally one and the same. Just their optics differed. While Mao’s style was aggressive, hyper-nationalistic, though he was equally shrewd in exploiting the deep ideological divide in the West (one should read Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story to know how the Great Helmsman manipulated and deceived the West), the Deng style was subtle and persuasive — but scrub the surface and the same Maoist characteristics would emerge. Deng and Jiang Zemin would speak what the West would like to hear and believe.
Former foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale writes in his much-readable After Tiananmen: The Rise of China (2022) how Deng’s protégé, Jiang Zemin, won over the US during his eight-day charm offensive in 1997. “Conscious that President (Bill) Clinton, during his election campaign in 1992, had excoriated President George HW Bush for ‘coddling dictators’, Jiang decided to visit the United States in an effort to change American minds about China,” he writes.
During those eight days, as Gokhale writes, Jiang “laid a wreath at Pearl Harbor to remind the Americans of their shared history in the Second World War”, visited colonial Williamsburg and “donned a colonial hat to woo the American public, just as Deng had done at a Texas rodeo in 1979 by wearing a ten-gallon cowboy hat”, and rang the “opening bell for trading on the New York Stock Exchange to highlight China’s support for capitalist practices”. He made all the right noises — from promising to open China even wider for American business, to offering to hold ‘democratic elections’ and promote human rights.
Bill Clinton was duly charmed. He wrote in his memoirs, My Life: “I was impressed with Jiang’s political skills, his desire to integrate China into the world community and the economic growth that had accelerated under his leadership.” Jiang had made such a deep impression that Clinton “went to bed thinking that China would be forced by the imperatives of modern society to become more open, and that in the new century it was more likely that our nations would be partners than adversaries”. No wonder, by the end of his visit, Jiang had secured for China a “constructive strategic partnership” with the US, and established a direct hotline with Clinton.
China expert Frank Dikotter, in his just released book China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower, shows Jiang as someone who “aimed to redress the emphasis on material pursuits alone, putting his weight behind a return to the core values of orthodox socialism”. Unlike Deng, he wanted people not only to get rich, but also be virtuous.
During his regime, Dikotter recounts, there was “a renewed attack on anything smacking of foreign culture”. As Jiang said on 24 January 1996, “We must strictly ban the cultural trash poisoning the people.” He was often seen to be extensively quoting Mao too. No wonder, during his term, foreign ideas and names were seen as “signs of neo-imperialism, incompatible with the demands of ‘spiritual civilisation’”. Dikotter writes, “Across the nation, from Xiamen to Chongqing, signs with foreign names were taken off hotels, restaurants and cinemas. In the capital alone, according to the local authorities, colonial or feudal names were removed from 263 streets, 34 commercial centres, 27 tourist attractions and no fewer than 23,873 company names.”
The West, wooed by Jiang’s charm offensive, made itself believe that growing trade with China would change the Middle Kingdom from inside. It pushed to convince itself even when every single parameter — from democratic records to human rights — suggested otherwise. Interestingly, and ironically, at that time when the West was pursuing the dubious policy of “constructive engagement” with China, one of the worst violators of human rights, India was facing mounting pressure from the West over alleged human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir!
It was during those 20-25 years between Deng and Xi that China laid the solid foundations for a strong military. “For the most part, this military expansion remained hidden in the open, partly the result of Chinese deception, but also because the world preferred to take repeated Chinese assurances that they would never seek hegemony or threaten peace and stability. Under the stewardship of general secretaries Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, China managed to build the modern military force that has allowed Xi Jinping to challenge the Americans for regional hegemony today,” writes Gokhale in After Tiananmen.
Given this hypocritical Western background, the economic crisis staring at the world and the ever loosening moral fabric of Europe and America, there is no guarantee the West won’t again turn a blind eye to China’s misdeeds, only if the latter pretends to act sheepishly. The presence of a Xi Jinping in China pushes the US-led West to act tough, howsoever disinterested it may seem. It will be difficult for Xi’s China to be out of the global radar. And for India, its immediate neighbour and long-term rival, there cannot be better news amidst a host of worst-case scenarios.
The author is Opinion Editor, Firstpost and News18. He tweets from @Utpal_Kumar1. Views expressed are personal.
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