Xi Jinping has more clout than Donald Trump. Should the world be wary? A man whose name was largely unknown outside of China just a few year ago has becoming the rising Asian giant’s most powerful leaders in decades.
As the cliché goes, a rose is a rose is a rose. Indeed, a half- smile is a half-smile a half- smile. However, what do you attribute to an eternally fixed, transfixed, unchanging, sardonic twist of the lips, which is neither rosy nor a half-smile? Especially, when it is so powerfully photogenic and sends multiple, strategic, signals? Especially, when it belongs to, perhaps, the most powerful man in the world in contemporary geo-strategic and globalised politics?
Xi Jin Ping, the numero uno of China, hardly speaks. The translations from Chinese (or Mandarin) is never truly expressive of the original thoughts, ideology and philosophy of the man. And, yet, he has now been canonized in Chinese history, after the great Mao Ze Dong, who created the first peasant revolution in the world after a long march of starving and exploited peasants, based on certain die-hard principles inscribed in his ‘Red Book’ with a red jacket, and which could be easily carried in a back pocket during the protracted guerrilla war. Of the many legendary things he is remembered for, including the same uniform for all Chinese people, and cocking a snook at powerful Joseph Stalin of Soviet Russia on the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’, the finest is that ‘a guerilla should be like a fish in the water’, using water as symbolic of ordinary peasants in the vast rural countryside of China.
No wonder, even when Maoism has all been buried in his exalted tomb at the Tiananmen Square in Beijing, he is still revered as a hero in the underground and overground struggles of ‘Maoists’ and ‘Marxist-Leninists’ in the remote forest interiors of India’s tribal hinterland, in the inaccessible mountains of the Himalayan land-locked kingdom of Nepal, now experimenting with secular democracy, and in the oral narratives and memories of the numerous struggles in Latin America’s erstwhile banana republics, from the Cuban revolution, to the Zapatistas of the peasant uprising in Mexico, to Bolivia’s indigenous tribes, now in power with their President Evo Morales not succumbing to American machinations to topple him, unlike, for instance, in Brazil. Indeed, despite the brutally botched up Cultural Revolution, cinematically depicted in Steven Spielberg’s classic, ‘The Last Emperor’, (which won 9 Oscars including the Best Film in 1987), the buried memories of Mao is resurrected as and when the top leadership wants it to resurface in China.
Deng Xiaoping, broke from the past to turn China into a capitalist and militarist superpower. He ushered in advanced globalization and liberalization, discarding the socialist collectivization and egalitarian economy of communism, and the principles of the ‘great leap forward’ of the Maoist agrarian revolution, to become the Messiah with the metaphor — ‘little bottle’ — as his name means in Chinese. His famous quote marked the mainstream and marginal transformation of China into a capitalist power camouflaged under the unilateral and one-dimensional dictatorship of the Communist Party of China: “It does not matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
Xi, in contrast, is stoic, statist, status- quoist, almost solitary, and a ‘revolutionary change-agent’ in his own right. His half- beatific, half-smile, neither hides or tells a story. Nor is he famous for a nick-name like ‘little bottle’, or a famous quote, except that his wife was a superstar and jazzy singer once upon a time. Instead, he has ushered in a theory called ‘three comprehensives’ which is still being unravelled, even while he has been superimposed as one among the two greats in the Chinese Constitution: Mao and Deng.
Indians would remember the bonhomie he shared with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, swinging on a ‘jhula’ on the banks of river Sabarmati in Ahmedabad. Modi was on a high with his visit to India and showcased him openly, ‘with hugs’, as his ‘personal friend’. Earlier, Modi was allowed to visit China, as the Gujarat chief minister, even though he was denied a visa to the US for many years by George Bush (as an aftermath of the Gujarat genocide, 2002), and not accepted with an open heart in the power centers of Europe, or the Middle-East. So, swinging Xi, with his sardonic smile, promised to gift India a massive loan in terms of some billions – which, ironically, and reportedly, has never materialized. Indeed, even while he was being hosted with grand receptions in India, Chinese forces had entered Indian territory in Siachin, cocking-a-snook at the Indian power establishment. Later, the Doklam crisis, which continues till this day, or China’s claim on Arunachal Pradesh (with stapled passport etc), has proved, that Xi is sending a clear pointer that who is the strategic and economic superpower in and around the subcontinent.
While backing Pakistan to the hilt, which is its old ally in thick and thin, with US President Donald Trump blocking aid to Pakistan worth many billions, and while opening up new ports and military bases across the line of control in ‘occupied Kashmir’ inside Pakistan, and, while, literally cajoling and bullying Myanmar, Nepal (and Maldives) into long-term infrastructural contracts and economic tie- ups, and while expanding its ‘imperialist’ base across the land mass in Africa, Xi has not taken a step back. His silk route or the belt corridor projects, even the stunningly amazing promise to build a train line to Mount Everest’s neighbourhood, has pushed the world to rethink its policies in Asia and Central Asia. So much so, China continues to bully all around the islands and waters of the South China Sea, building army and naval bases, capturing undiscovered islands, and generally caring a damn about international opinion on its muscle-flexing in what is officially claimed to be ‘international waters’.
In the Syrian crisis, China has strategically aligned with Russia and Iran, and the Syrian government, to stop European or American hegemony in the Middle-East, even as it appears that Xi is forever the finest and most flexible diplomat around. Vladimir Putin of Russia, who will yet again become president after two decades of unbridled power, is his invisible and strategic ally. And even while India consolidates its strategic friendship with America, China continues to show the world, and India, that the future lies in the land of the orient and opium-smokers, not in the crumbling economic and military empire of a bumbling and clueless Donald Trump. Surely, Trump knows, as did Barack Obama, that China is not only an intellectual giant in the research and academic centre of the US, it exercises immense power on the entire American economy with its entrenched tentacles around it.
The fact that ‘allegedly nuclearised’ North Korea shows a dirty finger to the US almost every day, and Kim Jong Un gets into a slanging match with Trump routinely, has not been lost on diplomatic observers. Clearly, the shadow of Xi looms over its unruly and cocky neighbour and strong ally in the Korean peninsula, even as it agrees to sanctions being imposed on North Korea while helping it from the back-door.
Meanwhile, Xi has clamped down on corruption. In a country where there is no freedom of the press, or internet, or the right to assembly, human rights or peaceful protest, or the minimum doctrines of public dissent, no one really knows how many of the charges are real or mythical. Top generals and top party apparatchiks are routinely hauled up in prison on corruption charges, even as dissenters, including writers and artists, disappear or made to shut up.
Undoubtedly, with a new combination of powerful forces and loyalists at his unilateral command, the ‘great helmsman’ of China is carving a new historical legend of absolute power — local, regional and international.
Xi Jin Ping is here to stay. And so will be his half beatific, eternally stoic, half- smile, almost like an afterthought.