And it was the matriarch, Xi’s influential mother, Qi
Xin, who called a clan summit to lay down the law.
With her son poised to rule China, she warned the
rest of the family not to dare invoke his name in their
business dealings. On his part he kept it simple.
When he took power he cut off all his siblings
without a word of affection or farewell.
So what could go wrong for Xi? Roger Garside, a
retired British diplomat, author and renowned China
expert, argues that the great dictator has feet of clay.
“The body politic of China is terminally sick, and
only a political transplant can save it. Xi’s enemies
know this, but he does not,” he says. “The
contradiction between economic reform and
political paralysis has produced a whole array of
deep-seated problems — a debt mountain, great and
growing inequality, systemic corruption, deep
mistrust at home and abroad, and an absence of truth
— which the political system can only intensify, not
resolve; and Xi has doubled down on the system. Now
a confrontation with the US over capital markets is
looming up fast. When it comes a Chinese financial
crisis will therefore become a political crisis.”
Garside has sketched out a fictional scenario of Xi’s
downfall in his new book, China Coup, which imagines
a rebellion by rival members of the elite. In the book
they see Xi trapped by his own ruthlessness, unfit to
rule but not daring to abdicate because he fears it will
be the end of him and his clique. Overconfident and
underqualified, he has become a menace to the class
he sprang from. Their own privileges — and, of course,
the wealth of their extended families — are threatened
by chaos and decay. Three conspirators enlist key
generals to confront the supreme leader. Garsidenames names, picking out Li Keqiang, the premier,
Wang Qishan, a veteran fixer, and Wang Yang,
supposedly a closet liberal, as the plotters. Confronted
at a politburo meeting, like Nikita Khrushchev, Xi
is sent packing with guarantees of his safety.
All this is fiction, of course. But there are persistent
rumours of splits within the ruling elite, including
talk of widening divisions with Li Keqiang over the
nation’s direction. Li, who speaks English, is more
outward-looking than his leader.
The Xi government can still count on great
strengths. It controls the economy, the exchange
rate, capital flows, trade tariffs and regulations. It can
bail out Evergrande, fix property prices and prop up
the stock market if it chooses. China’s role as the
workshop of the world cannot be replaced, so exports
are strong. There is no such thing, really, as a private
company in Xi’s China; all must host party cells and
obey the commands of the security state, whatever
their soothing words to foreign investors, who are
free to run the risks of entanglement if they wish.
One billionaire after another has fallen to the party’s
anti-corruption squads or vanished into the night
and fog of the Chinese judicial system. If they
re-emerge at all it is to cringe, confess their errors
and offer up restitution.
This is all part of “common prosperity”, a policy of
“levelling up” on a billion-citizen scale. The party has
flexed its muscles to take on China’s tech giants,
global behemoths like Alibaba, which began as an
online trading platform. Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder,
vanished for months after making a speech in October
2020 that criticised state regulators. The company’s
plans to dominate China’s fast-evolving fintech
industry were derailed, it paid a huge anti-monopoly
fine and went into full corporate-kowtow mode. The
message: nobody is big enough to take on Xi Jinping.
Ma was next seen giving a video speech to teachers
in January, and again meeting executives in Hong
Kong in October. He resurfaced recently on holiday on
his yacht off Mallorca before going to the Netherlands
to smell the flowers at a horticulture research
institute. Alibaba owns the most influential English-
language newspaper in Hong Kong, the South China
Morning Post, but recent reports suggest a Chinese
state-owned firm, Bauhinia Culture (Hong Kong)
Holdings, is weighing up a takeover; commentators
think Ma will be made an offer he can’t refuse.
Defiance does not pay. The property tycoon Ren
Zhiqiang, who last year was foolish enough to write
in a blog post on China’s handling of Covid-19 about
an unnamed “clown who stripped naked and still
wanted to be the emperor”, went to jail for 18 years
on hastily arranged corruption charges and was fined
almost half a million pounds.
In the end Xi’s dictatorship will worry the elite
Chinese more than it does the rest of us because they
have more to lose. “Xi Jinping seems more like an
emperor every day that he is in power,” wrote the
dissident author Yu Jie, one of the first to spot the
trend back in 2014, when I watched Xi in the Great
Hall of the People. The Communist Party claimed to
have abolished emperors, but when one man is set
above all others he casts a giant shadow nMichael Sheridan was Far East correspondent of The
Sunday Times, 1996-2016. His book The Gate to China:
A New History of the People’s Republic and Hong Kong
is published by William Collins at £25REX
It is all
about
survival.
Xi and his
core group
know what
befalls
those who
lose out
in Chinese
power
struggles
Below: under an anti-
corruption drive, Xi has
imprisoned political
opponents such as Bo
Xilai, top, centre, and
Zhou Yongkang, bottomThe Sunday Times Magazine • 33