The Economist February 12th 2022 35
ChinaAdvisingXiJinpingThinker-in-chief
I
n the year before the Tiananmen
Square protests of 1989, campuses in Chi
na buzzed with debate about how to make
the country more liberal. To some intellec
tuals the West offered a model. In the Sovi
et Union Mikhail Gorbachev had shown
how a start could be made. Amid this fer
ment, in August 1988, a bespectacled politi
cal scientist arrived in America for half a
year of study, initially at the University of
Iowa. He found much to criticise but also
plenty to admire in America: its universi
ties, its innovation and the smooth trans
fer of power from one president to another.
Capitalism, wrote the 32yearold party
member, “cannot be underestimated”.
That academic, Wang Huning, is now
one of seven members of the Politburo
Standing Committee, the Communist Par
ty’s supreme ruling body. As its chief of
ideology and propaganda, he is in charge of
crafting a very different message: that Chi
na practises true democracy, that Ameri
ca’s is a sham and that American power is
fading. For a party locked in an escalatingideological war with America, this line is
unsurprising. Mr Wang’s role in the strug
gle is more so. His early writing did not
suggest narrowminded nationalism. He
saw weaknesses in America’s system, but
did not exaggerate them. He saw problems,
too, in China’s. Even more remarkably, he
has been crafting the party’s message un
der three successive leaders. China’s cur
rent ruler, Xi Jinping, has trusted him in
this vital role even though he is not an old
associate. A statelinked newspaper called
him the party’s “number one adviser”.
It is a shadowy post. His occasional
speeches give little hint of what he does be
hind the scenes. Before Mr Xi stopped trav
elling abroad two years ago, at the outset of
the pandemic, Mr Wang often accompa
nied him on foreign trips, suggesting he is
also involved in diplomacy. Partylinked
media in Hong Kong have given more
away. They have credited Mr Wang with
shaping the defining policies of each lead
er for more than two decades, from the
“three represents” of Jiang Zemin (whichremoved taboos surrounding the admis
sion of private entrepreneurs into the par
ty) to Hu Jintao’s “scientific outlook on de
velopment” (aiming for a more ecofriend
ly and equitable approach) and Mr Xi’s
“Chinese dream” of a rich, militarily strong
and globally powerful China.
This may have required some tricky po
litical footwork. As a member of Mr Xi’s in
ner circle, Mr Wang would have needed to
distance himself from both Mr Hu and Mr
Jiang, whose allies have been among the
targets of Mr Xi’s purges. It was Mr Jiang
who had brought Mr Wang from Fudan
University in Shanghai, where he taught,
to the party’s headquarters in Beijing in- Being an academic, not a politician,
may have helped Mr Wang to rise above the
party’s internal battles. All factions have
valued his skills as a theoretician, and his
willingness to use them flexibly.
It is impossible to know what Mr Wang
truly thinks of the policies he espouses.
How did he react when, in 2018, the year
after Mr Wang’s elevation to the Politburo
Standing Committee, Mr Xi changed the
rules to make it easier for China’s leader to
remain in power indefinitely? In his book
about his American sojourn, “America
Against America”, which was published in
1991, Mr Wang noted that if a political sys
tem failed to devise a way of transferring
power, it would be hard for that country “to
enjoy enduring and stable political order”.
The book is often described as a gloomy
The career of Wang Huning reveals much about political change in China→Alsointhissection
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