Xi Jinping
Consolidating power
BY JEFFREY WASSERSTROM
Xi Jinping has had a profound impact
domestically and globally since as-
cending to power as Communist Party
General Secretary in 2012, soon after
which he became President and since
has developed the biggest Chinese
personality cult since Mao’s.
The easiest way to describe this
impact used to be by listing things he
did, from launching the Belt and Road
Initiative—a massive infrastructure
investment strategy to expand China’s
influence globally—to starting a crack-
down on corruption and ratcheting up
one on civil society with the second-
ary goal of eliminating political rivals.
He also did away with a constitutional
provision aimed at preventing rul-
ers for life and, after a cover-up of
a new virus’s spread caused global
harm, implemented a zero-COVID
policy that succeeded in minimizing
the disease’s domestic spread but has
locked millions in their homes.
To assess Xi’s particular impact
in 2022, however, it’s worth high-
lighting four things he has not done
but might have: reconsidered the
zero-COVID strategy that has been
criticized by the World Health Orga-
nization chief as “not sustainable”;
reversed course on Xinjiang, the site
of horrific human-rights abuses; dis-
tanced himself from a warmonger-
ing Vladimir Putin; and, of course,
named a successor.Wasserstrom is the Chancellor’s
Professor of History at UC Irvine
and author of The Oxford History
of Modern China