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Two years into Xi Jinping’s tenure as China’s president, many analysts consider him to be the most powerful leader since Deng Xiaoping, the man who oversaw China’s opening to the world and its market-oriented policies after the chaos of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. Roderick MacFarquhar, a scholar of elite Communist Party politics at Harvard University, goes one step further. Mr. Xi, he says, is the most powerful Chinese leader since Chairman Mao Zedong, the “Great Helmsman” who declared the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 and was worshiped almost as a god by millions of fanatical Red Guards.

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Yet for all of Mr. Xi’s personal power, his campaign against corruption is fraught with danger, putting at risk the future of the Communist Party he is determined to save, Professor MacFarquhar said in a recent talk at the University of Hong Kong. In an interview, he explained why.

Q.

Why do you think Mr. Xi is the most powerful leader since Mao, given that Deng Xiaoping had so much charisma and institutional power and experience from his revolutionary days?



A.

Deng had enormous power, of course, but surviving the Cultural Revolution with him were some very conservative leaders, one of whom was his senior in the party, Chen Yun. And Li Xiannian, Peng Zhen, all very conservative. That’s why the 1980s, when Deng was in his prime, are often described as opening and closing, opening and closing, because he had to ride the punch. Sometimes the conservatives forced him to close in and then he opened up again because he could see that it was bad for the economy. So he had people of equal status who had the ability, especially after [the 1989 suppression of protests at] Tiananmen, to impress upon him the dangers of what he was doing.

In the case of Xi Jinping, he has this unique aspect that he was chosen by his elders and peers and none of his colleagues were. In other words, they were all open to be chosen. He got chosen. That gives him the kind of prestige that Mao had in 1936, when he started his rise to power after all the others, [the late prime minister] Zhou Enlai and others, now forgotten, had their chance of leadership and failed. So I think that Xi Jinping is more powerful than Deng because he doesn’t have people of equal status who are able to challenge him because of their past record. He won out in the lottery for the leadership.

Q.

Mr. Xi was a child of the Cultural Revolution. How do you think that might have influenced him?

A.

A former student of mine who went through the Cultural Revolution has been quite high on what that means for Xi, in the sense that he thinks that, if you’re in the cauldron, if you have been thrown out of your family house and left to fend for yourself, you develop a self-confidence if you survive. If you can get through that, you can get through a lot more. I think he has got that self-confidence.

He’s also got the self-confidence of a princeling, of his family being revolutionary leaders. Not the very top, but revolutionary leaders. That invests him in the revolution. He wants to preserve it. Indeed, many people would say that the reason why he was chosen was because he had more invested in the revolution than some of his cohort of leaders. So I think for both those reasons he is very self-confident.

The others? You don’t get to the top of the Politburo Standing Committee of China without having enormous talents of some kind: political talents, administrative talents, infighting talents. You can’t write them off. But Xi beat them to the top, and that’s his strength.

Q.

You said in your speech that Mikhail S. Gorbachev was also a strong leader. What’s the difference between him and Mr. Xi?

A.

Let me stress the similarities. They both wanted to save the Communist Party because they both believed in Communism. I think probably Gorbachev really believed in Marxism-Leninism. I don’t think Xi Jinping probably believes in Marxism, only in Leninism. I think that the Cultural Revolution was a disillusioning experience for people from Deng Xiaoping downwards. The similarities are that both Gorbachev in his attack in perestroika on the bureaucracy and Xi Jinping in his attack on the bureaucracy in anticorruption were trying to improve the party, purify the party, get it moving in a different direction.

The difference between them is that Xi Jinping knows what Gorbachev did. Xi Jinping has obsessed about Gorbachev. Very early in his leadership, he was talking to his colleagues about Gorbachev, saying, “No one stood up to defend the party.” So, clearly, Xi feels he is going to be tough, stand up to defend the party, eradicate corruption and recover the legitimacy of the party in the eyes of the people.

Q.

Are there any examples in history where a Communist Party without ideology can sustain itself?

A.

There is no example because Leninist parties have only been around basically since the 1917 revolution in Russia. So there is no experience of this. The party in Cuba survived, I suppose, really because the opposition of the United States gave a certain national pride to the Cubans, especially when they were able to rely on the Soviet Union for economic support. The North Koreans, of course, survived because the Chinese are not prepared to cut them off, even though they hate the way they conduct themselves, because they don’t want another Communist regime to go down the tubes.

I don’t think there is any other experience, and my own feeling is that this party cannot reform itself. The choices for Xi Jinping are, one, ease off the corruption campaign in order to allow the economic reform program, which he’s talked about but which hasn’t got going, to proceed, because the economic reform may help to save the party in power. But if he is going to attack corruption root and branch, tigers and fleas as he would call it, then there is real danger. Danger for the party collapsing as it did in Russia, or danger of a leadership coalition against him.

Q.

Is it conceivable that there could be an opposition to Xi, a pushback?

A.

No one was prepared in Mao’s time to ally against him. And Mao could also rely on the fact that probably if Zhou Enlai confided in [the late President] Liu Shaoqi and said the chairman is going off his rocker, we shouldn’t allow this Cultural Revolution to continue, the chairman could rely on the possibility — probability — that Liu Shaoqi would come and report Zhou Enlai to him, and then dispose of Zhou Enlai.

That, I don’t think, applies now. People aren’t frightened of Xi Jinping in the way they were frightened of Mao. People’s interests, people’s families, people’s livelihoods are threatened. Comrades X, Y and Z can ally together against Xi Jinping. He’s not yet a figure that so terrifies his colleagues that they couldn’t dream of suggesting to a comrade, “Let’s ally against him,” because they don’t know that that comrade would not report him.

Q.

Is the real danger to the party Western values, a free press and a civil society? How seriously does Mr. Xi take that threat? How does it compare to corruption as a threat?

A.

There is an internal threat: corruption. There is an external threat: bad ideas from the West. He takes both seriously. His problem is that, with the internal threat, he can take the Discipline Inspection Commission, a very powerful weapon, backed by the whole apparatus of the Central Committee, the Secretariat, and he can home in on what he wants to home in on.

The problem for the external threat of foreign ideas is that, as part of the whole process of opening up and reform, Deng Xiaoping and his successors have allowed hundreds of thousands of students to go abroad, and once China began to be rich, they all started to come back instead of staying wherever they went to study. And so you’ve got now tens of thousands of former students from America, Europe, Japan, who are back in their own country, and they’ve seen a different future. If they’re comfortably off, if they work for the party, that may be enough. They can say, “OK, free press, it was fine when I was in New York, but doesn’t matter here, I’m all right.”

But I think the danger is that if people feel that the corruption campaign is going to undermine the party and chaos could result — that’s what happened in the Cultural Revolution — then people are going to start thinking, how can we change this system? Some will emigrate. Some have already emigrated. Certainly billions of dollars have emigrated. Children have been left abroad as a safety belt to hang on to. And it’s just a case of will people start thinking about alternative methods?

Of course, it being a Leninist party and leadership friendly, someone at the very top has got to have those ideas, that there’s got to be change. And that’s, frankly, a very difficult thing to envisage. Deng Xiaoping could do it, though he was at the very top, simply because the Cultural Revolution was such chaos, that you had to have something new. We don’t know at what stage of the campaign against corruption, the campaign on closing in of ideas from abroad, which could harm the economy, of course, at what stage someone inside China will say: “This is not going to work. We’ve got to change.”

Q.

A successful campaign against corruption and closing off to Western ideas are related then?

A.

You say a successful campaign against corruption. But the point about a successful campaign against corruption is that it’s all very well to get a few tigers, have cheers from the multitude because you’ve brought these people down. But it’s the fleas who are the real danger. The peasants and the workers are afflicted by local cadres. Petty corruption. Some of which results in ecological damage to the neighborhood and therefore health problems for themselves and their kids. Those are the people that are really the threat to the population at large, and if he goes after them, who’s going to work for the party? Who’s going to be the new cadres?

Q.

A party without ideology: Is that a sustainable model?

A.

Without an ideology, you lack the glue that the Confucian empire had, you lack the glue that the Maoist period had. And so you have nothing in common between party and people, between state and country. And that’s a very difficult thing to proceed with in China when you have a Leninist party that by its very definition, when it was first formed in the late 19th century, relies upon ideology to convince people that we understand the history, we understand the present and we know where to go in the future.

That’s a very powerful doctrine, if you believe in it. Without any such doctrine, he has coursed to this very negative policy of trying to keep-out-the-enemy doctrine. It’s much better if you’re closed in the armor of your own doctrine than if you just have the old apparatus of the Great Firewall in order to keep out the enemy doctrine.

Q.

Does China rely more on nationalism then? Doesn’t that risk fascism?

A.

I’m not sure about fascism. But I am sure that nationalism is one of the reasons why the foreign policy of Xi Jinping has been somewhat provocative perhaps in the East China Sea, South China Sea, vis-à-vis America, as a device to get people behind him in his campaigns, particularly the corruption campaign. But I think that in the long run that’s a very dangerous path to pursue because as Chinese governments in the past have found, if you unleash nationalism and then you are unwilling or unable to follow through with the right actions, then the people get fed up with you, they think that you are being unpatriotic yourself, that the government is failing. And so nationalism is a very dangerous thing to unleash. I don’t think it is fascism so much. I just think it is just a weapon for Xi Jinping.

Q.

If you don’t have Confucianism or Marxism, and you aren’t focusing on nationalism, what do you have?

A.

Nothing. That’s why Xi Jinping is so worried. What is interesting about what he is trying to do is he has had a campaign, which I didn’t quite understand at first, to say that the whole of the Communist regime is one united period of history. And he’s argued against what apparently happens in China, that you divide it into two periods: the Maoist period, which basically had those great tragedies, the famine and the Cultural Revolution, and the reform period, which basically has been a move towards a better, brighter, more prosperous future.

Because he realizes, he says in his attacks on Gorbachev and what happened in the Soviet Union, one of the problems was that they attacked Lenin and Stalin, and that led to an undermining of the whole system. And he realizes that, if you start allowing the first 20 years, 25 years or so, of Mao’s rule to be denigrated for all the mistakes that happened, then you are going to delegitimize Mao.

And as the picture of Mao’s face on the Tiananmen Gate shows, Mao is still the great legitimator of this regime. That’s all they’ve got left. They’ve got no Marxism-Leninism, they’ve got no party that’s got respect and authority any longer. People are revolting against local cadres 500 times every day, apparently, in China.

They have Mao. How long that will last? How much he means to the young people today? I don’t know.