China's new leader is quite scary

A long and terrifying read.

One astute insider described him as “a needle concealed in silk floss”. Everyone was taken in. When he became Communist Party leader in 2012, Xi Jinping was the compromise choice. Few inside or outside China guessed at what was coming next - five years of political shock and awe.

Since the communists fought their way to power, they had called themselves the “vanguard of the people”, an elite class whose mandate to rule came from “serving the people”. Without living by this higher code the Party had no claim to legitimacy. For the past five years, Xi’s blunt message has been: “Don’t join the Party if you want to make money.” But his problem was, and still is, that this is precisely why some of the Party’s nearly 90 million members did join up.

With an envelope of banknotes here, and a nod there, patronage is how Communist Party politics has often worked. Cleaning it up means removing not just individuals but whole networks of influence and a culture.

A fractured elite is a threat to an authoritarian regime and in pre-communist times, China’s imperial dynasties often fell victim to faction fights at court. By caging hundreds of powerful tigers at the top of the Party and army, Xi has torn up the rulebook which kept a fragile peace between the red elite after the death of Chairman Mao. Any of them might be making a speech in the Great Hall of the People one minute and dragged off to a cell the next.

“The internet has grown into an ideological battlefield, and whoever controls the tool will win the war,” warn Party-controlled media.

In a recent speech he warned that the internet must not become a “double-edged sword”, allowing “hidden negative energy” to harm good governance and social stability. He has enormously strengthened the so-called Great Firewall of China, the combination of legislation and technologies, supported by legions of professional and volunteer censors, which together enable the Party to control Chinese cyberspace. Cybersecurity is now central to Xi’s definition of national security. Internet service providers and social media sites are forced to censor users, while users are encouraged to censor each other. All are denied online anonymity and those who overstep red lines are jailed.

It apparently doesn’t matter that Mao’s policies led to famine and the deaths of more than 30 million Chinese, or that Xi’s own family had been persecuted in the lost decade of the Cultural Revolution. Under Xi Jinping, dwelling on inconvenient facts of history or insulting revolutionary heroes and martyrs is now a punishable offence called “historical nihilism”

A nation of active citizens is Xi’s nightmare. Christians, Muslims, labour activists, bloggers, reporters, feminists, and lawyers have been jailed for speaking or acting on their convictions. In some cases, they have also been paraded in televised confessions, recanting their beliefs and echoing the Party line that they allowed themselves to become pawns of China’s enemies in the West. Rebranding some expressions of conscience as a threat to national security is central to Xi’s politics.

Xi’s China has so far married great wealth with great repression. If he continues to cage his tigers, clean up his comrades and silence discordant voices, the existential questions may be for others. Not since Chairman Mao has China’s dream of greatness rested so heavily on one man.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/Thoughts_Chairman_Xi