Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan officiate a bridge link project in Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau to Guangzhou:CCTV. Chinese P...
BEIJING — Xi Jinping’s face dominates every wall and every section of a major new exhibition in the Chinese capital. Entitled “Five Years of Sheer Endeavor,” a derogative term that portrays China’s president as the guiding hand behind every national advance. From economic progress to military modernization, triumphs in space technology to innovations in cyberspace, as well as the construction of high-speed trains and root out corruption, all the credit goes to Xi.
In photos and videos across China's major cities, he is pictured chatting to toothless, grinning villagers, or surrounded by beaming schoolchildren, guiding white-coated scientists and hard-hatted engineers, and being greeted all over the world with pomp and pageantry. Even Barack Obama features, hand on chin, listening intently to the Chinese leader. Scores of books, websites,blogs and documentaries laced with rousing, patriotic music, drumming message for adoration: To a great leader with “resolve and wisdom,” a man of the people, approachable and loved by all. Wherever Xi goes, he unleashes a whirlwind of “big-power charisma,” China Central Television gushed, about a man it rather ominously described as the nation’s “supreme leader.”
Xi Jinping is a golden hand behind a new "Great China", and the power that drives Sinocism phenomena in propelling China from same class of third world like Africa, to became a modern giant of most powerful economy ever known in the world seconded by US as per the financial statistic of 2016.The Sinocism influences affect all stratagem not only in China, but most every policy of many nations across the globe.
This week, China’s Communist Party (CPC) stages a five-yearly National Congress where Xi formally granted a second and supposedly a final five-year term as general secretary. But such is the crescendo of praise directed by the Communist Party’s propaganda wing, many experts are wondering: In five years’ time, will Xi stay or will Xi go? “Conventionally you wouldn’t expect adulation on such a scale before a leader assumes the second term, because the second term is usually guaranteed,” said party historian Zhang Lifan. “The propaganda eulogizing Xi is a reflection of his own insecurities around the upcoming party congress.”
China’s president and party leader, Zhang says, wants to ensure that the congress, which begins next Wednesday, falls obediently into line behind him, and that his acolytes win key leadership roles. That would pave the way for Xi to throw out the rule book, Zhang predicts, and retain power well into the next decade.
“What he wants to do is create a very personalized style of leadership, where it seems there is no alternative to Xi Jinping in terms of taking the country forward,” said Rana Mitter, professor of modern Chinese history and politics at the University of Oxford. “The point of comparison with Vladimir Putin who also runs a very personalized style of rule.” Russia’s leader, of course, circumvented that country’s two-term presidential limit, ruling for four years through a proxy in the form of Dmitry Medvedev, before retaking the top job for an expanded six-year-long third term in 2012.
The question now is whether Xi will follow in Putin’s footsteps.
Communist China knows only too well the dangers of a personality cult and a leader who outstays his welcome. Mao Zedong for instance have led the party to power but he also led the country into mass starvation under the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1962 and then into the collective madness of the Cultural Revolution. No one is suggesting that the adulation of Xi is comparable to the cult of Mao, or that he might unleash some comparable calamity on China; yet history still serves as warning.
Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping imposed a system of collective leadership in the 1980s, noted Susan Shirk, head of the China center at the University of California at San Diego, along with rules mandating fixed terms in office, a fixed retirement age and term limits.
For three decades, Deng’s model of collective leadership, balancing different views and different factions within the party was remarkably successful, but by 2012 it was seen by many as having run aground. The economy was still booming but corruption was rampant, while fiefdoms corralled money and power strictly for their own interests. Colorless men in dark suits lacked connection with ordinary people. Ideologically the party seemed adrift, its ruthless determination to prolong its rule indefinitely its main unifying force.
Xi Jinping is a central power for reinvigorate the party’s ideology with a new popular nationalism and “rejuvenate” the nation a “China dream” of prosperity at home and international stage. Xi set up “leading groups” of ministers and advisers to control every aspect of policy making: Running many of the groups himself, he was soon nicknamed the “Chairman of Everything.” Politically he was coldblooded and hate corruptions at all cost. “It looks like Xi overstepped his own mandate and surprised many with his own political skill and ruthlessness,” said Bill Bishop, publisher of the Sinocism newsletter. In the past five years, 1.34 million officials have reportedly been punished for corruption or violating party discipline, including several “tigers” or senior officials, dozens of senior military officers and two very senior generals. Several victims are portrayed in the exhibition, some crying tears of remorse.
Aspiring politicians now rush to join the bandwagon, says Shirk, eagerly praising Xi “in the hope it will advance their careers and protect them from being targeted” by the anti-corruption campaign. Xi has also presided over the crackdown on some civil society and freedom of speech since the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests hundreds of activists, lawyers, journalists and academics have been jailed, silenced or fired, the space for free speech online significantly narrowed, and talk of greater democracy for the people of Hong Kong is completely crushed.
No satire allowed when it comes to Xi-worship. One man was sentenced in April for referring to China’s leader as “steamed-bun Xi” and to Mao as a bandit in a chat group, while another was jailed and charged with subversion for referring to him as “Xitler” on Twitter. Xi has also presided over ambitious expansion of China’s influence abroad, his “Belt and Road” project and a new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank promising to lavish financial resources around the region and a program of island-building in the South China Sea showing his military muscle.
Yet if liberals and social reformers despair, many people in China applaud “Xi Dada,” their nickname for “Uncle Xi,” just as many Russians have embraced Putin’s populist nationalism. “Xi Dada is different from previous leaders. He is a big personality who is tough,” said a 24-year-old postgraduate chemical engineering student, Jiao Hanhui, as he and his classmates contemplate on scientific portion of exhibition. The image of China is tougher than before on the third world stage, and China has a bigger voice now.
Xi would simply stay on as president and party general secretary for a third term starting in the year 2022.
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