: Who Is Xi Jinping?: "Xi Jinping’s respect for Mao is not a personal eccentricity...
...It is shared by many of the hereditary Communist aristocrats
who... form most of China’s top leadership today as well as a large
section of its business elite..... Contrary to the Western consensus
that Deng saved the system after Mao nearly wrecked it, Xi and many
other red aristocrats feel that it was Deng who came close to destroying
Mao’s legacy.... The children of the founding elite see themselves as
the inheritors of... a vast world that their fathers conquered under
Mao’s leadership. Their parents came from poor rural villages and rose
to rule an empire. The second generation... do not propose to be the
generation that ‘loses the empire.’... They see no irony in cheering Xi
Jinping’s attack on corrupt bureaucrats although Mao purged their own
fathers as ‘capitalist roaders in power.’ Mao’s purges they excuse as a
mistake. But they see today’s bureaucrats as flocking to serve the Party
because it is in power and not because they inherited a spirit of
revolutionary sacrifice from their forebears. Such opportunists are
worms eating away at the legacy of revolution.
The legacy is threatened by other forces... a slowing economy...
laid-off workers... underperforming giant state-owned enterprises... bad
bank loans... climate change and environmental devastation... downsize
and upgrade the military.... Any leader who confronts so many big
problems needs a lot of power, and Mao provides a model of how such
power can be wielded.... Xi emulates Mao in exercising power through a
tight circle of aides whom he can trust because they have demonstrated
their personal loyalty in earlier phases of his career.... Xi wants
‘rule by law,’ but this means using the courts more energetically to
carry out political repression and change the bureaucracy’s style of
work. He wants to reform the universities, not in order to create
Western-style academic freedom but to bring academics and students to
heel (including those studying abroad). He has launched a thorough
reorganization of the military, which is intended partly to make it more
effective in battle, but also to reaffirm its loyalty to the Party and
to him personally. The overarching purpose of reform is to keep the
Chinese Communist Party in power....
Deng built a system... senior leaders were limited to two terms...
divided leadership roles... made decisions in consultation with other
leaders and retired elders. By overturning Deng’s system, Xi is hanging
the survival of the regime on his ability to bear an enormous workload
and not make big mistakes. He seems to be scaring the mass media and
officials outside his immediate circle from telling him the truth. He is
trying to bottle up a growing diversity of social and intellectual
forces that are bound to grow stronger. He may be breaking down... the
consensus about China’s path of development.... He has broken the rule
that retired leaders are safe once they leave office, throwing into
question whether it can ever be safe for him to leave office. As he
departs from Deng’s path, he risks undermining the adaptability and
resilience that Deng’s reforms painstakingly created for the post-Mao
regime.
As the members of the red aristocracy around Xi circle their wagons
to protect the regime, some citizens retreat into religious observance
or private consumption, others send their money and children abroad, and
a sense of impending crisis pervades society. No wonder Xi’s regime
behaves as if it faces an existential threat. Given the power and
resources that he commands, it would be reckless to predict that his
attempt to consolidate authoritarian rule will fail. But the attempt
risks creating the very political crisis that it seeks to prevent.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário