By Peter Foster
The writer is The Daily Telegraph's China Correspondent. He moved to Beijing in 2009.
From behind the walls of a faceless government building in west Beijing came the news this week that China's mandarins have identified the man who will, in all probability, lead their country after 2012.
It was delivered through a typically obfuscatory communique from the official Xinhua news agency, which said the individual in question had been promoted to a job on the commission that oversees China's armed forces. By such signals do we come to know the identity of the man who will take the helm of the world's second-largest economy.
Mr Xi Jinping, a 57-year-old technocrat with degrees in chemical engineering and law, also happens to be the son of one of China's revolutionary leaders: A "princeling".
What he stands for is far more difficult to divine. Some say he's an economic reformer, or at least presume so since Mr Xi made his name pushing through economic development in the coastal provinces in the 1990s. His success may have something to do with that revolutionary lineage - his father Xi Zhongxun was a communist guerrilla fighter who was purged during the Cultural Revolution, but rehabilitated under Mr Deng Xiaoping.
Perhaps, say the rune readers, this makes Mr Xi the son more liberal-minded when it comes to political reform. Equally, say others, having suffered during the Cultural Revolution himself, Mr Xi is burdened with that same deep fear of political chaos that has made China's top leadership so resistant to change.
The truth is that nobody knows: There has been no manifesto, no hustings, no televised cross-examination, just the coded announcement that Mr Xi will become the leader of an organisation and a country that plays its cards disconcertingly close to its chest.
Perhaps it is a mistake to try and decipher the man. Like the current President, Mr Hu Jintao, he is almost anti-charismatic, a deliberately faceless embodiment of the consensus that rules China. (His wife, a folk singer popular with the over-50s, is far better known.)
Understandably, after the madness of the Mao years, big personalities are no longer welcome in Chinese politics; instead Mr Xi stands at the apex of a labyrinthine network of committees set up to inch China forward, step by step, towards a socialist nirvana with Chinese characteristics.
And therein lies the problem: While China's rulers are dealing in increments - "crossing the river by feeling the stones", as Mr Deng put it - the country they govern is plunging into the turbulent waters of the future.
When Mr Hu stepped out of the shadow of Mr Jiang Zemin in 2003, China had 190? million mobile phones. Today, it has over 800?million. Only 50?million were online; today, it is 420?million. During the same period, China's share of global GDP doubled to 8 per cent, and by 2019 - the mid-point of Mr Xi's putative reign - China could account for nearly 15 per cent.
Such momentous material advances are changing the social fabric of China at a far greater pace than the ruling party is adapting to meet the people's expectations. China's middle classes increasingly want to know why they can't afford to buy a house or why their children can't find jobs after graduation, just as its millions of migrant working classes want to know why, when they live and work in a city, they don't have the right to send their children to school there.
Increasingly, China's individuals think they know their rights and are prepared to defend them against rent-seeking officials, bullying commercial interests that cover up their mistakes and damage public health, and bent policemen and courts that put the interests of the party over the constitutional rights they pledged to uphold.
It is this changing reality that Mr Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace laureate, was reflecting when he wrote Charter 08, a document that offered a blueprint for gradual reforms that would bring basic rights and freedoms - of expression, association, religion and property ownership - within the grasp of ordinary Chinese.
Those demands are arguably the natural consequence of the economic and social development that the party has engineered. But whenever faced with pressure to take the next step, China's leaders have suffered from a 20-year attack of political vertigo, of which Mr Liu's 11-year jail sentence is but the latest expression. As Mr Sun Liping, a sociology professor who was Mr Xi's PhD supervisor, has written in an essay much read on the Chinese Internet, the result of this has been "social decay" - which has its origins in the uncontrollable power of the party that Mr Xi looks set to lead.
For the foreseeable future, the centre holds; but the tension created by political paralysis, by the ruling party's refusal to submit to checks and balances, to explain itself and even argue its case to a society increasingly expecting explanations, is not going to abate.
"The system of government in China will change. It will change in Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam. It is changing in Singapore. But it will not end up like the American or British or French or German systems. What are we all seeking? A form of government that will be comfortable, because it meets our needs, is not oppressive, and maximises our opportunities. And whether you have one-man-one-vote, or some-men-one-vote or othermen-two-votes, those are forms which should be worked out. I'm not intellectually convinced that one-man-one-vote is the best. We practise it because that's what the British bequeathed us ... "- Lee Kuan Yew
For the foreseeable future, the centre holds; but the tension created by political paralysis, by the ruling party's refusal to submit to checks and balances, to explain itself and even argue its case to a society increasingly expecting explanations, is not going to abate.
The world can only hope that out of its secret huddles and conclaves, the party has found a leader in Mr Xi with the ability to manage the consequences.
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
21 October 2010
