Inside the Mind of Xi Jinping, Francois Bougon CONTEXT; Rs.599, Pages 181 Xi Jinping is now the all-powerful leader of China. A country of 1.4 billion people, it has some 90 million members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It is the world’s second largest economy with a 2017 GDP estimated at US $12 trillion (Rs.857.33 lakh crore) representing nearly 20 percent of global income, which makes it larger than the next three — Japan, Germany and the UK — put together. Xi Jinping assumed office as general secretary of the Communist Party in 2012. He has since acquired trappings of power comparable to Chairman Mao. The collective leadership model created by Deng Xiao Ping has, for all practical purposes, given way. With the constitutional bar on holding office beyond two terms having been lifted, Xi may be around for a long time as the supreme leader of China. Clearly, the world needs to know more about him. Francois Bougon’s book does just that. An experienced China-hand and a correspondent with the French daily Le Monde, he uses Xi’s speeches and initiatives to piece together a portrait that provides telling insights into Xi’s thinking and leadership style. Xi is a product of privilege (his father was a vice premier, post-1949) and privation (his father fell out of favour and Xi was sent out to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution). Instead of disillusionment with the Party, he emerged with renewed resolve to reach the top. After several initial rejection of applications to join the Party, he was finally accepted and worked his way up from local and provincial levels to national leadership. That experience has made him empathetic to rural and local-level poverty alleviation while instilling a winner-takes-all instinct for complete control over the CCP and state apparatus to realise his vision for China. Xi has reiterated and reinforced his conviction in the supremacy of the Party and its sole monopoly over political power. However, the people’s acceptance of CCP’s monopoly of political power is conditional upon the party’s commitment to continuously improving their standards of living. In recognition of that, at the 19th CCP Congress, Xi framed this bargain as “the contradiction between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life”. He noted that this was a “historic shift” and “creates many new demands for the work of the Party and the country”. But the reality of contemporary China is that the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer. A study by Peking University in 2016 showed that China has one of the world’s highest levels of income inequality, with the richest 1 percent of households owning 33 percent of the country’s wealth, and the poorest 25 percent households owning just 1 percent. Ironically, communist China has over 3 million dollar millionaires, and its nearly 600 dollar billionaires outnumber those in the US. Moreover the Party has become corrupt and sleazy materially and ideologically. Its cadres and leaders have become wealthy feeding off…
