Core Leader Biography

Party of One: The rise of Xi Jinping and China’s superpower future Chun Han Wong Simon & Schuster Rs.2,490 Pages 416 If Chairman Mao taught China how to stand up and Secretary Deng Xiaoping how to walk, Xi’s ambition is to make it run and transform China into a superpower Despite being at the helm of affairs in China for more than 12 years, Xi Jinping is still somewhat of an enigma for the world and perhaps even for a large number of people within China. Xi became General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in late 2012 and then China’s President and Chairman of the Central Military Commission in March 2013. At that time, he was regarded as a pragmatic leader who would continue to honour the Party’s evolving and still young tradition of collective leadership. However after assuming power, Xi assumed a different character altogether and has become a type of leader that no one saw coming. One of the popular monikers for Xi Jinping is ‘Chairman of Everything’ since he has inserted himself at the helm of all important offices, created new oversight bureaus that report directly to him, and has reduced the powers of the prime minister and other members of the State Council. Chun Han Wong, the author of this book and a Singapore national, was a reporter of The Wall Street Journal in Beijing from 2014 until 2019. He was denied renewal of his press credentials for writing a story about an investigation by Australian agencies into a gambling and criminal nexus involving an individual named Ming Chai, who turned out to be one of Xi Jinping’s cousins. China lacks written rules on leadership tenures in absolute sense of the term. What it has are vague norms about peaceful and predictable transfer of power developed over the last 30 years and most of these were set in place under the guidance of Deng Xiaoping, who was China’s last paramount leader. All that has been disrupted by developments over the past few years under Xi Jinping. In 2016, Xi assumed the title of Core Leader and didn’t appoint a successor as required. On the contrary, the Party proceeded to remove the presidential term limit which meant that far from retiring after two terms, Xi could remain in power ad infinitum. The book begins by discussing Xi’s carefully chosen career path wherein he served tenures in the countryside, with the PLA, and then in important provinces. While this coverage is good, it is relatively short. One expected to read more about the career trajectory of Xi before he rose to centerstage, simply because there is not much authoritative work on Xi’s early career and life. Interestingly, the author argues that Xi’s stints in the provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang were relatively unremarkable and several of his ‘successful’ policy interventions were actually failures presented as successes as part of propaganda after Xi was confirmed as the designated successor to Hu Jintao in 2008. However, what…