Xi holds office at a time when the regime has to confront a series of daunting challenges that have all reached critical stages at once. It must manage a slowing economy; mollify millions of laid-off workers; shift demand from export markets to domestic consumption; whip underperforming giant state-owned enterprises into shape; dispel a huge overhang of bad bank loans and nonperforming investments; ameliorate climate change and environmental devastation that are irritating the new middle class; and downsize and upgrade the military. Internationally, Chinese policymakers see themselves as forced to respond assertively to growing pressure from the United States, Japan, and various Southeast Asian regimes that are trying to resist China\u2019s legitimate defense of its interests in such places as Taiwan, the Senkaku islands, and the South China Sea<\/p>\n
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 Jinping leads the Party, state, and military hierarchies by virtue of his chairmanship of each. But his two immediate predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, exercised these roles within a system of collective leadership, in which each member of the Politburo Standing Committee took charge of a particular policy or institution and guided it without much interference from other senior officials.<\/p>\n Ai Weiwei: Mao (Facing Forward), 1986; from the exhibition \u2018Andy Warhol\/Ai Weiwei,\u2019 which originated at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and will be at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, June 4\u2013August 28, 2016. The catalog is edited by Max Delany and Eric Shiner and published by Yale University Press.<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n 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, such as Li Zhanshu, director of the all-powerful General Office of the CCP<\/abbr> Central Committee.<\/p>\n Xi has also followed Mao\u2019s model in protecting his rule against a coup. His anticorruption campaign has made him numerous enemies. Xi has tightened direct control over the military by means of what is called a \u201c[Central Military Commission] Chairman Responsibility System,\u201d and he controls the central guard corps\u2014which monitors the security of all the other leaders\u2014through his longtime chief bodyguard, Wang Shaojun.3<\/a><\/sup> In these ways Xi controls the physical environment of the other leaders, just as Mao did through his loyal follower Wang Dongxing.<\/p>\n Xi conveys Napoleonic self-confidence in the importance of his mission and its inevitable success. In person he is said to be affable and relaxed. But his carefully curated public persona follows Mao in displaying a stolid presence and immobile features that seem to convey either stoicism or implacability.<\/p>\n Above all, Xi has followed Mao in the demand for ideological conformity. \u00a0Xi wants \u201crule by law,\u201d but this means using the courts more energetically to carry out political repression and change the bureaucracy\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n He may go even further. There are hints that he will seek to break the recently established norm of two five-year terms in office and serve one or even more extra terms.<\/p>\n Xi\u2019s concentration of power poses great dangers for China.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" More than halfway through his five-year term as president of China and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party\u2014expected to be the first of at least two\u2014Xi Jinping\u2019s widening crackdown on civil society and promotion of a cult of personality … Continue reading ![\"Ai](\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/nathan_2-051216.jpg\")
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