Xi Jinping is carrying Deng Xiaoping’s authoritarian torch in China

Signs of xi jinping’s power cover China. The latest came on January 17th when the Communist Party’s anti-graft watchdog announced that it had punished 983,000 individuals last year, an annual record. Beyond his iron fist is the force of his leadership. “Xi Jinping Thought” has been written into the constitution. Officials at every level declare their fealty to him as the party’s “core”. Students memorise his nuggets of wisdom, of which there is no shortage. The fifth volume of his works on governance was published last year.

All of these have lost the capacity to surprise. But when such signs first emerged, they stunned China-watchers. They heralded a shift away from the collective leadership that had guided China’s post-Mao era back to something more like strongman rule. When thinking about China’s recent history, Mr Xi thus offers a clear dividing line. The country’s modern development was kickstarted by Deng Xiaoping and his policy of “reform and opening up”, launched in 1978.

When Mr Xi came to power in 2012, China’s trajectory shifted. Officially, his rule is known as “the New Era”. Several outside scholars have instead branded it as China’s “counter-reformation”, in which Mr Xi has brought ideology and suffocating control back to everything. Whichever terminology one prefers, there was life before Mr Xi and a distinctly different life after him.

“The Broken China Dream”, a new book by Minxin Pei, a leading sinologist, offers a fresh perspective. Rather than emphasising the disjuncture, Mr Pei’s account stresses the through lines from Deng to Mr Xi. A handful of big decisions by Deng, China’s paramount leader until 1989, paved the way for Mr Xi’s ascent. Moreover, Mr Pei’s book points to an essential continuity between the two leaders: a relentless focus on reinforcing the party’s grip on China, albeit in different contexts.

Mr Xi’s most obvious break with his predecessors was the abolition of presidential term limits. This change, made in early 2018, allows Mr Xi to remain in office today—halfway through his third five-year term, when two terms used to be considered the maximum. There is every chance that Mr Xi dreams of ruling for the rest of his life. His ability to do this can be traced to Deng. In the 1980s Deng specifically ruled out making age and term limits either clear or enforceable at the apex of the party. Doing so would have undercut his own power.

Mr Xi has three official positions: party chief, military leader and head of state. But only the last of these—head of state, or presidency—had a term limit, and it has always been the least important of the three. Moreover, Jiang Zemin, who led China from 1989 to 2002, had already shown that he could retain the military chairmanship after giving up his other roles. In that sense Mr Xi inherited not rigid rules but weak norms. That someone would eventually overturn these norms was “an accident waiting to happen”, says Mr Pei.

The substance of Mr Xi’s leadership also carries echoes of Deng’s programme. The potted account of Deng’s tenure is that he was a political conservative, unwilling to broach any challenge to party rule, but an economic liberal, willing to usher in market forces. But political conservatism was much the stronger pole for Deng. He purged Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, liberal leaders, because of their perceived ideological laxity and, most notoriously, ordered the armed forces’ bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.

In the realm of economic policy, his objective was not to give birth to a capitalist economy but to harness the power of trade and investment to strengthen China. Deng’s flirtation with markets was thus purely instrumental. It was his vehicle, not his destination. So even as China’s wealth multiplied, Deng’s economic reforms remained incomplete. To this day both the rule of law and capital markets are subordinated to the party. Indeed, the successful growth of China’s private sector made for a paradox: the better it did, the less incentive that Deng or his successors had to alter the statist heart of the economy. Deng had ensured that the party would hold on to what Lenin called the “commanding heights”, with state control over finance, energy, telecommunications and transport. Mr Xi has made use of those heights—for example, choking off credit to China’s once-mighty property developers and pouring vast sums into the development of semiconductors. He has shown that the private sector, no matter how prosperous, must bow to his vision of the future.

In this telling, the biggest difference between Deng and Mr Xi is one of circumstance. Deng was determined to rebuild the party and the country after Mao’s erratic tyranny had left both in disarray. At the same time, he was constrained in how far he could push. Other leaders with revolutionary pedigree dating back to the founding of the People’s Republic were still on the scene and able to counter Deng. Mr Xi’s diagnosis is that he has to rebuild the party and the country after economic success left them flabby and ill-disciplined. As for rivals, he has faced fewer constraints than Deng. In the decades before Mr Xi’s rise, a balance between factions had led to stability, even stasis, among the party’s elite. Mr Xi has proven that a tough leader can bulldoze through that.

In Mr Pei’s view, Deng would look at China’s current situation with some envy: “He would have loved to act like Xi Jinping.” Mr Xi has built up China’s industrial and military muscle, just as Deng had wanted, all the while reinforcing party dominance. Detractors say that Mr Xi has taken China backwards. But the real issue is that Deng and his successors never took China as far forward as some optimists had once believed. ■