China's Great Leap Outward

Xi Jinping’s legacy may depend on an ambitious, expensive, but patched-together infrastructure program

- Howard W. French

During Xi Jinping’s first five years in office, it’s become a journalistic commonplace to describe him as the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.

The signs and trappings of his immense clout are indeed apparent almost everywhere one looks in China. He’s mounted a sweeping but opaque crackdown on corruption, whose rich and powerful targets lend the campaign the appearance of a vendetta against potential sources of resistance within the system, real or imagined. He’s almost completely usurped the role of Li Keqiang, his prime minister, a post whose historical function has been to run the economy.

Beyond that, Xi personally chairs almost all the so-called leading small groups, the secretive, intimately sized consultative bodies where big policy matters get decided. He’s also systematically downgraded rival power structures, such as the Communist Youth League, which once incubated leaders for a system based at least informally on the notion of alternation between competing ruling factions.

As if this weren’t enough, Xi has overseen the construction of a personality cult, with his image and propaganda extolling his many merits already all but inescapable. Going into the 19th Congress of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, which opens on Oct. 18 (page 34), Xi is said to have won a reworking of the country’s constitution and rules of leadership succession to accord him an exalted place in history, as a near-peer of Mao and Deng Xiaoping, and to allow him to stay in power well beyond the 10-year tenures that have been the norm since Deng’s time.