When Xi Jinping, China's new leader, appeared in public for the first time after being appointed on Thursday, the last major world power ruled by a Communist Party gained a new, human face, writes Jonathan Fenby.
in contrast to his predecessor, Hu Jintao, who always seemed to be reciting an officially approved text, the stocky, 59-year-old Xi seemed to speak with genuine personal feeling of what needs to be done in this nation of 1.3 billion people.
He talked of people's desire for a better life, for better jobs, education and health care – and for less pollution. He flashed his chubby smile unlike the ever dour Hu. His slightly bearlike stance contrasted with the ramrod backs of the Communist Party elite standing with him on the stage in the cavernous Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
There was even an impromptu element in an unexplained hour's delay in starting this final event of the week-long Communist Party Congress which has installed the country's new leadership.
Some observers with long memories of the old Soviet Union compared it to the early appearance of Mikhail Gorbachev as he sought to move the USSR towards a more relaxed and responsible system. But any comparison with Gorbachev would be an anathema to Xi and his colleagues – Gorbachev is a dirty name in China as the man who relaxed the Party's grip and brought disaster down upon it.
Therein lies the basic paradox as China moves into the Xi Jinping era.
On the one hand, its leaders acknowledge the major challenges facing them but, on the other, they are extremely reluctant to alter the power structure or the reliance of economic growth which have produced many of these problems. Meanwhile they indulge in backstairs politicking worthy of any Western party.
They fear that political reform would bring the whole edifice tumbling down, Gorbachev style. They stress Party unity above all, particularly since the drama surrounding the fall of the maverick politician, Bo Xilai, who crashed to earth this year accused of crimes, corruption and womanising after the mysterious death of the British businessman, Neil Heywood, in his southwestern fiefdom of Chongqing – but whose real sin was to have emerged as a challenger to the consensus machine that runs the People's Republic.
The bureaucracy and powerful vested interests, especially in the huge state sector of the economy, oppose reform that could affect their privileged positions. Popular protests, running to some 150,000 a year, have been met by an expansion of spending on state security, now larger than the military budget. Media are tightly controlled and censors patrol the internet.
While individual liberties have greatly increased, anybody who tries to organise political opposition is likely to end up in jail, as in the case of the Nobel Peave Prize winner, Liu Xiabao who is serving 11 years for having organised a petition in favour of democracy. Xi may smile for the cameras but this remains an iron-fisted regime which has control in all forms at its heart.
Yet, outside the serried ranks of delegates in the Great Hall of the People, everyday life in Beijing and across China went on last week in a way that takes as little account as possible of the ruling autocracy. Rather than Communism or Confucianism, the "ism" that rules in today's China is materialism. Having had a terrible 30 years under Mao, the Chinese have grasped the opportunities of market-led economic reform with both hands.
Their consumption has become a major force in driving the world economy.
They see life in down-to-earth terms of material betterment, epitomised by the young woman who said on a television dating show that she would "rather cry in the back of a BMW than laugh on the back of a bicycle".
Economic growth has changed society radically. Social media runs rings round the censors. Corruption and poorly enforced safety standards, notably for food, has bred widespread cynicism and distrust.
When a magazine reporter asked primary schoolchildren what they wanted to be when they grew up, most said they dreamed to becoming rich business people, pop idols or sports stars. But one six-year-old replied that she wanted to be an official. "What kind of official?" the journalist asked. "A corrupt official because they have all the nice things," came the reply.
One joke after the Congress appointed a senior figure to head an anti-graft campaign was that he had been chosen because he had no children who had profited from his position.
Until recently, foreign travel was a rarity but now 70 million Chinese travel abroad each year. Western hotel chains lay on Chinese breakfasts.
Smart London stores have cash machines from Chinese banks. Chinese visitors take the train from London to snap up bargains at the Bicester Village factory outlet centre and make the pilgrimage to the Somerset village of Street to visit the museum there dedicated to Clarks shoes, which are all the rage in the People's Republic.
Fees from Chinese students boost university funding in Britain, Australia and the United States; Chinese leaders may extol the riches of their country's culture and civilisation but they often send their children to study abroad – Xi Jinping's daughter is at Harvard under a pseudonym and Bo Xilai's son also studied there after having gone through Harrow School and Oxford.
The disjunction between the opaque, hermetically-sealed one-party system and this rapidly evolving society is the main challenge for the regime. For all his apparent normalness on Thursday, Xi's steady rise through the ranks of the provincial bureaucracy to power at the centre as Communist General is symptomatic of how things actually work in China.
This is not the meritocracy which China boosters proclaim as being superior to messy Western democracy. You only move up the ladder in China if you belong to the Party, and that covers only 6 per cent of the population. How you rise certainly depends on your performance, but also on your contacts.
Xi is the son of a revolutionary general who was purged in the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 – the young Xi was "sent down" to the countryside where he lived in a cave and looked after pigs. When his father was rehabilitated as Deng Xiaoping launched economic reform at the end of the 1970s, the son worked for a prominent general and then rose through administrative and Party posts in booming coastal provinces.
Friends from early days describe him as "supremely pragmatic and a realist" and also as "exceptionally ambitious".
What was the key to his rise to the top? He is a man with whom the various interest groups on the Chinese totem pole feel comfortable, the consensus choice in a regime which has evolved from the wild adventurism of the Mao Tse-tung era into a management system that happens to be running a country of 1.3 billion people rather than a big company.
We know something of his personal life. He likes American war films because the good guys win. He exercises by swimming. His first marriage broke down and his second wife is a highly popular folk singer who is major-general in the army entertainment corps but who retreated from the limelight as her husband rose to the top.
She says she picked him for his "inner qualities", describes him as frugal, hard working and down to earth and adds in perfect wifely fashion: "When he comes home. I've never thought of it as though there's some leader in the house; in my eyes, he's just my husband."
Having followed a conventional route to the top within the Party bureaucracy, Xi is unlikely to go off message. Though he is now the top man in an autocratic system the dictatorship which rules China is that of the Communist Party and its state, not that of an individual – and the party state is a complex animal.
The jigsaw of powers encompasses the political machine, reaching down from the leadership compound beside the imperial Forbidden City in Beijing to every village in the land.
All companies of any size have a Communist cell which has to approve important decisions. The bosses of big state enterprises, who have on their desks a "red telephone" connecting them to Party officials, are as powerful as ministers. The Party runs its own Discipline Commission which can pick people up at will, and hold them for six months without charge in a secret location.
The national military force is called the People's Liberation Army (PLA) but is, in fact, a tool of the Party – the chairman of its supervisory commission is the Communist General Secretary and powerful political commissars ensure it is kept in line.
But the power structure can no longer simply assert its will, as it did under Mao and in the massacre of protesters and ordinary citizens in Beijing on June 4, 1989, when the regime used the PLA against its own people around Tiananmen Square.
The Congress in Beijing, meeting within a stone's throw of the scene of the killing of student protesters 23 years ago, claimed the Party to be the one true representative of the Chinese people but those people are no longer marching to the beat of a single Party drum – not to mention the dozens of Tibetan monks who have burned themselves to death this year to show their rejection of Chinese rule.
So Xi has a tricky task ahead of him at home while abroad he has to work out how to deal with Beijing's scratchy relationship with Washington under the second Obama administration and, closer at home, is faced with an array of disputes with other East Asian states, including Japan, over conflicting claims to maritime sovereignty. Though China is anxious to project its power more strongly, particularly by building up its navy, the new leadership's main concern is with the domestic situation. China's growth inspires shock and awe leading some to see China ruling the world.
Never have so many people been pulled out of absolute poverty in such a short space of time than in the People's Republic since Deng Xiaoping launched economic reform in 1978. Never has a relatively poor country has such an effect on the global economy or built up foreign exchange reserves of more than £2 trillion.
But behind that achievement lie the problems Xi pointed to on Thursday and many more he did not identify.
The economy, though still growing much faster than in the West, is slowing down and needs rebalancing towards consumption and away from infrastructure, property and exports – a tricky process when the population has grown accustomed to runaway expansion.
The country will not collapse as has been predicted by China bears for more than 10 years. Its unique system of bureaucratic capitalism and a command economy has staved off the bad consequences that orthodox economics has repeated forecast. But that has come at a big price for its citizens.
For them the power-broking at the Congress was irrelevant. Growing wealth, albeit very unevenly distributed, has spawned a new society which the regime is hard put to contain. Xi will need his popular touch in the years to come; his problem is that, as a child of the system, he is likely to be unwilling, and probably ill-equipped, to steer the country's further evolution to the fairer, more relaxed society that would provide the safety valves to avoid the kind of upheavals which have marked so much of China's turbulent history.
from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9685141/Can-Xi-Jinping-bring-about-the-change-China-needs.html
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习近平能带来中国所需要的变化吗？以共匪的本性来说，这当然是不可能的。