The Political Thought of Xi Jinping - by Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung
ISBN: 9780197689363Date read: 2025-04-29
How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
(See my list of 360+ books, for more.)
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Shares the stated and implied policy of China’s president
my notes
Xi has largely kept the hardware of the CCP system in place. He has replaced or substantially upgraded the operating system, however.
PRC history using digital terms:
1949 Mao era = OS 1.0
minor updates over 25 years.
1978 Deng Xiaoping reform era = OS 2.0
updates under Deng, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao
2012-present = OS 3.0 = “Xi Jinping Thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era”
Xi wants to change the Party, the country, and the people. This is in contrast to the relatively modest and pragmatic approach of Deng Xiaoping, who merely advocated “crossing the river by feeling for stones” in his era of “reform and opening up.” Deng’s experimental approach required no master plan to guide China in its direction of travel. Xi Thought is the self-updating navigational chart to guide China’s ship of state to its destiny, encapsulated in “the China Dream.”
We distill the vision of Xi Thought into two core elements or ambitions:
1. to create “one state, one people, one ideology, one party, and one leader.”
2. to make China great again and better than any other country in the world.
Since Xi Thought is now the highest guide for policymaking, it is important to take what Xi says into account seriously.
Xi puts ideology and politics ahead of policies. This means that the design, implementation, and evaluation of policies is premised on Xi Thought, which must be considered before policies are made. This ideology-first approach contrasts with Deng’s pragmatic approach, by which policies were made first and then the ideology interpreted to uphold them.
Contrary to Mao’s treatment of Marxism-Leninism and China’s past, Xi is proud of China’s history. No longer a need to underline how “new China” has broken from “old China.” Xi sees the rise of the Communist Party to power in China as rooted in China’s long history and civilization. To sustain that narrative, he conscripts the moralistic, romantic, and rule-by-virtue elements in Confucian thoughts. The CCP is the sole legitimate heir to the Chinese civilization.
Four of Lenin’s principles seem especially influential on Xi’s Thoughts on how to organize and manage the CCP.
1. lower levels submit to upper levels and the whole party submits to the central party leadership to ensure strong party unity and discipline.
2. CCP remakes society according to their values rather than being transformed by society.
3. CCP controls the appointments of all important positions, whether party posts or not.
4. Invest in building the party organization, including penetrating party structures at the grassroots level.
Marx and Mao inspiration:
Zero-sum view of politics
paranoia of betrayal
belief that the Party will decay unless it is subjected to constant rectification
strong national pride
achieve self-reliance from foreign import, assistance, and technology.
concentration of power in the top leader
fusing institutional and personal authority
cultivation of a cult of personality around the top leader
ruthless treatment of enemies
relentless ideological indoctrination the use of the mass line to manipulate public opinion
Legalist and Confucian inspiration:
Legalism equates hegemony and coercion with good governance.
Confucianism beautifies authoritarianism in a moralizing discourse of harmony and hierarchical order.
Everyone must know their roles and play to its script in the “five relationships” that sustain society:
ruler and subject
father and son
elder brother and younger brother
husband and wife
friend and friend
In 2014, CCP published a selection of Xi’s speeches and made reading the book mandatory. Party schools and universities were required to incorporate the book into their curricula. 79 of his speeches from 2012-2014 were published into a book, translated into 33 languages, and spread worldwide.
Xi put forth eight basic guiding principles, called the “eight making-clears”:
1. Modernization of socialism, rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Build a great modern socialist country that is rich, strong, democratic, cultured, harmonious, and beautiful by the middle of this century.
2. The principal contradiction in society is between people’s ever-growing needs for a good life and unbalanced and inadequate development. Put people at the center. All-round development of the individual, and common prosperity of the entire population.
3. Maintain self-confidence in our chosen path, theory, system, and culture.
4. Advance the modernization of the state governance system and capacity.
5. Build the judicial infrastructure and a country based on “rule of law”
6. Build the army into a world-class military that obeys the Party’s command, can fight and win, and has an excellent workstyle.
7. Diplomacy will advance new international relations conducive to common destiny for humankind.
8. CCP is the highest power in political leadership
Xi specified six indicators for the “basic realization of socialist modernization” by 2035:
1. Make China a top-ranked innovative country.
2. Protect people’s rights to equal participation and development. A “rule of law” country, government, and society.
3. Enhance China’s cultural soft power: broad, wide, and deep.
4. Get people to live more comfortably. Increase the middle-income group. Reduce disparities in urban–rural, regional, and living standard, making access to basic public services more equitable.
5. Society full of vitality, harmonious, and orderly.
6. Improve the ecological environment: an environmentally sound China.
Xi’s five criteria for the fulfillment of the China Dream:
1. enhanced material, political, spiritual, societal, and ecological civilization
2. complete the modernization of state governance system and capacity
3. become the leading country of national strength and global influence
4. common prosperity for the entire population: happier, safer, and healthier lives
5. stand mightily among the world of nations and do so in higher spirit.
A mobile app, Xuexi qiangguo — literally, learning from the great power — released by the CCP Propaganda Department, developed by Alibaba Group. Use of the app on a daily basis became a mandatory requirement for all party members, civil servants, teachers, and employees of state-owned enterprises. Covid pandemic interweaved the use of the Xuexi qiangguo app into daily lives in China, substantially increasing its usage.
Consultative Leninism (our term) priorities:
1. Party supremacy
2. Governance reform to preempt public demands for democratization
3. Monitoring and shaping public opinion
4. Economic growth regardless of its previous ideological commitment to communism
5. Party-centric nationalism: national pride in a tightly guided narrative of China’s history
Reform policy implemented by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 led to the significant decentralization of power and created a more individualistic society. Risks economically empowered people and cadres becoming impatient of being politically marginalized. The Party has learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union that this could be dangerously destabilizing.
1. Party supremacy: the country is nothing without the Party. Regime security is China security.
2. Party-centric nationalism: portrays China as a long-suffering victim of the West and especially the United States, and the Party as the defender of China’s honor, instilling a strong sense of pride in the Party.
3. Give China “soft power” and make it superior to the West or liberal democracies.
4. Monitoring and shaping public opinion: putting the people at the center. Mass surveillance to solicit strong consensus anticorruption, antipoverty. Groom people to share one basic outlook and ideology.
5. Economic strength: a China-first approach, insulating the economy from external threat, market discipline over private entrepreneurship.
CCP has centralized authority, absolute discipline, ideological uniformity, organizational resilience, and successful penetration into nonparty structures.
Xi’s anticorruption drive: 3,881,000 cadres were sanctioned by Xi from 2013 to 2021, most being rank-and-file corrupt cadres. Within Xi’s first year in power, 18 “tigers” — corrupt cadres at the vice-ministerial rank or above — were expelled from the Party, stripped of political office, and handed down hefty jail sentences to account for corruption and related offenses. 58,000 cadres had criminal prosecution. Under Xi, by May 2022, 264 tigers had fallen from power.
TV series “In the Name of the People” in 2017, exalts fictional CCP disciplinary investigators for working fearlessly to bring corrupt senior cadres to justice. The series was an instant success.
Party members are required to criticize themselves and their colleagues for shortcomings, and to commit to make amends. The practice is meant to be an annual performance evaluation after an immersive experience of learning Xi Thought via the mobile phone app, Xuexi qiangguo, and ideological campaigns. What matters is that they are aware of the standards required of them, and that they are being monitored constantly. This pressures them into eliminating the deviant behavior Xi wanted to rectify.
The Party leads everything. It provides and exercises effective control over the whole country.
Xi does not trust that people will support the Party by default unless they are being actively guided to do so. For this reason, Xi sees no difference between the Party as a leader and a manager. Setting direction and managing, including micromanaging, are both necessary.
Xi said repeatedly that “our party is so large, and our country, so huge — it is such that if the Party Central lacks the sole authority to make decisions, nothing can be achieved.”
Party Central (dang zhongyang) is consistently mistranslated in English, but Party Central is a flexible concept, which may refer to:
(1) Party Central Committee (200 members, meets yearly)
(2) Politburo (25 members, meets monthly)
(3) Politburo Standing Committee (7–9 members, meets weekly)
(4) central leading small groups
(5) Xi as the core leader
The ambiguity obfuscates the differences between strengthening the Party’s leadership with strengthening Xi’s leadership.
In state-owned enterprises (SOEs), the CEOs are party appointees.
The revised Code of Corporate Governance promulgated by the China Securities Regulatory Commission in September 2018 commands all companies listed in China — including private firms — to “write party-building work into their articles of association.”
Cracking Down on “False Ideological Trends”: Known as “Document # 9” for circulation lists anti-Western sentiments of Xi Thought, including the promotion of separation of powers, multiparty system, universal suffrage, independent judiciary. These ideas dismiss the Party’s leadership. The intent of championing these ideas is regime change, and transplanting the Western political system to China. Western concepts of freedom, democracy, and human rights distort the Party’s worldviews on democracy, freedom, equality, justice, and rule of law.
Xi Thought benchmarks in opposite terms to liberal or Western political ideas, in order to rally the Chinese people to the Party.
It accuses Western countries of rallying behind the United States to implement neoliberalism in Latin America, the Soviet Union, and eastern Europe under the guise of globalization, bringing calamitous consequences on the receiving nations.
One of the goals of Xi Thought is to reshape economic globalization on China’s terms. This includes arresting the spread of Western, liberal, or capitalist governance models to China and developing countries. Xi Thought promotes a state-centric economic system that bolsters SOEs and public ownership.
What Western journalists describe as suppression of press freedom amounts to emancipating the mind from enslavement to Western thoughts, an important step to bolster national self-confidence.
Xi Thought views Chinese history as a useful tool to shape the thinking of Chinese people. He sees facts in history as incidental; interpretation is what matters, and only one correct interpretation is allowed.
The CCP has always been steadfast in its commitment to socialism. Although Xi accepts that the CCP made mistakes, he does not allow any mistake to be deemed ideological. Disallowed: claiming the reform and opening up to have gone too far or have deviated from the socialist direction, or questioning if China is still socialist.
If wrong ideas spread in China unopposed, it will disturb the national consensus on which flag to raise, which path to take, and which goals to pursue.
China’s consultative Leninist is superior because it has achieved two miracles that are rare in the world: rapid economic growth and sustained social stability.
Xi resorts to ancient Chinese governance ideas and systems to legitimize the fact that the CCP, the choice of history, alone knows how to apply ancient wisdom to today’s China. Yet, while Confucian governance ideals are accepted in Chinese society, they bear little resemblance to the ethos of China’s political system under Xi, which is about sustaining the Party’s rule at all costs, not moralistic governance. The turning point for China’s destiny, Xi claimed, was the arrival of Marxism to China, which gave birth to the CCP. If not for the leadership of the CCP, our country and our nation would neither have attained today’s achievements nor global status.
The Party is a communist party not only in name but also in reality by applying itself to improving the livelihood of the poor.
2.76 billion surveillance cameras are in place: two for every Chinese citizen.
By putting cadres from outside the locality in charge, Xi eliminated the tendency for local village leaders to funnel a disproportionate amount of poverty relief to their family and friends. Subsidies were transferred to the recipients’ bank account directly by the provincial government to avoid embezzlement by local cadres.
In 2016, 9.6 million poor rural residents were relocated for the purpose of poverty eradication. They included those living in areas (1) designated for ecological conservation and thus must not be developed, (2) officially classified as inhospitable or prone to natural disasters, and/or (3) too far away from a main road. The local government arranged every step of relocation and postrelocation settlement, ranging from financing the construction of mega resettlement points in the outskirts of cities, recruiting businesses to open factories in industrial parks purposely built to employ the relocated, to managing the farmland left behind by villagers on their behalf.
Beijing assigned 342 well-to-do counties along China’s affluent eastern seaboard to lift 570 impoverished counties in the less accessible western or inland regions out of poverty. These private companies, social groups, universities, and individuals in their jurisdiction had to contribute generously toward poverty alleviation in their paired western counties. This could take the form of setting up satellite factories to hire the rural poor, donating to impoverished villages for infrastructure improvement, stocking the staff canteen with produce from those regions, or other imaginative alternatives. 109,500 private companies contributed ¥106.8 billion (US$15.5 billion) for poverty alleviation. Monitoring its effectiveness did not seem to be a priority.
Xi is not interested in making China socialist at any cost. He does not intend to lead China to a socialist utopia, as Chairman Mao did, regardless of its consequences for the economy. Instead, he believes his brand of socialism will help to maintain economic stability and order, on which he can build an innovative and world-beating economy. This is why in terms of ranking of the top three economic goals, making China’s economy innovative comes first, followed by enhancing economic order and security, before promoting common prosperity.
When we were weak, everyone wanted to sell their technology to us. Now that we are developed, no one wants to sell us their technology. They are afraid that this will make us big and strong. Advanced Western countries have the mentality that training up the apprentice will starve the master to death.
Until China can surpass the West in innovation, its political power is constrained. His plea to Chinese scientists to stretch their limits to innovate appeals to nationalism. If China can independently manufacture technologies in key domains and choke-neck technologies, it will be practically impossible for the West to block it from taking a leading role in making international economic rules for these new technologies:
new generation IT
robotics
aerospace equipment
ocean engineering equipment and high-tech ships
railway equipment
energy saving and new energy vehicles
power equipment
agricultural machinery
Huawei enjoys an unparalleled degree of rapport with and support from the Chinese Government.
By 2020, as the world turned more critical of China following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, he became worried about advanced countries, curtailing the cutting-edge technologies the Chinese economy needs to innovate. To prepare for and, indeed, to preempt such an eventuality, he required his government to devise a “back-up plan for critical industries.” This means ensuring that there is “at least one alternative source” for every important product and material, so that the industrial and supply chains that matter to China can be fully “autonomous, controllable, secure and reliable” within the country.
Xi laid down two “guiding principles” for international engagement under the dual circulation strategy:
1. China should actively cooperate with all countries, regions, and enterprises that are willing to cooperate with it
2. the more China opens up to the outside world, the more it must pay attention to security and focus on enhancing its own competitiveness so that it can become indestructible.
China should enjoy the benefits of accessing the outside world without being vulnerable to such economic integration.
Any Chinese national who has settled abroad and who has been naturalized as a foreign national or has acquired foreign nationality of his own free will shall automatically lose Chinese nationality.
Converting people deemed unpatriotic or disloyal is a lengthy process, using coercion to change their mindset. This allows for a transition, during which people not yet fully converted are required to put up an appearance of loyalty. While Xi ultimately requires wholehearted support for the Party, inculcating widespread submission to the Party is an acceptable transitional arrangement.
Like people anywhere, people in China are preoccupied with getting on with their lives. Left to themselves, they are not predisposed to prioritize “national rejuvenation.” Xi works to change this. Whatever one finds oneself doing, one should always do it for the glory of China.
Xi expects the Chinese diaspora to serve as the Party’s eyes and ears, to open doors for China to acquire cutting-edge foreign technology, and to foster people-to-people connections that can help enhance China’s influence and prestige abroad - and to tell the China story well.
Turning minorities like the Uyghurs into patriotic Chinese is leveling them up, even if they require re-education to understand.
Xi: “We did not invade or bully others or claim to be the emperor or hegemon in the past, neither would we do so in the future.” China’s forceful occupation of Tibet and Xinjiang represented peaceful liberation. China’s war with India in 1962 and its invasion of Vietnam in 1979 are purely defensive acts.
Loving the Party and the nation are the same thing, and something that any hot-blooded Chinese patriot must do.
China is predestined to outcompete the United States, the vilest of capitalist countries, regardless of the setbacks that China may encounter along the way.
Xi asks people in China to consciously struggle against materialism and individualism: moral and social ills that originated in the West.
To ensure young people do not waste time, he requires online gaming companies to enforce restrictions on when under-18s can play video games: three hours per week, no more than one hour per day on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, or public holidays. The entertainment industry should not be a lucrative business but an “ideological battleground” in which the Party must dominate.
China will only ever cover the very basic social service to provide a minimum fall back.
The UN is the highest authority in international affairs should be bolstered. Xi urged all countries to fully abide by the UN Charter and international agreements and laws.
Xi said countries should only form partnerships, not alliances. Nuclear weapons should be completely banned.
Treat all political systems as equals. Democracies are not superior to authoritarian regimes and have no right to criticize the latter, especially on human rights and domestic governance. This implicitly rejects the postwar US global leadership, the US-led alliance system, and the doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” or the “responsibility to protect.”
Xi admitted tacitly that the ultimate yardstick for judging what is legitimate in the world order is not existing international rules and norms, unlike what he stated at the UN, but the Chinese concept of tianxia. He has romanticized it to the point of mythical. Xi’s tianxia worldview prioritizes regime security above all else.
The focus of Xi Thought on soft power is the less developed, less wealthy, and often undemocratic parts of the world. Countries that are more receptive to Belt and Road Initiative. Xi Thought does not make China more appealing to them overall, but it is not ineffective either.