China Vice-President Xi Jinping speaks during a state dinner at the Iowa State Capital in Des Moines, Iowa Feb.15.
REUTERS
Forty years ago this week, U.S. President Richard Nixon was about to begin his historic journey to China. It was, as Nixon termed it, “the week that changed the world.”
This weekend, China’s smiling president-in-waiting, Xi Jinping, ended his high-profile week visiting the United States. It was a week that intrigued the world.
If the 21st century turns out to be when China rules the world, how will historians in the future remember Xi Jinping’s role?
This week’s American visit by the man who is expected to rule China for the next decade assumed significance well beyond the carefully crafted speeches. Xi, as China’s vice-president, is expected to become leader of the ruling Communist Party later this year and to assume the presidency in March of next year.
Like a “rite of passage,” it was an opportunity for Xi to become better exposed to American ways and to introduce himself to the American political and military leadership, climaxing in a Valentine Day’s visit with President Barack Obama. If Obama is re-elected in November, these two men will form the most important political relationship in the world for years to come.
The current state of relations between the U.S. and China is not good, and that is a dangerous place for the world to be. The Americans are critical of China’s trade policies, suspicious of its territorial ambitions in the South China Sea and, most recently, angry at its veto with Russia of a UN initiative to resolve the Syrian crisis. China, for its part, is alarmed at the buildup of U.S. military resources toward Asia, resentful of what it regards as American “interference” in issues such as Tibet and scornful of how the U.S. conducts its own economic policies.
At 58 years of age, Xi showed his hosts that he is more self-assured and outgoing than the current Chinese president, Hu Jintao. Unlike other Chinese leaders, Xi has a familiarity with the United States, often mentioning a 1985 visit to Iowa when he stayed overnight in the small bedroom of a middle-class family, surrounded by their boy’s Star Trek figures. Xi is said to have a fascination with Hollywood movies about World War II. His wife, Peng Liyuan, is a glamorous and famous folk singer in the People’s Liberation Army, and he has family ties to the West. Xi has a daughter at Harvard University, a nephew at Washington’s Georgetown University and a sister in Canada.
In China, Xi is regarded as a “princeling,” a form of royalty in the Chinese context, experiencing both privilege and resentment as the child of a Communist Party hero. He is the son of Xi Zhongxun, a hero of the Long March who later became a vice-premier. But when he was only 9, his father was banished by Chairman Mao for 16 years. As a teenager, separated from his father, the young Xi was sent during the chaotic Cultural Revolution to live for seven years in a poverty-stricken cave home in northern China.
Describing those years, he once told a Chinese magazine that “I ate a lot more bitterness than most people.” In a U.S. embassy cable made public by WikiLeaks, a professor who knew Xi Jinping well since childhood described him as someone who “had his eye on the prize from early adulthood. Unlike many youth who made up for lost time by having fun after the Cultural Revolution, Xi chose to survive by becoming redder than red.”
During his years as a Communist Party official, Xi has been regarded as anti-corruption, pro-reform and pro-business, including the promotion of foreign investment. He is also noted for plain speaking. While visiting Mexico in 2009, Xi mocked international concern about China’s growing clout: “Some foreigners with full bellies and nothing better to do engage in finger pointing at us. First, China does not export revolution; second, it does not export famine and poverty; and third, it does not mess around with you. So what else is there to say?”
There is much more to say. No country on earth is more complex than China, but its emergence this century as the largest global power seems inevitable.
In historic and epic terms, the ground is moving beneath our feet. Power is shifting from the West — from the United States — to China, in particular, and to other parts of the developing world where the world’s new 21st century economy is taking shape.
Xi Jinping’s journey to what may become the world’s most powerful position will likely be a very central part of all of our lives.
Tony Burman, former head of Al Jazeera English and CBC News, teaches journalism at Ryerson University. tony.burman@gmail.com
Articles
Privacy
