The mystery of Hu Jintao’s exit and China’s hidden tensions

A single image from last week’s Chinese Communist Party Congress underlined “the utter ruthlessness of Xi Jinping’s pursuit of absolute power”, said Con Coughlin in The Daily Telegraph. It was the sight of Hu Jintao, Xi’s predecessor as president of China, being “reluctantly but firmly escorted from the closing ceremony”.

Was Hu taken ill, as officials claimed? Or, more likely, was he being humiliated, symbolically purged? Either way, the Congress was “the crowning moment” of Xi’s autocratic rule, as he began a third five-year term. That in itself is unprecedented in recent history: after Mao Zedong died in 1976, a two-term limit was imposed to ensure no leader could repeat his tyranny. But the Party lifted the ban in 2018, allowing Xi to stay in power for life, should he wish to.

And it looks like he does, said Cindy Yu in The Spectator. The new Politburo Standing Committee – the seven-member inner cabinet of Chinese politics – has been “packed with Xi acolytes”. The premier Li Keqiang, Hu’s former protégé, has been demoted after daring to query the cost of Xi’s draconian zero-Covid strategy. His replacement will be the Shanghai party secretary Li Qiang, whose “boneheaded dedication” to China’s lockdowns has recommended him in Xi’s eyes.

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Image of total consensus

The Communist Party’s propagandists try to project an image of total consensus, confirming Xi’s “absolute control and unquestioned wisdom”, said Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. But there’s a “ferment beneath the carapace of Confucian harmony”.

Great tensions are growing: an estimated 1.4 million people were arrested in the run-up to the Party Congress, to guarantee its “security and stability”. Xi’s zero-Covid policy, which places “entire cities under a form of house arrest”, is widely hated, particularly by young people. The birth rate is steadily declining, despite Xi’s efforts to avert demographic disaster by reversing Mao’s one-child policy.

China is facing “stagnation and deterioration”, said David Von Drehle in The Washington Post. Xi is sitting on a “debt bomb”, and the country’s overheated property sector is in crisis. The workforce is ageing, and the economy is “stalling”: it’s no coincidence that China has abruptly stopped publishing its economic data.

Xi is ‘an old man in a hurry’

All this may only make Xi more dangerous, said Mark Almond in the Daily Mail. Now 69, he’s “an old man in a hurry and determined to leave a lasting legacy of Chinese supremacy”. The obvious flash-point is the “island democracy” of Taiwan, which the US navy thinks Beijing could invade as early as next year.

Whether or not that happens, China’s direction of travel under Xi is clear, said The Observer. His “personality cult” is entrenched, and his speeches at the Congress show that he sees the outside world as an “increasingly hostile” place. “His vision for China suggests more repression at home, more state interference in the economy – and aggression abroad.”