Global News Podcast - What keeps China’s president up at night?

Episode Date: March 17, 2024

A bonus episode from The Global Story podcast. What keeps China’s president up at night? The Global Story brings you one big story every weekday, making sense of the news with our experts around the world. Insights you can trust, from the BBC, with Katya Adler. For more, go to bbcworldservice.com/globalstory or search for The Global Story wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

Hello, this is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service, with reports and analysis from across the world. The latest news seven days a week. BBC World Service podcasts are supported by advertising. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Thank you. Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. Where to Be a Woman is the podcast celebrating the best of women's wellbeing. Listen now wherever you get your BBC Podcasts. Hello, I'm Adam Fleming and welcome to the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

Every Sunday for the past few weeks, we've been publishing an episode of the Global Story podcast here. The Global Story looks at one big story in detail every weekday. You can find us and subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts. In this episode, we're asking what keeps China's president up at night? Xi Jinping has held China's top job for more than a decade. He faces no term limits, no real checks on his personal power. His ideas have already been enshrined in writing in the constitution. He seems to live in a kind of personal political Shangri-La. But there are signs that something is troubling him. His main deputy's just been very publicly diminished.

Two others have vanished altogether. And state security laws have been tightened yet again. So what exactly might Xi Jinping be so worried about? Well, joining me here in the studio is my colleague Celia Hatton, who spent 15 years as a correspondent in Beijing. She's now the BBC's East Asia editor. Hello, Celia. Hello. And also joining us on the line is Rana Mitter, who's presented many BBC documentaries about China. He's a China expert, and his day job is a professor of US-Asia relations at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Hello, Rana. Hello, Adam. Have you ever thought about doing a podcast about time management? Because it sounds like you're very good at it with all those jobs. If I want some of that, Adam, I'll come for tips from you, I think. Oh, thank you. You can stay for the whole episode. Right. So Celia, if we stick with this metaphor of Xi Jinping in bed, maybe asleep, maybe not asleep. I mean, the idea of us knowing his sleep patterns is so far from the reality of what we actually know about him, isn't it? Oh, God, that's so true.

I mean, even down to where he sleeps at night, We don't actually know. Now, the myth is that he lives in a compound right next to China's Forbidden City, right in the heart of Beijing. It's a very carefully guarded compound. From what we think we know about it, it's got beautiful lakes and green rolling hills. And that's where most government leaders are, in theory, live and work. Now, in practice, we think he actually lives in Beijing's northeast corner, kind of far out of Beijing, in a place called Jade Spring Hill, where the top leaders are actually believed to live. So if we want to picture him at night, maybe like staring blinkingly at the ceiling, probably he's out in the northeast corner of Beijing and not the symbolic heart of the city.

Rana, I'm a former British political correspondent, so I'm used to trading in press conferences, interviews, leaks, WhatsApps from sources, lunches with ministers. You China watchers, you get hardly any of that, do you? I think that's absolutely right, Adam. Perhaps 10 or 15 years ago, although China has always been a pretty closed society when it comes to political leaks, there was a political system that had oppositional factions within it. Whoever was the president still had to do a little bit to appease whoever was in the opposite faction to him. And it has always been a him so far. But under Xi Jinping, under the last, let's say, 10, 11 years, it's been increasingly the case that those factions have disappeared. And as a result, the number of people who will maybe put out a bit of interesting news, not of course, in the domestic

Chinese press, which is highly censored, but maybe the newspapers in Hong Kong, or maybe even more daringly, something that's in the overseas Chinese press, that kind of way of looking into what might be happening in those places that Celia mentioned, you know, the housing compounds out in the far northeast or even in the Forbidden City, much, much harder to find these days. And Celia, just to stick with Xi Jinping personally for a bit, what more do we know about his personal life, his domestic life, his inner life? I know very, very little. A few sort of tidbits that are dribbled out here and there. Of course, we know he's married to a very glamorous woman who used to be an opera singer.

He's got one daughter who attended Harvard. She's now believed to be probably back in China, we believe. We know that he loves football. You know, it led to a whole craze in China. I did an entire documentary traveling to the far reaches of China to go to football schools that had been established for poor children in China, because it kind of kicked off this idea that if Xi Jinping likes it, you know, we should all do it. Zhonglian Chuan, they shout. Come on, come on, come on.

But in terms of what he is, what he likes to do, what his enthusiasms are, he seems to be a party man through and through. He rose up through the ranks of the party. He had a very tumultuous childhood. He's the son of a communist revolutionary. He was actually the only Chinese leader who was born after the revolution to come into power. And he had a reputation, even in the early stages of his career, as being someone who was very focused on rising through the ranks. He's not known for a lot of eccentric dinners or fast cars. You know, he didn't really dabble in that.

Rana, just to check, you didn't teach his daughter at Harvard, did you? Because that would be an amazing coup. I'm afraid she, from all accounts, was there some years before I actually turned up on the scene. So I missed out on that. Right. Let's pursue this thesis then. There might be some things that are keeping him awake. If we knew anything about his sleep patterns. Celia, we've got to look for clues then.

One of the first clues was at the end of the big People's Congress meeting, which is sometimes described as China's parliament, often with the word rubber stamping, not real attached to it. And there was something a bit peculiar about this year's edition of that. That's right. One thing that we've traditionally looked forward to for the past 30 years is that there's a press conference. Once a year, China's premier gives a press conference. And over the years, it's become more and more staged. When I was first a journalist in China in the early 2000s, actually, you could go and in theory, get picked and asked a question. That is all over now. You're invited, perhaps, to ask a question. You have to submit

your question in advance. It's all very staged. But it was still a press conference nonetheless, when there was a kind of a wide range of questions asked and answered. Well, this year, it was announced right at the start of the parliamentary season, which was shortened, I should add, that this year's press conference would not happen. And it would not happen right up until 2027. So they've just completely just biffed it out of the park. And so we didn't hear from China's premier. Now, there are two things about this. First, it took away a kind of useful attempt to get some answers out of the Chinese government. And also, it really took away a platform from China's premier. And so again, we're just seeing that Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the party, the president of China, the chairman of

the Central Military Commission, he really is at the top. And so it's kind of served two functions by the cancellation of this press conference. And Rana, people of high rank, an important job in the administration disappearing has been a bit of a theme the last couple of years. It really has. We were saying earlier that it's very difficult to tell what's going on behind the very dark screen that hides the elite level of Chinese politics. Chinese politics at the top level, we see things that we can observe and then try and extrapolate backwards from them. In the last half year or so, we've seen that the foreign minister of China, Xin Gang, was dismissed summarily from his post. The defense minister of China, Li Shangfu,

was also dismissed summarily from his post. Several generals, including some involved in China's immensely important rocket force, which, amongst other things, has to do with nuclear weapons, were also kicked out of their jobs at very short notice. Now, we don't know exactly the reasons why even now, particularly around Qin Gang, the former foreign minister, there were a lot of rumours swirling that, you know, apparently it's to do with personal life. He may have had, it seems, a girlfriend, there may have been a pregnancy

involved, but nothing has ever been officially said about any of these things. So we don't know the details of the whys and wherefores. But what we can say is, look, these things clearly have happened. The dismissals were officially announced by the party. They are on the Xinhua News Agency and other major news outlets from China. And therefore, it's clear that there is something going on inside the top leadership. And the questions that therefore have to be asked are, is it the case that Xi Jinping, as people tend to say, has really managed to arrange all of the leadership chess pieces precisely to do his bidding? Or is there some sense that even now there are disputes about policy that don't lead to a definite change of direction, but suggest

that different personnel can still be shoved out of the way if they don't do what Xi wants? So Celia, does that mean that Xi Jinping might be kept awake by that thing that keeps all political leaders awake, which is potential rivals? Or is it actually disagreements? Or is it actually individual things with each of those people like sex scandals, whatever? Or is it a combination of all those things? Or do we just not know? I'm so confused. We don't know what led to either of these people being biffed out of their posts. Now, in the case of Qin Gang, the former foreign minister, he was thought to be a real protege of Xi Jinping. Fascinatingly, he wasn't just simply

replaced and China went on as normal. He has basically been erased from party history. I was just on the Chinese foreign ministry website yesterday. If you look up the list of past foreign ministers, his name isn't even there. Now, was he some potential rival? I don't think so. I think he's done something. You know, these rumors about this affair and the girlfriend, I think, are so persistent. There's probably something there.

But it seems with Xi Jinping that, you know, when we look at, for example, with the defense minister, another defense minister was put into place. We have a man named Dong Jun. Now, during this past parliament, there were rumors that maybe Dong Jun would also get a second title, that of state counselor. And that would have put him at the same level as his predecessor, Li Shengfu, who got kicked out. That didn't happen. And so it seems that if you think about Xi Jinping sitting alone in his bedroom at night worrying about things, it seems that he's still trying to less also ways in which other people are brought in at the top leadership level to try and, you know, break into that idea of, you know, silent contemplation on Xi's part about what he's going to do next. The number two, in a sense, or at least the one who people often say is a sort of gatekeeper, a figure who actually talks directly to Xi about a lot of these things, is not the Prime Minister, Li Qiang, necessarily, but Cai Qi, another figure who's at that top level. And it's worth noting

that that small group at the top, top seven of whom Xi Jinping is number one, the standing committee of the Politburo, are of course handpicked by Xi. They were brought into the leadership formally at the end of 2022. But also they had their own trajectories and their own interests. Some are interested in economics, others interested in technology, others very much interested in crackdowns on security issues and highly authoritarian politics. And actually, China's sort of most important propagandist, Wang Huning. All these people are around Xi Jinping and all these people, one suspects, input into his thoughts about where China should go next and what he should do next. I'm sure in the end he marches to the beat of his own drum, but these are people who he gets to talk to.

Rana, I'm just picturing your bookcase. It's really impressive in my mind. Right, so we've talked about the political environment that Xi Jinping is operating in. Next, we're going to talk about something that keeps all leaders awake at night, whether they admit it or not, the economy. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Global News, AmeriCast and The Global Story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free. Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership.

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You are listening to The Global Story. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts. Now let's talk about something that probably keeps all leaders awake at some point wherever they are, how their country's economy is doing. Rana, you wanted to point to Xi Jinping's New Year's message as a revealing moment. Absolutely, Adam. So in New Year, this is a Western style New Year, early January, Xi Jinping made a television address, in which he gave sort of state of the union, as you might say, in the U.S., a pretty clear statement of all the things that have been going fantastically for China, which is what those messages generally are about.

But it had one very unusual thing, which was, if not exactly an apology, at least an acknowledgement that things weren't going so well. And so what he's saying there is, along the way, we're bound to encounter headwinds. Some enterprises had a tough time. Some people had difficulty finding jobs and meeting basic needs. And for the General Secretary of the Communist Party to make that sort of concession on national TV was a sign that even he could not avoid the fact that many of the ordinary citizens watching TV at New Year would have felt that life was not going well in terms of the economy. I mean, we talked before about what keeps Xi Jinping awake at night. I think, you know, he may be thinking about this is now obviously just reaching into a mind which I don't know at all.

Let's say a 32 year old single mother who lives in a third tier city, maybe Ningbo in East Central China. You know, she's got a dodgy bank account that has her savings in it, which don't earn as much interest as she'd like. And she's not sure that there might not be a bank crash. She's got a dodgy bank account that has her savings in it, which don't earn as much interest as she'd like. And she's not sure that there might not be a bank crash. She's what's called a fangnu, a mortgage slave in China. In other words, she's putting most of her disposable income into paying for a highly expensive property. But she really needs to make sure she has somewhere to live. As I mentioned, she's a single mother. That's not that common in China these days, but it's much commoner than it used to be.

And she's got a single child who needs to be educated, not free in China. You get free high school at the basic level, but you have to pay maybe for extra tutoring, because the competition for getting through the university exams, the gaokao, as they're called, at the age of 18, are so fierce in China, that it's very much an up or out type of system. And she has to invest in that. And then there are her parents who are basically getting older, China's one child policy has led to a demographic shift that means that China is getting older before it gets richer. All of these things are coming together to make her feel that maybe she wants to, in a phrase that was very common a couple of years ago, Tang Ping, lie flat,

just lie flat on the ground and try and work out how on earth everything's going to work out. That's the person, I think, that Xi Jinping is going to have to be thinking about in terms of working out where is China's economy going? Where did that great growth spurt go? And how on earth can we adapt to a changing new world in which China produces added value jobs rather than manufacturing to get that kind of positive, positive feeling back. And Rana, that imaginary person you talked about could probably keep their heads above water economically when China's growth rate was like double digits, less so when it's single digits, even though it's a single digit, which is much bigger than most Western economies are experiencing. That's absolutely right. I mean, they've talked about a growth rate for this year

of about 5%. Now, if the UK or even the US got a 5% growth rate, they'd be very pleased. The difference is that the COVID pandemic really hit China's economy hard and recovery from that has been less smooth than they would have wanted. And secondly, of course, in the liberal world, if you really don't like the government, you can vote it out and choose something else. The Communist Party has placed not all but a great deal of its legitimacy on the idea that, look, we don't do liberal-style democracy, but we do increase standards of living year by year, decade by decade. Ask your grandparents what they had during the Cultural Revolution

and look at what you have now and be happy. As long as that growth continued, if not always evenly, at least noticeably, that worked quite well. But for many people now, it's no longer evident that they or their children will have a better standard of life than their parents would have done. And that is something that is proving much more difficult to turn into a positive narrative in the China of now.

Celia, Rana there was talking about a kind of nod towards the economic reality. But a lot of your reporting this year has been about the Chinese authorities hushing up the economic reality. That's right. I've spent a lot of time focusing on the missing numbers. So statistics that we used to get, information we used to get from the Chinese authorities that we simply don't get anymore. And the biggest example, or the most obvious example, came last summer, actually, when China abruptly announced that it wasn't going to release its youth unemployment figures anymore. Now, the month before, at the last figure that it had released, it said that 21.3, so about one in five young people were out of work. And that's a really shocking statistic.

Now, as Rana said, you know, many families in China only have one child. And it's really important. All the resources are poured into that child to make sure that child goes to a good university, gets a good job. So to think that one in five are out of work was quite shocking and worrying for many, many families. So the government said, we don't think this statistic is very accurate anymore. We're not going to publish it. And so that led to actually quite an outpouring on Chinese social media, which, as you can imagine, is quite tightly censored. But many peoples uncharacteristically wrote saying how upset they were that the government wasn't releasing this figure.

What were they covering up? That kind of thing. Now, in January, we then had the government come out and say, oh, we've come up with a new way to calculate the figure. Now, of course, it's much lower than before. So it's at 14.7, but still quite high. And so for thinking about what keeps Xi Jinping up at night, there's another thing. They've retooled how to calculate youth unemployment. But still, we have the government suggesting that actually maybe university

graduates should consider working in factories. Right, let's have a conversation now about how Xi Jinping might be feeling about his relationship with other world leaders. One of them, of course, is Joe Biden, US president, who last week gave his State of the Union, where he mentioned China. I've heard many of my Republican and Democratic friends say that China is on the rise and America is falling behind. They've got it backwards. America's rising. We have the best economy in the world. And since I've come to office, our GDP is up, our trade deficit with China is down to the lowest point in over a decade. And we're standing up against China's unfair economic practices.

We're standing up for peace and stability across the Taiwan Straits. I've revitalized our partnership and alliance in the Pacific. I've made sure that the most advanced American technologies can't be used in China. Frankly, for all this tough talk on China, it never occurred to my predecessor to do any of that. I want competition with China, not conflict. And we're in a stronger position to win the conflict of the 21st century against China than anyone else for that matter, than any time as well. Rana, parking the fact that Joe Biden seemed to invent a new measure of economic growth there called GTP rather than GDP. What would Xi Jinping have thought if he'd been watching or listening Joe Biden, hearing the words translated for him, and wondering how

much of this really relates to what he perceives as the way in which the United States has radically changed its policy in terms of dealing with China on issues of both economics and security. So up to probably the turn of the century, let's say the early 2000s, I think it's fair to say that there were lots of areas where the United States and China actually had quite similar goals for different purposes. And perhaps the best example was the US really kind of working hard to get China into the World Trade Organization, which they did in 2001. So you can see that sort of joint effort, which was typical of a time that's now pretty much vanished into thin air. Today, apart from to some extent on climate change, and even that's quite partial, it's very hard to see any areas where actually the two sides really have a mutual and shared interest in that way. And therefore, what I think Xi Jinping will hear is, okay, you're talking

about competition. But what you really mean is to use an old Cold War phrase, containment, but at the same time, from Xi Jinping's point of view, since you know, he is clearly going to be talking about competition. But what you really mean is to use an old Cold War phrase, containment. But at the same time, from Xi Jinping's point of view, since, you know, he is clearly going to be the greatest booster of the idea that China is rising in the world, he will hear Joe Biden's words and basically say, that's not the way that it looks from outside of the fence. Celia, as we come to the end of this episode of The Global Story, any other things that might be keeping Xi Jinping awake at night? It's been alleged that Xi Jinping is out of ideas. So when he first came into power in 2012, he was full of these kind of majestic speeches

where he talked about the Chinese dream, the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, all these kind of really sweeping statements. The big thing that really has been pushed in the past few months is this idea of new productive forces. So this retooling of the Chinese economy to go away from traditional things that have driven the economy to kind of more fancy high-end whiz-bang things, renewable energy, artificial intelligence, that kind of thing. But those aren't the things that are going to create lots of jobs. That's not really going to help our 32-year-old single mother, you know, really make sure that there's food on the table.

And so I think the thing that might really worry Xi Jinping is, well, where's my next big idea? How do I kind of get the Chinese people excited again and get that economic growth up again. So tiredness from being in office so long, not from insomnia induced by lots of domestic and international problems? Well, I think also tiredness, because actually being an authoritarian leader who is running a society where surveillance and keeping a kind of close eye on everyone's behaviour, also making sure that as little free speech, as little opposition to the government as possible is allowed into the public sphere.

All of these things are also very, very time-consuming and very tiring as well. And they also, I think, make things difficult because one of the reasons I think that actually Chinese social media is censored, but not as censored as it might be, is it's one of the few valves left in which people can actually say something about what they think. I think there's an additional problem, which is that essentially there is a real tension between two things that I think Xi Jinping wants to do. And that is between wanting to basically turn China into this renaissance country that's going to be a major

power in the 21st century. And that really demands openness in a whole variety of ways. You need to have free flow of intellectual ideas, intellectual property and thinking across China's borders. You need more investment coming in rather than scaring it off. And you need to be sort of wholehearted and actually in listening rather than tell mode when it comes to international institutions like the United Nations. And China hasn't been very good at any of those things. At the same time, it's also the case that China is looking inward in a big way at the moment. Xi is a product of the Cultural Revolution of the 60s when he grew up. And somehow that seems to have shaped him into the view that if you don't watch out, there's a sort of danger behind every tree, a foreign spy, an internal dissident.

And in fact, China has always been at its best and most productive in the last half century. When it was still an authoritarian state, there's no doubt about that. There were political prisoners and torture and all sorts of things. But there were also attempts to create civil society. There were sort of media outlets that could actually do real investigative journalism. There was social media that had real power and, you know, had feminist movements, had environmental movements, all of that. Most of that has disappeared in the last 10 years. And I think trying to juggle that with being a genuinely

global society, yes, that is a very tiring thing to do, because frankly, I don't think that in that form, it's very easily sustainable. A lot for Xi Jinping to talk about. Oh, Celia, before we go, we know there is one thing that definitely drives him around the band and it is memes of Winnie the Pooh on social media. The rotund, honey-loving bear character. Absolutely, to the point where apparently

the rumour is that he's gone on a diet to reduce his resemblance to Winnie the Pooh. This all came out from when Xi Jinping went to visit the United States and he was seen walking with then President Barack Obama. Good morning. Ni hao. President Xi. And, you know, because Barack Obama is so tall and slim,

and Xi Jinping, especially at that point, was quite rotund and is quite a bit shorter than Obama. Someone released the meme of Tigger walking with Winnie the Pooh. And that just repeated itself over and over and over again, many people. And then it kind of leaked out that the foreign ministry, the Chinese foreign ministry, didn't like Winnie the Pooh pictures being leaked onto social media. And then it just kind of continued over and over again. So yes, Winnie the Pooh is something that Xi Jinping really hates. It's basically been removed from the Chinese internet.

Absolutely. Well, thank you for planting lots of interesting memes in our brains today. Rana, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Adam. And Celia, thanks to you too. Thank you. And thank you for listening. Special thanks today to Corey Chisholm.

He listens in Barrie, Ontario. He wrote to us a while back about China's rise. Hopefully we have begun to scratch your itch on the subject, Corey. Please do keep your emails coming in. Our email address is theglobalstory at bbc.com. And you can also send us a voice note or a text on WhatsApp. Our number is plus 44 330 123 9480. Wherever you are in the world, this has been The Global Story.

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