CEO, China by Kerry Brown

Author:Kerry Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics;international relations;Asia studies;economics;history;China;Xi Jinping;Chinese Communist Party
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2016-03-21T15:59:39+00:00

Xi’s thinkers

The sources of Xi’s ideas, and the people who have most impact on his thinking, can be divided into those he has known a long time, and those he has inherited from previous leaders. Chinese leaders live in a vortex of protocol-driven meetings and highly scripted and choreographed encounters with the public and the outside world. Added to this is a barrage of paperwork. Some idea of what his daily routine might be like was issued in a Shanghai paper in October 2014. Up at dawn, and going to bed after midnight, Xi seems to be trying to emulate the infamously punishing work practices of China’s nemesis in the early 1980s, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who got by on four hours of sleep a night. Even with a schedule as driven as this, there is the question of how fresh or new ideas get through, and how thinking ever gets done. Xi probably has a few minutes to take decisions on things ranging from the military to the Party, and from personnel to international issues. He can only survive by delegation, and that includes getting people he trusts to do his thinking for him while he struggles with the daily deluge of being a leader.22

Chief among these intellectual influences is Chen Xi, a classmate of Xi’s in Qinghua in the 1970s, who pursued an academic career for most of his life before being made deputy director of the Organization Department in charge of personnel decisions under Xi.23 Chen, a native of Fujian Province, studied initially at Fuzhou University Technology College before going to Beijing to attend Qinghua University in the chemical-engineering department at the same time as Xi. After returning briefly to Fuzhou, Chen went back to Qinghua and spent most of the next two decades there, becoming increasingly influential in the political and management areas of the elite university. After a year’s study leave at Stanford University in California in the early 1990s, Chen was appointed deputy Party secretary of Qinghua from 1993 and made full Party secretary in 2002. It was while Chen occupied the most senior position at Qinghua that his old friend and colleague Xi completed a doctorate there.24 Serving as Party secretary of Qinghua until 2008, he was then made deputy minister of education from 2008 to 2010, and then, for only six months, served as deputy Party secretary of Liaoning Province before coming back to Beijing in late 2010 to replace the daughter of Deng Xiaoping, Deng Nan, as director of the Science and Technology Commission. Once Xi was elevated in 2012, Chen followed suit, being lifted into the immensely powerful Organization Department to be a vice minister there. Chen is seen as having created a very close bond with Xi while they studied together in the 1970s. If anything, it proves Xi’s loyalty to his old friends, with stories of how graduates of the chemical-engineering department at Qinghua from the mid-1970s onwards would meet informally in Beijing at least once a year for a catch up from 2007, when Xi was back in the capital.

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