Special Report: Cables show U.S. sizing up China's next leader

By Paul Eckert


WASHINGTON
Thu Feb 17, 2011 1:29pm EST

(Reuters) - What does the United States make of Xi Jinping, the man widely expected to take over from Hu Jintao late next year and lead China for the next five or 10 years?

An unpublished WikiLeaks batch of U.S. diplomatic cables portrays the 57-year-old Xi as untainted by corruption -- he is referred to as "Mr Clean" -- and disdainful of China's nouveau riche and consumer culture.
He is also depicted as an elitist who believes that the offspring of Maoist revolutionaries are the rightful rulers of China. His father was a major Communist leader who fought alongside Mao Zedong and helped implement Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms.


On human rights, the cables leave the question open. They note that Xi's father was critical of the military crackdown against Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989 and that the Dalai Lama had "great affection" for the elder Xi.

The cables, which Reuters obtained through a third party, trace Xi's rapid rise from provincial official to national leader, covering a period from October 2006 to February 2010. They are based on conversations with numerous Chinese sources -- scholars, senior journalists, businessmen, relatives or friends of senior officials and the occasional government official.

There are very few fly-on-the-wall accounts of meetings with Xi or other top
There are very few fly-on-the-wall accounts of meetings with Xi or other top leaders, and none since he rose to national-level power in October 2007. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this cache of roughly 1,000 pages of cables is the window they provide into official U.S. efforts to size up Xi, the likely next leader of the world's most populous country, second largest economy and America's most important -- and complicated -- bilateral relationship.


What emerges is not a coherent biography. Rather, the documents contain granular details -- Xi likes Hollywood World War II movies for their "grand and truthful" tales of good versus evil, and wishes Chinese films would promote such values -- that the diplomats offer as potential insights into his character.

Aside from basic biographical information and background included to provide necessary context, this report relies solely on the content of the cables.

THE PRINCELING

Who is Xi Jinping?
He was born in 1953 as the middle child of Xi Zhongxun, a first generation Chinese Communist revolutionary comrade of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, who rose to deputy prime minister.


As party boss in the southern province of Guangdong from 1978-80, the elder Xi (pronounced "she") implemented China's first experimental "economic zone" in Shenzhen, a key element of reforms that have propelled China from a dirt-poor land to an economic giant.

His status makes his son, in Chinese parlance, a "princeling": an informal grouping of an estimated 200-300 descendants from top Communist revolutionaries whose careers and fortunes are built largely on their family name.

Eventually, Xi's relatively liberal father fell victim to one of Mao's purges in the early 1960s. He was sent to the countryside and later jailed. His son, like many youth in his generation, was also "rusticated" -- sent down to the countryside -- for seven years. The punishment included farm work.
joined the Communist Party in 1974, while his father was still in one of Mao's jails, and steadily rose through its ranks. Xi joined the People's Liberation Army and worked as a secretary to the then defense minister while on active duty at the powerful Central Military Commission.

Xi studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing from 1975-9 and then served a long stint as a party official in poor rural areas of Hebei, the northern province that surrounds Beijing.


From the mid-1980s, Xi then shifted to the fast-growing export powerhouse provinces and cities on China's southeastern coast. In quick succession he rose to the top of the government in Fujian, then Zhejiang province, becoming Communist Party secretary there in 2002.

In 2007, he was named party secretary in Shanghai, sent in to mop up after his predecessor was jailed and disgraced in a massive scandal over misuse of the city's social security funds. After a short stint in Shanghai, in the fall of 2007, Xi was elevated to the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party Central, ranking 6th on the elite nine-member group that rules China.

He was appointed China's vice-president in March 2008. In October 2010, he added an important political title seen as a strong indication that he will succeed Hu: Vice Chairman of the Communist Party's Central Military Commission

CABLES SKETCH CHINA'S SYSTEM


Hu Jintao and Xi come off as competent and honest in comments by Chinese business, media and academic sources quoted in the cables.

"Hu was untouchable from the corruption standpoint in that he, his wife, his son and his daughter were all clean," the diplomats quoted a Chinese executive of a U.S. investment bank as saying.

Xi was likewise referred to as "Mr Clean," having refused a 100,000 renminbi ($15,180) bribe offer during his time working in Fujian province's port city of Xiamen, site of brazen smuggling scandals in the late 1990s.

"Xi has no need to risk taking bribes given the amount of money his wife, a famous singer, pulls in," said the investment banker. Xi's 48-year-old wife, Peng Liyuan, sings syrupy folk songs with a People's Liberation Army troupe.

In contrast to Xi, several retired senior leaders do not fare well in the cables.

The investment banker "noted that the base rate to purchase influence" with one

powerful elder was around 500,000 renminbi ($76,000 dollars), while it cost only 50,000 renminbi for influence with a retired minister of lower rank.


The men in question were associates of Hu's predecessor and party chief and state president, Jiang Zemin. Although retired and in his 80s, Jiang's meddling and maneuvering to protect or promote his family and followers -- and Hu's efforts to rein in Jiang's influence -- are a theme of many 2006-7 cables.

In revenge for the sacking on corruption charges of Shanghai Party Secretary Chen Liangyu, Jiang's people tried to set up a minister regarded as a Hu protege with a woman but he refused the advances, said the investment banker. (Another source said the minister did have a relationship with the woman in question.)

Jiang's allies then tried get that woman to seduce the minister's son and arranged a transfer of 500,000 renminbi ($76,000) into the son's bank account. "By the time the son realized that there was a large sum of money of unknown origins in his account, the matter had already been turned over to the Minister of public Security for investigation," read the cable.

They then forced the minister to resign as the price for closing his son's case, said the investment banker.
Relations at the party's top echelon are "akin to those in the executive suite of a large corporation, as determined by the interplay of powerful interests, or as shaped by competition between princelings with family ties to party elders and 'shopkeepers' who have risen through the ranks of the Party," said a cable from July 2009, citing conversations with a source with family connections to senior leaders.
Shopkeepers is a derogatory term the offspring of revolutionary leaders use to describe those without elite party family backgrounds, a fellow princeling who befriended Xi as a teenager told diplomats.


"While my father was bleeding and dying for China, your father was selling shoelaces," the friend, who now lives outside China, quoted one of his peers as saying.

A senior Chinese journalist likened Hu to chairman of the board or CEO of a big company, where some issues are put to a vote, and others are discussed until consensus is reached. "Hu Jintao holds the most stock, so his views carry the greatest weight," said the journalist.

The party "should be viewed primarily as a collection of interest groups" with "no reform wing," a second well-connected journalist told the U.S. diplomats in December 2009. "China's top leadership had carved up China's economic pie,
creating an ossified system in which vested interests drove decision-making and impeded reform as leaders maneuvered to ensure that those interests were not threatened," a diplomat wrote in a synthesis of the journalists' views.


Retired, and in some cases active, leaders and their families had taken firm control of sectors such as electric power, oil, banking, real estate and precious gems and they opposed media openness, fearing the scrutiny this might bring to their activities, it said.

"The central feature of leadership politics was the need to protect oneself and one's family from attack after leaving office," said the cable.

"Ever since the 1989 Tiananmen protests and the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, a number of party elders have been pushing to place their progeny atop the party, believing that only their own offspring can be trusted to run the party," a diplomat wrote in a cable after conversations with a party think tank scholar.

Hu, a "shopkeeper" in the view of princelings, has run into resistance in trying to rebalance growth from the fast-growing coasts to the poorer inland provinces
under his otherwise uncontroversial policy platform, formally called the Scientific Development Concept.


The most important factor frustrating Hu is "the power of retired cadres and their princeling sons and daughters, many of whom have become China's vested interests, controlling major sectors of the economy and opposing the SDC, particularly its notion of redistributing wealth to more backward areas," said the party think tank scholar.

AMBITION, CONNECTIONS, HUMILITY

The friend who knew Xi as a teenager was quoted by U.S. diplomats as describing Xi as "extremely pragmatic and a realist, driven not by ideology but by a combination of ambition and self-protection."

The friend, who shared Xi's background as the son of revolutionary leaders but moved abroad, said Xi had his "eye on the prize" from the very beginning and mapped out a career plan very early in his life.

The network and reputation of Xi's father gave Xi broad support in the party. The misfortunes Mao's 1966-76 Cultural Revolution visited upon Xi's family did not alter his career choice or direction, the friend said, noting that Xi joined the party in 1974 while his father was still in prison.

Xi was exceptionally ambitious and, with "promotion to the center in mind from day one," chose to start his Party career in hardscrabble Hebei province as a calculated move to get experience in the Chinese countryside and broaden connections.


The friend told the U.S. diplomats that while many of Xi's peers became alienated from the Party as a result of the Cultural Revolution and mainly sought to enjoy life -- women, drinking, films -- Xi did none of those things.

"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,'" the friend was quoted as saying.