Steven W. Lewis
Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), President of the People’s Republic of China, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, is indisputably just such a “world-historic personage.” To see how powerful he is, one need only look at China’s main state newspapers in recent years to see days when the entire front page was covered with stories about what Xi Jinping thinks about this issue or that policy, or watch state television news to see report after report about Xi Jinping’s speeches and travels throughout China. Xi is widely believed to be China’s new leader for life, having eliminated or marginalized his rivals at the top of the party, so much so that he has no obvious successors, and he has already paved the way to become general secretary for at least a third five-year term at the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in November 2022. Xi has directed state propaganda to refer to him as the ideological “Core Leader” of the Chinese Communist Party, thereby creating the perception that he should be viewed as the legitimate ideological successor of the People’s Republic of China’s greatest leader, Chairman Mao Zedong, originator of the Chinese Marxism known as Maoism. Unlike his predecessors at the 80th and 90th anniversaries of the founding of the CCP, who gave their addresses in the nearby gigantic Great Hall of the People, on July 1, Xi took full advantage of the COVID precautions requiring large gatherings to be held outdoors to hold his centenary speech looking down from atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace, wearing the same grey Sun Yatsen suit that Mao was wearing in the giant portrait hanging just below him. He looked out across tens of thousands of cheering party members in the giant square below to the enormous Mausoleum of Mao in the distance. Observing all of this outsized pageantry and brutalist symbolism must make learned Chinese Marxists wonder, however—following Marx’s famous invocation of Hegel’s notion of the role of historic personages—is Xi Jinping the tragedy, or is Xi Jinping the farce?
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