Decoding the visit of the Chinese heir apparent is a fraught business
CHINESE vice-president Xi Jinping was unpacking his bags yesterday after a sweeping 10-day tour of the US, Ireland and Turkey, during which he met president Barack Obama, Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He visited farms in Iowa and Clare, and watched – even played – a little hurling.
The visit was high-profile everywhere he went, and dominated the news in China.
So how much more do we know about the man who is tipped to replace president Hu Jintao as the head of the Communist Party, in a process starting in October? Will he push reform, oversee a gradual transition to democracy, or just keep growing the economy and further entrench the authoritarian government of Hu? No conclusive answer came out of the trip, nor was one expected. But the three-nation tour has given some extremely useful pointers as to what style of leadership we might see in the world’s emerging superpower.
The trip was filled with symbolic aspects that mean a lot to a Chinese public used to having to decode actions and gestures and timings to interpret the course of their government, in the absence of transparency or accountability.
A big symbolic dimension was that it took place on the 20th anniversary of the southern tour by Deng Xiaoping, when the then supreme leader made a visit to southern China, including the soon-to-be boomtown of Shenzhen, and soothed the nerves of those who doubted China’s opening-up and reform policy.
Coming just three years after the massacre of democracy activists centred on Tiananmen Square, which threatened to shut China off from the world again after a few short years of opening up, the southern tour accelerated the process of economic reform while doing little to instigate political reform. Certainly Xi is keen to present a more populist exterior than that of Hu. As well as meeting a phalanx of leaders in the three countries, he caught up with old friends in Iowa, watched an NBA game in Los Angeles, enjoyed Riverdance, and visited Istanbul – 30 events in Ireland and Turkey alone. He also accepted interviews with The Irish Times and Turkey’s Sabah.
The questions and answers were strictly controlled but yielded plenty of useful information and caused a huge stir in China, where people are keen to find out if this heralds a new era of openness, because Hu Jintao does not give interviews.
The postmortem on the Ireland and Turkey stages of the trip was in a lengthy piece carried on the Xinhua news agency by foreign minister Yang Jiechi, “consolidating friendship, strengthening mutual trust, deepening co-operation and boosting common development”. This is the standard jargon to describe these events, but it becomes more pointed later on, striking a hopeful note for Ireland.
“Since the outbreak of the euro zone debt crisis, Ireland has acted aggressively to deal with the crisis and became the first among debt-ridden European countries to register modest economic growth,” said Yang.
Human rights were largely glossed over by western leaders, but this visit was never about substantive issues. It’s important to note that Xi Jinping, while heir apparent to the leadership, is still only the vice-president, and the decisions will continue to be made by Hu for a long while yet.
Xi will now know who to call when Ireland assumes the EU presidency in January, dovetailing nicely with the earliest months of his leadership. This relationship with the Taoiseach will be even closer after Kenny has visited China on a mission that is expected towards the end of next month. There will, presumably, be opportunity to deal with more substantive aspects of the human rights debate then.
So, a successful visit from a Chinese point of view, but one that has merely piqued our interest as to what kind of leader we can expect Xi to be. And caution is always worthwhile when trying to evaluate the arcane workings of the Chinese Communist Party.
Ten years ago, China-watchers were looking at the enigmatic soon-to-be president Hu and wondering if beneath the opaque visage there beat the heart of a liberal. It didn’t turn out like that.