A former Australian prime minister forecasts that Xi Jinping will stay China’s leader for the next 15 years because he has a family history of longevity and fears losing power.
The brief second tenure of Kevin Rudd as Labor Prime Minister in 2013 coincided with President Xi’s first year in office.
Xi began his third five-year tenure on Sunday before 2,300 delegates at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing.
Rudd, a former Mandarin-speaking diplomat and foreign minister, asserted that President Xi may remain in power until the late 2030s, when he would be in his mid-80s.
Mr. Rudd noted in an analysis piece for the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs that the Chinese President’s late father Xi Zhongxun, a high-ranking Chinese Communist Party official persecuted by revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, lived to the age of 89, while his mother Qi Xin lived to the age of 96.
Dr. Rudd stated that it is likely that Xi will continue to rule the country for the rest of his life, despite the fact that his legal titles may change over time.
His mother is 96 years old and his father survived to be 89.
If his predecessors’ longevity is any indicator, he will likely remain China’s preeminent leader until at least the late 2030s.
Former Australian prime minister’s 420-page dissertation on China’s 69-year-old tyrant earned him a doctorate from Oxford University last month.
Dr. Rudd stated that President Xi, who has coordinated fabricated anti-corruption purges against his possible CCP competitor, feared losing power.
‘Xi is 69 years old and unlikely to retire; as a lifelong student and practitioner of Chinese politics, he is fully aware that he and his family would be subject to punishment from his successors if he were to leave power,’ he said.
President Xi is China’s most powerful leader since Chairman Mao’s death in 1976, as he was able to get the two-term restriction eliminated in 2018, virtually making him president for life.
Rudd said that Xi could employ surveillance technology to maintain control, which would enable him to quell protests in a way that Mao and Soviet Russian tyrant Joseph Stalin were unable to.
‘Xi confronts few political weaknesses. Elements of China’s society may begin to chafe under his increasingly authoritarian machinery,’ he warned.
However, modern monitoring technologies enable him to suppress opposition in ways that Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin could scarcely conceive.
Rudd anticipated China will remain an authoritarian state until after Xi’s death, stating that many of the younger elites were trained in China rather than in foreign liberal democracies.
‘Xi exhibits growing confidence in China’s rising ‘nationalist generation,’ particularly the elites who were educated at home rather than abroad, who came of age during his rule rather than during the more liberal regimes of his predecessors, and who see themselves as the vanguard of Xi’s political revolution,’ he said.
It would be naïve to believe that Xi’s Marxist-Leninist worldview will implode in the short to medium term under the weight of its own internal contradictions.
If political change occurs, it will likely occur after Xi’s death rather than before.
China, under the direction of Xi, has militarized the South China Sea.
President Xi declared in a two-hour speech to the CCP’s 20th National Congress on Sunday that Taiwan, an autonomous democratic island that produces 90 percent of the world’s computer chips, might yet be taken by force.
He told delegates, “We will continue to work for peaceful reunification, but we will never relinquish the use of force.”
We reserve the right to take all necessary steps.
The wheels of history continue to turn toward the reunification of China.
“Complete reunification of our country must be achieved, and it is unquestionably achievable.”
Two years after stifling Hong Kong’s autonomy in violation of a 1984 deal with the United Kingdom to permit self-rule in the former British colony until 2047, President Xi also pledged further repressive measures to govern the territory.
He stated, “We have helped Hong Kong begin a new phase in which order has been restored.”
The leader of the Chinese Communist Party and chairman of the Central Military Commission have likewise committed to continue Covid-zero lockdowns regardless of the economic cost.
“In response to the surprise attack of COVID-19, we prioritized the people and their lives and tenaciously pursued a dynamic COVID zero strategy,” stated Xi.
People’s health and safety have been safeguarded to the greatest extent feasible, and enormously positive progress has been made in both epidemic response and economic and social development.
As a result of Covid limitations, China, Australia’s largest trading partner and a significant purchaser of iron ore used to produce steel, is projected to grow at its slowest rate in almost half a century in 2022.
A Reuters survey of economists predicts an annual growth rate of 3.4% through September.
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