When Wang Huning (王滬寧), a policy adviser to the Chinese president, made a six-month trip to the US in 1988, he returned with notes for a 400-page memoir.
“The Americans care for strength,” he wrote after watching a football game at the US Naval Academy. “There are tactics in football, but, strictly speaking, there are no refined tactics, and the game is mostly about strength.”
“This reflects the American spirit — that is to achieve a goal in a short time with power,” he wrote. “The Americans adhere to this spirit in many fields, like the military, politics, economics and so on.”
As Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) began his first state visit to the US with a day packed with pageantry and diplomacy at the White House, Wang was among a small group of advisers at his side.
A member of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) elite Politburo, Wang, 59, studied US society as a politics professor in Shanghai and an adviser to Xi’s two predecessors. In the process, he got to know US academics and officials.
Yet, people who knew Wang back then say he has become unapproachable and ignores invitations for conversations.
US officials find it difficult to talk to him casually on the sidelines of international forums.
They and other Western officials say that this icy remove is true not only of Wang, but also of other advisers with whom Xi travels, including Li Zhanshu (栗戰書), essentially Xi’s chief of staff, and Liu He (劉鶴), his top economic adviser.
The problem presents a huge challenge for the US and other nations. By some standards, Xi’s administration is the most secretive in 66 years of CCP rule.
In past decades, foreign officials could speak with senior Chinese officials or aides and trust that those people were proxies for their leaders. The most famous example is Zhou Enlai (周恩來), the Chinese premier under Mao Zedong (毛澤東), with whom then-US secretary of state and national security adviser Henry Kissinger secretly negotiated the US-China rapprochement.
With Xi, those channels do not exist.
“One of the problems we have in US-China relations now is that we basically don’t know these people,” said David Lampton, the director of China studies at Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “I don’t think we have a very good understanding of who below Xi Jinping speaks for him.”
The refusal of Xi’s inner circle to develop ties with Western officials is consistent with a fundamental belief that has become widespread in the system in China — namely that Western ideas and influences will undermine the CCP and lead to a “color revolution.”
“If the party thinks it’s besieged by external and internal forces, the natural human reaction is to bring your organization more tightly together to reduce the flow of information to the outside,” Lampton said. “Then you also have the Leninist background of the secret, conspiratorial party.”
There is also broad agreement that Xi keeps colleagues and advisers — especially technocrats in state ministries — at more of a distance than other Chinese leaders did and that he relies mainly on his own knowledge and instincts in making decisions. When he wants to listen, he turns more to party groups.
He is the head of seven of 22 “leading small groups,” opaque policy councils that weigh in on matters ranging from economics to cybersecurity. He also created the National Security Commission, another secretive group that aims to coordinate security policy to defend the party against internal and external threats.
“I believe it is President Xi who is calling the shots,” said Su Hao (蘇浩), a professor at China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing. “He is the paramount leader, and the major policies will have to come from him. Others can only help him during the process.”
“We’re seeing something new with Xi,” said John Delury, an author of Wealth and Power, a book on modern Chinese history. “Never has the gap been bigger between No. 1 and everyone else.”
That Xi keeps a tight grip on authority and does not divest power could be a result of his experiences during the Cultural Revolution.
“The thing they don’t have is trust,” Delury said of that generation.
Others say Xi learned a lesson about the importance of hoarding power after seeing how his predecessor, former Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), was weakened by Jiang Zemin (江澤民), the former president, who kept pulling levers after his retirement.
“It taught him a lot about what not to do,” said Christopher Johnson, a former China analyst at the CIA who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Don’t let these alternative power sources develop under you. Keep everyone a little off balance.”
So under Xi, there is no equivalent of Dai Bingguo (戴秉國), the chief foreign policy official of the Hu administration who met with White House officials. Yang Jiechi (楊潔箎) holds the same title, but the post is diminished.
“We built up an interesting channel between National Security Adviser Tom Donilon and Dai Bingguo,” former White House official Evan Medeiros said. “We knew Dai had a close personal relationship with Hu.”
Center for Strategic and International Studies senior Asia adviser Bonnie Glaser said she has been struck by how US officials who speak with their Chinese counterparts are “not really sure that these messages are getting conveyed up to Xi Jinping.”
Political insiders in China say there are a handful of people whom Xi trusts. Most obvious is Wang Qishan (王歧山), 67, the head of the party’s discipline and inspection commission, who is overseeing Xi’s ambitious anti-corruption campaign. Wang, a House of Cards fan, is one of seven Politburo Standing Committee members and by many accounts wields even more power than Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強).
Li is expected to steer economic policy, but Xi insists on having the final say, political insiders say.
That is in part because Xi is able to turn to Liu He, 63, an economist who has master’s degrees from Seton Hall University and Harvard University.
Liu, head of the office of the party’s central leading group for financial and economic affairs, has written about the need for China to adopt a more consumer-oriented growth model and to embrace market forces.
US officials say he says the same in meetings.
Li Zhanshu, 65, the chief of staff, is perhaps the closest to Xi. Chinese officials often bring into their inner circle other officials with whom they served in the provinces. From 1983 to 1985, Li was party chief of Hebei Province’s Wuji County, next to Zhengding County, where Xi was serving as party chief.
The two “appreciated each other” and “usually drank together,” one person familiar with their backgrounds said.
Both men had fathers who worked for the CCP in its nascent days and Li has written lovingly of an uncle who died fighting for the communists in 1949.
Li climbed the ladder in postings across China, from party chief of the city of Xian to governor of Heilongjiang to party chief of Guizhou. He was appointed head of the General Office of the party’s Central Committee in 2012 after a scandal toppled the powerful man holding that post, Ling Jihua (令計劃). That November, Li was selected for the Politburo.
As head of the General Office, Li is in charge of Xi’s affairs, but he has also been given a central role in policy and diplomacy. In March, Li met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow to prepare for Xi’s visit to Russia, a task that under another president would have gone to a state councilor.
More important, Xi has placed the executive body of the National Security Commission under the General Office and thus under Li. The commission’s executive deputy is Cai Qi (蔡奇), 59, who served with Xi in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces.
Xi also receives informal advice from members of “princeling” households, or families of the original party leaders. One such princeling is General Liu Yuan (劉源), 64, a political commissar in the People’s Liberation Army. Liu, the son of a former Chinese president, pushed an anti-corruption campaign in the military that Xi supported.
“Liu Yuan plays a very important role here,” Johnson said. “He has strong views on the US, not particularly friendly ones. He is among Xi’s guys who promotes that whole ‘color revolution’ style of thinking.”
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