China’s Xi Jinping was re-elected as President for a second (and final) term last week as observers noted a growing ‘leader cult’ comparing him with the communist republic’s revered founder ‘Chairman Mao’. US President Trump, meanwhile, found his recent political reprieve short-lived following announcement of an impending first criminal indictment in the Russia probe.
And, Europe, especially the European Union, watched nervously as Union-member Spain’s rich but rebellious province of Catalonia on Friday announced its secession from the country.
There is little doubt that China’s President Xi Jinping is the third best thing to have happened to China’s politics since Deng Hsiao Peng and, before that great economic reformer, the greatest Chinese reformer of all, Mao Ze Dong. But can our business-suit-clad Xi be credibly elevated to the ‘greatness’ attributed (by most in this world except for rabid fundamentalists and fascists) to ‘Chairman Mao’ whose strategy of social revolution and empathetic leadership inspired social movements across the globe?
I would agree with many analysts that President Xi – who is also General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, the core seat of power – certainly towers above several of his immediate predecessors in his achievements as leader. Most analysts would say that President Xi’s achievement was that he has made the most of the solid political-economic foundation laid for a reformed economic system by the great Deng Xiao Ping.
China was already strong and economically booming when Xi came to power in 2012, but 64-year-old Xi has had the vision to translate that economic clout into a global outreach that has spread China’s influence worldwide on a scale previously displayed only by European colonialism and 20th century US expansionism. Today, China has launched a massive economic ‘Belt and Road’ investment and trade expansion that reaches across Asia and Europe as far as the UK and, across Asia and the Indian Ocean, deep into impoverished Africa – at a cost of US$ 1 trillion!
The sheer scale of this dual infrastructure, investment and trade expansion programme leaves Western politicians and businessmen alike, gasping.
According to reports from Beijing, the national congress of the Chinese Communist Party ended last week with the decision to incorporate “Xi Jinping Thought” as a theoretical discourse on par with the importance given to ‘Mao Ze Dong Thought’. There is a growing genre of Xi Jinping biographical literature, memorabilia and personal historic sites such as the rural caves in which the young Xi lived when he, a middle class student, was banished to the countryside durin g the Cultural Revolution.
The Mao cult certainly performed a role in unifying the Chinese population in the enormous communal endeavour to make socialism the economic and social success it became under Mao Ze Dong. Today, China’s prosperity and might means that such communal endeavours are no longer needed. Instead, booming Chinese capitalism requires – and is driven by – individualist entrepreneurship. This does not need the inspiration of political leaders but the incentive of wealth and social acceptance.
Thus, even as the Xi cult lacks credibility, it is also unlikely to succeed as image-building that serves as a tool for power.
In this sense, it seems as if the propaganda machinery of the Chinese Communist Establishment, and perhaps party-nurtured Xi himself, are using the methods of the collectivist past. It not only seems ludicrously out-dated and impractical, but also betrays the authoritarian style and intentions of Xi and his currently dominant faction of the Party.
Not that Donald Trump would care – immersed as he is (once again) in controversy and scandal.
Last week the US President was to interact amicably with his own Republican Party Senators and House Representatives to plot the successful passage of a sweeping tax reform bill through the US Congress. Instead he found himself having to get back on Twitter and attack two top Senators of his own Party who have beguin publicly denouncing him and questioning his ability to govern.
On Tuesday, the US President headed for luncheon to discuss his tax plan with fellow Republicans. Instead, as an Al Jazeera analyst observed, “the day turned into open civil war between Trump and members of his own party”.
Just before Trump arrived at Capitol Hill, Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker told news media that Trump’s behaviour was “debasing the nation”. A “furious” Trump retaliated on Twitter that Corker would not get re-elected even he contested next year.
That same day, reports Al Jazeera, Republican Senator Jeff Flake lashed out at his President in the Senate itself when he, too, announced that he would not run again in 2018. Flake told the Senate that : “We were not made great as a country by indulging in or even exalting our worst impulses, turning against ourselves, glorifying in the things that divide us, and calling fake things true and true things fake,” according to Al Jazeera.
Then, on Friday, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has been probing Russia’s covert cyber manipulation of the US election system during the last presidential elections, reportedly filed its first criminal indictment with a grand jury in Washington DC. CNN News reported that the grand jury has seemingly accepted the indictment.
However, what the indictment is about and who is being indicted is yet to be revealed with the FBI remaining silent.
American observers speculate that the likely target of this first federal prosecution is Paul Manafort, a free-lance political consultant who had worked for Russian and Ukranian politicians and bubsinessmen for years before taking on the chairmanship of the Trump presidential campaign in its early stages. Manafort had to resign from the campaign when media exposé of his failure to disclose his close dealings with the Russians and their Ukrainian political allies embarrassed the Trump campaign.
However, the US security agencies own surveillance of links between various Trump campaign officials and the Russians (including dealings with the Russian Ambassador in Washington) has prompted the FBI to investigate not only the Russian cyber subversive activity but also a seeming collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign to tilt the election in Trump’s favour.
Was there actually an active collusion between Trump’s people and Russian agents in this very real cyber subversion of the American political system by that country’s main rival power? Was Trump himself ‘in the know’? Did the US president actually try to block the FBI probe by suddenly firing the head of that agency early in his presidency?
Donald Trump now sees his country’s principle law and order agency the FBI closing in on his own political aides and perhaps, himself, as the Russia probe goes deeper into this political scandal.