Editorial

Abstract

(...) Xi has garnered such an outpouring of journalistic attention—aptly dubbed of late “Chairman of Everything”—that he would seem to need no further scrutiny. Indeed, the man now holds a startling total of 12 top positions in leadership bodies, five of which were invented since his taking power in late 2012 (or, perhaps that were invented for him). He has placed himself (or has been placed?) in charge of the economy, in a move that eroded the authority of the Premier, the official who in the past managed this sphere of work; he has also reorganised both the military and—at the March 2018 session of the National People’s Congress—the cabinet. In the wake of that People’s Congress meeting, a number of aspects of Xi’s rule have become ubiquitous representations seen repeatedly by anyone who reads about China. These features are: an overweening reach for power and control; a now unquestioned capacity to legitimate his programs and policies by reference to an inchoate “China Dream”; and a near obsessive drive—distinguished by a high degree of repressiveness not seen in some 40 years in China—to keeping society quiescent (...). The papers in this collection challenge this boilerplate delineation in several ways. In the first place, the pieces breathe life into what have become truisms for students and observers of today’s China. They do so as they show how the several urges and objectives we encounter in writing about Xi have–or have not–become instantiated in some of the performances of officialdom. They look not at generalities but at specific areas of politics, and they document a few of the implications and the blowback (in religion) they have engendered. But secondly, and more critically, they interrogate the measure of Xi’s capacity to innovate, as opposed to his ability to intensify. Readers will find that these essays provoke some reconsideration of the role this new “helmsman” (in the mode of Mao), as Xi has been termed, has in fact been able to chisel out in his five-plus years in power so far. The authors of the papers, all political scientists, are newly-minted scholars, recent recipients of the Ph.D. But while they are up-to-date in their analyses and conversant with methodologies and approaches of the present, each of them displays a firm grasp of the history of the field of Chinese politics and of politics in China as they have transpired over the decades (...).