Far from the streets of downtown Beijing, adorned these days with hundreds of red flags, a dusty avenue opens up. Here, in Ma Ju Qiao, south of the capital, dozens of migrant workers, one of the lowest echelons of those who live in the city, gather at dawn, waiting for someone to come and hire them. Arrived from rural areas, they are rude men who do everything and at the first opportunity they offer you a cigarette, they jokingly ask you about the size of your penis, they laugh out loud and squeeze your hands with their calloused palms.
One of them, a small and lively guy, has a Mao Zedong button pinned to his shirt. “He did great things for the country,” he smiles. And then he lists the most important leaders of the People’s Republic, according to his criteria: there is Mao, then Deng Xiaoping, architect of the years of reform and opening, and also Xi Jinping, current president, general secretary of the Communist Party and president of the Central Military Commission. He only mentions positive things about him, such as the New Silk Road, a strategy that he defines with a long circumlocution that the interpreter translates: “A mathematical formula in which China wins.”
In the official imaginary, signed by the Communist Party, Xi has risen to the top of the great leaders who have shaped the country. After 10 years at the head of the state machinery, his figure has become omnipresent. His thoughts have been fixed in the Constitution, they are studied at universities, children quote his words at school when raising the flag, the propaganda organs broadcast innumerable speeches. Some analysts say that he is the most powerful man on the planet. And it is very likely that he will remain so until at least 2027: according to the planned script, next week he will be re-elected for a third term at the XX Congress of the Communist Party, the great five-year political event that begins on October 16.
At the meeting, Xi is expected to outline some of Beijing’s guidelines for the coming decades in an increasingly turbulent and withdrawn world. Will there be greater openness or growing nationalism? How far will it squeeze the tech giants? What will happen to Taiwan? Many also await signs that illuminate the end of the zero covid strategy that keeps the country in a chrysalis, but that Beijing defends despite the fact that much of the world has turned the page.
While the West is wary of the growing cult of personality and authoritarian drift, many in China see Xi as a leader who has raised morale. “I felt proud,” says Deng Libo, 45, another of Ma Ju Qiao’s migrant workers, about his experience on the front lines of the battle against covid-19. Deng, originally from a farming village in Jilin province, spent a few days in the summer a dai (great white, in Chinese) as the uniformed army with PPE is known, the executing arm of the anti-pandemic strategy.
Deng is a strong man, he wears a T-shirt with a skull and when he laughs he shows yellow teeth that look like grains of corn. He leads to his house through unpaved streets. He lives in a room that only fits a bed and a chest of drawers, surrounded by dozens of similar rooms. He asks to speak softly so as not to wake up those who work night shifts.
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
subscribe
When a confinement is decreed, which can happen at any time, the dai, faceless beings who have often been the object of public fury, the incarnation of the power that orders the confinement of blocks and sends the positive ones to quarantine centers. They are also called “white devils”, says Deng, who has suffered moments of “aggressiveness”. He was hired for about 500 yuan (about 72 euros) a day to work in a confined block in Beijing in early summer: the wave of omicrons that caused the closure of Shanghai threatened to paralyze the capital. But Deng defends this strategy against the Western one: “In our country it is different.”
Not everyone agrees. Jazz sounds in a local in Beijing, the bartender shakes the shaker and a 37-year-old publicist from Shanghai who lived more than 70 days of “nightmare” locked in his apartment in a 37-story block, smokes a cigarette while shooting: “We all know who is screwing our lives.” He does not pronounce his name, he refers to him as “the man we all know” or similar expressions, but he avoids saying Xi Jinping, almost as a reflex action of those who talk about him on the internet, but avoid his name to bypass censorship.
The publicist prefers to give a fictitious name to avoid problems: Celvin. “She’s stupid,” he says about pandemic policy. And he does not believe that things will change soon: “This is no longer just about coronavirus,” he says. “She has given certain people certain privileges.” And, according to him, it is difficult to let that power escape.
The individual versus the state
Celvin could be considered one of the elites: he has studied abroad, speaks good English, earns a well above average salary. He complains about the state of the economy, derived, according to him, from the Chinese isolation since 2020. But there is something that still seems to worry him more. On September 18, he recalls, a bus carrying passengers to a quarantine center had an accident. 27 people died. None, obviously, went of their own free will. The event sparked a wave of anger in the networks of a country exhausted by restrictions.
For Celvin it was one more example of the vulnerability of the individual against the State: “You are nothing more than a number,” he denounces. “You wonder if the same thing can happen to you. If someone is going to knock on your door in the middle of the night to tell you that you have to get on a bus. It reminds me of the Nazi situation. I’m afraid of people knocking on my door. You have no control over your life.”
In his opinion, the wrecked vehicle is also a metaphor: “We all travel on that bus. We know there is a driver headed to the wrong place. But we can’t control the steering wheel. You can’t go down. We travel on a bus called China.” Luckily, he assures, there are those who have begun to “wake up” thanks to the coronavirus situation. “It’s like the Cultural Revolution of our generation,” he concludes. And then he spends some time explaining different nicknames with which they call the one he prefers not to name to get around internet censorship.
One of the nicknames, “Bun”, derives from Xi’s visit to a popular fast-food restaurant in Beijing where they serve baozi, some stuffed buns. The president appeared there in 2013 shortly after taking office. He ordered a menu and sat down to eat with the common people. By then, Xi had unleashed a harsh anti-corruption campaign against what he called “tigers and flies” – elites and common party cadres – the seal with which he landed at the top of the pyramid. With the coup he tried to put a stop to the excesses of previous years, while, according to some analysts, he separated rival factions. The figures are stratospheric: since the end of 2012, the Chinese authorities have investigated more than 2.7 million public officials and punished 1.5 million, according to data collected in the book Xi Jinping. The Backlashby Richard McGregor (2019).
In 2012, Xi criticized that the commanders had “lost contact with the people.” The visit to the popular restaurant was his way of saying that he was different from the previous ones and underlined the concept of the “Chinese dream”, on which many of his policies have gravitated, and which, according to the official narrative, seeks to improve the standards of everyone’s life, not just an elite.
The restaurant is located on a tree-lined street in Beijing. The noise is considerable at noon. The “president’s menu”, as the shop assistant calls it, costs just over four euros and includes half a dozen baozi, boiled vegetables and a soup of liver and intestines. Zhao Yumin, 79, a retired researcher, eats alone at one of the tables. A regular at the restaurant, he says that after Xi’s visit, the queues were very long. When asked about the president’s decade, he responds with a thumbs up: “Very good.” “With President Xi, my heart is at peace.” He highlights his “determination” to put an end to corrupt officials and “serve the people”, the fight against environmental degradation and his pulse to restore “China’s confidence” with a development that benefits everyone equally. His speech is not very different from the official newspapers. “The party is stronger today than it was ten years ago,” he adds, but he denies that it is a “tyranny.” And he believes that the criticized covid strategy, despite the economic blow, will ultimately be beneficial: “In China we save the whole world.”
The figures give him part of the reason: the country has managed to keep the number of infections and deaths low, compared to the European Union or the United States, but at the cost of global disconnection and the economic blow. Many, inside and outside the country, consider the sanitary lockdown to be one more dimension of the controlling drive in multiple areas of the Xi era, which ranges from a greater presence of the State in companies to the harsh repression of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang ―who could constitute “crimes against humanity”, according to a recent UN report.
“We have a leader who seems to aspire to control everything and who changes the Constitution to remain in power,” denounces an academic in his 40s who prefers to remain anonymous so as not to lose his job. In his opinion, the 20th Congress will be a new step in this direction, towards less freedom and more authoritarianism and nationalism, he says while sipping a coffee at a Starbucks. But he makes it clear that he doesn’t like the place: he reminds her that the revolution has been perverted; in the 1980s, China opened up to capitalism until it became the “second imperialist power” on the planet, part of a block aligned with Russia; the other bloc would be the West.
This professor at one of the best universities in Beijing defines himself as a “true Marxist”, which in China is also a form of dissidence. In his view, Congress these days belongs to “the bureaucratic powers that control all the resources of the economy.” They are the same ones that exploit wage earners, he adds, whose struggle lives on, for example, in migrant workers when they demand better conditions, such as sending their children to school in the city where they settle (right now they lack this right).
According to the professor, as the era of hypergrowth is left behind, China faces potential turmoil due to falling profits, the glue that held the pact between party and citizens. As a solution, he says, the country could turn towards social democratic positions with greater freedoms – it does not seem likely – or walk towards greater authoritarianism and control of the population wrapped in ideology: “I cannot change your life, but I can change your mind”, defines the strategy.
The QR codes that one has to scan with the mobile everywhere to access any place in China are just an expression of that vigilant state that uses technology “to control where you move all the time”, continues this teacher. These days, even college kids have to ask permission to leave campus, he protests. “Power wants to keep people as individuals and the pandemic gives reasons to avoid relationships between people.” He then takes one last sip of coffee and disappears into the streets of Beijing.
Follow all the international information in Facebook Y Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
read without limits
#loves #Jinping #powerful #man #planet