When he became leader in 2012, his view of power was unromantic and realistic. ‘People with little contact with power always see these things as mysterious and novel,’ he said in a rare moment of public reflection. ‘But what I see aren’t just the superficial things: the power, the flowers, the glory, the applause. I see the bullpens and how people can blow hot and cold.’ His family came with him: his nonagenarian mother called a family meeting to warn them against exploiting his rise.* His wife Peng became the first leader’s wife to be publicly prominent since Madame Mao, but she claimed, ‘When he comes home, I’ve never felt as if there’s some leader in the house …’ His political ‘lineage’ rose with him too; he purged rivals and their ‘lineages’.
Now his mission was simple. ‘East, west, south, north and centre,’ he said, ‘the Party leads everything.’ Deng ruled that the Chinese must ‘bide their time and hide their strength’. But now Party rule was consolidated, the former British and Portuguese colonies Hong Kong and Macau restored; only Taiwan remained unredeemed. As he was promoted to Core Leader without the usual term limit and with his own ‘Xi Jinping Thought’, Xi promised a ‘Chinese dream’ for his people, with ‘common prosperity’ for all. China boasted the second largest GDP after America, becoming the world’s largest exporter. Now, Xi looked abroad.
‘The Chinese nation has stood,’ declared Xi, ‘grown rich and become strong – and now it embraces the new brilliant prospect of rejuvenation.’ This meant an expansion of Chinese power, military and economic, as he offered loans, roads, ports and technology to extend his ‘Belt and Road’ network of power, without having to conquer an empire. It was an autocratic version of the Marshall Plan. The trajectory of the Xi era was upwards: ‘The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation has entered an irreversible process.’ But it could be delivered only by the Party founded by Mao. ‘Don’t forget the original intent,’ warned Xi. That meant that any resistance to the Party must be crushed. Xi, a harsh authoritarian, cracked down on dissent, tightening police supervision of citizens and internet using the new technologies of surveillance and face recognition, while in Xiangjing he conducted an ethnic purge of the Muslim Uighurs, a million of whom were confined to education camps. But the unification of China, meaning the conquest of Taiwan, was the spark wheel of Xi’s world mission, not just as Chinese nationalist and Maoist heir but also given his father Xi Zhongxun’s ‘United Front’ work. It was, writes Jospeh Torigian, ‘always both a national and a family affair’. As Chinese growth faltered under his rigid autocracy, Xi surely pondered a ‘short, victorious war’ – the risks of ‘rolling the iron dice’ to retake Taiwan that could win him immortality or destroy his rule altogether. Simultaneously, his natural ally, Putin, promoting his resurgent Russia, was weighing up a similar gamble.
Putin had faced minor sanctions for annexing Crimea, but his war in Ukraine was stalemated. His view of Ukrainian illegitimacy was only confirmed when Ukraine elected a clown as president: Volodymyr Zelensky, forty-year-old son of a mathematics professor, was a Russian-speaking Jewish comedian from east Ukraine who had become the most popular man in the country when he starred in a TV series, Servant of the People, in which he played an everyman history teacher who becomes president of Ukraine. When he decided to run for president, he called his party Servant of the People. In March 2019, he won a landslide victory: in the era of Trump, the preposterous Neronian fusion of politics and showbusiness seemed to confirm the decadence of democracy. Indeed, Trump’s corruption – his refusal to recognize the difference between his interests and those of the state – soon tainted Ukraine. He tried to withhold Ukrainian military aid unless Zelensky smeared his Democratic rival Joe Biden, a gambit that led to his impeachment. Trump survived his congressional trial. Zelensky emerged unscathed.
Diminutive, emotional and playful, Zelensky seemed too soft to handle his dictatorial antithesis, the lethal Putin, who believed that the actor personified Ukraine’s failure. Zelensky had shown courage in entering this brutal arena, but he struggled to govern Ukraine and halt its rampant corruption. It looked as if his presidency might fail. In one of his movies, Rzhevsky versus Napoleon, Zelensky had played Napoleon invading Russia. But in real life the threat was from the east.
Yet, if ever a crisis came, the essential relationship in the tripolar World Game was between Xi and Putin, who had met thirty times. ‘I’ve had closer interactions with President Putin than with any other foreign colleagues,’ said Xi in June 2019 as Putin showed him the Romanov palaces of his home town, Petersburg. ‘He’s my best and bosom friend.’ Xi boasted of their personal affinity: ‘We’ve taken a high-speed train ride together, watched an ice-hockey friendly, celebrated his birthday and bantered about light-hearted matters, literature, art, and sport …’ But while Russia’s rigid dictatorship was still dependent on its oil income, its bigger brother China was at a historic zenith, a moment unique in its history. Then Xi faced that challenge: a pandemic.
The Party knew such a disease would one day come, but no one knew when and no one was prepared. On 17 November 2019, a man in China’s Hubei Province was diagnosed with a new virus. On 31 December, Wuhan Municipal Health Commission announced a cluster of cases of pneumonia caused by an unknown germ. A thirty-three-year-old doctor at Wuhan Central Hospital, Li Wenliang, shared a report of a respiratory virus with his colleagues and was arrested for ‘making false comments on the internet’. On 31 January 2020, two Chinese tourists in Italy fell ill. On 6 February, in the United States, the first patient died; on 7 February, Dr Li died of this new respiratory virus, Coronavirus 2019. The fast-moving twenty-first-century world, in which millions of people flew from city to city on cheap flights, spread the disease with unprecedented speed. For two years, fear and panic followed waves of the virus that, like every pandemic, inspired civil schisms, distrust of foreigners, wild conspiracy theories and strained governments, which by March 2020 were confining people to their homes. The lockdown started to reverse a century and a half in which the office – the working space – had occupied as much time and attention as family life. Thanks to smart computers, many people could work at home, as they had before the industrial revolution; ironically, the pandemic returned people to their families.* Fifteen million people – mainly older and poorer, and those with respiratory vulnerabilities – died.
Xi declared a ‘dynamic zero-Covid’ policy that treated the pandemic like ‘a people’s war against an invisible enemy’, but such a disease was impossible to control and it exposed the vulnerability of China’s prosperity and the rigidity both of its system and of its leader. In the open world, smaller war democracies – Taiwan, Israel – proved more efficient than larger comfort democracies, but its mitigation was most catastrophic in India where around five million (a third of the global Covid deaths) died, thanks in part to its government’s incompetence.
Trump’s bombast wilted amid the hysteria, his incompetence and insouciance exposed, and in November he decisively lost the election to Biden, who at seventy-eight became the oldest president with Kamala Harris as the first female, first African-American and first Asian-American vice-president. Even though Biden had won six million more votes, Trump, refusing to concede, espoused a conspiracy claiming that he had been robbed of the presidency. On 6 January 2021, encouraged and abetted by Trump, a mob of freakishly garbed Trumpians stormed the weakly defended Capitol to stop Congress’s electoral vote count. It was fortunate that Trump lacked the backing and the acumen to organize a coup, but he now dominated the Republican party, hinting at a second presidency; America had not seemed so fragile since the civil war.