Timothy Garton Ash: Why Obama and Xi Jinping Need an Australian Retreat with Kevin Rudd
Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist. His personal website is www.timothygartonash.com.
..Individuals make history. If the last leader of the Soviet Union had not been a man called Mikhail Gorbachev, the world would be a different place. So the character and views of China's leader-designate, Xi Jinping, who is currently visiting the United States, do matter. After spending several years failing to obtain a clear impression of President Hu, attention now turns to the man who will, barring accidents, succeed him.
The best thumbnail summary that I have read comes in a forthcoming book by Jonathan Fenby, titled Tiger Head, Snake Tails. (The title refers to modern China, not vice-president Xi.) As you would expect, the available evidence is thin and inconclusive. The fact that Xi suffered personally in the Cultural Revolution ("I ate a lot more bitterness than most people"), the reformist communist sympathies of his father, his evident pragmatism, the discovery that he has a sister in Canada, a brother in Hong Kong and a daughter studying under a pseudonym at Harvard: all this suggests someone who might push forward essential political reforms at home and be equipped with a better understanding of the west.
The fact that he has risen to the top by carefully staying on the right side of all the main groups in the communist establishment, his close ties to the People's Liberation Army, his remarkable outburst in Mexico in 2009, denouncing "some bored foreigners, with full stomachs, who have nothing better to do than point fingers at us": these straws point to a potentially colder wind from the east.
Every little phrase and gesture in his current American trip will be pored over with neo-Kremlinological zeal, to identify him as either great reformer or hardnosed realist. Or, inevitably, "enigmatic". As with Gorbachev, western leaders may get hints of the personality now, but we won't really know until he's firmly in the saddle, which means 2013 at the earliest...