Xi Jinping's Rule Under Scrutiny in The Red Emperor Book

New Book Exposes Xi Jinping's Ruthless Power and Stalinist Ambitions

In my continuing quest to learn more about the US's number one strategic rival, I recently finished reading (i.e., listening to it on Audible) the book The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China by British journalist Michael Sheridan. While the author occasionally lapses into not particularly journalistic emotive language to enliven the narrative, the book contains a wealth of information about the paramount leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC) that is rarely discussed in the US.

There are a few top takeaways from Sheridan's biography of Xi Jinping that are relevant to Americans who are concerned about bilateral relations and China's future geopolitical influence:

Xi absolutely expects to retake Taiwan by force during his tenure as China's head of state. It is therefore foolish to think that, under his leadership, the PRC can be dissuaded from this ultimate goal.
Despite his high-profile focus on fighting corruption in the PRC's military, civilian government, and corporate leadership, Xi's own family members and associates have enriched themselves during his rise to power in ways that have few legitimate explanations.
The PRC's industrial policy is an inextricable element of its foreign and military policy in a way that has no parallel among other major nations like the United States and its allies. Relations and agreements with major PRC-based corporations are per se relations with the Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party.
Xi has consolidated one-man rule to a degree not seen since the rule of Mao. Outside of a coup directly challenging his authority (extremely unlikely), there is no reason to think that a counter-faction of pro-Western liberalizers inside the PRC is going to soften the nation's foreign policy in a way that is more amenable to US interests.

The Red Emperor includes other lurid details that, while attention-grabbing, are less obviously relevant to the book's primary audience of concerned Westerners. Sheridan describes Xi as a philanderer and an alcoholic, though he stops short of suggesting that these personal deficiencies are fatal flaws. Indeed, in his book and much other commentary about the ruling (almost entirely male) elite of the PRC, extramarital affairs and heavy drinking have long been a common sign of high status and machismo. A rising star in the Chinese Communist Party who was interested in neither vice likely would have aroused more concern than one who indulged to excess (though some efforts have been made recently to restrict heavy drinking by government officials at public events).

While Xi's modern buildup of conventional and nuclear military force is obviously the biggest threat his rule poses to the rest of the world, the single most important concern for anyone trying to follow current affairs in the PRC is simply the country's lack of transparency and a free press. Sheridan is a veteran journalist with a wide network of sources who was Far East Correspondent for The Sunday Times for twenty years and even he frequently confesses that many of the stories and rumors he recounts are ultimately unverifiable because of the total control the Beijing regime has over what gets published and what gets censored.

When I interviewed Derek Scissors, chief economist of China Beige Book and a long-time PRC watcher for Episode 155 of Free the Economy, he was very clear that economic data in the Middle Kingdom is a function of state control and not a robust market of competing biases. When I suggested that the PRC's economy is different from the US because they "don't have the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and a million finance and investing websites," Scissors said:

They have those things. They publish tons of information. It's just all exactly the same information. They're not allowed to publish deviations from a certain information set. So, if you look in China at investment websites - there are many investment websites - you would start to notice a strong similarity to government publications.

This control over information extends to every aspect of society - from the country's real estate crisis to, perhaps most infamously in recent years - the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet data from official PRC sources continues to be cited in the Western press with minimal caveats or pushback. Journalists who would never promote regime propaganda from the Kremlin or Pyongyang without an alternate point of view seem to have fallen for Beijing's own myth that Chinese government bureaucrats are somehow objective, science-minded sources of information.

It should be obvious now, however, that under Xi, that is far from true. Many Western observers seem to be under the illusion that because they have impressive railways and glass-skinned office towers in large modern cities, the rest of Chinese society is analogous to the (neo-)liberal regimes of North America and Western Europe. But Xi and his deputies in Beijing harbor a hostility to individual rights and constitutionalism that would horrify the average resident of Washington, DC, London, or Brussels. Even self-interested dictators in other countries often pretend to believe in freedom of expression, while they cynically censor their own critics. But the Chinese Communist Party explicitly disavows even the idea of an independent journalist as an alien and hostile concept.

In short, they lie. Of course, I'm the first person to admit that US and other Western government officials often lie as well. But we don't throw the people who uncover those lies in prison; we give them prestigious awards and sometimes even make popular films about them. In Communist China, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein would have been sentenced to life in prison, suffered conveniently-timed heart attacks, or simply executed.

Sheridan's portrait of Xi makes it clear that there will be no Watergate-style revelations coming out of Beijing anytime soon. China's president clearly believes that he and his fellow princelings in the Communist Party deserve to continue ruling in a way that exalts the state and silences any critics, no matter accurate or compelling their critiques. Sheridan, though not without abundant evidence, alarmingly asserts that "Stalin is the most important influence in Xi Jinping's political psychology." Any rational effort to defend the interests of the United States, its system of human rights, and its economy is going to have to reckon with this unpleasant reality.