‘Either way, it’s going to be Xi’s China’ — Q&A with Chun Han Wong

Chun Han Wong has been covering politics in China for the Wall Street Journal since 2014, including some meaty coverage of China’s hard-line turn under Xí Jìnpíng 习近平.

Now he has published a book, Party of One: The Rise of Xi Jinping and China’s Superpower Future, the subject of which is exactly as advertised.

Reading the book felt to me like reliving the last 10 years, during most of which I have been reading and writing about Xi on an almost daily basis. Party of One includes all the major events and news stories about Xi since he became China’s leader in November 2012, and draws on Wong’s own well-connected reporting and a wide variety of other sources.

We chatted by video call this week on Monday morning, Singapore time, as he was recovering from a weekend of Shangri-La Dialogue reporting.

This is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

—Jeremy Goldkorn

I really enjoyed your book. You pack a lot in there: It’s a history of the last 10 years in China as seen through Xi Jinping’s rule, but for someone who isn’t familiar with the 20 years or so before that, it also fills in all the background.

How challenging was the research? Can you talk a little bit about the difficulties of getting any real new information about Xi Jinping as a journalist in China?

The environment has gotten more and more difficult. I moved to Beijing in 2014, so that was still the early Xi era. At the time, my impression was that people were still willing to talk. You could get them, in the right setting. You could still arrange meetings, and they’d still come out and talk to you and share what they’ve heard, or their views on what you would think to be sensitive political issues.

But then as the years went on, as Xi Jinping consolidated his power, there were signs that people were getting less and less comfortable. First of all, meeting foreigners was a problem. There were government bureaucrats who…could not meet foreigners alone, at least formally. They could not respond to, say, an invitation for an interview or conversation and go there by themselves. A lot of them would bring a colleague, they’d say a colleague, but in some cases, pretty much a minder who would say nothing in the conversation but take notes or just pay attention to what’s being said.

When this happens, you do get a sense that people are feeling that they’re under pressure, that they’re being watched, they have to be very mindful. And that affects the kind of information you can get. You have to rely on people you already knew beforehand, those people who implicitly trust you to be responsible with the information they give you. And you can still get that, but then as the years go on, when you want to meet new people, that’s more difficult.

Even getting information from official sources [has become more difficult]. All sorts of public resources that you used to rely on to find some obscure pieces of information or some official data points…these slowly started to disappear.

And most recently in Hong Kong, for example, we saw some books disappear from local libraries. And obviously in the last few months we’ve seen the Mintz corporate raids — that sends a very clear signal that the Party is in charge of information, data is seen as a key aspect of national security, and anything that could be seen as even vaguely detrimental to Chinese national interests will be closely controlled.

[It has started affecting] foreign businesses, and so people outside China have really started paying attention, but this is a process that started a long time ago.

You cover in some depth Xi’s anti-corruption campaigns. One of the interesting details you report is that one of your sources had said that officials under investigation in detention under shuāngguī 双规, sometimes they’ll get the mother of the suspect to cook them a dinner. What a way to get to someone’s soul!

Anyway, as you point out, the anti-corruption campaigns are also perhaps the most popular thing that Xi Jinping did, at least amongst ordinary people who have long perceived that there was way too much corruption.

How did you find reporting on the anti-corruption campaign? Was that different from looking at other aspects of contemporary Chinese politics?

This campaign is all-encompassing and today it still goes on. Some of the more popular TV shows that come out from time to time are documentaries that outline the cases of corruption that they’ve solved…

This campaign, as Xi Jinping said, is always continuing. It’s always on the road. So it still shapes politics today because I think it forms a very key component of Xi’s vision for governance. If you want to create a highly centralized party, the edicts and the political vision of the top leader must be effectively implemented down to the grassroots. The bureaucracy needs to be disciplined, the bureaucracy needs to fall in line, and fear is a very useful tool in that regard.

Xi Jinping is the most prolific codifier of Party regulations since the founding of the Party and these rules don’t mean anything if you don’t enforce them forcefully. You have to enforce them. People have to believe that the threat of punishment is real. And that’s what we’ve seen.

We’ve seen over the years the sort of things that people get punished for slowly shift. Initially, in the first wave, [the targets] were mainly corrupt officials. The kind of behavior, the wrongdoing that they were being accused of [were] things like corruption, embezzlement, stealing of public funds. But you slowly see things like disobeying Central Party directives, improper discussion of central Party directives, an expansion into political crimes that is reminiscent of the Mao era. In the Mao era, the biggest crime you could commit was a political one, and Xi Jinping has brought that element back. Disobeying the Party center is considered a serious political crime, and that is the sort of thing that they’re punishing right now.

So I think that you cannot really separate [the anti-corruption campaign from other aspects of contemporary Chinese politics]. This is the thing that’s constantly in the background. And it should inform how you think about how officials behave, how they make decisions, how ordinary people behave, and how they respond to government orders.

One of the subjects of the book is the Party’s controls on private business. The most prominent case in the book is Jack Ma [马云 Mǎ Yún], the cancellation of the Ant IPO, and the Jack Ma takedown, and you look at some of the other entrepreneurs as well.

I sometimes find myself in an argument with observers of China in the last few years where I ask: “How can this situation continue? This repression of entrepreneurs. Surely this is going to kill the goose that’s been laying the eggs that have made China so prosperous. Surely this is going to frighten young people off from being entrepreneurs and it’s going to do real damage to the economy.” Of course there are plenty of people who agree with me on that.

But I also get a lot of pushback, often from people who know China very well and work in China who say, “No, actually, the crackdown on big tech companies is popular, and good for startups, that the U.S. should do the same, and that most entrepreneurs are still getting on with it and it’s fine.”

Are entrepreneurs being intimidated by the current political environment? Is it changing their behavior?

I think it’s definitely changed behavior. Intimidation — I think that’s probably a fair word to describe it.

But I think the desire to do business and entrepreneurship still exists. It exists in every level of society. One of the most popular industries that emerged in the past few years is livestreaming. And in some ways, you could describe individual livestreamers as mini entrepreneurs who are trying to create their own businesses, trying to create their own brands. That sort of spirit still exists.

But I think what the Party has done is to remind everybody in no uncertain terms that it’s in charge, its interests are paramount, and where you start to get close to those interests and potentially affect them in a negative way, cross its red lines, you should be prepared for the consequences. Jack Ma is the biggest example of that, where you overstep the lines and the Party makes it very clear what you can expect if you get too big for yourself.

The lessons are maybe not quite the same for people lower down the economic chain. [They might not] get punished in the same way, but it’s very clear that the Party’s position is paramount, and you have to pay attention to what the Party does.

But the Party is not interested in controlling every single corporate decision or individual businessman’s decisions about how to run an enterprise. What I expect is people [are becoming] aware of what the government’s priorities are. And [they’re thinking], don’t do anything that damages the government or is inimical to it. If anything, you should be trying to find ways to show that you are supportive of it.

Some of the examples I bring up in the book show that people are definitely afraid of what the government is capable of. I mention this small company. Well, they’re big in Hubei [Province], Xiangda [襄大集团], [which has been targeted in a government crackdown]. They still try to run the business the best they can. They’re not going to give up just because of the government pressure. The daughter who’s taken over the company has been trying to push back, stand for her father’s rights. Ultimately, the business is their family asset and they’re doing their best to keep it going. I think what they’re doing is being more aware, trying to adapt to the environment that has changed around them and doing the best they can…

In some ways China has been through a lot worse, in terms of crackdowns on entrepreneurs. As I discuss in the book, going back to the Mao era, the situation was a lot more negative and the consequences for running a private business were much more harsh. So we are heading arguably in the wrong direction, we’re heading back toward the tendencies of that era, but people have coped before and people will still try to cope.

Obviously they hope things can be better, but people find a way.

Toward the end of the book, there’s a bit about a very sad essay you wrote in Chinese, which was circulated quite widely, about being a reporter for foreign media in China. And what it means for people like you to be kicked out and how it’s going to change foreign perceptions of China.

Can you talk about the Chinese reception to that essay? What was your takeaway from what Chinese people said about it?

I was quite surprised it went as viral as it did. Within hours, it had tens of thousands of views. It maxed out on WeChat, the tally that shows the number of views, [at 100,000-plus].

As you can expect, given the diversity of views about the role of foreign media in China, there was everything from negative to positive. Even the positive, I would say, was more like a lament because the subject is about how it’s become very difficult to operate in China, and those people who respond positively obviously are the ones who want journalism in China, if nothing else, as a way to basically introduce China, help people outside China understand the country, be a bridge of understanding and mutual learning, and they see the positive values of the continuation of opening up.

The reception from those people was obviously more positive. But then there were also obviously people who thought of this like, “Ah, this is another Western media person trying to lecture us about what’s right or wrong, how we should do things. You miss the point that we need to retaliate against Americans for doing the same to Chinese journalists in the U.S. This is basic, this is reciprocity. How can you defend something that is so obviously [about what is] right or wrong?”

There were also government officials who paid attention. I heard that some people were asked by people from the government: “Do you know who wrote it?” Someone showed me a WeChat post by a Foreign Ministry official who said something along the lines of…this is the same holier-than-thou attitude you see from every Western journalist covering China.

So it was a very wide-ranging response from the more nationalistic to the more [sympathetic].

There were even two quote-unquote “semi-formal” responses. The Paper published a commentary in response to my piece and Economic Daily’s website published a column in response. They were saying, “This is sort of arrogance that Western media brings to China. You know, Chinese people are very clear-eyed about who’s good and who’s bad, who’s a good journalist, who’s a bad journalist, who’s [looking at] at China with the right eyes.”

I think they noticed that it was getting a lot of attention, and they wanted to at least put out their response and counternarrative to it.

How does that feel to you as an ethnic Chinese person? Do you feel at all torn? Or is that something that you’ve learned to just isolate as a part of yourself as a journalist？

Well, I do actually use my ethnic Chinese-ness to facilitate my reporting. I can speak Mandarin, and a lot of times in China, people don’t necessarily immediately catch that you’re not local, if you can speak to them in Mandarin and you look Chinese. Obviously, I use that to my advantage.

But at the same time…I don’t find myself caught between this East-West thing. I work for an American newspaper, I’m Singaporean, ethnic Chinese, and I was educated in the U.K. at university level, but I don’t necessarily feel hugely attached to either side.

It’s sort of the Singaporean perspective. Like we have feet on both ends of the spectrum. And I think we are in some ways positioned at least to have an understanding of both [Eastern and Western] perspectives.

We [Singaporeans] obviously are brought up [under a lot of] Western influence, but I went to a school that puts great emphasis on Chinese cultural and language education, so I was brought up in sort of that tradition, too. You’re exposed to both sides, you can sort of code switch in your mentality even when you’re dealing with a situation where you think your Chinese background is of use, whether you’re interviewing an ordinary person or a government official. You find a common ground with the person you’re talking to. So that was very useful for me.

You talk about the problems of succession in your book, so my last question is: What if Xi Jinping just died of a heart attack tomorrow? What do you think would happen?

As I mention in the book, there are not many rules and procedures governing this, but at the very basic level, just talking procedurally, you would expect the Central Committee to have to meet and choose the next General Secretary because they are the body empowered to choose the General Secretary, and the body empowered to choose the Chairman of the Party’s Central Military Commission.

But in practice it would be a much more fraught process because who gets to convene the Central Committee meeting, under what terms, when, who gets informed about it, how does the actual process function, that is where the machinations can come in. That is where the infighting could happen.

If you watch the movie The Death of Stalin, obviously it compresses a lot of real life events into a span of one or two weeks, but it gives you a flavor of what might happen when a very powerful leader dies, and then people below him have to jostle for their positions using very obscure rules that people don’t remember, or they suddenly think, “Oh, yeah, I actually could find a way to put myself in a more advantageous position.”

The fact that there’s not that many clear rules and not that much precedent to fall back on, I think, makes it very hard to predict how this process might play out. It’s very contingent. It might come down to good fortune for certain people, being at the right place at the right time.

But I think from the outside, there’s such a lack of information…not being able to know with any precision about the interpersonal relationships between senior officials and what sort of information flows between them…

The irony is that, in fact, at the top levels of the Party, there is also information asymmetry. Some people know more about what’s happening than others. And this adds to the uncertainty of the process.

Given the lack of information for outsiders, the best we can do is to understand what the problem is, analyze the frameworks in which they think about the problem, how the Party thinks about the problem, and sort of game out certain scenarios. We can never really predict what might happen, but I think it is incumbent upon us to at least think about how this might play out, and, from there, prepare ourselves for what might happen.

So if he doesn’t have a heart attack and he’s alive for another 30 years, where are we going to be in 30 years?

As a journalist, I try not to make big predictions. After all, I think it’s a bit of a fool’s errand to try to look too far ahead, given that this is a very opaque system. They say a week is a long time in politics. Thirty years is eternity.

But if he can last that long, it’s fair to say that he would have been…successful to some extent, in implementing his agenda, or at least making sure that people are not unhappy enough with him that he has to be forced to leave.

He [would have made] sure he got enough buy-in from the elite and the broader populace that allowed him to sustain power. Or maybe he would have sustained it far more through the use of the coercive powers of the state.

Either way, it’s going to be Xi’s China.