The title of Tuesday’s “Frontline” is slightly misleading. “China, the US & the Rise of Xi Jinping” is much more about Xi, the Chinese president, than about the United States and China, and much more about China than the United States. That said, Xi would like nothing better than to be seen as interchangeable with the nation he has led since 2013.
Airing on GBH at 10 p.m., it will also be available on the PBS App, the “Frontline” YouTube channel, and the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. Martin Smith, the episode’s correspondent, wrote and directed it with Marcela Gaviria.
Xi, 71, is the first Chinese president born after the founding of the People’s Republic. His father, a senior Communist official, was purged and later imprisoned. During the Cultural Revolution, Xi was sent to the countryside, including a stint at a work camp. Even so, he seems never to have lost faith in the party. One of the more alarming aspects of his rule has been his very public emulation of Mao Zedong, the instigator of the Cultural Revolution, and his legacy.
Rising within the party’s rank, Xi served as governor of two provinces, then briefly as party secretary in Shanghai. He moved on to Beijing, where, among other duties, he supervised planning for the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Perhaps the single greatest global story of the past half century has been China’s economic transformation. What looms as the single greatest global story of the next quarter century — or is that too long a time frame? — is its political and diplomatic transformation. That transformation began before Xi came to power. It’s often overlooked that Deng Xiaoping, who encouraged Western investment, helping turbocharge the Chinese economy, was the one who allowed sending tanks into Tiananmen Square in 1989. And the Great Firewall, with its governmental controls on access to Western websites, dates to the late ‘90s.
But Xi has vastly accelerated both the authoritarian nature of Communist Party rule and the nation’s global assertiveness. One million Uyghurs, an ethnic minority living in Xinjiang province, have been detained. Pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong have been crushed. There are now 700 million surveillance cameras in China. No, that number is not a typo.
“It makes George Orwell look like something from the Stone Age,” says the China expert Orville Schell, one of numerous talking heads heard from on Tuesday’s episode. Others include former national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, New York Times correspondent Edward Wong (who’s particularly good), and a few defenders of Xi and his policies, though their presence seems more like an afterthought. Certainly, they don’t make a very strong case.
As regards the rest of the world, there has been China’s cultivation of “wolf warrior diplomacy,” saber-rattling in the South China Sea, confrontations on trade with the West (especially the United States), and increasing belligerence toward Taiwan. Taiwan is where diplomacy and trade collide. Seventy percent of the world’s computer chips, Smith points out, are made there, and 90 percent of the most advanced.
The return of Donald Trump to the White House is likely to worsen relations. A more worrying factor is that Xi’s not going away any time soon. In what may be the most troubling act of his presidency, he ended term limits for the office. Since Deng, no Chinese leader had ruled for more than 10 years. Mao ruled for 29. Might his appeal for Xi be even more about duration than ideology?
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.
