He’s about five feet ten, dark hair, dark suit, red tie, Mona Lisa smile. Did you happen to see him go by here?
Xi Jinping, the incoming Chinese President, the man in line to run the world’s second-largest economy, has cancelled a string of meetings in recent days, and hasn’t been seen in public in more than a week. His government has dodged all questions about his absences. By the time I put this online, he may well have popped back up, intact and unmoved, to explain his recent whereabouts, but in the meantime more than a few people are beginning to wonder if China’s next head of state can really expect to conduct his life with the kind of imperial remove enjoyed by his predecessors.
After giving a speech on September 1st, Xi was next scheduled to meet with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, but Xi bailed out. Then it was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose meeting was cancelled. Finally, on Monday he called off a visit with the Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt. So far, the only hints of why have come through back channels: the government told American officials that the Clinton meet had to be scuttled because Xi had a back problem. Online, the Chinese rumor mills went berserk, with explanations ranging from an injury sustained while swimming or playing soccer to the suggestion (later withdrawn) that he may have been injured in a traffic accident related to a revenge attack by supporters of purged leader Bo Xilai. The Times has a blind quote from a political analyst who says he was told that Xi “had suffered a mild heart attack.”
Another theory, the most mundane, is that he is simply buried in work in the weeks ahead of the upcoming 18th Party Congress, China’s political bar mitzvah, in which Xi will be formally designated as the supreme ruler for the next ten years. While that might make sense to outsiders, I have some doubts, because it runs counter to the rules of Party stagecraft. In Chinese politics, the participants read every detail—the seating arrangements, the toasts, the time spent with each person and where—as a clue, so it seems unlikely that Xi would allow speculation to foment unless absolutely necessary. (A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman declined to confirm whether Xi had been scheduled to see the Danes or to comment on the car-crash rumors.)
Most plausible, for the moment, is that Xi’s people are managing the optics. If, in fact, he is hobbling around with a slipped disc, or had a mild heart attack, they will almost certainly prevent him from being shown in public looking frail. In modern Chinese history, physical robustness has always been used as a proxy for political health; when Chairman Mao was locked in battles with internal foes in late 1965, he sequestered himself for months of plotting and then burst back on to the scene to show his vigor by swimming the Yangtze. By then in his early seventies, Mao showed that he was very much alive and, to those who chose to see it that way, challenging old Confucian principles of physical modesty and humility. (The propagandists overegged the pudding a bit and said Mao swam nine miles in sixty-five minutes that day, which, as Time noted, would have been a world-record pace.)
But massaging the physical whereabouts of Chinese leaders has become considerably more difficult. Last year, Premier Wen Jiabao arrived at the scene of a train crash in Wenzhou to show his sympathy to the victims and survivors and to call for a thorough investigation. When people grumbled that he had waited too long to visit, he announced he had risen from eleven days in his sick bed in order to make the trip. But that claim was swiftly challenged by Chinese Web users, who found references to Wen attending a range of official meetings in previous days. Whatever the explanation, it wasn’t ideal: either he hadn’t been at the meetings where he was said to be or he hadn’t been in bed.
That was a small but meaningful step forward for Chinese citizens’ ability to monitor the people who serve in their name. But it is striking that even in 2012 the Chinese public and the world is not much better off in tracking the health of Party élite than the residents of Moscow were 1984, when a Washington Post correspondent scooped his colleagues on the fact that Yuri Andropov had died. How did he do it? Among the constellation of clues, he noticed that the lights at the Defense Ministry were burning all night. And, the clincher: a jazz concert scheduled to be on the radio was replaced at the last minute by classical music.
There is no indication that we should be scanning Chinese radio for clues today, but the Party isn’t giving people many other options.
Photograph by How Hwee Young/AP.
