00:00These are the seven most powerful men in China.
00:06They represent the top leadership positions of the ruling party
00:09and their identities are revealed every five years
00:12at a carefully choreographed political event called the National Congress.
00:16China's Communist Party unveils its new leadership over the next five years.
00:20The order of appearance is symbolic.
00:22The first person to emerge is the head of the party for the next five years.
00:26At the most recent event in October 2022, that person was Xi Jinping,
00:31China's president for the last 10 years,
00:33who walked out in the top spot a historic third time
00:36after getting rid of China's presidential term limit
00:38that restricted all his predecessors to two terms,
00:41a signal that he may be planning to stay in power for life.
00:45The world hasn't seen a Chinese leader like this since Mao Zedong,
00:49the revolutionary founder of the People's Republic of China,
00:52whose ruthless dictatorship scarred the Chinese people for generations.
00:57Xi has been compared to Mao a lot, and he clearly draws from Mao's playbook.
01:02But there's something else that connects these two.
01:05When Xi was just a young boy, Mao ruined his life.
01:09Generations apart, their paths crossed unexpectedly,
01:12and a teenage Xi from an elite family in Beijing ended up in exile,
01:17condemned to hard labor in the countryside.
01:19Fifty years later, Xi is one of the most powerful political figures in the world
01:24and the only leader since Mao to have unchecked power over China.
01:29So how did he go from being banished in his country
01:32to taking complete control of it?
01:34Xi Jinping's connection to Mao formed long before Xi was even born.
01:47It goes back to when a bloody civil war was raging in China.
01:52A group of radical communist revolutionaries, including Mao,
01:56gained influence over large swaths of mainland China,
01:59and controlled a communist military called the Red Army,
02:03that fought the Nationalist Party ruling the Republic of China at the time.
02:07At this point, the communists were losing... bad.
02:10The bulk of their army was pinned down here,
02:12in a communist-controlled region originally established by Mao,
02:16now surrounded by nationalist forces.
02:18And they were running low on food.
02:20So the Red Army decided to launch a bold attack,
02:23to break through the nationalist forces
02:25and evacuate the roughly 130,000 communist soldiers and civilians stuck here.
02:31On October 16, 1934, they made their move,
02:35and attacked a weaker part of the enemy line.
02:38They broke through,
02:39and even though their numbers quickly dropped,
02:41with thousands dying and thousands more fleeing to the countryside,
02:45around 86,000 stuck together and pushed on.
02:49This was the beginning of a year-long historic retreat called the Long March.
02:54The journey to establish a new communist base,
02:57far from the nationalist forces.
03:01Mao, who used to be a military leader, wasn't in charge at this time.
03:05He'd insisted on using guerrilla tactics,
03:07which had heavily influenced the Red Army earlier in the war,
03:10but that approach had fallen out of favor,
03:12and he was demoted.
03:14The Long March changed that.
03:16After escaping the siege here,
03:18the Red Army continued to suffer relentless attacks
03:20by the pursuing nationalist army.
03:22The military leaders of the march had pushed
03:24for a more traditional wartime strategy of direct confrontation,
03:27rather than Mao's guerrilla tactics.
03:30And the result was catastrophic for the Red Army.
03:32Less than half of the original escape group
03:34survived the first three months alone.
03:36So it was at this first stopping point
03:38where Communist Party leader Zhou Enlai handed military leadership back to Mao.
03:43And Mao picked an endpoint for the march.
03:46Here, 800 miles away in rural northern China.
03:50But they didn't go straight for it.
03:52Mao led the Red Army deep into the mountains,
03:54where he predicted lighter resistance.
03:56And he was right.
03:58But the journey was still brutal.
04:00It was nine more months of non-stop marching and fighting
04:04along this several-thousand-mile route,
04:06before they ultimately arrived in northern China,
04:09where a guerrilla base led by a communist revolutionary named Xi Zhongshun
04:13offered Mao's army refuge,
04:15bringing the Long March to an end.
04:18That man was Xi Jinping's father.
04:21In the end, fewer than 8,000 of the original marchers survived.
04:28Even though thousands died on the Long March from starvation, fighting, and disease,
04:34Mao's leadership was credited with saving the Red Army from total annihilation.
04:38And he became the de facto head of the party as well as the military,
04:42entrusted with rebuilding the army to take on the nationalist forces for total control of China.
04:47Wherever and however the Red troops move into battle,
04:52they spread the glory of Mao Zedong.
04:55This is a good stopping point in the story to talk about how power in the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, works.
05:02Officially, the highest level of authority is a group called the Central Committee,
05:06and is responsible for all of the party's major policy decisions.
05:10Within the Central Committee is a select group of officials called the Political Bureau, or Polyp Bureau.
05:16In most communist parties, like that of the former Soviet Union,
05:20the Polyp Bureau represents the most powerful members of the party besides the General Secretary.
05:25But the Chinese Communist Party has a key distinction that makes it unique.
05:29It has one more, even smaller selection of top officials who ultimately have the final say,
05:34an elite class of Polyp Bureau members called the Polyp Bureau Standing Committee.
05:38This group, which includes the General Secretary, holds supreme control over the Central Committee,
05:44dictates the will of the party, and is in full control of the Central Military Commission,
05:48which oversees China's defense.
05:51Mao's promotion during the Long March landed him here,
05:54in the highest position of the military and the Polyp Bureau Standing Committee.
05:58Even though he was considered the de facto head of the party when the Long March ended in 1935,
06:03he officially became head of the party in 1943.
06:06With both the party and the military under his control,
06:09Mao began to exploit the system to ensure he remained at the top for the rest of his life.
06:15At Mao's first National Congress as the official party leader in 1945,
06:21the party introduced a resolution that brought his influence to a whole new level.
06:25It unified the party around a single understanding of its history,
06:30and declared Mao's political ideology, later called Mao Zedong Thought, or Maoism,
06:35as the unquestioned guiding principle of the Chinese Communist Party.
06:39Basically, Mao's ideas or policy decisions could no longer be challenged by anyone.
06:45It was here he unveiled his equivalent at the time of the Politburo Standing Committee,
06:49the four other top party leaders, all Long Marchers deeply loyal to Mao,
06:54like Lu Xiaoqi and Zhou Enlai,
06:56who would go on to hold some of the most powerful positions in the future government.
07:00Four years later, Mao declared final victory for the Communists in the decades-long Chinese Civil War
07:05and established a new country, the People's Republic of China, or PRC.
07:10Mao Zedong, once a lowly party worker,
07:14now assumed the stature of the dominant figure in all of Eastern Asia.
07:20But winning a revolution isn't the same as running a country.
07:23Because now that you're running a country, there's all these other things you have to do,
07:27like deliver the mail and build a dam and stuff like that,
07:31you can't possibly have the party do all these things.
07:34So the party set up a government that would take the policy decisions made by the Politburo Standing Committee
07:39and figure out a way to make them a reality.
07:42And so it evolved to a system where the party would make all the important decisions,
07:48and especially the Politburo Standing Committee.
07:52Then, as it is today, many of these decisions would go to the State Council.
07:57So the State Council is the highest decision-making body on the state side,
08:02led by the Premier of China.
08:04The Premier of China, by the way, is almost always a member of the Politburo Standing Committee.
08:09One way Mao kept a tight grip on power over the years was by promoting those loyal to him
08:14to top positions in the party and government, whether they had government experience or not.
08:19For example, Zhou Enlai, the former party leader who helped Mao rise to power during the Long March,
08:25became China's first premier.
08:27The advantage of that is that they could never challenge him.
08:31The disadvantage of that is they didn't know what they were doing,
08:34and so administration suffered, policy outcomes suffered.
08:40Long March survivors often became party elites under Mao.
08:44Xi Jinping's father, for example, was appointed Secretary General of the State Council.
08:49And as the son of a Long Marcher, Young Xi was given the informal title of princeling.
08:54Mao succeeded in never giving up his power during his lifetime.
08:58His unchecked policies resulted in massive famines and widespread persecution
09:03that cost between 40 and 80 million lives over a span of decades,
09:07and culminated in the disastrous Cultural Revolution,
09:10a violent final attempt from Mao to consolidate his power
09:13and force loyalty to the practice of Maoism.
09:16The idea was to make himself and his ideas eternal.
09:20The way he viewed communist figureheads like Lenin and Marx before him.
09:25Anyone that didn't fall in line with Mao's ideology was publicly humiliated,
09:29impoverished, excluded from society, and in many cases, executed.
09:34Either at the hands of the army,
09:36or by a militant youth group obsessed with enforcing Maoism, the Red Guards.
09:41Even those closest to the dictator weren't safe from his purges during the Cultural Revolution.
09:57High-level officials, including members of the Politburo Standing Committee and Long Marchers,
10:01were removed from their positions.
10:03Lu Xiaoqi was denounced as a traitor and died while imprisoned under harsh conditions.
10:08Mao also removed the chief of staff of the army and replaced him with a Maoist,
10:13leaving no one left to oppose him in the military.
10:15Mao's handpicked successor, who always appeared loyally by his side in photos and propaganda posters,
10:21died under mysterious circumstances when his plane crashed as he was fleeing to the Soviet Union.
10:26Mao later denounced him as a traitor.
10:28He denounced Xi's father, too.
10:31This is a photo of Xi's senior being restrained and publicly criticized by the Red Guards
10:36at the height of the Cultural Revolution.
10:38He would remain a prisoner in Beijing for eight years following this.
10:43With his father purged, Xi Jinping, 15 at the time,
10:46was expelled from his elite school in Beijing and sent to work in the countryside.
10:50He had to live in a cave and, you know, do hard manual labor.
10:54His food was barely enough for, you know, a growing young person.
11:01And Chairman Mao was responsible for all of it.
11:05But then Mao died.
11:08The Cultural Revolution ended.
11:10His successor was Deng Xiaoping,
11:12one of the Polyvirus Standing Committee members who was removed from power during the Cultural Revolution,
11:17who, just before Mao died, started making a promise to fellow exiled party veterans.
11:23Deng Xiaoping signaled credibly to all the surviving long marchers that he wanted to rehabilitate people.
11:31So when Mao died, they all supported the rehabilitation of Deng.
11:35And as soon as Deng was rehabilitated, he went ahead and rehabilitated all these people.
11:40With experienced leadership back in place,
11:42the party needed to figure out how to prevent something like this.
11:45From ever happening again.
11:51In order to undo Mao's cult of personality,
11:54the party introduced a second historical resolution in 1981.
11:58It condemned periods of Mao's rule
12:00and emphasized a renewed commitment to collective leadership,
12:04vowing to oppose the consolidation of power around one person moving forward.
12:08The successors to Mao didn't want a dictatorship,
12:12so they divided up these positions and put them in the hands of different people.
12:18Like Mao, Deng kept tight control over the Central Military Commission as its chairman,
12:23and held a leadership position in the government, but was never head of state.
12:27He never held the highest position in the party either.
12:29Instead, he set up a new advisory commission and served as its chairman,
12:33which allowed him to influence the party's direction without positioning himself directly on top of it.
12:39This allowed a power-sharing structure while still making Deng the de facto leader of China until he stepped down in 1989,
12:45following the army's massacre of students protesting in Tiananmen Square.
12:49A protester suddenly ran into the middle of the street and in front of the oncoming tanks.
12:55Anger at Deng Xiaoping, the entire Chinese government.
12:58It had the real feeling of rebellion in the streets of Beijing.
13:03People want to fight the military out of their city.
13:06Deng and his ideology, which moved away from Maoism, set a precedent of sharing power.
13:13He opened up China and established economic ties with these countries,
13:17and was the first PRC leader to visit the U.S. in 1979.
13:21Today we take another step in the historic normalization of relations which we have begun this year.
13:29Deng's reforms became the foundation for decades of economic prosperity
13:33that led China to having the world's second largest economy over time
13:36and being on the verge of becoming the world's next superpower.
13:40Communism is creating a consumer society.
13:43It also reminds you that the standard of living in China is going up.
13:46Here, capitalism rules.
13:50One thing power sharing did lead to was a lot of policy innovation
13:56and then some degree of decentralization,
14:00and both of these things helped China's economy enormously.
14:05Which is why this period of economic growth and reform stretching over roughly 30 years
14:09is known as the Deng era.
14:11And whether he wanted to or not, Deng kept his word
14:13and never tried to consolidate absolute power around himself.
14:17He did end up sharing power.
14:19And that set the stage for power sharing in the party until the rise of Xi Jinping.
14:27So what was Xi doing all this time?
14:31When Mao died in 1976, Xi was back in Beijing studying communist philosophy.
14:37Even though the Chinese Communist Party had ruined Xi's family, he had joined it,
14:41just as the Cultural Revolution was winding down.
14:44But why?
14:45Personally, he might begrudge Chairman Mao for doing all these terrible things to his family.
14:51But I think at this time, he also recognized that in the system of the Chinese Communist Party,
14:57power is everything.
14:59Without power, you're nothing.
15:01But in order to get that power, Xi did something unexpected.
15:05He left Beijing.
15:07As his competitors were fiercely competing with each other in the 1980s and 1990s,
15:12he sort of got out of their way and went to the provinces.
15:17He took positions in party leadership in rural, poor provinces all around China,
15:21where there were no other princelings to compete with.
15:24First in Hebei, a poor rural province outside of Beijing,
15:28where he easily reached the top spot as party secretary.
15:31Then in Fujian, a heavily militarized region where top members of the army were stationed.
15:36He moved up the ranks to party secretary here, too,
15:38before becoming the governor of the province a few years later.
15:41After making powerful friends in the military, Xi went here,
15:45where he once again assumed the office of party secretary
15:48and grew his support on the civilian side.
15:51This strategy of moving around didn't just give Xi a leg up in areas where competition was slim.
15:57It also gave him credibility as a humble, hardworking party leader.
16:01And he cultivated a growing group of supporters who would come back into play years down the road.
16:05It was his last stop, and his shortest one, that ultimately got him back to Beijing.
16:14A brief stint in the top party spot in Shanghai in 2007,
16:17where he rehabilitated the city's image following a high-level corruption scandal.
16:22Xi developed a reputation here as a prudent leader who towed the party line.
16:26Just seven months later, he finally returned to Beijing,
16:29having been promoted to the all-powerful Polypiro Standing Committee.
16:34Basically, the people who were deciding on top leadership at the time,
16:38they wanted a princeling.
16:40But they didn't want a princeling who was too ambitious or too strong.
16:43So Xi Jinping, he was seen as less ambitious because he was willing to go to the countryside
16:50and work in lower-level positions.
16:53When Xi emerged at the 2007 National Congress and leadership unveiling,
16:57he was one of the nine most powerful men in the country.
17:00It was at this moment that his strategic climb over 17 long years in the countryside paid off.
17:07Big time.
17:09When the General Secretary stepped down in 2012, Xi emerged at the top spot in the party as China's leader.
17:15Now, the elite son of a former revolutionary, turned exiled peasant, turned party darling,
17:22was poised to seize control of everything.
17:28Like Mao, Xi Jinping believes that rallying around a single figure is crucial to the party's survival,
17:34rather than the collective leadership Deng's reforms had normalized.
17:37So pretty much as soon as Xi Jinping came to power, he started getting rid of people.
17:42The news, four top officials removed for taking bribes, was announced on state TV.
17:49Xi Jinping has just sacked his foreign minister, just sacked his defence minister,
17:54he sacked a whole lot of other people at the top of the military establishment.
17:57The former security czar has not been seen in public for more than a year.
18:01The investigation against Xi allows the Chinese president to remove those opposed to his reforms.
18:06He launched a major anti-corruption campaign as soon as he took power in late 2012, early 2013,
18:15which led to the arrest of hundreds of senior level officials, as well as military officers.
18:22These purges targeted Xi's rivals in the party, whose vacant positions he filled with his own supporters.
18:28After this massive purge, Xi Jinping was in very tight control over both the party and also the Chinese military,
18:39thereby making him the most powerful leader of the Chinese Communist Party since the death of Mao.
18:46That pattern continued in the second term, where he unveiled five new faces of the Politburo Standing Committee,
18:51three of them with close personal ties to Xi.
18:55In 2021, Xi pulled off one of his most dramatic acts yet to enforce his influence over the Chinese Communist Party.
19:03He introduced a third historic resolution that unified the party's ideology around one clear line of thinking, Xi Jinping thought.
19:12Xi's personal political ideology would now be the core in the party's thinking, political stance, and action.
19:20Basically, Xi Jinping's ideas could no longer be challenged.
19:24And they weren't for many years.
19:27During Xi's first 10 years in power, the size of China's economy more than doubled.
19:32So did average individual income.
19:34So did military spending.
19:36Under his leadership, China's presence on the world stage has grown, too,
19:40positioning the rising superpower to take on the role of an aggressor externally,
19:44reasserting claims over parts of the South China Sea, intimidating Taiwan and Tibet,
19:48and stripping democratic process in Hong Kong.
19:51Inside its own borders, strict internet censorship and surveillance are widespread.
19:56And oppression of Uyghurs, a mostly minority Muslim ethnic group, is marked by human rights abuses.
20:02But it wasn't until COVID that Xi saw the first real challenge to his authority.
20:07Anger in China is growing.
20:09Video showing protesters in Xinjiang fed up with China's zero COVID rules.
20:14The boldest public challenge yet for leader Xi Jinping.
20:20With these protests all around the country, and the party's reputation in peril,
20:26she reversed the failed policy.
20:28But is now faced with a shaky economy and cracks in his unchecked authority.
20:34It was just weeks before the widespread protests
20:41at the 20th National Congress in 2022 that Xi walked out in the leading position a third time.
20:48He had already locked in the presidency for another five years.
20:52And unveiled a Politburo Standing Committee completely packed with those loyal to him.
20:57After removing the final senior members of the party that had ties to his predecessor.
21:01Now, there is no one left in party or military leadership whose ideology differs from Xi.
21:07I don't think anyone can push him out at this point.
21:11I think he will be the most powerful leader in China as long as he's alive and conscious.
21:21Thanks so much for watching this episode of Atlas.
21:23So many teammates worked on this piece.
21:25A small army of editors, animators, and researchers helped bring this complicated story into focus.
21:30I'd especially like to shout out Raja, one of the key researchers on this piece,
21:34who conducted an incredible interview with our expert Victor Xi.
21:37It takes a lot of resources to make these videos,
21:39but we publish our work free to watch here because we think journalism should be accessible to everyone.
21:43If you believe in keeping journalism free and want to support our continuing work,
21:47go to vox.com slash give now to make a contribution.
21:50Thanks again.
Comments