Xi Jinping Turning Paranoid And Wouldn't Leave Beijing

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s image may be all over the news these days, but in real life, Xi has all but vanished from the world stage.

Photo Insert: An illustration of Xi Jinping

Hunkering down in Beijing for more than 700 days, Xi was a no-show at last year’s United Nations General Assembly, the G-20 summit in Rome, and the UN climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, Craig Singleton, a senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former US diplomat, wrote for Foreign Policy.

Xi’s disappearing act is occurring at the same time he and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) face serious domestic headwinds, including rampant energy shortages, rising unemployment, and a real estate market teetering on the edge of collapse. Times have clearly changed since before the COVID-19 pandemic when Xi confidently boasted about ushering in a new, China-centric global order.

Xi’s refusal to go abroad clearly reflects his fervent desire to stay on top of any renewed coronavirus outbreaks, the second-order effects of which have paralyzed China’s industrial output. But the pandemic alone cannot explain Xi’s refusal to leave his seat of power—or to shelve, however temporarily, his grand international ambitions.

Instead, if Xi’s latest pronouncements are any indication, there is something else keeping him awake at night: Growing fears about resistance to his rule from factions inside the CCP.

Indeed, Xi reassured himself by declaring that 627,000 party leaders had been disciplined, a top aide of a rival has been given a suspended death sentence, and Politburo members had been sanctioned.

Yet, the Shanghai faction of the CCP had been seething with anger over Xi’s scrubbing term limit for party leaders to extend his rule after keeping Bo Xilai imprisoned.

Xi had also erred in gunning after tech companies, censuring Jack Ma and imprisoning billionaires believed to be critical of his regime. Other CCP leaders also want China’s sea grab in the South China Sea to end for being Xi’s ambitious ploy to keep power by riding on Han nationalism while pursuing claims in the vast sea that have no basis in history and geology.

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