China’s New ‘Helmsman’ Offers a Strident Nationalist Message

BEIJING — President Xi Jinping, closing out a legislative meeting that took on the trappings of an extended coronation, struck a stridently nationalist note Tuesday as he warned against challenges to China over Taiwan, Hong Kong or other regions where Beijing’s claims to sovereignty are contested.

“All maneuvers and tricks to split the motherland are sure to fail,” Xi said. “Not one inch of the territory of the great motherland can be carved off from China.”

His nationalist message, an implicit defense of the “One China” policy that China views as a nonnegotiable basis for its relations with the United States, came as China ended a 16-day meeting of its legislature, the National People’s Congress.

The ardently patriotic speech cautioned against challenges to Chinese territorial claims, especially any move to seek independence for Taiwan.

Xi’s 38-minute address was a final flourish in a political spectacle that has emphasized his supremacy and set him on a path to possibly decades of dominance. The congress left little doubt that for years to come, Chinese politics will center on Xi and how far he can go in strengthening his rule before risking a serious setback or backlash.

“Miracles are constantly emerging across this great land of China,” Xi told nearly 3,000 lawmakers in the Great Hall of the People.

The annual meeting of the Communist Party-run legislature, held every March, has usually been a stolid ritual giving leaders a chance to show collective unity, lay out goals for the year and hear mildly worded suggestions from the lawmakers, who are picked for their loyalty.

Not this time. Xi transformed this year’s extended meeting into an adulatory celebration of him and his policies to permanently install the Communist Party at the heart of China’s resurgence. Just over a week before the meeting, the party made a bombshell announcement about ending a constitutional term limit on the presidency, clearing an obstacle to Xi’s long-term hold on power. Some lawmakers shed tears of joy as they unanimously re-elected Xi.

He is now officially China’s “national helmsman,” an accolade echoing one of the honorifics used for former Chairman Mao Zedong, the “great helmsman.”

“I don’t like the word Maoist, but Xi really is bringing back the party in charge, but also bringing back a personified power in charge,” Ryan Manuel, an expert on the Chinese Communist Party at the University of Hong Kong, said by telephone.

“But personifying power has risks,” he said. “Xi has, better than anyone since Mao, gone around the checks and balances that were placed on him.”

After the lawmakers assembled March 5, they swept away the constitutional term limit on Xi’s presidency, with only two no votes out of 2,960 submitted. They approved a new investigation agency to extend his anti-corruption drive. They inserted “Xi Jinping Thought” into the constitution, putting Xi in China’s ideological honor roll even before he formally started his second term as president. And they elected him for that second term without a single dissenting vote.

“These are really long-term risks that he’s leading to with these choices,” Manuel said. “It’s not going to happen in the next two years. But if in 10 years’ time, Xi Jinping is still in power, he may have had 10 years of no one telling him the truth.” Chinese media coverage of the congress was saturated by Xi’s images and words, drowning out other members of the leadership, including the premier, Li Keqiang. On Sunday, the day after Xi was reappointed president, the front page of the People’s Daily, the party’s main newspaper, and other papers were dominated by large pictures of Xi, underscoring his unrivaled status.

“Xi and his supporters within the Chinese Communist Party have broken the post-Mao-era taboo of promoting one individual leader above the whole party,” said Anne-Marie Brady, a professor of political science at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand who studies Chinese propaganda. “I haven’t seen a People’s Daily cover like that — big red headlines and only one leader’s face featured in the photos — since circa 1966-1976.”

Li’s annual news conference Tuesday, usually a highlight of the final day of the congress, now seemed an afterthought. Reporters’ questions are usually vetted beforehand, and Li took none that asked about the removal of Xi’s term limit.

After Xi gave his speech in the morning, the newly appointed chairman of the congress, Li Zhanshu, paid extravagant tribute.

“Supported by the whole party, loved and esteemed by the people, Comrade Xi Jinping is full deserving to be the core of the party, commander of the military and leader of the people,” Li said. “He is the national helmsman for a new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the guide of the people.”

The term “helmsman of the nation” has been promoted by the People’s Daily and other party-run media in recent days. It has clear parallels with the “great helmsman,” a phrase used in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s to venerate Mao Zedong, China’s founding revolutionary leader. The Chinese word used for Mao the “helmsman” (duoshou) was slightly different from the one used for Xi (zhangduozhe).

But still, for many Chinese, the term inevitably evoked Mao and the Cultural Revolution, said Zhang Lifan, a historian and former businessman in Beijing. “The helmsman is the one who steers the direction of the craft,” he said. “There was also a song about how a ship at sea depends on its helmsman.”

While Xi does not approach Mao in raw, untethered power, the glorification of Xi has approached levels not seen in Chinese politics since that time. During the congress, some delegates swooned and wept about Xi.

Party media outlets have suggested that Xi will not remain leader for life, despite facing no term limits. But some lawmakers would hear none of that.

“I felt this wave of heat from people around me,” one delegate, Du Meishuang from Hunan province in southern China, told reporters after Xi won his second term as president Saturday. “It should be lifelong, a whole life. That’s what the hearts of the ordinary people are saying, really.”

Such fervor in the Great Hall of the People was unthinkable under Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, a poker-faced functionary. Even Deng Xiaoping, for all his personal power, discouraged personal adulation as a dangerous remnant of Mao’s time.

More measured advocates of Xi have said his power must be extended and consolidated so that China can push through hard economic changes essential to ensuring the country’s continued prosperity. They also point to the rot of corruption that set in during the collective leadership of Xi’s predecessors.

“To achieve the things that need to be done — and the big three right now are controlling financial risk, eliminating extreme poverty and pollution — he is now more able to affect more changes than ever before,” said Robert Lawrence Kuhn, a biographer of Chinese leaders who appears on China’s main state television network. “Because any resistance will realize that it’s futile and they can’t wait him out.”

But the acclaim for Xi has unnerved Chinese people and foreign observers who fear hubris by a leader unrestrained by checks and balances. In private chats over recent weeks, retired officials and academics in Beijing have also said Xi’s inflated power may encourage him to press harder for the return of Taiwan, the democratically governed island that Beijing views as a breakaway province. Xi’s latest comments appeared likely to encourage that view.

“Now you have almost all the power in your hands, and you have all the trusted people on your team, you need to deliver miracles,” Ding Xueliang, a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who studies Chinese politics, said before Xi’s speech. “Xi Jinping needs to deliver something big, and Taiwan is something very, very big.”