Dictator's Immunity?
Xi Jinping’s Crisis Resilience during Covid-19— and Its Lessons for Future Crises
By Connor Swank
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In the closing days of January 2020, as an explosion of Covid-19 was on the brink of tearing across China unchecked, Xi Jinping experienced something unprecedented: a crisis of self-confidence. Abandoning his usual depiction of himself in Party-state propaganda as the spearhead of all major government initiatives, he beat a hasty retreat from public view, shunning public and media events related to the emergency response and delegating formal responsibility for handling the crisis to a subordinate. Rising dissatisfaction with his performance, it seems, forced him to restore his lofty public profile not long thereafter and maintain it for the remainder of the crisis, but the damage had been done: his aversion to accountability over the burgeoning disaster had undermined his prestige at the outset of his greatest test.
This spell of self-doubt, and the glimpse it offered into Xi’s mindset, was a rare gift to the analyst of Chinese politics. In balking at this critical juncture, Xi unintentionally exposed previously-concealed attitudes that contradicted elements of his public image. First, Xi showed that he held a lower valuation of his political resilience than did most outside observers, a far cry from his facade of unassailability following years of large-scale purges, legal reform, and political reorganization. Second, he revealed that he harbored serious doubts about his party’s much-touted ability to mobilize the masses to achieve great works in times of hardship (ironically enough, at least for a protracted initial period of the crisis, this ability was to prove itself very much intact). Finally, in common with many leaders, Xi showed that he was susceptible to ill-considered and damaging short-term shifts in policy under duress. This trait would manifest itself far more starkly, not to mention more destructively, in his disastrous reversal of anti-Covid measures at the end of 2022.
Insights such as these into Xi’s behavior during the Covid crisis do not simply hold historical value; they also hold forward-looking value. China today faces crises that are no less threatening than Covid: structural economic stagnation, a possible new full-scale cold war with the United States, even the threat of a major hot war over Taiwan. Xi’s behavior in response to the recent Covid pandemic constitutes a useful baseline for evaluating his real and perceived political resilience, critically important factors in his regime’s historical development, in the future, when he could confront challenges of equivalent or even greater magnitude.
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The full analytical significance of Xi’s spell of self-doubt at the outset of the Covid crisis hinges on the accuracy of his self-estimation. If Xi was weak due to factors that were known to him but sheltered from public view, and if those factors have not yet been altered, he will likely again be weaker in near-future crises than his public image suggests. If he was not, however, it suggests that he suffers from a different kind of vulnerability: vulnerability to miscalculation, which carries its own dangers for dictators.
While it might seem self-evident that Xi understands his political situation better than the outside observer and that his behavior can be taken as strong evidence of genuine vulnerability, it is a matter of contention whether leaders in Xi’s position can actually correctly evaluate their own strength. Experts have long believed that dictators suffer from a degree of blindness about their political situation because their subjects, fearing consequences if they express negative feelings about the regime, reliably put up a false front of support. Recent research by scholar Martin Dimitrov, however, has found that dictators enjoy substantial means of getting around this problem: regimes like the Chinese Communist Party employ mechanisms of both voluntary and involuntary information extraction, with certain voluntary mechanisms– even in the absence of a fully free and open society– often proving highly informative for political leaders. This strongly suggests that the longstanding idea of the “dictator’s dilemma,” which blinds autocratic leaders to accurate self-perception, is overdrawn.
Historical precedent, however, suggests that a more nebulous factor may be even more important than information in determining a dictator’s propensity for miscalculation: the personality of the dictator. However well-informed, dictators misjudge their own positions all the time, if only because all of the information they accrue cannot empower them to cease to be human. Some dictators, by virtue of their psychological makeup, are more prone to errors of political self-perception than others. In the Soviet Union, not only did Joseph Stalin, secure even by the vaunted standards of Communist rulers, famously underestimate his resilience by living in constant terror of plots; his irrationality even distorted his information and intelligence before he received it by encouraging subordinates to invent conspiracies to satisfy his paranoia. The scarcely less paranoid Mao Zedong aped Stalin in lashing out at phantom threats from his subordinates years, even decades, after they had abandoned all thought of challenging his primacy. Mihail Gorbachev, though not paranoid, judged that his exalted position as General Secretary rendered him secure enough to pursue radical reforms to the Soviet Union– only, of course, to later lose both his position and the Soviet Union. These were each, in various regards, intelligent and well-informed men; each also suffered from damaging distortions of self-perception that had little or nothing to do with the mechanisms at their disposal for information collection.
Is Xi, like many of his forebears, psychologically predisposed to see himself distorted, like an image in a funhouse mirror? Although we can perceive aspects of his personality from his public behavior– his personal ambition, his ruthlessness, his disregard for human rights and even human life, to name a few– the black box that conceals the lives of Chinese leaders renders the question impossible to answer with certainty. All that can be determined, perhaps, is that Xi’s behavior, including at the outset of the Covid crisis, cannot be considered strong evidence of the objective state of his political resilience. Xi is likely well-informed, but he is more than likely human, and that quality is ample to outweigh all the information a leader could ever hope to obtain.
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What does evidence from other phases of the Covid pandemic suggest about the strength of Xi’s position then and thereafter? Although Xi– despite a protracted initial period of apparent success in keeping Covid transmission low by global standards– set off a catastrophic wave of infection in late 2022 when he abruptly lifted Covid controls without having first properly immunized the Chinese population, the extraordinary truth is that his political position suffered no clear harm as a result. He faced no known attempted coups or political revolts as a result of his Covid catastrophe, which killed untold numbers of Chinese citizens; popular protest, which erupted against his lockdowns weeks before he cynically abolished controls wholesale, has yet to return; and he was granted a precedent-breaking, and formerly proscribed, third term as national chairman in 2023. Rather than exposing weaknesses in his political position, the resolution of the Covid crisis appears to have reaffirmed Xi’s status as one of the most secure leaders in China’s modern history– and indicated that his self-doubt at the crisis’ outset was likely grounded not in fact, but in pessimistic underestimation of his own political resilience.
Beneath the surface of this public triumph, however, are fissures that have likely left Xi in a worse position than that he held during the anxious opening weeks of the pandemic. While it is a fact little-known and inexplicably little-discussed among the knowledgeable, it is clear that Xi’s callous handling of the pandemic has triggered widespread feelings of bitterness and deep disillusionment with the regime among the Chinese population. Also little-discussed, now that the crisis has passed, is the fact that Xi’s Covid policies sparked the first nationwide protest movement against the political center since the start of his tenure as national leader. These signs of public discontent, of which Xi is aware, do not guarantee that he will be less confident of his political security in a near-future crisis. They do, however, hint at factors that appear to have at least temporarily rendered him objectively less politically resilient, his political support objectively hollower, than before.
Also potentially suggestive of problems is the genesis of Xi’s decision to overturn zero-Covid. Here, as is often the case in Chinese politics, much is unknowable: was Xi’s reversal triggered by popular protests against his restrictions that erupted across China in the final weeks of the policy, elite concerns over zero-Covid’s deepening disruption of lucrative economic activity, both, or other factors? Regardless of the answer, what is clear is that the reversal was seriously damaging to Xi’s domestic reputation, even if this damage could be concealed, and that this damage was foreseeable to Xi himself, so vigorously and for so long had he championed zero-Covid. Such damage must have been a bitter pill for Xi to swallow; that he swallowed it regardless suggests that he reversed himself not because he wished to, but because he felt that he had to– a determination that suggests, once again, a lower self-estimation of his political resilience than observers impressed by his personal power and his regime’s massive repressive apparatus are likely to hold.
What does all of this suggest about Xi’s confidence in his own position when his regime encounters its next existential crisis? If Xi was indeed acting out of caution rather than confidence when he dismantled his prized anti-Covid measures, his political successes thereafter could have altered his perspective by reassuring him that he is more secure than he feared. Notably, however, Xi’s self-doubt appeared to survive not only the opening weeks of the Covid crisis, but also its protracted successful phase, when his draconian lockdowns purportedly resulted in substantially lower rates of infection and death than in much of the outside world. At least in that contingency, marked policy success was insufficient to undo an apparent inclination towards pessimism.
Xi’s self-perception in crises to come will hinge on a wide array of factors, many of which are impossible to predict. All else equal, however, the vagaries of Covid appear to have exposed a self-doubting dictator beneath a public mask of unassailability– and, separately, to have undermined the strong foundations of his objective political resilience. Among other points, these are hypotheses that observers may profit from in the next crisis.
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1) Chris Buckley and Steven Lee Myers, “Where’s Xi? China’s Leader Commands Coronavirus Fight from Safe Heights,” The New York Times, February 13, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/08/world/asia/xi-coronavirus-china.html; David Gitter, “A Great Test: The CCP’s Domestic Propaganda Campaign to Defend Its Early Covid-19 Fight,” in Party Watch Annual Report 2020: Covid-19 and Chinese Communist Party Resilience, ed. Julia G. Bowie (Center for Advanced China Research, 2021), pp. 21-22.
2) On the restoration of Xi’s high public profile, see Gitter, “A Great Test: The CCP’s Domestic Propaganda Campaign to Defend Its Early Covid-19 Fight,” p. 24; on public criticism of Xi in China, see Lily Kuo, “Taking Credit, Avoiding Blame? Xi Jinping’s Absence from Coronavirus Frontline,” The Guardian, February 4, 2020,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/04/blame-xi-jinping-absence-coronavirus-frontline-china-crisis.
3) Martin K. Dimitrov, Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China (Oxford University Press, 2023) pp. 6-7, 15-21, 59, Kindle. [Disclosure: Dimitrov currently serves as a member of the Board of Advisors of the Foundation for the Interdisciplinary Study of China.]
4) For indications that Stalin was not thinking rationally during and after the Great Terror, see Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, trans. Nora Seligman Favorov (Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 228-230 and 280, Kindle. Regarding the concoction of conspiracies, Khlevniuk also discusses political police chief Nikolai Yezhov’s work to manufacture and feed Stalin false intelligence: Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, p. 239.
5) As late as 1971, Mao’s suspicion of his designator successor Lin Biao boiled over into a period of intense pressure on Lin that culminated in his flight and death; see, for example, Chen Jian, Zhou Enlai: A Life (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024), 595-612. For a noteworthy study on the totality of Mao’s power and the docility of his subordinates at a juncture long before Lin Biao’s “betrayal,” see Frederick C. Teiwes with Warren Sun, China's Road to Disaster: Mao, Central Politicians and Provincial Leaders in the Great Leap Forward, 1955-59 (Routledge, 1998). For information on Stalin’s persecution of his purported potential successor Molotov shortly after the Soviet Union’s victory in the Second World War, see Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, pp. 391-397.
6) For a technically sound argument against following Chinese English-language propaganda in referring to Xi Jinping as a “president,” a term whose Chinese equivalent is absent from Xi’s long list of titles, see Isaac Stone Fish, “Stop Calling Xi Jinping ‘President,’” Slate, Aug 08, 2019, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/xi-jinping-president-chairman-title.html.
7) David Ownby, “David Ownby on the Lack of Dialogue among China’s Intellectuals and His Upcoming Book,” Interview, Center for Advanced China Research, September 25, 2023, https://www.ccpwatch.org/single-post/david-ownby-on-the-lack-of-dialogue-among-china-s-intellectuals-and-his-upcoming-book.
8) For reporting that discusses both the protests and elites’ economic concerns, see Julie Zhu, Yew Lun Tian and Engen Tham, “Insight: How China's new No.2 hastened the end of Xi's zero-COVID policy,” Reuters, March 2, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/china/how-chinas-new-no2-hastened-end-xis-zero-covid-policy-2023-03-03/. Understandably, but importantly to note, this reporting relies on the testimony of only a handful of anonymous sources.