Tobin Harshaw, Columnist

Emperor Xi's China Is Done Biding Its Time

A Q&A with former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who is going to school on the Chinese president.

March 3, 2018 at 1:00 PM UTC

Tobin Harshaw is a Bloomberg Opinion senior editor and columnist on national security and military affairs. Previously, he was deputy editor at the op-ed page of the New York Times and the newspaper’s letters editor.

White is the new red.
Photographer: Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images

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Mao Zedong once insisted that "the people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history." Then again, he's also the guy who said that poverty is good, a world war is nothing to fuss about, and that reading books can be a bad thing. In other words, take him with a large grain of MSG.

One person who seems to be doing exactly that is Xi Jinping, the president -- and now, likely president for life -- of Mao's China. This week, his puppet Communist Party Central Committee looked poised to abolish the 10-year term limit on his job, which is a strong hint that Xi thinks the individual can be a pretty effective motive force on history all by his lonesome. And if you want to disagree, he has a remorseless "anticorruption" task force to persuade you otherwise.