Wang Huning is one of the most important advisors to China's state and party leader Xi Jinping. © Wang Zhao/AFP
Even China's all-powerful head of state listens to him: Wang Huning, "probably the most influential intellectual in the world", shapes the country like no other.
Munich/Beijing – It's a rather inconspicuous step into the limelight. In October 2017, the large, ornate double door of the Golden Hall in the Great Hall of the People in the heart of Beijing will open. Xi Jinping, whom China's Communist Party had just confirmed as party leader, will appear before the assembled world press. Behind him, in single file: the six other members of the Standing Committee of China's powerful Politburo, among them, in fifth place in the hierarchy – Wang Huning. Wang looks around shyly, he bows briefly when his name is mentioned. Then, as is customary in this strictly choreographed ceremony of power, he leaves the stage to Xi Jinping. As Xi speaks, Wang stands silently next to him, he is the second from the left.
Standing a little apart, being inconspicuous, but still acting in the heart chamber of power: this is the role in which Wang Huning likes himself. Hardly anyone in China has been as powerful in recent decades as Wang, who was born in Shanghai in 1955, and hardly anyone has been so good at attracting attention. "Wang Huning plays a crucial role in the Communist Party," says Munich sinologist Hans van Ess in an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau.
Wang Huning taught China's communists to despise the West
It was Wang who once taught China's communists to despise the West. Of course, the leadership of the People's Republic has always looked at the countries of the West, primarily the United States, with a mixture of secret admiration and open rejection. In the 80s, however, when China reopened after decades of voluntary isolation, it was not yet entirely clear which path the country would take. "There were still lively discussions about the right way forward and real wing fights," says van Ess. And even after the bloody suppression of the democracy movement in 1989, all options were open to China. "There were discussions about what the right system for China should actually look like," van Ess said. Even free elections seemed possible, at least at the local level.
In 1991, a book that Wang Huning, then a professor of politics at the renowned Fudan University in Shanghai, had written in the months before, burst into this mixed situation: "America against America", a mixture of travelogue, political analysis and ideologically tinged pamphlet. In 1988, Wang had traveled for six months through the United States, the "number one capitalist country," as he writes, visiting more than two dozen American cities, an Amish settlement, the Coca-Cola factory in Atlanta.
The U.S. political system is responsible for their decline, according to Wang
Stunned, Wang also recounts in the book what he experienced in California, in a park right next to the University of Berkeley: "There were hundreds of people dressed in rags, they spent every night there, some with small tents made of rags, others with newspapers on the floor on which they slept." How can it be, this poverty in the richest country in the world?
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Wang Huning finds the answer in the U.S. political system. "My analysis shows that the powerful groups that dominate politics are above the common people," he writes. At the top of politics and business are people who only pursue their own interests, he describes the USA as a huge self-service shop. In addition, the country is torn between seemingly irresolvable contradictions. Wang writes about racial unrest, about religious fundamentalism and spiritual emptiness, about an exuberant individualism that is destroying the American family.
"Wang Huning's book contributed to the fact that China's leadership said to itself: The path taken by the West cannot be the right one," says Hans van Ess. "And so the people who wanted to persist on the path of one-party rule and pleaded for the Communist Party to retain control over everything prevailed in China's leadership."
China's "Three-Generation Teacher" Also Influences Xi Jinping
In the mid-1990s, Wang's rise from celebrated intellectual to influential politician began. Under state and party leader Jiang Zemin, Wang climbed further and further up the political hierarchy of the Communist Party. Jiang's successor, Hu Jintao, took him on state visits and brought him into the Politburo. There, under Xi Jinping, he advanced to the Standing Committee, where he still sits today, now in fourth place. For Xi, Wang conceived the "Chinese Dream" of the People's Republic's resurgence as a world power. Like no other, he has mastered the art of wrapping concrete political objectives in catchy slogans.
"In terms of sheer political survival, Wang is unique, having served under three successive leaders at the top level of the Communist Party for over 30 years now," said David Shambaugh, one of the best experts on China's power structures. "Teacher of the Three Generations" or "Teacher of the State" are just two of the unofficial titles awarded to Wang.
When an angry mob stormed the Capitol in Washington in January 2021, people in China suddenly started talking about Wang's long-out-of-print book again. The Bloomberg news agency reported at the time that individual copies of "America against America" had been sold for up to $2,500 at Chinese online retailers. You don't even have to read the book in China to understand what's going wrong in the US. A glance at state television is enough, where the horror reports that America actually produces as if on an assembly line are presented anew every day: shootings, the drug epidemic, the hundreds of thousands of corona deaths.
Next task: the Taiwan question
Xi Jinping's "Chinese Dream", once conceived by Wang Huning, has long since supplanted the "American Dream". The two states have embarked on a course of confrontation from which they can hardly be dissuaded. In Washington, Republicans and Democrats are outdoing each other in their verbal attacks on China, and in Beijing, President Xi recently warned: "Western countries, led by the United States, have engaged in a comprehensive containment and oppression of China, which is hindering the country's development to an unprecedented degree." Wang is likely to see it the same way.
This spring, Wang, whom Sinologist Daniel Leese recently called "probably the most influential intellectual in the world," was assigned another role by Xi Jinping: As chairman of an important advisory body, he is now jointly responsible for China's Taiwan policy. The People's Republic regards the democratically governed island state as part of its own national territory.
At the beginning of February, Wang Huning met with a leading Taiwanese opposition politician and struck a surprisingly soft note. The two sides should "jointly ensure peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait," Wang said, according to Chinese state media. How this is supposed to work in view of China's increasing military threats, while in Taiwan only a vanishingly small minority can imagine a "reunification" with the People's Republic – Wang must now find a convincing answer to this question. If he fails to do so, the conflict with the West is likely to escalate further. Xi Jinping has long since made it clear that when it comes to Taiwan, China "will never promise to renounce the use of force."