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Getting to know the real Xi Jinping could mean preventing a conflict
Tom Plate says the Chinese president is not as humourless, as vain or as aggressive as Westerners have been led to believe
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Years ago, Singapore’s founder Lee Kuan Yew would needle me, in all seriousness, about the time and effort we silly journalists invest in seeking to lay out a leader’s personal traits. He dubbed our penchant for such detail “the Western journalist’s exaggeration of eccentricity”.
The irony was that Lee was a fascinating man, anything but coldly humourless, as the West’s impression of him had it, with a global profile resulting not just from what he said but how he said it.
He entirely missed the point about “eccentricity”. How is it possible to understand any leader’s talents in the absence of sense of character?
Sure, Germany’s Angela Merkel will never win prizes as Miss Personality but admirers tell you she has one. Remember crabby Margaret Thatcher’s famous “handbag strikes”? And were not America’s leaders John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan celebrated, and more effective, due in part to their stylish wit?
Which brings us to the personality of Xi Jinping. Compared to what we know of our witless US president (about whom we probably know enough), the West knows little about China’s president. Ignorance breeds speculation: Xi is allegedly power-mad, for example – a DNA-Napoleon in ambition; and, perhaps most creepily of all, has almost no sense of humour (see, for example, the dismissive remarks in Harvard professor Roderick MacFarquhar’s recent article in The New York Review of Books).
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