What motivates Xi Jinping? What could drive the actions of the leader of communist China is the key strategic question of the decade.
Events and conditions ensure that there’s a finite, short-term timeframe in which we'll see profound strategic actions initiated by Mr. Xi before those factors turn against him. Is that a timeframe of two or three years? Less? Slightly more?
There are indications that what’s rational for Mr. Xi isn’t necessarily so for others, both inside mainland China and abroad. Therefore, preempting or preparing for Mr. Xi’s actions must be a priority for his allies and adversaries.
The issue of Mr. Xi’s emotional or psychological priorities is particularly critical—perhaps unique—because, since the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in October 2022, Mr. Xi has become the sole decision-maker at a national level in mainland China. He’s increasingly isolated from challenges to whatever decisions he can make.
Not even Mao Zedong was in such a position of unfettered unilateral control, nor did Mao have such a level of strategic military and economic capability at his disposal.
Mr. Xi has refined and strengthened his predecessors’ techniques for eliminating political rivals, with the result that a significant error in judgment could be executed by his armed forces without being averted, except by possible revolt within the military. Therefore, the result of a single poor decision could be consequential not only for the CCP and China but for the global community.
A detailed understanding of the psychological pathology of Mr. Xi as an individual is now of greater importance than just an understanding of the CCP’s system of governance and control. There’s little doubt that foreign intelligence services have devoted considerable resources to understanding the deep, personal motivational factors that drive Mr. Xi’s innermost priorities. But in the end, it’s still a process of reading tea leaves.
This task, however, is far more delicate and critically important than for resources to be devoted to an understanding of the psychological motivations of, say, U.S. President Joe Biden or even Russian President Vladimir Putin. Not that any understanding of a major political decision-maker is unimportant at any time, but the situation of Mr. Xi is a hair-trigger due to the solitary nature of his authority, claimed objectives, and past performance.
Most other national systems, at least in major powers, see decision-making shared and moderated to varying degrees at the pinnacle political level, providing a potential filter or dampening against poor choices. The “collegial effect,” often part of the hierarchical legal framework of a state, may not ultimately override a strongly-held view by a head of government, but it potentially provides a check on excesses. Even a sole ruler, combining the positions of head of state, head of government, and commander-in-chief of the armed forces (as in the United States), can often have formal and informal “checks and balances” to prevent a sudden, even whimsical, commitment of the nation’s future.
Mr. Xi’s situation bears greater similarity to the situation that prevailed with Argentina’s last military head of state and head of government, Lt. Gen. Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri Castelli.
Galtieri served as president of Argentina from December 1981 to June 1982 and led his country into a precipitate and disastrous war with the UK over the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. His quixotic decision to commit Argentina to war as a means of diverting Argentinian public opinion—so that he could retain power—was ill-conceived, without preparation, and unable to be stopped because of his singular control of national power.
The war led to a catastrophic defeat of the Argentine armed forces by the British in the South Atlantic War of 1982.
That led me to suggest over recent years that the greatest fear of the increasing concentration of power in mainland China around Mr. Xi was that it would lead ever closer to “the Galtieri syndrome” emerging to distort Chinese actions into a realm that defied even consideration of China’s own strategic interests. In other words, a “rational” appraisal of the CCP’s strategic intentions wouldn’t adequately prepare for possible or probable actions.
The “Galtieri syndrome” also was exhibited before Galtieri’s rule in Argentina by then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who—despite being surrounded by a system of advisers and legal constraints—took ill-informed steps that caused the collapse of the Iranian government, irrevocably changing the Middle East balance, and gave away the U.S.-owned Panama Canal. These steps, caused by Mr. Carter’s psychological pathology, were key contributors to the long-term strategic decline of the United States but at least were able to be constrained to avoid direct warfare with the two major U.S. strategic rivals at the time: the USSR and China.
But what today could constrain Mr. Xi, other than a putsch by his own People’s Liberation Army (PLA)?
That would be difficult to achieve, given the interlocking safeguards that Mr. Xi has built into his personal protection. The recent mutiny by Russian private military contractor Wagner was cause for immediate review in Beijing of Mr. Xi’s vulnerabilities. The CCP, however, hadn’t allowed the creation of a Chinese nongovernmental private armed security force such as Wagner and has, since the Maoist period, increasingly constrained the autonomy of regional military chiefs who once had the authority, virtually, of private warlords.
Those days are gone.
So if anything, the Wagner example could well have reassured Mr. Xi that, with caution, he had little to fear from such an isolated revolt. Not only has Mr. Xi comprehensively destroyed, weakened, or sidelined his domestic opponents, but he has initiated a campaign of mass population conditioning that has dampened unrest, even at a time of rising and destabilizing unemployment and the de facto expropriation of the life savings of very large segments of the mainland Chinese population.
In many respects, Mr. Xi has done well despite the ongoing deterioration of China’s longer-term strategic strengths. Foreign intelligence services have done what they could to weaken Mr. Xi and weaken the CCP’s control of key territories and populations, such as in Xinjiang, where the Uyghur population has been encouraged to protest their separate identity and call for a return to the pre-CCP and pre-Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) days when “East Turkestan” could have found an identity from its days within the khanates of Central Asia.
But the urgent problem for the United States, the Republic of China (Taiwan), Japan, the Republic of Korea (South Korea), Vietnam, India, Russia, Australia, and the Philippines is less the CCP but Mr. Xi himself.
Psychological strategy offers scope for both offensive and defensive planning and operations. It must always take account of the psychological condition of the target audiences, whether en masse or at an individual level. In this case, the target that requires an understanding of his psychological pathology is Mr. Xi himself. Similarly, the containment of Mr. Xi by his foreign adversaries requires not only an understanding of possible neutralizing actions but also an understanding of how to separate Mr. Xi from his ability to command the start of hostilities against his neighbors, including Taiwan.
National-level intelligence agencies always attempt to divine, from available—and usually nonscientific—evidence, the nature and motivations of their audiences. They devote resources to understanding the pivotal triggers of action within the minds of hostile and even friendly national decision-makers.
What’s clear, as intelligence agencies attempt to study the potential triggers of hostility within Mr. Xi, is that it’s also necessary to divine the resources that could be successfully compelled to action by Mr. Xi. And then to determine how he could be separated from command of those resources before or during a potential kinetic event.
The phrase “Galtieri syndrome” is used advisedly. Galtieri was an alcoholic, a condition that caused him to have a short attention span, making him prone to reactive, ill-considered decisions. And it has become increasingly clear that Mr. Xi’s long history of alcohol abuse makes it necessary to determine whether he, too, is capable of self-deluding and sudden commitments of national military resources to the irrevocable act of invasion.
Some of this was covered in detail in the 2023 book, in Chinese, by professor Yuan, who sought political asylum in Australia in 2005. His book, “The Final Battle in the Taiwan Strait,” details his experience as a drinking companion of Mr. Xi in the days when Mr. Xi was only a minor regional official. Mr. Yuan details the extent of Mr. Xi’s drinking with him at the Long March Restaurant near Beijing University, concluding that he was, in fact, an active alcoholic at that time and noted how, after sufficient alcohol, the normally cautious Mr. Xi would talk incessantly of his views on war and Maoism.
Mr. Xi, he said, would abandon the natural caution that governed his working life following the purge of his father. But after drinking, Mr. Xi would become dogmatic on key issues, such as his belief that expending vast numbers of Chinese lives to achieve CCP objectives was worthwhile.
There’s no evidence that Mr. Yuan’s book has been translated into English. Still, it has very real and perceptive observations of Mr. Xi’s nature, which is capable of maintaining a public mask deliberately concealing an angry inner force. Mr. Xi’s caution, the professor indicated, was probably caused by the purge of his politically prominent father, Xi Zhongxun, former secretary-general of the State Council, among other positions, in about 1965. He was imprisoned and demeaned during the Cultural Revolution until he was fully rehabilitated in 1978.
Mr. Xi then learned how to navigate the party shoals to ensure his safety.
Mr. Xi today wears his extreme Maoism on his sleeve, including his commitment to the concept of an “internal circulation” economy that would supposedly give China an autarkic, utopian self-reliance. But the more extreme radicalism he hides is clearly the main concern for the CCP and foreign powers.
There have been other references to the hard-drinking days of Mr. Xi’s youth, always hinting that it reflected alcoholism. Mr. Xi has, since 2015, moved strenuously to ban the consumption of alcohol at many official events, even though he’s known, when protocol demands, to consume alcohol for toasts. Perhaps he has curbed his intake of alcohol because of the legacy of behavioral patterns that reflect the significant discrepancy between his private and public personae.
Where Now?
It isn’t intended here to attempt a meaningful or comprehensive diagnosis of Mr. Xi’s possible motivations.It’s only to suggest that intelligence on Mr. Xi’s deep background and consequent behavior is critical to understanding his strategic decision-making processes, just as British intelligence services went to great lengths in World War II to understand Adolf Hitler’s motivating drivers and triggers (his preoccupation with “black” magic and other occult arts, for example, among a wide range of other unique markers).
The key is always to determine what’s seen as logical or possible in the mind of an intelligent subject and not to project a “mirror image” of the analyst’s logic onto the subject. Mr. Xi, as with Hitler, should be seen as a highly complex, highly motivated, and intelligent individual, resistant to the logic or opprobrium of those around him, and possibly surviving by a manipulative paranoia that encourages the preemptive destruction of opponents. Mr. Xi isn’t alone in probably showing these characteristics. Still, he’s uniquely significant to the global strategic equation at present because of his singular grasp on power in mainland China.
Even with a fair understanding of Mr. Xi’s deep ambitions and possible triggers, the question arises, “What then?”
Would it be better for his opponents to see him unleash the PLA prematurely on his neighbors with little chance of success—but with massive cost in human lives—or would it be better to play to his psychological traits and defer conflict?
Or would it be best for Mr. Xi’s adversaries to devise strategies to separate—split—Mr. Xi from his power, much as the Last Emperor, Puyi, was left unknowingly isolated in the Forbidden City while China descended into the destruction of the land’s historical nobility.
Significantly, the CCP has a history of “splitting tactics” and “splittist tendencies” within the party, to a far more obvious degree than in the CPSU, but there’s little evidence that Western agencies have truly attempted to exploit this characteristic.
Mr. Xi has effectively sealed off much of the current generation of youth in mainland China from news and influence from abroad. They may protest against Mr. Xi and the CCP based on their own present distress, but how can they and the rank and file of the PLA be motivated by the comfort of support from abroad?
