Why Xi Jinping is not another Chairman Mao

EACH time President Xi Jinping grabs more powers, critics compare China’s leader to Chairman Mao Zedong, whose one-man rule led the country to disaster. Those grumblers may underestimate Mr Xi’s ambitions. Rather often, the charge that Mr Xi is emulating Mao—a despot whose campaigns of political terror and deranged economic policies left tens of millions dead—is a prediction that China’s leader is storing up trouble for himself, by weakening norms and institutions that might helpfully check and balance his authority. Such doomsayers are drawing lessons from Mao’s unhappy end. Over the two decades before his death in 1976, absolute power and a cult of personality left the Great Helmsman increasingly isolated and paranoid: a tyrant alienated from his most capable revolutionary comrades, military commanders and aides, many of whom were purged or driven to their deaths.