The president of China, Xi Jinping, has admitted to watching “The Godfather,” and this week he proved he could be a shrewd student of one of that film’s themes: the art of amassing and applying power in a small, secretive circle of men.
Mr. Xi emerged from a four-day meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee stronger. He won endorsement for a new national security commission that is likely to enhance his influence, as well as for a leadership group on reform that could give him a more direct say in economic policy, which has tended to be the prime minister’s domain.
One year after taking leadership of the party, Mr. Xi is looking like an assertive, even imperial president, who sits well above his six colleagues on the Politburo Standing Committee. By contrast, his immediate predecessor, Hu Jintao, made a vocation of serving as a colorless executor of elite consensus.
“Xi sees power in very personal terms and seems ready to act on that understanding,” said Joseph Fewsmith, a professor at Boston University who specializes in Chinese elite politics. “Whether that is good for China is another question.”
Xiao Gongqin, one of China’s most prominent proponents of “neo-authoritarianism,” thinks Mr. Xi is very a good thing: a new incarnation of his idea of a model leader, Deng Xiaoping.
Professor Xiao, who teaches history at Shanghai Normal University, attracted fame, and controversy, in the late 1980s for arguing that China needed a pro-market strongman to extinguish political opposition while shepherding the country into economic modernity. Mr. Xi absorbed that “neo-authoritarian” idea by consciously imitating Mr. Deng, the party patriarch who oversaw the economic reforms of the 1980s, Professor Xiao said in a telephone interview.
“Xi Jinping marks the arrival of a golden age for Chinese neo-authoritarianism,” the professor said.
“It’s essential to concentrate power now,” he said. “This period requires a strong man, a very powerful leader, and this powerful leader must have both prestige and also institutionally guaranteed powers.”
But advocates of democratic liberalization see many perils in Mr. Xi’s potential amassing of power, as well as the formation of the new, possibly powerful security committee. Rong Jian, an outspoken opponent of neo-authoritarian thought in the 1980s, said he was alarmed by the outcome of the Central Committee meeting.
“He wants to be Putin,” said Mr. Rong, a political commentator who formerly made a living from selling art. Mr. Xi has potentially far greater national economic power in his hands than Mr. Deng had, Mr. Rong said.
“Now these resources are tremendous, almost on par with the United States,” he said. “So if they perform well, they could make a big difference. But if not, they could cause immense harm.”
During a visit to the United States last year, Mr. Xi recalled watching “The Godfather” as a young man. The other Hollywood film he recalled watching was “The Deer Hunter,” the 1978 drama about the harrowing experiences of American soldiers in the Vietnam War. Another Hollywood film that Mr. Xi has cited is a thriller: “Mission Impossible.”
Mr. Xi’s leadership style reflects his background, and what appears to be agreement among many senior officials that they need a more agile and forceful leader to cope with difficult economic restructuring, foreign policy pressures, and domestic challenges to one-party rule, said watchers of Chinese politics. Mr. Xi seems to agree and has repeatedly said change is urgently needed.
During the Central Committee meeting, he told officials that they had to accept the “necessity and urgency” of change, according to a report in one Chinese newspaper. “This comprehensive deepening of reform will certainly encounter ideological and conceptual obstructions, and impediments from entrenched interests,” he said.
Mr. Xi appears to be a multilayered matryoshka doll, with each layer of his political persona left by a successive phase of his life — under Mao Zedong, Mr. Deng and then his successors.
Although he and his family suffered harshly under Mao — who purged Mr. Xi’s father from the party elite — Mr. Xi has shown careful respect for him, and has revived and reworked some of Mao’s methods of rousing political mobilization for his own ends.
“I think Xi has been very clear that he is looking back to some mythology of a disciplined party working on behalf of the people that his father served,” Professor Fewsmith said.
But soon after he came to power, Mr. Xi also paid homage to Mr. Deng, by mimicking his early 1992 journey to southern China. Mr. Deng used that visit to reaffirm publicly his political dominance and unleash a rapid expansion of markets after the chill of the 1989 crackdown on student protesters. Mr. Xi apparently hopes to achieve a similar fusion of one-party control and capitalist dynamism, several experts said.
“He has adopted Leninist ideology not to return to the old Leninist path, but to suppress an explosion in political participation, and create a healthy, stable political environment for reform,” said Professor Xiao, the proponent of neo-authoritarianism.
Mr. Xi’s inner circle includes another past proponent of such ideas: Wang Huning, who also served as an aide to the two previous presidents. As a political science professor in the 1980s, Mr. Wang was an ally of neo-authoritarianism. He is now a member of the Politburo and constantly accompanies Mr. Xi, as he did the two previous presidents. And he is a plausible candidate to serve on, and even run, the national security committee.
“Wherever there is no central authority, or where central authority has deteriorated, the state will fall into schism and chaos,” Mr. Wang said in an interview published in 1995. “A robust central authority is the fundamental guarantee of achieving steady growth for a relatively low cost during the course of modernization.”
Many economists and political analysts say that Mr. Xi’s immediate predecessor, Hu Jintao, failed to provide that authority, perhaps because the party’s top echelons were crowded with officials who disdained him. Mr. Xi has been polite but muted in his comments on Mr. Hu’s record. He has, however, mocked the former leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, as a coward.
But by no means are all watchers of Chinese politics sure that Mr. Xi can avoid misusing his expanded powers, or squandering them on broken promises that breed more social discontent.
“He has to put all of these sprawling agencies, for external and domestic affairs, into his own hands,” said Hu Jia, a human rights advocate in Beijing. “That makes him even more dangerous than Hu Jintao. As well, Xi Jinping personally has a sense of crisis. He doesn’t want to become like the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty, Puyi.”
Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting from Beijing.