Xi Jinping
Chinese President Xi Jinping

All eyes in Australia should be firmly fixed on the quinquennial Chinese Communist Party Congress — its 19th since taking power in 1949 — that begins in Beijing’s impressive Stalinist Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square.

It will be the last act in the first five-year term of Xi Jinping, who was, at first, seen as something of a plodder who owed his career to his storied father, a revolutionary general and economic reformer who started the southern financial capital of Shenzhen. Five years on, the view on Xi has changed: he has ruthlessly crushed his enemies inside and outside the party in China.

The top leadership group, the Politburo Standing Committee, will be overhauled with only Xi and his Premier Li Keqiang guaranteed to stay, the other five men in the group are past the unofficial retirement age of 68 that has, nonetheless, been stuck to for almost three decades since the violent upheaval of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Of course, all the deals are done before the conference even begins — in backroom meetings and negotiations. The process is top-down rather than bottom-up despite the ridiculous fig leaf of a “secret ballot” at the congress. Everything is decided by senior leaders led by Xi as well as former leaders who operate behind the scenes — although the latter group will have far, far less influence this time, compared to five years ago, according to the chorus of experienced China-watchers.

But as Australia’s former ambassador to China Geoff Raby noted: “It doesn’t really matter who is in the PSB this time around, Xi is clearly in charge.”

Every five years, the congress names new members to the Central Committee of the Party, the top body that has about 200 members and 100 alternates. This group, in turn, “elects” 25 members to the Political Bureau, or Politburo, whom, for want of an analogy, become the country’s effective cabinet. From this number, a small group — which, at present, has seven members — forms the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the inner cabinet that wields all real power in China outside the military.

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This was always designed by the Communist Party to be very much a collective leadership, and the top person in the group, the party’s secretary-general, was to be first among equals (as Deng Xiaoping dragged China back into the 20th century, after Mao’s death, it very much became that, especially after the former’s death).

But the underestimated Xi has emerged as an equal more equal than others, placing himself at the head of most of the important “small” or “leading” committees — and creating more of these — that are populated by the Central Committee’s elites that set policy for the country.

The party’s fearsome propaganda machine now has a laser-like focus on Xi. In preparation for the congress, there is a massive exhibition in Beijing celebrating Xi’s “achievements” including those, like China’s fast trains, that preceded him.

Yet no matter who is in charge or pulls the strings in China, what happens to the Chinese economy matters very much to Australia. China is the country’s No. 1 trading partner and importer, making up about one-third of both categories. China is also the No. 1 trading partner with almost every country in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations — which is collectively our No. 2 trading partner — as well as with our No. 3 and No. 4 trading partners, Japan and South Korea respectively. The Chinese are the second biggest group and biggest spenders in the tourist sector.

And increasingly problematically, it is the largest supplier to our booming (but fraught) international student market, supplying 29% of international students in a market that is second only to mineral sand metals, far outstripping all agricultural exports combined. This has provided a golden opportunity for the party’s shadowy United Front Department to begin wielding influence in Australian academia — as has been widely chronicled.

It has raised such serious concerns in Canberra that Frances Adamson — Raby’s successor as Beijing envoy, and one of the most risk-averse diplomats that this author has met during almost a decade working in Asia — was emboldened to say in a recent speech that universities should resist foreign interference, as she warned Beijing to expect greater scrutiny of its activities.

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Backing up her departmental heads less than a week later, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said: “We don’t want to see freedom of speech curbed in any way involving foreign students or foreign academics.”

“This country prides itself on its values of openness and upholding freedom of speech. Australia is an open liberal democracy we welcome students and visitors to our shores but people come to Australia because of our values, openness and freedom so we want to ensure everybody has the advantage of expressing their views whether they are at university or whether they are a visitor.”

That will go down in Beijing like a cup of cold sick.

There will, as Professor Kevin Carrico noted in a tart commentary on the Australian National University’s East Asia Forum site this week, be much talk of reforms.

Indeed, back in in 2013, Xi promised that the market would henceforth have a bigger influence in the Chinese economy. And yet, since then, the state has continued to consolidate its ever larger Beijing-run state-owned enterprises that dominate critical sectors. Communist Party committees are now embedded in all major companies, spying on executives for Beijing, which has now promised to take a slice of major “private” enterprises, which Xi now, probably rightly, sees as a potential major threat to the party,

So while Chinese demand for Australia’s rocks, wool, hotel rooms and university dorms will wane and wax, the greater threat comes from Xi’s acceleration of China’s military modernisation as it has annexed huge tracts of the South China Sea, despite maritime disputes with seven other countries attracting international opprobrium.