top of page
Search

The Great Helmsman

thegoodbarblog

Updated: Dec 1, 2023





Loyal members of China’s Communist Party hail Xi Jinping as “The Great Helmsman.” But Xi Jinping is not the first Great Helmsman. Mao Zedong was also “The Great Helmsman.” The shared epithet is just one more detail tying the present leader to the past. It’s one more discomfiting reminder that Xi Jinping is China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong.

It’s a reassuring image—Jinping clutching a tiller, charting a course for the country, promising to steer China through choppy and calm waters. It’s only fitting that a man with the honorific “The Great Helmsman” should be fond of a nautical book. Among the many enigmatic qualities of Jinping, none is perhaps more baffling than his appreciation of western art, and among the odd collection of books and television shows and films that he has said he enjoys—Sleepless in Seattle and Game of Thrones, to name a few—one of the dearest to The Great Helmsman’s heart is Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Xi Jinping is no ordinary fan of The Old Man and the Sea, either. He’s mentioned his love for the novella on several occasions. He’s visited Cojimar, the Cuban town where Hemingway wrote the book. He’s visited Hemingway’s favorite Havana bar, where he even sampled a mojito, Hemingway’s drink of choice. “I just wanted to feel for myself what was on his mind and what the place was like as he wrote those stories," Jinping said.

Written by Ernest Hemingway in his later years, The Old Man and the Sea is one of his finest works, and it’s the fullest realization of his iceberg principle, or the theory that if a writer expresses their ideas precisely enough, they can shear their prose of anything flabby and inessential. Hence Hemingway’s terse and muscular writing style. Widely imitated but never duplicated, Hemingway’s style is a beloved one, cherished by readers the world over. But because of its pith and reticence, because of its sometimes evasive quality, it’s a style that often leads to misinterpretations on the part of injudicious readers.

The Old Man and the Sea follows a fisherman named Santiago—for most of the book he’s referred to as the Old Man—and his quest to break an 84-days-long slump of not catching a single fish. The Old Man exhibits sterling qualities like strength, fortitude, and a pertinacity that borders on the irrational—he was once locked in an arm-wrestling match with someone that lasted two days. It’s easy to understand why Xi Jinping might be drawn to such a character. The Old Man would make a good party member after all. His lifestyle is austere, almost ascetic. The shack the Old Man lives in is furnished with “a bed, a table, one chair, and a place on the dirt floor to cook with charcoal.” It’s a living environment redolent of Jinping’s in Liangjiahe Village, where as a young man escaping the tumult of the cultural revolution, he lived in a cave for seven years. The Old Man is unsentimental about pain. Hemingway writes, “[the Old Man] settled comfortably against the wood and took his suffering as it came.” And he says macho things like, “man is not made for defeat.” Compare this line with Jinping’s, “The Chinese nation is a great nation; it has been through hardships and adversity but remains indomitable.”


The Old Man decides to leave the harbor, believing that he will be able to break his cold streak and pull in a large fish in the more remote waters beyond the harbor. After first catching an albacore, the Old Man hooks a prehistorically large marlin, and the story, properly speaking, begins. The marlin drags the Old Man farther and farther out to sea, and while the the Old Man strives to defeat the fish, the entire time he curses himself for fishing so far out, feeling he has in a manner betrayed the marlin. The Old Man eventually catches the marlin, but only after a grueling two-day battle, during which time he suffers bodily harm. At one point, the fish jerks him forward and he falls down and bloodies his face. And then his hands, raw from yanking on the rushing rope, are described as “mushy.”

The Old Man’s trouble doesn’t end with catching the marlin. When he tries to bring the marlin back to the harbor, he is harried by sharks who smell the blood leaking from the fish. The Old Man battles them valiantly, and manages to kill two sharks and bust up another, but in the end the sharks overpower him and strip the marlin to the bone. The Old Man laments, “fish that you were. I am sorry that I went too far out. I ruined us both.”

He returns to shore a weaker man. He carries his boat’s mast on his shoulder and staggers under its weight, stopping and sitting several times before he finally makes it up the hill to his shack.

Almost three months ago, the White House revealed that China has been operating a spy facility in Cuba since 2019. China and Cuba are now discussing the creation of a more advanced spy facility, one that would be equipped with sophisticated electronic eavesdropping devices whose range would include U.S. military bases in the southeastern states. Mark Warner and Marco Rubio, chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, released a joint statement denouncing China’s actions as “unacceptable.” Tensions remain high between America and China, even after Anthony Blinken and Janet Yellen undertook diplomatic missions aimed at thawing relations. This week, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimando, visited China. She was the first commerce secretary in five years to do so.

Earlier this year, China captured the nation’s attention when an errant spy balloon drifted across the United States before being shot down above the icy waters of the Atlantic. Both the balloon and the intelligence base in Cuba signal a willingness on Jinping’s part to push the envelope. The failure of his Zero-Covid policy, the implosion of China’s real-estate market, and the nation’s foundering strategic partnership with Russia—it’s a bit like a fisherman going 84 days without catching a fish. Jinping must now deflect attention. He will want to assert his strength and power and divert western eyes away from China’s sluggish economy. Perhaps Jinping seeks to do so with his increasingly hawkish stance toward Taiwan, whose semi-conductor-rich nation he sees as a part of China. Biden has said that the U.S. would defend Taiwan’s sovereignty, putting American boots on the ground in the event of a Chinese invasion. Biden has also publicly called Jinping a dictator.

What Jinping wants to do is catch a big fish. But catching a marlin is one thing. Returning to shore with the marlin is another thing entirely.

Maybe it’s time that Jinping re-read Hemingway’s book—it’s short, only 16,000 words. He could learn a lesson or two from the Old Man. Maybe he would finally understand that the story isn't about the old man's resilience—it's about his folly. And Maybe he would finally understand that it doesn’t pay to stray too far from one’s shore.

And if Jinping ever visits China’s spy base in Cuba, let’s hope he takes a moment to pause and gaze out at Havana’s harbor, where the lights of the city play on the smooth face of the water, and let’s hope he remembers the Old Man. Let’s hope he remembers what happens to the Old Man when he leaves the harbor.






 
 

Commentaires


Subscribe Form

Thanks for submitting!

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
bottom of page