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When Xi Jinping held the first-ever talks in Beijing with a former president of Taiwan, seeking to press the island closer to unification, a bookish-looking official stood out for his ease around China’s leader.
While others treated Mr. Xi with stiff formality, the official, Wang Huning, spoke confidently in his presence and sat next to him during the meeting, said Chiu Kun-hsuan, a member of the delegation that accompanied Ma Ying-jeou, the former Taiwanese president.
The scene gave a glimpse of one of the most important, yet little understood, relationships in China: between Mr. Xi, the country’s most powerful leader in decades, and Mr. Wang, the ruling Communist Party’s most influential ideological adviser in decades.
“He has the top leader’s full trust,” Professor Chiu, an emeritus scholar at National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, said of Mr. Wang. “Wang Huning’s influence has been in ideology, but now in China under Xi Jinping, ideology connects everything.”
Given the opaque nature of Chinese politics, the world often fixates on Mr. Xi, who since taking power in 2012 has centralized control and surrounded himself with loyalists, making it hard to know whose views he most values. In his circle, Mr. Wang stands out for rising to the top despite never having led a province or city, and for advising three successive Chinese leaders across three decades — a rare feat of adaptability and survival.
The New York Times spoke to more than a dozen people who have known Mr. Wang or met him, including during a visit to the United States in the late 1980s, and read dozens of his papers and books. The interviews and writings illuminate how he rose to the apex of power by developing ideas that he put to the service of China’s leaders, with a lasting influence on how the country is ruled.
Mr. Wang is credited with honing the Communist Party doctrines that have guided China’s rise, founded on the conviction that only the unyielding dominance of the party can secure the country’s success in the face of rapid economic change and intensifying competition with Western powers.
More recently, Mr. Xi has entrusted Mr. Wang with handling the fraught political relations with Taiwan, the island democracy that Beijing wants to absorb. Taiwanese officials say Mr. Wang has been overseeing efforts to deepen Chinese influence over the island, through selective displays of good will and covert influence activities.
Yet Mr. Wang, 69, is little known to outsiders. A professor turned party theorist, he stopped giving interviews after he began working at the Communist Party headquarters in 1995, cutting off contact with most former colleagues and staying aloof from foreign visitors.
Since 2012, he has been central to distilling Mr. Xi’s vision for China into an ideological program for a superpower that is technologically advanced, unabashedly authoritarian and increasingly fortified against American-led containment.
Mr. Wang “provided the ideological spirit for authoritarianism over the last 30 years,” said Rush Doshi, a former deputy senior director for China on President Biden’s National Security Council who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations and Georgetown University. “He has helped craft the national narrative.”
Winning Over Taiwan
Now Mr. Wang is turning his ideas, political acumen and influence with Mr. Xi to Taiwan. He appears to be sharpening strategies for reaching deeper into Taiwanese society and rolling back its people’s deepening rejection of China, including Taiwan’s cultural links with the mainland.
“He’s also someone who knows how to use both a soft touch and a hard fist,” said Chao Chun-shan, a professor emeritus at Tamkang University in Taiwan, who has been in meetings with Mr. Wang in the early 1990s and twice since last year.
Mr. Wang has assiduously wooed dozens of members of Taiwan’s opposition Nationalist Party, which favors stronger ties with China, treating them almost as a Taiwanese government in waiting — one that Beijing would rather deal with. He has politely quizzed Nationalist lawmakers: Who has old roots in Taiwan? Who came from families that fled mainland China in 1949? He asked them to describe their concerns, making a point that he was paying close attention, said several members of the delegations.
His overtures to the opposition fit with Beijing’s strategy of isolating Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, and his governing Democratic Progressive Party, which rejects China’s claim of sovereignty over the island.
Behind the scenes, Mr. Wang has overseen Chinese efforts to influence Taiwanese public opinion with online campaigns, which amplify messages that are skeptical of American power, scathing about Mr. Lai and admiring of China, according to two Taiwanese security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
At the same time, China has hardened its military approach to Taiwan; it recently held exercises encircling the island. It is also using legal measures to intimidate Taiwanese people, like the recently issued rules calling for execution, in extreme cases, for supporters of independence.
Such efforts may appear crude and likely to alienate many Taiwanese, but over time, their chilling effect could make a difference politically, said John Dotson, the deputy director of the Global Taiwan Institute in Washington. “Even if it only moves public opinion by a few points, that can be decisive,” he said.
Mr. Wang may also have considerable influence over China’s plan for unification. Mr. Xi has said Taiwan must accept the “one country, two systems” formula that Beijing used for Hong Kong, but that arrangement is widely rejected in Taiwan. Instead, Chinese officials like Mr. Wang now speak of a “comprehensive plan” for Taiwan, a phrase that allows for adjustments to the formula.
“If his past roles are any guide,” Mr. Doshi said, referring to Mr. Wang, “he’s likely been tasked with figuring out an approach to Taiwan that involves crafting long-term strategy, as well as the ideological framework for unification.”
From Democratic Hopes to ‘Neo-Authoritarianism’
Mr. Wang, like Mr. Xi, is the son of Communist officials and was one of the few Chinese youths chosen to go to university during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, a decade of violence and zealotry when students were drilled in Marx, Lenin and Mao.
But as Mr. Wang started graduate school at Fudan University in Shanghai in 1978, many in China were starting to look to Western countries for inspiration. Talk of democracy, suppressed under Mao, crept into classrooms, and Mr. Wang, who specialized in political science, became an avid student of Western political traditions.
“He was quite open and lively,” Chen Kuide, who shared a dormitory room with Mr. Wang at Fudan, said in an interview. “He also wrote contemporary poetry.”
Mr. Wang became fascinated with the “political culture” of democracies: the shared public faith in government that kept countries stable as leaders came and went. A strong web of public values was a key pillar of solid political order, he wrote, often citing American scholars like Samuel P. Huntington and Sidney Verba.
Mr. Wang stayed on at Fudan as a lecturer and joined the Communist Party in 1984. He was never a rebel, but he shared in the hopes, widespread in China in the 1980s, that the party could absorb some democracy.
“In today’s world, democracy has become the goal of political development,” Mr. Wang wrote in a Shanghai newspaper in 1986. “Without a highly democratic political system, there can be no talk of standing tall as a modernized, powerful country among the world’s advanced nations.”
But as the decade progressed, China confronted growing public anger over inflation and corruption. Student protests for democracy broke out in 1986. Even as Mr. Wang continued to praise democracy as a long-term aspiration, he cautioned against rapid political liberalization.
Abrupt political opening could bring upheaval and derail China’s economic takeoff, Mr. Wang wrote, arguing that its leaders could learn from South Korea, Taiwan and other Asian “dragons” that had grown rapidly under authoritarian rulers.
“He became more of a realist,” said Mr. Chen, the former roommate, who later worked alongside Mr. Wang. “He had the ways of a politician or political operator.”
Mr. Wang wrote a report saying that China needed a “centralized” model of modernization, not a democratic one, to loosen the state’s hold on the economy — which would cause a painful surge in prices for food and other necessities — while keeping a lid on instability.
The report circulated among policymakers in Beijing, according to a memoir by Wei Chengsi, an official in Shanghai who had commissioned it, and it became a seed for “neo-authoritarianism,” a school of thought arguing that China needed a strongman leader.
“His support for a strong central government and central leader was obvious,” said Ming Xia, a former student and colleague of Mr. Wang at Fudan University.
American Lessons
In 1988, Mr. Wang began a six-month visit to the United States, his first immersion in the superpower that China was coming to both admire and fear.
“He was deeply struck by how developed the United States was,” Hsu Chang-mao, a journalist from Taiwan who got to know Mr. Wang at that time, said in an interview. “After he returned, he dressed more attractively and stylishly; you could see that he’d been influenced by the American sense of fashion.”
But Mr. Wang’s travels across America, as a visiting scholar at the University of Iowa and other campuses, also seemed to deepen his view that Western-style democracy had flaws and could not be easily copied in China.
The United States lacked the social discipline and cohesion of Japan, Mr. Wang wrote in “America Against America,” a 1991 book about his visit. He was repulsed by a camp for homeless people in Berkeley, which he described as dirty. He followed the 1988 presidential race and concluded that voters ultimately had limited say in government.
His American sojourn appeared to reinforce his belief that a country had to instill the correct attitudes in its citizens, including respect for authority and tradition, or disorder would weaken it from within. Mr. Wang approvingly cited Allan Bloom, a political theorist whose book denouncing liberal cultural trends, “The Closing of the American Mind,” was a best seller at that time.
After Mr. Wang returned to China in 1989, his skepticism of democratization deepened. That spring, student-led pro-democracy demonstrators occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The Chinese military crushed the movement on June 4 with tanks and troops, killing hundreds, if not thousands, in the capital and across the country.
In the aftermath, Mr. Wang warned that the party still faced deeper threats. China’s leaders, he wrote, needed a “comprehensive overhaul of the entire system of social control” to tame the effects of economic growth, especially corruption, as well as an influx of Western investment and cultural influence.
Mr. Wang urged leaders in Beijing to reassert their control over revenues and state-owned companies. Their grip on economic resources had weakened in the previous decade, and revenue-rich local officials sometimes chafed at orders from Beijing, he warned.
He argued that as China opened to the outside world and the party retreated from directing people’s lives, leaders needed new ways to retain their loyalty. The new challenges, he wrote in 1992, “demand that China’s system of social control respond more firmly, flexibly and vigorously.” He advised Beijing to develop new ways to monitor and shape people’s values.
“He was really writing about what they were trying to figure out: how do you maintain political order through very fundamental social and economic change?” said Timothy Cheek, a historian of the Chinese Communist Party at the University of British Columbia.
In 1995, Mr. Wang was plucked from academia by Jiang Zemin, the former Shanghai party secretary who had become China’s leader in 1989. He joined the party’s Central Policy Research Office and was later credited with helping shape Mr. Jiang’s “Three Represents” concept, a policy for bringing private entrepreneurs into the party’s embrace.
After Mr. Jiang stepped down, Mr. Wang remained a top adviser to the next Chinese leader, Hu Jintao. When Mr. Xi came to power in 2012, he retained Mr. Wang.
The Man Behind ‘Xi Jinping Thought’
Mr. Wang’s continuing close access to Mr. Xi suggests that he remained an influential source of advice as the Chinese leader grappled with a pandemic, economic troubles and growing antagonism with Western governments.
Experts credit Mr. Wang with a big role in shaping Mr. Xi’s ideas into an official credo — Xi Jinping Thought — focused on China’s resurgence as a great power. To combat the dangers he sees to party rule, Mr. Xi has demanded ideological conformity, restricted Western cultural influences, expanded censorship and sought to silence even mild dissent.
Mr. Wang became office director for a commission on policy reform, which has pushed Mr. Xi’s ideas of state-steered growth, and he continues to shape major policy documents. He defended China’s tight control over the internet before an audience of multinational executives. He accompanied Mr. Xi on trips abroad, including summits with American presidents.
Mr. Wang gained “a real policy-shaping role, not just as an ideologue,” said Matthew D. Johnson, a research director at Garnaut Global, a consultancy, who has studied Mr. Wang. “I don’t think he’s a one-trick pony.”
In 2017, Mr. Xi rewarded Mr. Wang by promoting him to the Politburo Standing Committee — the top tier of party power. And Mr. Xi kept him on the committee for a second term in 2022, as others stepped aside.
During a party congress in 2022, Mr. Wang’s standing with Mr. Xi played out in front of television cameras. The tightly choreographed proceedings were briefly interrupted when Mr. Hu, the retired leader, apparently agitated and confused, seemed to resist being led out by an usher.
When Li Zhanshu, a senior official, tried to help Mr. Hu, Mr. Wang tugged at Mr. Li’s suit and whispered to him, apparently urging him to sit down. In theory, Mr. Li had a higher rank, but that didn’t deter Mr. Wang.
Amy Chang Chien contributed reporting.
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