Hong Kong’s Retreat Chips Away at Xi Jinping’s Iron Image – NYT

BEIJING — China’s leader, Xi Jinping, was in Tajikistan on Saturday, celebrating his 66th birthday with the Russian leader, Vladimir V. Putin, when the political crisis in Hong Kong took a dramatic turn with an unexpected retreat in the face of mass protests.

Mr. Xi’s trip fortuitously gave him some distance from the events in Hong Kong, where the leadership on Saturday suspended a Beijing-backed extradition measure, but there was no mistaking that it was a stinging setback for him.

The move, the single biggest political reversal during Mr. Xi’s nearly seven years as China’s paramount leader, suggests that there are still limits to his power, especially involving events outside the mainland, even as he has governed with an increasingly authoritarian grip.

“This is a defeat for Xi, even if Beijing frames this as a tactical retreat,” said Jude Blanchette, a consultant and the author of a new book on the revival of revolutionary ideology in the country, “China’s New Red Guards.”

The extraordinary events — street protests, which continued on Sunday, have been some of the largest since the British handover of the territory in 1997 — could even inspire Mr. Xi’s beleaguered critics at home, who, despite vigorous censorship, managed to follow what unfolded over the last week.

“This further chips away at the image of Xi as an all-powerful, omnicompetent and visionary leader,” Mr. Blanchette added.