BEIJING — The reappearance Saturday of Xi Jinping, a top Chinese leader who had vanished from public view, removes one question mark facing the Communist Party, but a wave of protests against Japan is a sign that internal power struggles are far from over.
On Saturday, diplomatic tensions boiled over, with hundreds of demonstrators throwing rocks and eggs at the Japanese Embassy in Beijing, while smaller protests erupted in up to 40 other Chinese cities.
Demonstrators were demanding that Japan give China control of a group of islands known as the Diaoyu in China and the Senkaku in Japan.
Both countries claim them as part of their territory, but Japan exercises control over them.
Because public gatherings are tightly controlled in China, it seemed likely that at least one faction in the government approved of Saturday’s protests. Some analysts see a relationship between the protests and the political tensions surrounding the disappearance of Xi, the vice president of China, who had been out of public view for two weeks.
Xi attended National Science Popularization Day on the campus of the China Agricultural University in Beijing, according to two photographs posted on the website of the state-run Xinhua news agency and a report on the evening news.
No explanation was given for his absence. Beijing-based analysts said Xi was nursing an ailment — a heart problem and a sore back were the two most widely discussed possibilities — but that he was also dealing with political challenges that forced him out of sight. In the photographs Saturday, he looked healthy.
The challenges include deep rifts in the party over personnel and policies. Xi’s ascension to president is to be announced at a party congress expected to be held in just weeks. But no date has been set for it — a sign, analysts say, that the party is divided over many critical issues.
