What is the significance of Xi Jinping securing his third term as leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at the 20th Party Congress (16-22 October)?
Xi in his past two terms as leader had sought to steer away from policies and practices from the era of Deng Xiaoping; his third term is a clear sign that he has largely succeeded.
CCP congresses have been held every five years. Typically, 2000 +delegates gather for a week. Through processes as opaque as the way the Vatican selects a new Pope, the congress confirms a new Central Committee (around 200), a 25-strong Politburo, a Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) of between five and nine, and a new party leader, plus changes to the Party constitution.
In 1978, having survived being purged by Mao (twice) as a “capitalist roader”, Deng became the CCP’s supremo. Unlike Mao, he did not persecute veteran leaders of his generation, who had also endured Mao’s bullying. He led as a “first among equals”, so to speak. He was acutely aware of how economic disasters, political chaos and massive human suffering during Mao’s era, especially during the Cultural Revolution, had severely weakened the CCP’s morale and legitimacy to rule China.
On winning the civil war in 1949, Mao’s CCP had imposed a police state over the Chinese working class and peasants from day one of the People’s Republic. It was not a workers’ revolution. Chinese workers had zero control over the Maoist state or the state-sponsored All China Federation of Trade Unions, and were subjected to exploitation in the name of “socialism”. Initially tolerant of “patriotic” national bourgeoisie and landlords, the CCP regime expropriated them in the 1950s. Trying to emulate the Soviet Union, Mao’s adventurous attempts to force-march China’s industrialisation were terrible disasters. He launched the Cultural Revolution to deal with his critics within the CCP, whom he labelled as revisionists and capitalist roaders.
Deng ushered in market-orientated reforms — the economic prowess of China today is a direct result of his policies. While opening up China’s economy to external investment and loosening controls on the domestic private sector, he never embarked on political reforms. He aimed to perpetuate the CCP’s monopoly of state power. After the Tiananmen massacre of 4 June 1989 and the collapse of the USSR, Deng’s regime further opened up to the West. Triumphant western powers reckoned that as China modernised economically with external investment that would inevitably lead to political reforms. This optimism persisted as China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001. They could not have been more wrong in their assessment.
To prevent the CCP from being misled by a future Mao (or Gorbachev), Deng established a framework for succession planning and power-sharing between factions. Under these protocols, no one can be party leader for more than two five year terms, no one can be purged once in the PSC (the top committee), and no one can start a new five year term of office in the Politburo once they’ve reached the retirement age of 68. The irony of course was that Deng continued to hold ultimate power after he “retired” from all official positions. It was he who ordered the bloody massacre in Tiananmen.
After Deng, Jiang Zemin and then Hu Jintao each served two five-year terms as Party leader and President of the People’s Republic. When it was Xi’s turn to be party leader in 2012, the two retired party leaders still held many levers of power and had proteges in the PSC.
Deng’s collective leadership schema was doomed to fail, as autocratic systems require an autocrat. Once there were established faction leaders with protected status within the Politburo Standing Committee, political stalemate, patronage and systematic corruption accelerated, with many entrenched provincial power bases spread across a country geographically larger than Europe, and over 90 million CCP members. Many of those were entrepreneurs, previously not allowed to join the Party.
Earlier in 2007, Xi and Li Keqiang were both promoted to the PSC. Li was a high-flying technocrat with a PhD in economics from Peking University, who rose spectacularly through the ranks of the Communist Youth League and became a protégé of then Party leader Hu Jintao. Xi was a “princeling”, who as a child had traumatically witnessed his high-ranking cadre parents persecuted and purged from power during the Cultural Revolution, with himself and other “princelings” sent down to the countryside to “learn from the peasants”.
As the son of a “counter-revolutionary”, arrested for escaping from being sent down to the countryside and despatched to a labour camp, Xi somehow survived and was admitted to the Communist Youth League after seven applications. He applied ten times before being allowed to join the CCP. His emerged from this tough experience to climb resolutely up to the top of the party ladder, albeit after Deng’s return to power in 1978 had rehabilitated his parents and other fellow “capitalist roaders”, so that he and fellow princelings could rely on their backgrounds to rise quickly.
Xi’s main leadership rival, apart from Li, was another princeling, the flamboyant Bo Xilai. Bo turned the decrepit inland megacity of Chongqing, China’s third largest after Shanghai and Beijing, into a brash modern metropolis, through Maoist-style “red” populism and strong-arm tactics to expropriate corrupt provincial cadres while attracting massive foreign investments. Central leaders became alarmed at Bo’s charismatic Maoist rhetoric, the destablising effect of his Chongqing policies on party regimes in other regions, and a rumoured coup to take over the Party. Jiang and Hu moved decisively to strip Bo of Party membership, sentencing him to life imprisonment for “accepting bribes, embezzlement and abuse of power”. Such a dramatic move against a Politburo member was a massive shock to the party.
In contrast to Bo, Xi was perceived as a safe bet, not aligned with any faction, not playing the Maoist card, someone who had a solid but not outstanding track record and therefore was acceptable to the two previous leaders. However, once appointed, Xi turned out to be astute and single-minded in pursuing his agenda and outwitting different factions and regional power-blocs. During the last decade, he has vigorously purged and marginalised opponents, including Jiang and Hu supporters, often by charging them with corruption or abuse of power. He has also “retired” rivals. While every CCP leader has deployed these moves, Xi has been relentlessly persistent in clearing out opposition.
Despite rumours of a coup leading up to this Congress, his power now appears to be secure. He has appointed six loyalists to join him in the PSC. He has achieved a much larger reshuffle of the Politburo and Central Committee, installing many more of his supporters. The Politburo has lost its solitary female member and is reduced to 24 men.
Xi at age 69 has stayed on, as have his key allies, while leaders more independent of him, such as Premier Li Keqiang and Vice Premier Wang Yang, both not yet 68, were prematurely retired from the PSC, not even staying on the Central Committee. Wang Yang, a technocrat like Li, had initiated free market approaches with less state intervention in the dynamic province of Guangdong, which includes the industrial powerhouse city of Shenzhen and the Pearl River delta, China’s Silicon Valley. In the past two years, Li and Wang had often emphasised the importance of keeping the economy going, while Xi was insisting on zero-Covid lockdowns, which had led to severe economic dislocation.
With no obvious successor and with Xi Jinping Thought now written into the Party’s constitution, Xi is set to establish a personality cult like Mao, and looking to continue indefinitely as autocrat.
What does Xi Jinping seek to achieve, what challenges faces him and the CCP, and most importantly how should socialists campaign against his policies and his regime?
Essentially, since coming to power in 2012, Xi has seen his mission as an existential struggle to shake up and toughen up the CCP so that it does not suffer the same fate as its counterpart in the USSR. Xi aims for China to eventually gain world hegemony midway through this century, in what he calls his “China Dream”, drawing upon Confucian ideology and glories of former imperial dynasties. In the 20th Congress, his policies have been confirmed and tweaked in response to hostility from US imperialism, while recent policies like “dynamic zero-Covid” have been rigidly adhered to with no exit strategy in sight.
To achieve this, Xi’s regime in the past decade has been, and looks set to continue to:
• Continually increase the Party centre’s power over the provinces, imposing greater ideological control on party members through anti-corruption drives and a beefed-up party disciplinary machinery.
• Re-direct resources towards less developed inland provinces. While power blocs of party elite and entrepreneurs in coastal provinces wanted to press ahead with more economic innovations Xi has reined them in by emphasising the key slogan of “common prosperity”.
• Increase state investment in aerospace, high speed rail, AI and robotics, IT, farming, pharmaceutical (the “made in China 2025” policy).
• Heavily curtail tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent who wield huge financial clout through online gaming, purchasing, payment and comms platforms, and muscle in to control private enterprises generally — placing CCP cadres on boards, adding harsher state regulations to clip the wings of independent entrepreneurs.
• Utilise a massive police state machine to impose surveillance, censorship and control of Chinese citizens (worse than during the Cultural Revolution) with the aid of technology and a budget as great as the People’s Liberation Army’s.
• Attack the influence of western culture — block access to the internet in general through China’s Great Firewall; replace Facebook, Google, Twitter, Whatsapp, Youtube etc, with the government-controlled Tiktok, WeChat, Weibo etc; kill off the private English tuition industry and curtail international schools, lean on overseas Chinese scientists and engineers to return to the motherland.
• Assert Great Han chauvinism, claiming to be the custodian of a 5,000-year Chinese civilisation; marginalise and persecute ethnic minorities, their languages and cultures in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia; impose the regime’s narrative of patriotism in Hong Kong’s civil service and schools; promote Mandarin and target Cantonese language and culture as the last bastion of those stubborn resisting Hong Kongers.
A wide range of foreign policies include the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), deploying the PRC’s industrial strength to implement massive infrastructural projects in many countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. There are also the Confucius Institutes in Western universities; “United Front” activities in the Chinese diaspora; military bases built on islands in the South China Sea, border incursions along the Himalaya mountains against Bhutan and Nepal, as well as India; moves to intimidate South Korea, Japan and other souith-east Asian countries; and above all threats against Taiwan. The fact that the UN General Assembly did not vote to debate the damning report on Xinjiang by UN High Commissioner on Human Rights is a sign of China’s diplomatic muscle.
Many of Xi’s moves look like pages out of Mao’s Little Red Book. The construction of his cult of personality, the Orwellian prying into Chinese citizens’ lives, and the move to control the private sector, stir up CCP cadres’ memories of Mao’s exercise of absolute power and the attack against “capitalist roaders”. However, with the People’s Republic facing serious challenges domestically and now in major conflict with US imperialism, it was inevitable that the CCP factions could not but accept Xi’s terms.
By surrounding himself with loyalists and browbeating regional power groups and other factions inside the CCP into reluctant compliance, Xi puts himself in danger of making missteps based on poor information, and of rigid policy making and implementation which gets only tokenistic compliance or even passive resistance, as he tries to exert top-down command on the huge CCP bureaucracy across the massive country.
The CCP’s legitimacy is indeed based on delivering “common prosperity”. If Xi cannot achieve this, the whole Party, not just his grip on power, will be in crisis.
Xi and the CCP face unprecedented challenges. The Chinese economy is seriously stalling. It faces long-term structural problems linked to the way the CCP runs the country, which are accentuated by the serious disruptions arising from its zero-Covid policy:
• The expansion of the private sector over the past two or three decades has created a new middle class and an increasing gap between rich and poor, and uneven development between prosperous coastal provinces and marginalised landlocked provinces.
• Middle class investment in housing (which comprises three-quarters of Chinese household assets) has created a massive market, fuelled by huge debts, which has started to run aground. Major developers have become insolvent, projects have failed to get completed, prices have plummeted, mortgage strikes and loan defaults have hit banks and local government, which rely heavily on land sales as income. It was an unsustainable model in any case.
• Local government struggles with tight central control, indebtnesses, reduced income and now additional expenditure, as a result of zero-Covid mass testing and isolation costs.
• A demographic timebomb: the birth rate is falling rapidly, as those born during the one child policy are under so much economic pressure working and caring for the elderly that they are delaying marriage and childbearing. The ageing population is increasingly straining social welfare and health services.
• The increasing demand for a highly skilled labour force runs up against a relatively weak education system, yet as the economy shrinks there is high unemployment of graduates this year.
• Manufacturing and the massive housing programme have relied on super-exploitation of rural migrants working in cities, of whom 200 million are denied housing, education and social welfare benefits enjoyed by urban citizens, and local governments do not have the finances to grant them residential status (hukou).
• Foreign investors have started to diversify their manufacturing out of China, to Vietnam, India and south-east Asia, in response to geopolitical tension and the rising cost of labour.
Specific crises points for Xi include:
• Sanctions — The US ban on technology exports, especially advanced microchips, has caused serious production bottlenecks. Chinese company shares on world markets have taken a hit as the US moves to delist some of them, while audit problems continue.
• In foreign policy, the tide may be turning as China continues to back Putin and so begins to aggravate more nations, including those now heavily in debt as a result of Belt and Road project loans.
• Chinese citizens are increasingly aggressive in protesting against Covid lockdowns, youth unemployment, and banking and housebuilding failures, through wildcat strikes, refusal to pay mortgages, runs on small banks and outbursts on cyberspace.
The latest manifestations include videos going viral of the lone protestor in Beijing unfurling a huge anti-Xi banner during the Party Congress. Those have led to sympathy protests by overseas Chinese students in UK and US such as not seen since the Tiananmen protests of 1989.
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