China Seems Powerful, But Has Big Problems

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

The twentieth congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that took place Oct. 16-22 in Beijing made Xi Jinping, the party’s general secretary and China’s president, effectively in charge for life. It seems to have completed his elevation to uncontested paramount leader of the country.

Over the last decade, Xi has reversed the political changes of the 1980s designed to prevent over-centralization of power. He has done away with presidential term limits, reasserted party control, and elevated his personal status to a level unseen in at least 30 years, if not as far back as the Mao Zedong era.

It is a dramatic step away from the collective leadership devised by Deng Xiaoping to forestall future Mao-style dictatorship; and, by endorsing Xi’s key goal of reimposing the Communist Party’s absolute primacy, it rolls back Deng’s efforts at distinguishing between party and state, ideology and governance.

Since coming to power at the eighteenth CCP Congress in 2012, Xi has shaken up China’s politics, including a relentless anti-corruption campaign. A key Xi focus became cadre integrity, clean government and the need for the party to find its “moral compass.”

“Xi Jinping Thought” was included in the CCP’s fundamental documents at the nineteenth congress in 2017. In China, having a political philosophy named after a leader carries enormous significance. For Xi, it is a core expression of his expanding power. At his speech opening the congress, he said that “fully implementing” his thought was a key theme.

In September, the CCP published new regulations on the promotion and demotion of leading party cadres, which removed mandatory retirement ages and term limits, allowing for the advancement of Xi loyalists.

Xi unveiled the members of the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s top ruling body, now filled with close allies from his inner circle, limiting potential resistance. Among them, Li Qiang, currently the party secretary of Shanghai, will become premier and therefore the one to manage the economy.

As he begins his third term, Xi must contend with a severe economic slowdown exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, tensions with the United States over the contested island of Taiwan and China’s militarization of disputed atolls in the South China Sea, and his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin as war rages in Ukraine. 

In September alone, a month of only minor Covid-19 outbreaks, Xi’s Covid lockdowns imprisoned 313 million people indoors. The “Zero-Covid” policy has crushed consumption, bankrupting thousands of small businesses and dragging down growth this year to three per cent, the lowest figure in four decades.

Youth unemployment has swelled to about 18 per cent, even as the population is starting to decline. The Zero-Covid campaign is probably the clearest testament to the power of President Xi, and he intends to retain it. “Covid is political in China,” explained William Hurst, professor of Chinese development at Cambridge University.

Compared with the boom years following 1992, these are grim times for many Chinese. It hasn’t helped that Xi has diluted or reversed some of the reforms that fuelled China’s extraordinary rise, starting with a subjugation of the key ministries of state to his personal control.

The challenge, maintains the historian Frank Dikotter, who specializes in modern Chinese politics, is how to address a wide range of “longstanding structural issues,” including the thorny problems of Communist Party monopoly over power and the means of production.

His reinsertion of Party cells into private businesses as decision-makers is counterproductive, writes Rosemary Righter, the former chief editorial writer at the Times of London, who specializes in international economics: “He cannot see that CCP control over the private sector will dampen, not invigorate, the newly laggard economy.”

Meanwhile, the Covid clampdowns have been a pretext to reinforce the already constant surveillance of everyday life, the all-pervading censorship and suppression of dissent. The security apparatus keeps a lid on popular unrest, though discontent is beginning to grow over plummeting house prices and mounting environmental scandals. Does this indicate a political vulnerability that the Party is papering over?

Imperative in Xi’s mind is national unity: every ethnic group, not just the majority Han Chinese, must fuse into one indivisible state, from Tibet and Xinjiang in the west to Taiwan in the east. He has called for a unified “community of Chinese nationhood” as a bulwark against threats at home and abroad. “The rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is now on an irreversible historical course,” Xi told the delegates.

In May, Xi told the CCP Politburo that Westerners often wrongly perceive China. “They don’t view China from the vantage point of over 5,000 years of civilization,” he explained, “so it’s hard for them to truly understand China’s past, present and future.”

Xi’s crowning achievement would be getting Taiwan back into the Beijing fold. Delegates voted to enshrine opposition to Taiwan’s independence in the constitution.

“China is not a democracy, and as we have seen throughout the proceedings at the Party Congress, only one man’s opinion matters,” remarked Victor Shih, an expert on elite Chinese politics at the University of California San Diego. But as Cai Xia, a former professor at the CCP Central Party School until forced to flee in 2019 after criticizing Xi’s policies, insists, “Even in China, it takes more than sheer force and intimidation to stay in power: performance still matters.”