Since coming to power in 2012, China's Xi Jinping has reforged the Chinese Communist Party with his anti-corruption campaign and his accumulation of titles. In a post-Mao system designed to distribute power, Xi's reforms risk tying China's success too closely to his own. Gordon Chang's article, written for The Cipher Brief on September 4th, examines the architect of China’s most recent and expansive policies, Xi Jinping.
Like no leader since Mao, Xi Jinping has roiled China’s political system.
He demands “absolute loyalty” to the Communist Party, and inside the Party, he insists on complete obedience to himself. It has been decades since China has had a leader with such a will to power. Much of what we thought we knew about the institutionalization of the political system appears to no longer be true.
Xi has now identified his interests as the same as the Party’s and the Party’s as the same as China’s. Therefore, the People’s Republic of China will, in all likelihood, rise or fall with him.
Not long ago, China looked stable. Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s successor, had begun a process of institutionalization of politics, moving toward what many characterized as collective leadership. Xi’s elevation to the apex of political power in November 2012, when he succeeded Hu Jintao as the Party’s general secretary, marked the end of that era of relative calm.
The new leader sought to rapidly consolidate his position, and most outsiders thought he had in fact been successful in doing so. The American intelligence community, for instance, had assessed him to be politically secure by the time he met President Barack Obama at the Sunnylands summit in early June 2013.
Observers cited Xi’s wide-ranging “anti-corruption” campaign against both high- and low-level officials, “tigers” and “flies” in Beijing lingo, as proof that he dominated the political landscape. New Chinese Communist leaders have always engaged in some housecleaning, but Xi’s efforts have been unprecedented in scope and duration.
And prosecutions are continuing at a fast pace. The Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection reports that in 2015 it investigated 54,000 officials for corruption. That figure compares with 55,000 in 2014 and 51,000 in 2013, the first year of the campaign.
The CCDI, as that feared Party organ is known, has not provided comparable figures for corruption investigations for years before 2013, but the total number of officials “disciplined” has soared since the last year of Hu Jintao’s rule. In that year, 2012, there were 161,000 total punishments, well below the 336,000 in 2015. The surge is an indication that corruption probes increased dramatically as well.
Xi has styled his efforts as a nationwide movement against corruption, and he has been putting venal cadres behind bars, but he has not prosecuted members of his family, who have enriched themselves during his rule, or political supporters. He has, however, relentlessly jailed anti-corruption activists. The inescapable conclusion is that Xi’s campaign is more a political purge than a law-enforcement effort.
The continued prosecution of officials by the unaccountable CCDI is, in reality, a sign of continued weakness of China’s leader, not his strength. If Xi Jinping were as strong as many believe, why would there be need for more detentions?
The unprecedented prosecutions threaten the basis of Party rule by “deconstructing” the web of patronage relationships that has kept the ruling organization in power. For almost four decades, powerbrokers tried to maintain a delicate balance among the Party’s competing and shifting factions, groups, and coalitions.
Deng Xiaoping’s contribution to politics was to reduce the cost of losing political struggles, thereby reducing the incentive to fight to the end and risk tearing of the Communist Party. Xi Jinping, however, has reversed the process, breaking decades-old norms designed to ensure stability and thereby increasing instability. Moreover, he has been, as one observer noted recently, “re-introducing fear as an element of rule for the first time since the Cultural Revolution.”
Xi’s motto, as one of his political allies said, is “You die, I live.”
Therefore, Xi’s unprecedented actions mark the end of a quarter century of calm, a time that permitted China to recover from, among other things, Mao Zedong’s disastrous 27 years of rule and the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.
At this moment, the Communist Party looks headed to another round of debilitating leadership struggle, something evident from the series of rumors of coup plots and assassination attempts, especially in the first months of 2012 on the eve of Xi taking power, and again in 2014 and 2015. These rumors, for the most part, looked false, but clearly something was—and still is—amiss in elite circles.
And now the infighting has broken out into the open. In March, for instance, “loyal Communist Party members” challenged Xi Jinping in public by issuing a letter, posted on an official website, calling on him to resign. And the CCDI, Xi’s main tool in his purge, got in on the act. It published an essay, also in March, on its site attacking authoritarian rule, a clear dig at China’s supremo.
Xi, by pressing too hard, is creating opponents and driving them together. For instance, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, adversaries their entire careers, appear to be cooperating, because they realize they now have a common enemy in Xi. And as his opponents unite, Xi has had to find supporters, looking to the generals and admirals to form the core of his political base. The growing influence of assertive flag officers goes a long way in explaining Beijing’s increasingly provocative approaches to its neighbors and the U.S.
“I have sensed from the start that he has the kind of ambition that makes other people worry,” notes famed China historian Arthur Waldron, referring to Xi. No wonder some Chinese have started speaking of Xi’s “new Caesarism.”
China’s Caesar has destabilized the political system at a time of stress in Chinese society, and the consequences are bound to be felt far from the capital of Beijing. If he should fail—or perhaps even if he succeeds—Xi risks taking down the country he now leads.
