Students and teachers at Nanjing University of the Arts watch Xi's speech
Many people in China normally don't pay much attention to these set-piece, long, predictable speeches from their leaders.
However this year they were looking for any indication that the country's strict Covid amelioration measures might be eased after the Communist Party Congress.
The short answer from Chinese leader Xi Jinping: no.
He said that there would be no wavering on zero-Covid because of the need to prioritise saving people's lives.
The lockdowns, the mass testing, the health code scanning, the quarantine, the travel restrictions are all here to stay for the foreseeable future.
There was not even the slightest acknowledgement of the social and economic pain being caused by the policy.
Other massive challenges being faced by the government but which didn't get a mention include: soaring youth unemployment and the property crisis.
Instead, this nearly two-hour long speech was heavy on standard Party rhetoric and short on actual solutions to China's problems.
If you are a university graduate who can't find a job in the tech sector following government crackdowns on these companies, Xi Jinping urging you to "follow the Party's guidance… striving to be the new generation, building a modern socialist county" is not going to be much comfort.
The largest applause, no doubt scripted, came when Mr Xi spoke about unification between the mainland and Taiwan.
He said Beijing would encourage economic cooperation with the island, that it would genuinely strive for peaceful unification but that the Party would "never promise to renounce the use of force as an option".
He also defended the much-criticised state security law in Hong Kong which he said had restored order to the city.
Likewise, he justified the demolition and alterations to many mosques in the northern Chinese provinces of Ningxia and Xinjiang - home to a mostly Muslim population - by saying that religions here must be "Chinese in orientation".
Structures seen as reflecting an Arab image of Islam have been replaced by those with a more Chinese aesthetic.
There were a few other elements that did not go unmissed.
Former leader Jiang Zemin was not present but he is now 96 and perhaps too frail to attend. Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao from the former administration were on stage with Mr Xi.
Also in attendance, seated at the front row of the podium, was former Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli - his first public appearance since Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai accused him of sexual assault last year.
The 75-year-old has not publicly commented on the accusation.
Zhang Gaoli (C) was seated at the front row of the congress
However, Mr Xi's administration does have a good story to tell in terms of climate change and other environmental initiatives.
The congress opened in Beijing under a clear blue sky. There was a time when this was unusual in the capital. Now it's the other way around; the bad pollution days are the ones that stand out.
China's leader said: "We'll boost low carbon industries and promote low carbon ways of life. We'll intensify pollution control. We'll work to eliminate all serious pollution".
But coal fired power won't be phased out until the new sources of power are in place. "We're building the new before discarding the old," he said.
There may still be a massive income disparity here between the richest Chinese people and those less well-off but, in poverty alleviation, there have also been improvements and Xi Jinping referred to this.
Yet, if you watched this speech and had no idea what is actually going on in China right now, you would have a distorted picture of reality.
The overall message from the speech was that China is charging ahead in leaps and bounds under the Communist Party's guidance - but the economic uncertainty swirling around here right now is of a kind not seen in the country for decades.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, center, with former presidents Jiang Zemin, right, and Hu Jintao, left, attend the celebration to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the founding of Communist China in Beijing, 1 October, 2019.
Credit: AP Photo/Ng Han Guan
Many China watchers consider institutionalization as the key to China’s political stability at the elite level since the 1980s. Andrew Nathan identified the institutionalization of power transitions as one of the main reasons behind China’s authoritarian resiliency. However, as Joseph Fewsmith has noted, what China scholars defined as political institutions in China are nothing more than norms. Since the Deng Xiaoping era, these norms have been constructed and guarded by senior figures in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who are the main stabilizing force within the Party.
These seniors (元老) are retired national leaders who remain politically influential through their networks and proteges. They have historically played a significant role in Chinese politics by mediating elite conflicts, forging factional consensus, and setting the direction of policy. They played a vital role in personnel affairs by promoting followers, designating successors, and even deposing the top leader.
The first generation of seniors emerged during the 1980s. They were Mao’s comrades who were purged during the Cultural Revolution and later revived by Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang. Among them, the eight most powerful figures – known as the Eight Immortals – enjoyed unrivaled political influence. These seniors played an essential role in shaping economic policies during the 1980s.
Two seniors in particular, the conservative Chen Yun and reformer Deng Xiaoping, led the struggle over China’s future between a planned economy with a market as a supplement and a socialist market economy. Hu Yaobang, the CCP secretary during this period, complained about being sandwiched between the two elderly strongmen, while also facing complaints from Li Xiannian, arguably the third most powerful senior in China, that Hu only followed Chen and Deng while ignoring Li.
During the turbulent five years between 1987 and 1992, senior politics reached a new dimension: Seniors, especially Deng Xiaoping, played the role of kingmaker and king-breaker. They deposed two party secretaries due to what they perceived as “political mistakes” before bringing Jiang Zemin, the party secretary of Shanghai, to Beijing.
When facing the student protests in December 1986, Hu Yaobang took a conciliatory approach. He believed that rather than suppressing the movement, the party leadership should address student concerns and pursue democratic reform. However, Deng and other conservative seniors considered Hu “not forceful enough” to counter this bourgeois liberalism. After several meetings in Deng’s house, seniors forced Hu to resign.
After Hu’s fall from grace, Deng and the seniors had to pick his successor. Two candidates stood out for the next CCP general secretary: The liberal-minded Premier Zhao Ziyang and Deng Liqun (no relation to Deng Xiaoping), a stubborn conservative and one of the CCP’s best political theorists. Deng Xiaoping worried that Deng Liqun might jeopardize the economic reform process. After receiving a criticism letter, Deng Xiaoping decided to strip Deng Liqun from all his positions, a move that received consent from conservative seniors such as Bo Yibo and Chen Yun. The fall of Deng Liqun paved the way for Zhao Ziyang’s ascension.
In the end, however, Zhao shared a similar fate to his predecessor. During the Tiananmen protests in 1989, Zhao supported a conciliatory approach toward protestors and vehemently opposed military suppression, which contradicted Deng’s strong-fisted approach. When Zhao admitted to the public that Deng still made all major decisions, Deng viewed it as a personal betrayal, effectively throwing him under the bus. Ultimately, Deng and other senior leaders deposed Zhao for “splitting the party” and placed him under house arrest for the rest of his life.
Following the downfall of Zhao, the seniors picked Shanghai Party Secretary Jiang Zemin as the next leader, because of his deft handling of student protests in Shanghai. Jiang was an acceptable figure for both conservatives and reformers.
Deng’s final demonstration of his political influence was his Southern Tour in 1992. Following the Tiananmen protest and the bloody crackdown, many conservatives within the CCP believed that economic reform had brought political chaos. Therefore, the national priority shifted from economic reform to political struggle. In his speech on the 70th Anniversary of the CCP in 1991, Jiang declared that “class struggle will exist in China for a long time.” He emphasized the importance of ideological campaigns, especially the struggle against “peaceful evolution” and “bourgeois liberalization.” Following the speech, many observers claimed that Jiang might assault, even destroy, China’s infant market economy. Thus, Deng believed that he must take action to stop Jiang and conservatives from reversing the “reform and opening up” process.
During the winter of 1992, Deng toured the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and gave a speech in which he threatened Jiang, saying that “whoever refused to reform will step down.” According to Li Rui, who was closely connected to the power center, Deng was so worried about the trajectory of reform that he had even decided to depose Jiang. However, other senior leaders like Chen Yun, Li Xiannan, and Bo Yibo stopped him. Bo reportedly told Deng ,“You took down Hua Guofeng, Hu Yaobang, and Zhao Ziyang; you can’t have it your way more than three times (事不过三).” Deng agreed, but Jiang got the message. A year later, Jiang announced that reform and opening “must not change in a long time.”
Deng’s final political legacy was to designate a young Hu Jintao as Jiang’s successor, which started the tradition of a retired top leader appointing the successor of the current leader.
Between 1992 and 1995, Jiang Zemin quietly consolidated his power as influential senior members passed away. He wrestled away his primary political opponents, Qiao Shi and Li Ruihuan, by manipulating the retirement age. By 2002, he demonstrated his power by expanding the Politburo Standing Committee and filling it with his proteges, notably his long-term confidant Zeng Qinghong. The expansion made sure that Jiang maintained his political influence after his retirement. Jiang capitalized on his influence to nurture a relatively open political environment and a wave of political reform during the mid-2000s. The rise of Xi Jinping as Hu Jintao’s successor was also Jiang’s decision.
Meanwhile, Hu was considered a weak leader who ruled under Jiang’s shadow. He could not consolidate power effectively like Jiang, had trouble controlling the Jiang-supporting People’s Liberation Army, and did not even receive the title of “leadership core.” Hu’s weakness was further demonstrated when he failed to promote his protege and the head of the Organization Department, Li Yuanchao, into the Politburo Standing Committee in 2012.
Xi’s consolidation of power was the result of consensus among senior leaders. Many seniors believed Hu’s “first-among-equals” leadership style had hindered policy implementation because power was too fragmented. They thought China needed a more “presidential” top leader with centralized power to push through difficult reforms. They also concluded from the Bo Xilai case that weak leadership led to unchecked corruption and elite power struggle. Therefore, as Fewsmith argued, seniors supported Xi’s power consolidation and the anti-corruption campaign. Both Cheng Li and Fewsmith have pointed out that Xi must have gotten approval from Jiang Zemin and other seniors in Jiang’s faction to purge Jiang’s protégé, Zhou Yongkang.
However, the seniors certainly did not expect Xi’s power consolidation to go this far, with Xi taking down all political rivals regardless of their factional background.
Today, China is in a new era. For the first time since 1978, China has no senior who can constrain Xi. Jiang Zemin is 96 years old and rumored to have severe health problems; his absence from the CCP’s 100th-anniversary celebration confirmed these rumors. Hu Jintao was never a powerful figure, and his influence further dwindled after Xi purged many members of the Communist Youth League faction, Hu’s traditional power base. Other seniors, such as Zeng Qinghong and Wen Jiabao, have kept a low profile to avoid the anti-corruption campaign. Xi’s constitutional amendment in 2018, paving the way for his incoming third term as CCP general secretary and China’s president, demonstrate that no senior figure can constrain Xi’s attempt to obstruct party norms.
What does the lack of seniors mean for Chinese politics?
The case of senior politics in Meiji Japan serves as a useful comparison. Japanese seniors (genro) were heroes of the Meiji Restoration. Their influence in politics started in 1892 when the genro group picked a new prime minister following the sudden departure of Prime Minister Matsukata Masayoshi. The genro shared a similar political role with seniors in China. First, they maintained the power to select prime ministers to ensure stability during the power transition. Second, they sat above narrow bureaucratic and party interests to guide domestic and foreign policies based on national objectives. Third, they adjusted the difference between political parties, bureaucracy, and the military to maintain centralized control.
The genro group faded out of Japanese politics in the 1920s due to their age. As a result, Japanese politics fell into deep chaos. Fanatic military officers seized power following genro’s departure through coups and pursued aggressive foreign policies, which the genro group abhorred. The military government’s unchecked power led Japan to World War II and its eventual defeat.
The parallel is not exact, of course. The PLA certainly is not in a position to seize power; in fact, Xi has strengthened the CCP’s command over the gun. However, seniors provided an additional check on the top leader. They also forestalled any political deviation from reform and opening in the past 40 years. Furthermore, they stabilized the decision-making process by guarding political norms. Without seniors, Xi might run into the mistake of pursuing extreme policies with unchecked power. The nationalistic foreign policies and the zero-COVID policy only confirm this danger.
AUTHORS
GUEST AUTHOR
Zhuoran Li
Zhuoran Li is a Ph.D. candidate in China studies and a research assistant at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University. His work has been featured in The Diplomat and the National Interest, and he has appeared on Vox News.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has just accomplished something Donald Trump could only dream of: getting himself written into his party's constitution.
The Chinese Communist Party has voted to put Xi into the same pantheon as Communist Party legends Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, paving the way for him to lead the country into the indefinite future. It also means that he will have new power to expand his crackdown on dissent at home, pursue aggressive military moves in the South China Sea, and ensure that much of the Chinese economy remains under de facto state control.
Xi’s elevation happened on Tuesday, during the last day of the party’s congress, a weeklong event that occurs once every five years as a way for the party to fill key leadership slots and set national policy priorities.
More than 2,300 delegates voted unanimously to enshrine “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” into the party’s constitution. The addition of that phrase — which some analysts joke is as unwieldy in Chinese as it is in English — effectively means that Xi’s vision for China is officially part of state doctrine.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian of China at the University of California Irvine, says it’s premature to say whether Xi’s level of power should be compared directly to Mao, the founder of modern China, or Deng, the iconic reformer who opened up China’s economy to the world in the 1980s and helped pave the path to its meteoric rise today.
“It’s better to focus on the fact that he’s in the same league as those two,” Wasserstrom told me.
Xi is poised to become very, very powerful
The Chinese Communist Party has only added only one leader, Mao, to the constitution while he was alive. The party added Deng’s name and vision for China to the constitution after he died in 1997. No other Chinese leaders have had their name added to the constitution.
Experts say that Xi’s addition to the constitution gives him a vast political mandate and means he could be in power longer than most Chinese presidents. The recent norm in China is for the president to take on two five-year terms. Xi is currently beginning his second five-year term, but now it’s more likely that he could potentially end up taking on a third or fourth term.
Alternatively, Xi could step down after his second term but still hold sway over the direction of the country. Damien Ma, a fellow at the Paulson Institute, a nonpartisan Chicago think tank, told me, “Xi could certainly adopt the Deng model where he may not hold formal posts but clearly has huge influence over all major party decisions.”
And Xi’s prospects of holding power for an extended period of time grew even stronger on Wednesday, when the Communist Party revealed the five new members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the most senior decision-making body in the party. As the Washington Post notes, in a break from recent tradition, none of those new members appear young enough to be a successor to Xi when he completes his term in 2022. That absence of an obvious heir could be yet another sign that Xi will hold the reins for longer than 10 years.
Xi wants to make China great again. That’s going to be easier now.
So what is Xi’s vision? We got a taste of it during his whopping 3.5-hour-long opening speech at the beginning of the Congress last week, during which he heralded a “new era” in Chinese political life and repeatedly boasted of China’s reemergence as a “great power” in the world.
Xi spoke about reforming state-owned companies, but didn't suggest that he intended to privatize them as part of a bid to make China into a more conventional free market economy.
As the New York Times noted, Xi said the word “market” only 19 times, compared to 24 times by his predecessor Hu Jintao at the previous congress in 2012, and 51 times by then-President Jiang Zemin at the 1997 congress.
Julian Gewirtz, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School studying Chinese history and politics, told me after the speech that Xi emphasized “that he is strongly committed to the distinctive Chinese hybrid system in economics and party-led system in politics.”
Xi also championed China’s growing influence on the world stage, celebrating the country’s increasing control of the disputed South China Sea under his first term and calling for efforts to make the Chinese military more powerful. He described China as a country that wasn’t looking to pick fights but would unapologetically defend its national interests.
As he spoke of his country’s growing stature, Xi made it clear that China wasn’t trying to mimic or replace Western powers. He said that China is “blazing a new trail” for developing nations to follow.
“Under his reign, there is no more hope of convergence,” François Godement, director of the China-Asia program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told the Washington Post. In other words: Under Xi, China is not simply going to morph into a Western-style liberal democracy as it grows wealthier.
And Xi signaled that he would continue to crack down on any signs of dissent. Under his rule, Chinese authorities have restricted the ability of citizens to criticize the government online and hit NGOs with suffocating government regulations. During his speech, Xi suggested there was more to come — pledging enhanced internet censorship to “clearly oppose and resist the whole range of erroneous viewpoints.”
“The trend line is away from opening up — it’s increasingly tough to be a human rights lawyer, a feminist activist, an NGO worker,” Wasserstrom said.
While it’s impossible to predict exactly how long Xi will end up staying in power, one thing has become clear: China’s president has just been given quite a bit more power to lead the world’s biggest country.
Xi Jinping delivers a speech at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, in 2012. Feng Li/Getty Images
When Xi Jinping was elected general secretary of the Chinese Community Party in 2012, one of the first things he did was take his senior colleagues to the National Museum in Tiananmen Square.
The seven new top leaders of China walked through the “Road to Revival” exhibition, a fairly straightforward nationalist history of the country, from the first Opium War in 1840 through the present.
There, Xi delivered a speech about the Chinese dream in which he set forward the goal of “achieving the great revival of the Chinese nation.”
As Xi is poised to take on a third term as China’s president this week at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the highly symbolic museum stroll is worth recalling: it shows how much Xi is shaped by history.
Xi has become increasingly authoritarian — consolidating power, imprisoning dissenters, and now taking a third term, unprecedented since Mao Zedong.
Many of the most aggressive voices about China in the US have painted Xi as inflexible. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called him a totalitarian, and Trump’s National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien likened Xi to Stalin. Even those who have worked closely with Xi have come to see him driven by ideology. This week, former Australian prime minister and China expert Kevin Rudd described Xi as a “true believer.”
We may risk misunderstanding Xi, however, if we don’t consider the evidence that he is a pragmatist, who is drawing on the centralized power of the state to apply clear lessons from home and abroad. China’s own modern history and Xi’s experiences living through it likely present the major referents of Xi’s worldview and his priorities, but there are three other moments that have come to inform his worldview as president.
Three historical moments
No historical event haunts Xi and the Chinese leadership more than the Soviet Union’s collapse. “It’s hard to overstate how obsessed they are with the Soviet Union,” historian David Shambaugh has said.
A month into his first term in December 2012, Xi delivered a private speech to party leaders in Guangdong province with “deeply profound” learnings from the USSR’s downfall, with a focus on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s missteps. A summary of those remarks was later circulated. “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered,” Xi said, according to the summary. The lessons he took from the collapse: Retain tight control of the military, don’t make reforms that undermine the party’s power, and make no unforced errors.
“Finally, all it took was one quiet word from Gorbachev to declare the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party, and a great party was gone,” Xi reportedly said. “In the end, nobody was a real man, nobody came out to resist.”
Performers in the role of rescue workers gather around a Communist Party flag during a gala show ahead of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing on June 28, 2021. Ng Han Guan/AP
Another major historical moment that has informed Xi’s thinking is the United States’ war on terror that was launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Xi perhaps saw the ease with which the US perpetuated bad policies worldwide and at home.The US did face a credible terrorism threat, but Washington’s response was a massive overextension of power: invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan; deepening extrajudicial policies that meant close collaboration with autocratic Arab and Muslim countries; and advancing surveillance policies, including a misguided dragnet of Muslims, Arabs, and other minorities inside the US and long-term detentions in Guantanamo Bay.
The lesson Xi apparently took from America’s global war on terror wasn’t that overextension and hubris would lead to decline. Xi, instead, has seemed to grasp that he could get away with brazen expressions of power, so long as they were framed as counterterrorism.
China, before Xi ascended to the top of the party, took on many of the worst tenets of the war on terror, its rhetoric and policies, to clamp down on the country’s Muslim communities in the province of Xinjiang. The mass detention and relocation of Uyghurs in Xinjiang has been called a genocide.
Though these policies began in the early 2000s, Xi has accelerated them and come to be associated with them. As Gulzira Auelkhan, a Uyghur who survived the camps, has said, “In the camp, guards openly said it was Xi Jinping’s policy. … We had to publicly thank him for everything.” Or as Xi has put it, “The facts have abundantly demonstrated that our national minority work has been a success.”
Third, recent political uprisings have informed Xi’s thinking. Top of mind are the color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan (former Soviet states) in the early 2000s and the Arab revolutions in 2011 that spread across the Middle East and North Africa and toppled dictators.
It’s led to a major emphasis on the Chinese state’s stability.
One way to ensure that is to eliminate the corruption within the party and the Chinese government — for Xi, the rot at the top of the undemocratic regimes exposed their own vulnerability to citizens. Anti-corruption campaigns have been a key component of Xi’s rule, and a way to avoid the fate of leaders like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who over his 29 years in office was known for his expensive tailored suits and decadent lifestyle that appeared at the expense of his increasingly impoverished nation.
The Arab Spring occurred before Xi took office, but its ongoing protests and counterrevolution were still present in 2012 and may have informed the crackdown on Chinese party corruption, including the fall from grace of party honcho Bo Xilai.
Learning from China’s history
The crack-up of the Soviet Union, America’s war on terror, and the fall of autocratic regimes elsewhere are certainly instructive for Xi.
But John Delury, a historian at Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies in Seoul, emphasized that Xi’s main references come from within China. He did take the core members of his party to the history museum, after all.
The museum itself offers important clues for how Xi thinks. “It’s an orthodox lesson of essentially modern Chinese history, which is the century of humiliation,” Delury told me. The museum tells the story of the Qing Dynasty — “China let itself become weak, the system became weak. And ‘We got whooped by these European powers and then by the Japanese. And we can never let that happen again,’” he said.
That account is well-known in China, but, Delury says, “It does tell us a little bit about Xi’s instincts.”
It’s less clear what Xi has gathered about the histories of succession among China’s leaders. There is much speculation but little clarity about who might follow Xi as president after his third term — or perhaps even another. The party is changing the constitution to extend his presidency, and we don’t yet know when that term will end or what comes next.
“From the beginning, from 1921 when the CCP was founded, there are very few examples of a smooth, orderly transition of supreme power,” Delury said. “It’s a mess.”
As Delury put it, “Xi Jinping would know this history.”
