By claiming a third term at the 20th Party Congress, Xi Jinping has become China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. Now he will be leader until either he dies or is deposed in a power struggle. With old Party institutions melting away under his watch, Xi may be inaugurating a new period of political uncertainty that is superficially stable, but structurally fragile.
Xi has restored a personalistic dictatorial regime and demolished the collective leadership and intra-party rules that Deng Xiaoping instituted after Mao died. Hu Jintao’s mysterious exit from the Party Congress on Saturday, right after the names of the leaders in the new Central Committee who would be eligible for the Politburo and Standing Committee were announced, dramatized the end of collective leadership. It also hinted at the possibility of future splits between those who favor more sharing of power among Party elites, and those who believe that Xi Jinping’s strongman rule is China’s best hope.
Deng sought to institutionalize the competition for power and the policy making process precisely to avoid arbitrary decisions with tragic consequences for China, like the ones Mao made to initiate the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. During his first decade in power, Xi Jinping has already made a number of sudden decisions that have proven costly to China. In addition to the abolition of the regular succession of the country’s top leader, there was the 2021 crackdown on private business, the stubborn refusal to modify the zero-COVID policy (“persistence is victory,” Xi insists), and the refusal to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine. His overreach is likely to worsen during a third term in which his concentration of power will be even greater.
The disunity and corruption of Hu Jintao’s collective leadership, which directly preceded Xi, helped him make the case that the nation needed a stronger leader and a more centralized system to rejuvenate itself.
In his new Politburo Standing Committee, Xi Jinping has opted to surround himself with yes-men instead of figures with their own political standing and professional experience who might question his misjudgments and challenge his power. To engineer this outcome and free up four slots to appoint his loyalists, he has demolished the retirement age norms that had been gradually established in the Party leadership over the past four decades. Wang Yang and Li Keqiang, both age 67, have retired even though according to the current norms of “67 stay, 68 leave” they could have remained, but Wang Huning, also 67, is being allowed to stay on. Under Xi, the retirement age norms that make high level leadership competition more predictable have been torn up. General Zhang Youxia, at age 72, will stay on as first vice-chairman of China’s military command, the Central Military Commission. And Foreign Minister Wang Yi, age 69, will be China’s Politburo-level foreign policy maker. Other respected figures below the age of 67 have been sent into retirement: Loyalty to the leader now matters much more than age.
Paradoxically, Xi was chosen to be the next leader in 2007 by an internal election within the Party, a procedure that he has now scrapped. His pedigree as the son of a Chinese revolutionary leader who was of suitable age, and his career cultivating international investors and private entrepreneurs in China’s coastal provinces had broad appeal to the Party elite, even though he himself was not considered particularly talented.
The disunity and corruption of Hu Jintao’s collective leadership, which directly preceded Xi, helped him make the case that the nation needed a stronger leader and a more centralized system to rejuvenate itself.
Xi radically transformed the political system by taking charge of everything, ending the Party’s delegation of economic policy-making to the government (Premier, State Council, and government technocrats), purging his rivals — real and imagined — through a massive anti-corruption campaign, and promoting ideologically loyal officials over competent ones.
When Xi rushed through the constitutional change to eliminate the two-term limit for the presidency in 2018, there was no visible resistance from provincial leaders or any other political figures. This was at root a consequence of Deng Xiaoping not taking de-Maoization far enough. China’s legislature and courts have never been permitted to establish themselves as autonomous checks on the actions of Party politicians. And the Central Committee and other collective bodies within the Party, their members all appointed to their jobs by the top leader, have been helpless to check Xi’s powerplay.
Overreach is the inevitable result of the lack of institutional checks on Xi’s decisions, as well as the need for local officials to prove their loyalty by overdoing their implementation of his policies — and their fear that if they tell him the truth about negative consequences, he might target them in his permanent purge against corrupt and disloyal officials. This is the combination that led to the devastating famine during Mao’s Great Leap Forward campaign of forced rural collectivization in 1958. The same pattern is being repeated in the forced quarantining, lockdowns, testing, and surveillance that local officials today have no choice but to impose on the public, under Xi’s extreme zero-COVID campaign.
The costs of overreach are piling up.
Perhaps the greatest harm has been that done to China’s standing in the world. The country started to look much more threatening when Xi ordered the construction of massive artificial islands with military fortifications in the South China Sea in 2013, and sent its Coast Guard, fishing militia, and Navy to confront its neighbors’ legal claims to the waters and land features off their coasts. Beijing has alienated other countries, whether it be by ramping up military pressure on Taiwan and Japan, picking a fight with India on its border, or cutting off most imports from Australia because its government called for an international scientific investigation of the origins of COVID. Xi’s alignment with Vladimir Putin’s brutal unprovoked war against the Ukrainians has only deepened China’s isolation from Europe and the United States.
The internment of Uyghur Muslims in thought reform camps in Xinjiang and the sudden imposition of a Hong Kong Security Law that destroyed Hong Kong’s autonomy in 2020 have further alarmed the world.
…the 20th Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party has buried collective leadership and confirmed the dictatorial rule that China has rebuilt under Xi Jinping’s first decade in power.
The global response has been predictable: countries are balancing against the China threat by forming coalitions like the Quad (U.S., Japan, Australia, and India), AUKUS (the U.S.-UK provision of nuclear power submarines to Australia, and the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, trying to constrain China’s aggression and reduce their own economic dependence on China. As the German Economy Minister said recently, “We can’t let China blackmail us.”
The cost of overreach is hitting home too. Xi’s abrupt crackdown on private Internet companies in 2021, including destroying billions of dollars of investors’ equity by vetoing companies’ IPOs just days before they were to be listed and wiping out the after-school tutoring industry, pummeled the economy that was already on the ropes due to Xi’s stubborn refusal to adjust his extreme method of managing COVID.
In 1956, the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union rejected Stalin’s dictatorial rule three years after his death and restored collective leadership. China did the same after Mao died. But in 2022, the 20th Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party has buried collective leadership and confirmed the dictatorial rule that China has rebuilt under Xi Jinping’s first decade in power.
Yet the costs of Xi’s overreach and his lack of power sharing are frustrating members of China’s elite. The tension within Zhongnanhai is building up because political competition has become an unpredictable free-for-all with almost no rules or norms. We don’t know just what will happen, but when it happens, we shouldn’t be surprised.
Susan L. Shirk is a research professor and chair of the 21st Century China Center at UC San Diego. Her new book, Overreach – How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise, was published last week by Oxford University Press.