By Gordon G. Chang
World Affairs
World Affairs
This week, Michael Sheridan of the Sunday Times revealed that China’s Communist Party is internally circulating an anti-Western screed, “Minutes of the 2013 National Conference of Propaganda Chiefs: Briefing on the Ideological Situation at the Present Time.” Among other things, the document tells officials they must “completely understand the harm of viewpoints and theories propagated by the West.” Moreover, officials are exhorted to “use battlefield tactics” to defeat China’s own liberals. The party must “stand up” to Western nations.
Hong Kong’s Apple Daily, a democratic-leaning newspaper, calls the “Minutes” “the definitive version of Xi Jinping’s theories now that he is in power.” In power, Xi, the party’s new general secretary, has proven to be a disappointment to many. In the glow of last year, he was portrayed as a modern reformer, someone who would lead China forward. Yet his elevation to the country’s top leadership position was followed by his worrying turn to the “left,” which in the Chinese context means Maoism.
Analysts tell us not to worry. Robert Lawrence Kuhn, for instance, believes that Xi must persuade hard-liners that he will not jeopardize the position of the party as he advances needed economic reforms. “It’s not an irrational combination in the Chinese system,” says the noted follower of Beijing politics. “My guess is that some of the talk is designed to consolidate a position so that he’s not attacked by the extreme left.”
Yet the problem is more serious than that. Xi has two irreconcilable goals. He is, as Claremont McKenna College’s Minxin Pei explains, trying to maintain Communist Party rule while substantially reforming the economy. The dilemma is that all structural economic restructuring reduces the role of the party in society.
This is most neatly highlighted by the fact that while Xi hopes to implement seven areas of economic reform, his government has reportedly issued a circular listing the “Seven Don’t Mentions.” In China today, things that cannot be mentioned—the “seven evil subjects”— are universal values, press freedom, civil society, civic rights, the party’s historical mistakes, crony networks, and judicial independence.
Xi, unfortunately for him, is in a maze with no exit. Today, there is a growing recognition that fundamental economic change in China cannot occur unless there is also far-reaching political reform to remove entrenched interests. Yet meaningful political reform is completely off the table, as China’s lurch to the left makes clear.
The truth is, we do not know what Xi Jinping really wants. Yet even if he is a reformer, he is part of a collective political system, and as important as he is, he does not make decisions on his own. The Politburo Standing Committee, the apex of political power, is dominated by the so-called “conservatives,” hard-line anti-reformers who control at least four and perhaps five of the seven seats on the committee. So even if he is trying to change China for the better, he must bargain with interest blocks that could have much more sway than he possesses.
People say that Xi became general secretary because he was the figure most acceptable to the party’s squabbling factions. He is said to be the leader of the “princelings,” which is made up of descendents of former leaders of the People’s Republic. Yet the princelings are by no means a cohesive group. This ultimately means that in a political system dominated by coalitions, he is a leader without a substantial power base of his own.
Therefore, we should not be surprised that Xi, with his Maoist, anti-West, regressive line, may be playing to strong blocs in the party. We have to wonder about a political system where progress is only possible if one adopts the language of the Cultural Revolution and imposes crackdowns on all things liberal.
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