Xi Won’t Go

The Chinese Communist Party is, above all, a strategic body. But strategy always involves some elements of taking gambles—large choices where you decide to head in one direction and exclude going in another. Even the Party cannot travel in two different directions at the same time.

Party Secretaries have a number of functions—to be storytellers, symbolic figures, and chief deciders over these strategic directions. They are also gamblers—following their instincts and putting all their political capital on large decisions. For Xi Jinping’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, the gamble was simply to go all out for economic growth no matter what. For a decade, the plan worked. China quadrupled its GDP, and rose to be the world’s second-largest economy. With double-digit growth most years, even over the time of the great financial crisis, who was going to complain?

With falling growth, and a bunch of collateral issues around the Party being more a commercial than a political entity by the end of this era, the Xi leadership shows a shift to a new gamble. No more relentless accrual of raw economic growth. Now the game is to stack up political capital. Leaders in China are in some sense also always hoarders. And since 2012, Xi has been the chief hoarder of titles and domestic accolades. The extension of the state presidency slated to be decided at the National People’s Congress in March is a continuation of this.

For all the country’s social, cultural, and historic diversity, China is often a complex place run on a simple storyline. Most other similarly sized places have a myriad of political forces and leadership groups vying for power. China just has one. And within the monopolizing Communist Party there is currently one dominant leader. From March, he is about to become even more dominant.

How can we interpret this? Basically, as confirmation that the dice has been thrown, and the onus is now completely on elite leadership as the core political tool to steer this vast ship towards its historic destiny. 2021 marks the first centenary goal, the achievement of modernity on China’s terms. It’s a moment of vast symbolic importance. It marks the end of the era of weakness, victimization, and of accepting things on the terms of others. China’s renaissance will have been completed—or at least the initial stage.

Getting to this point cannot be jeopardized. Xi and his colleagues know they have public support here. What Chinese person in their right might would ever want to see their country returned to the vulnerability of the past. With this dynamic vision for the future, Xi can ask for the indulgence of his fellow citizens in granting him whatever status his elite leadership needs. This is important to convey purposefulness, stability, and certainty.

There is of course the delicate question of whether stacking so much on one particularly strategic move will actually work out. If things go according to plan, and the country continues to move in a positive direction, with domestic issues managed, and sometimes solved, then the likely answer to this question is yes. But if there is disruption and turbulence, the great gambit that Xi has made to place so much onus on elite leadership may well prove a foolhardy one. As always in Chinese politics, the stakes are always high—and at this particular moment they have never been higher. Xi has just made one thing clear though. Domestically, no matter what happens in the next few years, in terms of elite leaders, there will be no runners-up!

When Deng Xiaoping came to power beginning with the Third Plenum in December 1978, he had enormous authority because of his previous positions and his experience in high places. He had been a member of the Communist Party from its early days in the 1920s, and worked closely with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. He had five years experience in France and one year in the Soviet Union. He had been a military leader for 12 years and was the Political Commissar for the entire front command at the huge and decisive Huai Hai Campaign. He had done a great job leading the Southwest Bureau with a population of approximately 100 million for three years, from 1949 to 1952, just after the Communists Came to power. He had been general secretary of the Party for a decade, and from 1973 to 1976, after Zhou Enlai became ill with cancer, he had been, with the advice and help of Zhou Enlai, the key person meeting foreign visitors. Thus after he took charge in 1978, he could be the deputy prime minister and still have the authority to lead the Party, the government, and the military.

Deng wanted to establish a system for stable rule that would last for a long time. He believed that holding a Party Congress every five years and a Plenum at least once a year would provide a stable system of rule. He also believed that terms of office for leadership positions would help provide stability.

I am not a specialist on Xi Jinping, but I believe that when he came to power, he did not have the natural authority that came from such a long history in high places as Deng Xiaoping had. He therefore needed to set up a structure such as being head of various small groups in order to rule effectively. By the time he came to power, corruption had become a serious problem. To attack corruption in high places means that the family and friends of those attacked or who worry about the possibility of being attacked may create difficulties for Xi Jinping. Thus Xi Jinping has the difficult job of trying to prevent the families of those who were criticized or might be criticized from resisting or gaining power. I imagine that such concerns must be behind Xi Jinping’s efforts to strengthen his position of authority at the present and in the future.

I do believe that following regular procedures for holding meetings and having terms for offices is likely to be a more stable system for the long run than having all power concentrated in one person’s hands. If power is highly concentrated in one person’s hands over the long term, then any time serious problems arise, as for example from the slowdown of the economy which is likely in the next few years, then the one person will have to accept responsibility for everything. Therefore, I think it would be good for China and for Xi personally if Xi could find some way to preserve a system that provides regular procedures for making decisions and selecting new officials.

As I wrote before the announcement of the abolishment of term limits, although Xi Jinping has transferred authority from state, market, and society to the Party over the last five years, these changes do not reveal his final goal of either personalist rule or strengthening Party rule. And this is still a hard question to answer. Nicholas Kristof argues that abolishing term limits is an attempt to strengthen the Party to undertake stalled economic reforms, but most others argue that Xi is consolidating power as the new Mao (or a new emperor). In thinking through the logic of these arguments, it seems that this would strengthen the power of the presidency (and vice-presidency), but given that this role is usually held simultaneously with the general secretary position, it does not seem like it is a move to strengthen the state in order to undertake reform. Instead the combined Party-state apparatus is being consolidated and strengthened, rather than strengthening both parts separately. This aligns with Xi’s creation of Party leading groups to oversee state and military functions, and makes sense with how he views both Gorbechev’s and Hu’s governance failures—basically that they allowed the state to strengthen at the expense of the Party, straining the linkage between the two and allowing for the existence of a state without a Party. It is almost impossible to know the true intention underlying this change until we see Xi start enacting reforms in SOEs or other state sectors, or to see him do the things that usually indicate a desire to consolidate personal rule. Learning from other situations where leaders have tried to transition dominant or single-parties into personalist rule, we would want to look for the following: attempts to install family members or close personal associates in positions to take over power, coup-proofing attempts against the military or other elites, changing rules that inhibit the rulers’ power, crackdowns against other sources of political power such as religion, universities, media, civil society, and attempts to create an authoritarian bargain with other elites, like buying them off with power, policy, or money. I am not sure how other analysts would assess this, but Xi only seems to be changing the rules and cracking down on other sources of power (including other elites via the anti-corruption campaign), and not doing the other things that we might expect if he was trying to establish personalist rule in China. If that is a good signal of his intentions, he might actually be trying to strengthen the position, not himself as a person, and will still step down at some point in the future peacefully once he has “fixed” China. However, regardless of his intentions, it seems that whatever good Xi might do for stalled reform in China, challenging the rules that allow for peaceful leadership transition and balance elite ambition will only lead to future political plotting, violence, and uncertainty, none of which will ultimately be good for China in the future. So even if Xi is not trying to become the next emperor, he might pave the way to just that outcome in the future.

In overturning one of the key elements in Deng Xiaoping’s attempted institutionalization of the Chinese governing system, Xi Jinping has pushed forward the melding of the Party and the state which has run through his overall policy approach since he ascended to the top of the domestic power structure at the end of 2012. His global ambitions have given the presidency a new importance; he could hardly have made his globe-trotting round of state visits as head of the Party or turned up at a G7 summit as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) but he also needed the post to have real resonance. Though the presidency lacks domestic clout and ranks third in the quiver of top positions held by Xi, the two-term limit set down in 1982 made it an obvious target for a leader who clearly wants to escape from organizational and constitutional constraints, and can now apply the same open-ended criteria to his more important jobs as the head of the Party and the military.

The change about to be approved by the National People’s Congress thus forms part of a wider process that has been going on over the past five years: the reversal of the separation of Party and state advocated by Deng. The steady incursion of C.C.P. bodies into domains previously reserved for the government, as well as the probable appointment of Party figures to senior State positions and the creation of a wide-ranging Supervisory Commission, are all hallmarks of Xi’s ambitions to meld the organs that run the People’s Republic into a single unity under his central control with which he can identified himself as the core leader of the nation. Whereas Mao asserted his all-embracing command as a result of the long struggle for power, Xi has to construct his own edifice.

Some observers suspect that the announcement of the constitutional change so soon after the 19th Party Congress reflects concern on Xi’s part about opposition. To which one can only respond, as with past assertions that his position is weaker than it appears, by noting, first, that he is bound to have aroused considerable resentment since 2012 through the anti-corruption campaign and other measures but, second, that evidence of organized and coherent opposition is lacking. It seems more likely that the timing was an attempt to build on the momentum of the Congress and to establish new ground rules as early as possible in the second term—in fact, 10 days ahead of the expiry of his first five years as president.

This was, above all, a political signal issued by a leader intent on consolidating his authority at the top of a remodelled power structure. The actual constitutional change was of little import given the way Xi could have continued to rule the roost after 2023 even if he stepped down as head of state. But symbols matter and a message has been sent, not only inside China but also to the world. Xi means what he said at the Congress about putting China at the center of the global stage, and his indefinite purchase on the presidency forms part of that. But, for him, it needs to be backed by a unified Party-state which can make the most of what Beijing sees as the weakness of democratic capitalism.

The implications of Xi Jinping’s triumph in removing presidential term limits are, as noted repeatedly on this thread, momentous for China and for the rest of the world. It is also significant for a place that is “China” or “the rest of the world” depending on your perspective: Taiwan.

In the eyes of Beijing, of course, Taiwan is but a renegade province. Xi made this perfectly clear during his address at the 19th Party Congress. As Richard C. Bush commented, “Xi Jinping displayed the greatest toughness when talking about the threat of Taiwan independence.” Xi vowed to defeat independence in any form.

Tsai Ing-wen is too savvy to stand outside the Presidential Office Building in Taipei and declare establishment of The Republic of Taiwan. But even much subtler moves than such hard independence are raising Beijing’s ire. The Global Times railed against Tsai in October 2017 that she “has been challenging the 1992 Consensus and the political status quo of the One China policy, and pushing forward all types of ‘implicit’ and ‘cultural’ Taiwan independence since assuming office.” And cross-strait tensions have continued to ramp up since this was written last fall. With Xi bent on the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and now setting up a longer runway to achieve that end, Tsai’s (and her successors’) jobs are all the more fraught.

Xi has not set a timetable for resolving the “Taiwan issue,” but officials in Taiwan are keenly aware of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CCP in 2021 and the more distant 100th anniversary of the founding of the PRC in 2049. These dates do not necessarily have a talismanic quality, but they underscore the fear that bringing Taiwan back under Beijing’s rule is firmly on Xi’s “to do” list.

Taiwan cannot counter this threat alone. There are signs that “the United States is cautiously starting to push back” to Beijing’s ratcheting up of pressure. This will be a delicate dance. No one I know in Taiwan wants to be at the top of the priority list for Beijing or the United States (at worst playing the so-called “Taiwan card”), as that probably would not end well for Taiwan. Nor do people here want to be ignored. This leaves Taiwan in a tricky position: how to be part of the conversation without becoming a point of crisis.

My sons’ preschool classmates in Taipei will be old enough to vote in 2035 the date, as Richard McGregor notes, that has been flagged by Xi as “by which time China will be a modern, prosperous state.” I’ve increasingly wondered whether come 2035 the kids on the Taipei playground will be able to exercise that right. As the world grapples with the implications of Xi’s expected long reign, I hope that helping the people of Taiwan retain the ability to decide their own fate remains a priority: “[T]he issues between Beijing and Taiwan must be resolved peacefully and with the assent of the people of Taiwan.”

China experts woke up Sunday to big news: among the constitutional changes approved at the Central Committee meeting last month was the removal of the two term limit for the Chinese presidency. This is one of the strongest possible signals that Xi intends to stay in power after his second term, potentially ending an era of limited rule by the Party secretary.

What does this mean for Chinese governance? Some scholarship on authoritarian politics, like that of Milan Svolik, focuses on the use of party systems to promote authoritarian power-sharing. Beatriz Magaloni argues that the stability and duration of hegemonic party regimes like that of the PRI in Mexico benefit from regularized and orderly political succession. The logic is relatively straightforward: if any one faction or subgroup comes to power, there is always another chance next time. Not so when one leader rules indefinitely: in that case political factions often strive to make their own opportunities. Does personal rule mean a fragile, conflict-fraught Chinese polity?

Not necessarily. China is not Mexico, nor is it Zimbabwe, which might have been characterized (until recently) as the archetypical personalist regime. Much of what we know about personalist autocracy comes from historical one-man-dictatorships. That often means post-independence regimes in the global South, mostly without strong ruling parties and with hobbled economies. Xi is in charge of arguably the most powerful and technologically enabled autocratic regime in history. So, Xi may come to personalistic rule in a very different position than revolutionary leaders in the 1960s did.

That might mean that he’s able to deal more effectively with some problems other personalistic rulers struggle with, like what authoritarianism scholarship since Ronald Wintrobe's landmark work has called ‘the dictator's dilemma.’ With some violence to the original work, the dictator’s dilemma is the ‘shoot-the-messenger’ problem writ large: when there’s only one person who matters, nobody wants to deliver bad news. But dictators can’t do everything, so they rely on information being passed up the ladder to make decisions. The perverse incentives of a dictator’s agents can mean that the autocrat won’t learn about problems until they’re too late, or end up triggering uprisings with political repression.

But with the pervasive, overlapping, and robust authoritarian tools that the Chinese government has built up across the last decade, I’m not sure that Xi will have the same trouble getting high-quality information that 20th century dictators struggled to find.

Whence Chinese politics? China has had personalistic rule that shifted back to collective rule before—Xi Jinping’s long presidency doesn’t mean collective rule is over forever. It does mean, though, that we are in for very tense period in elite politics generally, and around the next political succession in particular. Xi broke more than a few political eggs to make his anti-corruption omelet. A lot of stability-preserving norms, like not prosecuting former Politburo Standing Committee members, are now gone. This means, as has been written above, that Xi is all in with no way back. Retirement isn’t safe for Xi—or for anyone else.

Let’s stash all the comparison of Xi Jinping with Mao Zedong or Vladimir Putin for now. China is not descending into a second Cultural Revolution or plunging into Russia-style atrophy under a dictator. To the contrary, China under Xi will continue its ascendance, although with increasing exposure to the key-man risk.

Xi now has an unobstructed path to indefinite rule and authority not only unrivaled in recent Chinese history, but also unchecked. But he is not engaging in a game of thrones just to eliminate rivals and amass personal privileges. He has a proven record of delivering on policy, a vision for the country’s future that enjoys popular support, and an intention to rule through institution building rather than personal fiat.

Xi has presided over robust economic growth, neutralized political rivals, sustained a tough anti-corruption cleanse, reformed the military, subdued neighbors quarreling with China over maritime rights, and elevated China’s global stature. He is broadly popular among the Chinese public and has helped the Party recover legitimacy.

In November, during the Party Congress, he pledged to shift the Party’s mission from delivering high-speed—but costly—economic growth to meeting the people’s demands for a “better life.” The new agenda encompasses a broad array of goals including better public services, stronger social welfare, cleaner environment, eradication of poverty, closing regional gaps in development, and rising global influence. He declared that by 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic, his roadmap will lead China to become a “great modern socialist country” and “global leader.” His vision closely tracks the aspirations of China’s growing middle class and reflects a keen understanding of problems the country needs to fix.

Xi has shown himself to be a believer in institutions—as long as they remain subordinate to the Party and serve as instruments of his rule, not competing centers of authority. He has been revamping the bureaucracy, strengthening the legal system, and even selectively empowering the civil society—environmental NGOs are authorized to sue polluters—to ensure Chinese officials diligently execute central directives and hold them accountable if they don’t. Poor implementation of his policy is now tantamount to corruption and political disloyalty, subject to investigation and punishment by the Party’s much feared discipline watchdog. Next week’s National People’s Congress will formally establish the National Supervision Commission, which will administer party disciplines to all public servants including non-party members to ensure they do what they are told.

In short, Xi has primed the Chinese party-state for his agenda, which is to restore the Middle Kingdom to its historical grandeur and global greatness. But that means the Party and the country now rises and falls with Xi the person.

Even though Xi has proven a largely popular and effective ruler, his unchecked power could turn him into a bad one. As he continues to amass power and demand absolute loyalty from Chinese leaders and officials, dissenting invites dire consequences. He is less likely to hear challenges and feedback even when his ideas are flawed and policies produce poor results. The absence of disagreements means he could become more insulated and prone to mistakes.

Compounding the risk is the complexity of his “better life” agenda. It requires difficult tradeoffs, between economic growth and environmental protection for example and among social classes and regions with diverse and contradictory interests. Making such decisions requires more debate and consultation not less.

The system’s stability is predicated on the Party—now Xi himself—always succeeding in reading the sentiment of the Chinese majority and satisfying their needs, while keeping the disenfranchised marginalized and silenced. But as the Chinese society continues diversifying, mastering the task will become increasingly challenging. Pockets of grievances can multiply and pressure can build. After all, it was Mao Zedong who said “A single spark can start a prairie fire.”

By rewriting the constitution, Xi has entirely reversed China’s progress, as initiated by Deng Xiaoping and made over several decades, towards institutionalizing and regularizing succession politics. Future leaders are more likely to emerge from political bloodbaths rather than through excellence in governance, which is a problem that has dogged most other authoritarian states and of which China has been spared since the death of Mao, until now.

Nonetheless, China’s ruling elite has made the choice of accepting the risks, which appear distant and hypothetical, in order to keep a proven leader in office for as long as possible.

The sobriquet of the main character of the novel Water Margin, inspiration for the communist party, was “timely rain.” Since ancient times in China, a good politician has had to know when to rain and when not to. Too much rain or too little rain is just bad.

Xi’s concentration of power is the same thing.

In 1982, Deng introduced term limits to decentralize power, as Mao’s mistakes came from too much power in one man. Thirty-six years later, the issue is just the opposite: power was spread to thousands of centers and the big changes necessary became impossible to implement. Decentralization of power lead to economic development by turning officials into entrepreneurs. Corruption was the marginal cost. As years went by this marginal cost increased, undercutting all the advantages of decentralization. Thus, the party decided to recentralize.

The central nerve of the issue is: economic reforms are a matter of life and death for China (and the pile up of public debt is a proof of it), and this concentration of power could be useful.

Yet there are two issues that stand out:

• We don’t know if, after this concentration, we shall see the economic reforms. And this could be for lack of determination from the center or still strong resistance from the “anti-reforms” periphery.
• Will these expected economic reforms or efforts to reform suffice without political reforms? Facing the possibility of risky political reform, would the center’s determination falter? Then what? Stalling? Withdrawal?

We don’t have any answers, but Xi surprised us all, including those who chose him and thought he would be a puppet. But surprises are not necessarily pleasant or positive.

Xi’s China is not isolated. Putin’s rule shows a new way of semi-tolerant despotism (he is no Stalin). In America, Trump said he was a model and many in the West think like him, feeling fed up by the cumbersome trappings of democracy.

The European Union is de facto ruled by a small group of unelected technocrats. Many claim they are more effective than elected politicians.

China is well within a trend of crisis among “traditional” democracies, and the former freedom of the Internet that concentrated power of information into a bunch of platforms underscores this trend.

It would be crazy for democracies to follow Putin on his path— as he has more talent and experience as an autocrat. Democracies must address their crisis of efficiency or we are all in danger.

The interesting thing about the change in the national constitution is less Xi’s revelation that he intends to stay in power beyond the two-term rule (which has been widely assumed), but that he stressed the importance of doing it by legal means (which will be less relevant in the case of the party which has norms rather than constitutional principles.) If there is to be rule by law, then it must apply to the most important offices of state, and it should be announced at the beginning of a new five -year term of the NPC not towards its end.

The next most interesting thing is to see how many actually try to vote against the change at the NPC. Presumably, the party and military delegates will be solid if not 100%, but perhaps a few hardy souls will vote against the lifting of term limits on one man rule. Not that Xi will be deflected...

The Chinese Communist Party’s proposal to erase from China’s Constitution term limits for presidents is not a surprise. Current President Xi Jinping, in power since 2013, effectively declined to anoint a successor as he began his second term, and has worked assiduously to consolidate power, indicating his intent to remain in power for the foreseeable future.

The consequences of this stroke-of-a-pen change are potentially devastating for human rights in China, with significant repercussions abroad.

Xi has proven especially hostile to independent civil society. Among his earliest targets: anti-corruption campaigners like the New Citizens Movement. Given Xi’s claim to prioritizing an end to graft, this move was ironic, but it made clear that independent voices would not be tolerated. Since Xi took power five years ago, Chinese authorities have aggressively and assiduously silenced human rights lawyers, women’s rights activists, labor rights activists, legal reformers, language rights advocates, and all manner of peaceful critics of the government. Many have been forcibly disappeared or arbitrarily detained. Beyond that, the state-controlled media have steadily smeared their work, trying to deter future generations of whistleblowers and others who seek to challenge state authorities.

The late Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo once described the Internet as “god’s gift to China”—a tool that could allow people across the country to communicate with some degree of privacy and anonymity. But Xi’s government has also further tightened Internet control and imposed extraordinary mass surveillance systems across the country: second generation IDs, compulsory biodata gathering, facial and voice recognition, and big data systems known as “Police Clouds,” all used to integrate information about people to predict supposed threats to the government’s stability. It is increasingly difficult to perform mundane tasks anonymously, from buying a train ticket to getting a broadband connection, let alone engaging in activity critical of the government.

Another great hope of the 1990s and 2000s: modest legal reform that allowed some room for checks on state power. Again, Xi had other plans: a slew of laws giving the state vague but vast authority, while also strengthening a powerful and unaccountable Party body, the Supervision Commission. That body is now being absorbed into the government, but will sit outside the judicial system. At the same time, there have been no significant advances made on critical legal reforms, such as reducing torture.

These developments obviously have terrible consequences inside China—no effective checks on extraordinary power, leaving more people vulnerable to abuses.

But Xi has demonstrated that his aspirations aren’t limited by China’s borders: he has sought to remake key international institutions, such as United Nations human rights bodies, or simply make institutions do China’s bidding even if contrary to their mandate; for instance, China has used the international law enforcement agency Interpol to harass Chinese dissidents living abroad. Beijing is taking its much-vaunted—yet often deeply abusive—approach to economic development global through initiatives like “One Belt, One Road”; few countries lining up to join appear concerned that the projects lack any community input.

So the stakes couldn’t be higher. Governments concerned by the inroads that a permanent Xi presidency will make on human rights globally need to develop a plan of action in response: insist on established international human rights standards on global threats by China on issues ranging from academic freedom to economic development, and redouble their support to the promotion of human rights inside China. The clock has started.