China and Xi Jinping: Hard on the Outside, Soft on the Inside

The Chinese have a proverb: "wai ying, nei ruan," i.e., hard on the outside, soft on the inside. As it applies to Xi Jinping, he is a genuinely harsh ruler; he exudes conviction and personal confidence. But this hard personality belies a party and political system that is exceptionally fragile on the inside.

Partaking in the pretense of political participation and as part of several constitutional amendments to be considered, the March 5th, 2018 annual congressional meeting of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) removed term limits on China’s presidency. While some see Xi Jinping's consolidation of power as the epitome of China's unstoppable rise to global supremacy, actually this grab of power (which did not happen overnight as Xi already during his first term had centralized a lot of power) reflects a weakness and a lingering insecurity that the Chinese political system is facing. Indeed, had the leaders of the CCP been convinced by their higher moral ground and absolute popular voter confidence they would not need to resort to dissident suppression tactics and would be comfortable in facing critics.

But, like in the rest of Asia, a lot is about appearances and saving face, and Chinese politics has always had a theatrical cladding, with orchestrated events like the annual congress intended to cast an image of stability and power of the CCP. Citizens and officials alike know that they are supposed to abide by these rituals, participating cheerfully and mindlessly repeating official slogans - a bit similar like in North Korea or during the days of Stalin. This behavior is known in Chinese as "biaotai," “declaring where one stands,” but it is little more than an act of symbolic compliance.

Despite these appearances, China’s political system is badly shattered, and nobody knows it better than the CCP itself. China’s mogul, Xi Jinping, is hoping that a clampdown on (alleged) corruption (as a mean to suppress dissent) will buoy the CCP’s rule. He is resolute in not becoming the next Mikhail Gorbachev of China, overseeing the CCP’s collapse. But rather than being the antithesis of Michael Gorbachev, Xi Jinping may well end up having a similar effect. His despotism is severely stressing China’s system and society—and bringing it closer to a breaking point.

Some pundits think that Xi Jinping’s tough tactics may augur a more open and reformist direction later in his term. No one should buy this argument as Xi Jinping and the CCP regime essentially see politics in zero-sum terms: in their views, relaxing control is a nail in the coffin and a sure step toward the fall of the CCP system and their own demise. They also take the conspiratorial view that the West (i.e., the U.S.) is actively working to overthrow CCP rule. None of this implies that sweeping political reforms are just around the corner.

Granted, forecasting the fall of authoritarian regimes is a hazardous business. Neither Western pundits nor the intelligence agencies were able to foretell the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and even less the collapse of the USSR in 1991. And twenty years later, they were still not able to anticipate the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings.

China-pundits have been on high alert for critical early warnings of regime decay and decline ever since the regime’s near-death experience in Tiananmen Square in 1989 when thousands of students were massacred and thousands more imprisoned. Since then, several experienced Sinologists have put their professional reputations on the balance by proclaiming that the collapse of CCP rule was ineluctable; others were more cautious, including me. Like in the rest of the world, times are also changing in China, and so there is a need to amend our analyses.

The grand finale of Chinese Communist Party ruling has come, I believe, and it has progressed further than many may understand. We have no clue about the pathway to this ending, of course. It will likely be very unsettled and unstable. But until the CCP system begins to collapse in some way, those inside of it will continue to play along, thus contributing to this veneer of stability.

Just like the way it came to fruition through a revolution in 1949, Chinese Communist rule is unlikely to end quietly; a single event is unlikely to cause a peaceful implosion of the regime. Similar to 1949, its demise is likely to be lengthy, violent and messy. One should not rule out the likelihood that Xi Jinping will be deposed in a power struggle or coup d’état (f. ex. while he is traveling overseas). With his aggressive alleged and orchestrated anticorruption campaign, Xi Jinping is overplaying a weak hand and profoundly alienating crucial party, state, military and commercial constituencies.

Below, you will find six revealing signs of the regime’s vulnerability and the party’s systemic fragilities.

Firstly, since taking office in 2012, Xi Jinping has dramatically intensified the political repression that has blanketed China since 2009. The target dissidents include the social media, the Internet, press, arts, film, and literature, intellectuals, religious groups, Uighurs and Tibetans, lawyers, university students and professors, NGOs, and even textbooks. A more confident and secure regime would not need to resort to such a severe clampdown. It is symptomatic of a party leadership’s deep insecurity and anxiety.

Secondly, in order to shift national attention away from China's domestic problems, Beijing is waving the nationalistic flag against foreign countries such as Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, the U.S., South Korea, India, etc. Indeed, with a slowing economy (i.e., China's annual GDP growth for 2018 should be at 6.5% - below the magical 7%) that will result in layoffs and rising protests. Additionally, with the threat of a trade war with Washington, more strains on the Chinese economy can be expected. And while China’s economy is viewed in the West as a freight train, it is actually clamped down in a couple of systemic pitfalls from which there is no easy escape. As a reminder, years ago (November 2013) during his first term, Xi Jinping lead the party’s Third Plenum, which unveiled a massive package of proposed economic and financial reforms aimed at transforming China from an export-led to a consumer-driven economy, but so far, not much has been seen. Yes, consumer spending has increased, the bureaucracy has been reduced, and a couple of fiscal reforms were introduced, but overall, Xi Jinping’s ambitious goals remain dead on arrival. The reform package challenges profoundly entrenched and powerful interest groups, such as local party cadres and state-owned enterprises, and they are plainly averting the implementation of these reforms.

Third, the endemic corruption that riddles the security apparatus and party-state alike also penetrates Chinese society as a whole. Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign is more severe and sustained than ever before, but no crusade can remove the problem. It is doggedly rooted in the single-party system that embodies the CCP, the absence of the rule of law, patron-client networks, a state-controlled media, and an economy failing in transparency. And, as already mentioned, Xi Jinping's campaign looks more like a selective purge than an anti-graft campaign. Unsurprisingly, many of its targets to date have been allies and political clients of former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin (i.e., the butcher of the Tiananmen Square in 1989). Now passed 90, Jiang Zemin is still considered as the godfather figure of Chinese politics. Going after Jiang Zemin’s patronage network while he remains still alive is hazardous for Xi Jinping, mainly since he does not seem to have brought along his own clan of loyal apostles to promote into positions of power. Another problem: Xi Jinping is a party princeling (i.e., a child of China’s first-generation revolutionary elites), and this silver-spoon generation is widely abhorred in Chinese society at large.

Fourth, even many regime flag-wavers are just unaware. It is hard to miss the playhouse of faking that has imbued the Chinese body politic for the last few years. Party loyalist feign compliance with the party and their leader’s latest mantra, but it is evident that the propaganda is losing its power, and the emperor has no clothes.

Finally, when you think about it, China’s economic elites have already one foot out the door, and they are ready to make a run for it en masse the day the system begins to shatter. For example, in 2014, there was a study by Shanghai’s Hurun Research Institute in which it found that 64% of the wealthy individuals whom it polled—393 millionaires and billionaires—were either emigrating or intending to do so. Wealthy Chinese are sending their kids to study abroad in large numbers (cf. in itself, an indictment of the quality of the Chinese higher-education system). Or, what about the fact that thousands of Chinese women each year travel to the U.S. and return home with infants born as U.S. citizens. Wealthy Chinese are also buying up real estate overseas at record levels and prices, and they are parking their financial assets in shell companies in tax havens. Meanwhile, Beijing is trying to extradite back to China a large number of alleged economic fugitives residing overseas. Now, when you have a large number of the country’s elites, i.e., including many party members, that make a run for it, it is an indicative sign of lack of confidence in the political regime and the country’s future.

These five increasingly evident fissures in the regime’s control can be addressed only through political reform. Until and unless the CCP relaxes its draconian political ascendency, it will never be able to fully harvest the fruits of a “knowledge economy”, which was a key objective of the Third Plenum reforms. Unwittingly (but concomitantly, unsurprisingly), the political system instituted by the Chinese Communist Party has become the main obstacle to the country’s much needed economic and social reforms. If Xi Jinping and the CCP party leaders do not relax their grip (which will likely not happen anyway), they will be reviving precisely the destiny they hope to avoid and that the USSR fell victim. Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, the upper layers of CCP leadership have been bedeviled with the demise of its fellow communist giant, the USSR. Hundreds of Chinese postmortem analyses have dissected the causes of the Soviet disintegration, but none of them have dared to see parallels with the ineluctable path the the CCP will be facing.

When you think about it, Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” is nothing less than a puppetry theatre meant to avoid at any cost the Soviet incubus. During his first term, Xi Jinping gave an indicative internal speech ruing the USSR’s collapse and lamenting Michael Gorbachev’s betrayals, claiming that the Kremlin had lacked a “tough man” to stand up to Gorbachev. Alas, Xi Jinping’s wave of repression and crackdown nowadays is meant to be the opposite of Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. Instead of opening up, Xi Jinping is doubling down on clampdowns over dissenters, rivals within the party, and society as a whole. 

And, again, instead of conducting repression, Xi Jinping's should look for inspiration at his predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, who both drew very different takeaway lessons from the collapse of the USSR. During the first decade in the 2000s, they implemented a series of policies with the intention to liberalize the CCP system with carefully limited socio-political reforms aimed at gradually making the regime more accountable.

For instance, they both reinforced the local party committees and experimented with multicandidate party secretaries. They also recruited more intellectuals and businesspeople into the CCP. They extended party consultation with non-affiliated party groups and made the Politburo’s proceedings more accountable and transparent. They likewise also improved mechanisms allowing feedbacks within the CCP, implemented more meritocratic decision criteria for promotion, and established a system of compulsory midcareer training for the more than forty million party and state cadres. They put into force retirement requirements and had officials and military officers alike rotating between job positions every two or three of years.

In other words, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao attempted to address change, not to block it. But Xi Jinping is against all of this. Once Xi Jinping was in power an increasingly anxious and frightened regime started to roll back nearly every single one of these political reforms, and from that period onwards to diffuse domestic revolt, Xi Jinping played the nationalistic card portraying overseas countries as the villains attempting to endanger Chinese society and the country's ambitions.

No one can foretell when the regime of the CCP will fall, but this time the tree is not hiding the forest, and so it is hard not to come to the conclusion that we are witnessing its the grand finale of the CCP. The Chinse Communist Party is the world’s second-longest ruling regime (second to the one in North Korea), and history knows that no authoritarian political system can stay in power forever.

That is why China pundits should continue to keep their eyes on the CCP’s instruments of control and repression, and on those assigned to use those instruments. Large numbers of party members and Chinese citizens alike are already voting with their feet and fleeing the country or showing their insincerity by faking to comply with party dictates.