There is no record of what happened this Saturday at the CP China Congress. On the one hand, the party consecrated Xi Jinping as a virtual president for life by giving him an unprecedented third term breaking a decades-old tradition to avoid succession disputes.
On the other, Hu Jintao, his predecessor as the last mandarin, was removed from the podium in an episode as unusual as unexpected, when the conclave had just opened to the press.
Whether for health reasons, as the regime maintains; Although it is an act of public humiliation for the last generation of leaders before Xi, as several analysts affirm, the episode appears as a symbol of the magnitude of the changes that are imposed in Beijing.
As expected, Xi Jinping has further strengthened his authority and will face a new term with no successor in sight, as usual. Due to such a concentration of power, the fact fuels the criticism of the West, which often compares it to Mao, with just reasons. Although Xi is a full-fledged autocrat, the parallel seems exaggerated.
Apart from the obvious differences in historical density with the Great Helmsman, Xi is not a Maoist, nor are the Chinese leaders from 1978 onwards, even though they know that a good part of their legitimacy lies in the continuous memory of that mythical figure.
There are other factors that explain the difference. Mao supported his mandate in the concept of “permanent revolution”, which Xi rejects because his goal is instead to ensure stability at all costs. In his eagerness to promote obedience and hierarchies, the current president rescued Confucius, even though he is a figure from the imperial past that Mao always repudiated.
But the point of greatest dissidence is perhaps the PC itself, which Xi seeks to anchor and reinforce as the body that nurtures the entire Chinese system. Mao, on the other hand, relied more than anything else on the army, as the brutal Cultural Revolution of 1966 showed, which almost destroyed the party with a witch hunt that sought the “purification” of its structures.
In any case, although Xi must submit to consensus decisions that Mao made by himself, the truth is that the results of the conclave that closed yesterday consolidate a strategy of iron control initiated in the 2017 Congress, as this chronicler of Clarion.
Since then, Xi has appealed to strict verticalism to contain the tensions caused by economic opening in a decision-making system without intermediate obstacles.
The Hu Jintao episode is an eloquent example of what is happening. Hu, a low-profile politician and no-nonsense manager, was indeed the leader of the process that led China to become a vast global factory after the opening initially encouraged by Deng Xiaoping.
During the decade he was in power between 2002 and 2012, China quadrupled on GDP, in a management that was characterized by an unknown openness and a great tolerance for external ideas. And this is unparalleled in Chinese history.
Still, it is abundantly clear that Xi Jinping is the most powerful of all leaders since Mao’s death. But this strength is not due merely to his figure, but to the central fact that China’s gravitational weight means much more than in the past. The reasons are simple: he has more money, he has more technology and he has a military power that he never had before. And this is happening when the West seems to be getting weaker and weaker.
Xi and his CP colleagues, it became clear this week, see themselves as heirs to a project started in 1949 that seeks to position China as the “empire of the center” alluded to by its original Mandarin name.
Aspects of this project are made up of an exacerbated nationalism with mechanisms that maintain the country’s unity on the path to planetary hegemony, as well as a diplomacy that looks increasingly aggressive in its continuous clash with the West. But the whole program faces internal economic problems, which are added to the global ones.
According to the IMF, China will grow 3% this year, a far cry from the high rates of yesteryear, with youth unemployment skyrocketing to 20%. Likewise, the emergency appears in the real estate sector (30% of GDP) with its main producer, the Evergrande company, in default since December. Everything is complicated by draconian lockdowns due to Covid, which hit the economy even harder.
Shanghai –China’s New York– was closed for two months with citizen protests and clashes with the police. China needs to attract investment, especially in the higher value-added sector. But contradictorily, he does not stop stalking his local tycoons, such as the owner of Alibaba, Jack Ma, reprimanded for his criticism of financial regulators.
A closer proximity to the US would ease the problems. But that is not Xi’s agenda, as he questions further liberalization of state-owned enterprises encouraged by Premier Li Keqiang, a critic of the Putin alliance. The removal of him from power -although announced- indicates where the new mandate will be oriented.
The outcome of the Congress confirms that each generation of Chinese leaders has less room for maneuver in a society in transformation whose discipline is complicated. Without internal dissent, the flip side of absolute power is absolute responsibility.
As problems grow, Xi will have less room to dodge blame. It is not good news that the recipes that seek to avoid the divorce between the PC and the population are a return to practices that seemed outdated.w