The path remains immutably traced. A third five-year term awaits Xi Jinping at the head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and therefore of the country, at the end of the five-year congress which officially opened on Sunday morning, October 16, at the People’s Palace, a huge building in Stalinist architecture located in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
The announcement, which should take place on October 23, the day after the close of the XXe CCP Congress, will make Xi Jinping, in power since 2012, the most powerful leader since the regime’s founder, Mao Zedong (1949-1976).
The XXe CCP congress intervenes “at a critical moment when the whole Party and the people of all ethnicities are on the road to building a modern socialist country”, Xi said in his opening speech. The 2017 one lasted three and a half hours.
Arriving at the podium to thunderous applause, Xi Jinping, 69, began to take stock of the past five years and deliver his roadmap for the next five.
He castigated the “external forces” mingling with Taiwan, an island that the Chinese regime considers part of its territory. He also felt that Hong Kong had passed “from chaos to governance” after the severe takeover by Beijing of the territory, where huge pro-democracy demonstrations had taken place in 2019.
Protect the “health of the people”
Above all, while one of the main questions revolves around whether or not to maintain strict health measures to fight the coronavirus pandemic – the zero Covid strategy inseparable from the Chinese president – Mr. Xi affirmed that China has prioritized human lives first of all. China has “highly safeguarded people’s safety and health and achieved significant positive results by coordinating epidemic prevention and control with economic and social development”he estimated.
This zero Covid policy has reinforced social control over citizens, all of whose movements are now computer-recorded, in this country already criticized on the international scene for human rights violations. The quasi-closure of the country vis-à-vis the rest of the world and the repeated confinements have however put a stop to growth, which this year should be the weakest in four decades, excluding the Covid-19 period. .
If the official press hammered home this week that ” go to bed “ in the face of the coronavirus would be « irresponsible », the economic cost of this strategy and the popular resentment it arouses are undeniable. An anger that sometimes goes beyond social networks: this week and despite the reinforced security measures in the capital, a man hung two banners hostile to the Chinese leader and zero Covid on a bridge in Beijing. One called on citizens to go on strike and drive out “the traitor dictator Xi Jinping”.
A stranglehold imposed over the years
The 2,296 or so delegates of the CPC, who have come from all the provinces and some of them dressed in their traditional outfits, will appoint the new Central Committee by next Saturday, a kind of party parliament with some 200 members, including the political bureau and its twenty-five heads is the decision-making authority.
In reality, they will only validate decisions taken upstream by the various sensibilities of the CCP: this is moreover how Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, chosen as a man of compromise between the factions before imposing its stranglehold over the years, notably through a formidable anti-corruption campaign which has enabled it to sideline rivals.
A crucial point will be the composition of the future Standing Committee, this group of seven or nine personalities at the highest peak of power. Xi should not leave room for a possible successor because “He doesn’t want to have someone blowing down his neck”says researcher Jean-Pierre Cabestan, based in Hong Kong and associated with the French think tank Asia Center.
Specialized in Chinese economy and politics, the firm MacroPolo expects Xi Jinping to form this Committee “with one eye already set potentially beyond 2027”.
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