In March 2018, the Communist Party passed a constitutional amendment to remove term limits on the presidency, paving the way for Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely. However, Roger Garside, a two-time British diplomat in China, says that regime change in the CCP is not only possible, but inevitable!
Garside has been following developments in China since 1958. He devotes several hours a day to studying the Chinese issue. “Everything I have learned has convinced me that regime change in China is not only possible, but inevitable.” He said.
He is the author of books such as “Coming Alive: China After Mao” and “China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom.
In an April 30 article in Canada’s The Globe and Mail, Gaystead drew on his years of research on the Chinese Communist regime to offer his insights on its transformation.
In the article, Gethard said he thought his best contribution would be to write a book to expose the true nature of the Chinese Communist regime. And as he did so, he saw growing evidence that the Communist regime was not authoritarian, but totalitarian. Historian Robert Conquest defines a totalitarian state as one whose power is unrestricted in any area of public or private life and which extends that power as far as possible.
China’s constitution places the Communist Party above the law and does not recognize limits on the party’s power, Gethard said.
Communist Party fears economic liberalization will bring political change
As a diplomat, Gethard said, he lived through the death of Mao Zedong and the beginning of China’s reforms. Over the next 30 years, the Chinese Communist Party pursued a strategy of transition to a market economy. He originally thought China would be like many countries, where economic liberalization and increased property ownership would bring political change. But the CCP has stopped the transition. The CCP did so because it feared that further economic liberalization would bring about political change and undermine its political monopoly.
Chinese elites strongly oppose Xi’s line
Gethard said there is much evidence that the CCP is a totalitarian regime that is “strong from the outside,” and that “its most fundamental weakness is its reliance on control, not trust.”
Gethard said many in China’s elite are strongly opposed to Xi’s line because they realize that economic reform without political change is already damaging China and endangering their own interests, and that their best hope for preserving their wealth and power lies precisely in radical political reform.
Even the most successful Chinese entrepreneurs, those who have amassed vast fortunes and built business empires in fintech or e-commerce, can have record IPOs (initial public offerings) canceled at the last minute, or their wealth confiscated by an executive order.
China’s vibrant private sector and large middle class, who own property, are educated and enterprising, have been stripped of all political rights, Gethard said. A Chinese entrepreneur may drive a Maserati and send his son to Harvard University, but he is a political slave. China’s economic success “is not due to socialism, but to the dynamism and enterprise of the Chinese people, who have no right to elect or remove their rulers. Such a system of government breeds mistrust and resentment and is at the root of the Communist regime’s weakness.
“Not surprisingly, figures released over the past decade show that the CCP regime has consistently spent more of its budget on internal stability maintenance than on defense. Its fear of internal discontent outweighs its fear of external enemies.” He said.
CCP can’t solve deep-seated problems
If one sets aside the CCP regime’s own narrative of success and self-confidence, it becomes clear that the so-called all-powerful party lacks the power to solve a range of deep-seated problems that have persisted for a long time, Gethard said.
He added that China’s state sector is rigid and loss-making, but the regime does not allow a vibrant and profitable private sector to expand because it fears it will undermine its political monopoly. To protect unprofitable state-owned enterprises, the Communist government retains ownership of major banks so that it can force them to provide support to those state-owned enterprises. With private companies unable to obtain funding from state-owned banks, they have to turn to shadow banks, whose practices lack transparency and whose risks cannot be calculated by regulators.
These are just a few examples, he said, to illustrate the consequences of the CCP’s halfway termination of the transition to free markets for political reasons. But the consequences of this inherently flawed strategy extend far beyond the economic sphere. For example, it has brought about a moral crisis, largely caused by deliberately enriching party officials and their business friends through corruption.
Xi’s anti-corruption campaign addresses the symptoms but not the root cause, because the root causes of corruption are systemic, such as relying on corruption to keep officials “loyal” to the Communist regime. Only through systemic reforms, such as an independent judiciary and a free press, can corruption be eradicated, but this is anathema to Xi, Gethard said. In the absence of systemic reforms, the regime can only tinker with problems, not effectively address them.
Gethard said there is ample evidence that many educated and powerful elites understand these problems and recognize that they cannot be solved without changing the political system. These elites also believe that their best hope of defending their wealth and power is to lead the country through systemic reform.
Two Possible Ways for Communist Regime Change
Many people do not believe that regime change is possible in China, the world’s second-largest economy, an attitude that comes from decades of being fed narratives about how successful China is, courtesy of the Communist regime itself and all those associated with the regime in business or other fields, Gethard said. Moreover, people’s view of the future is often determined by inertia: there is a natural tendency to think that the world will continue to be the way it is. Yet in January 1991, who would have predicted the self-dissolution of the Soviet Union and its Communist Party?
Gethard also says that in his new book he describes how China achieved regime change through a coup d’état and initiated a transition to democracy. He also describes how the Communist Party’s top brass conspired to oust Xi Jinping and open the way for systemic change.
He said that the coup was not only a product of the internal political dynamics of the CCP, but that the U.S., through the implementation of the U.S.-China confrontation, also played a key role in driving the coup from the top. Because this confrontation led to a crisis in China’s financial markets, the crisis would have prompted conspirators to launch a carefully prepared plan to topple Xi Jinping.
A coup is one way to bring about change, Gethard said. Another possibility is that Xi’s opponents will prevent him from being reappointed general secretary of the Communist Party at the 20th Communist Party National Congress (20th Congress) in November 2022 and use the opportunity to put China on a path of change. The 20th Congress will be a critical point in time reflecting China’s future, as Xi’s re-election would increase the likelihood that he will remain leader for life and make his removal from office thereafter more difficult.
How the United States and its allies can create the conditions to facilitate regime change in China
Gethard said the continued growth of China’s economy depends in large part on continued access to the world’s currency reserves, international banking system, capital markets and largest center for science and technology development, all of which are controlled by the United States and its allies. “This gives us a geopolitical advantage that we can use to create the conditions for change (in China). We have to harness that power in a progressive way to incentivize change.”
He also said the potential benefits of an orderly transition from autocracy to democracy in China include the achievement of a peace based on trust; a dramatic expansion in the areas of democracy and the rule of law; and the exercise of the creative genius of the Chinese in the arts and sciences.
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