Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping walks to the Monument to the People’s Heroes during a wreath-laying ceremony in Tiananmen Square. (Sept. 30, 2020)
In his first foreign policy address, President Biden called China “the most formidable competitor” of the United States. Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping recently said in a speech that “Time and momentum are on China’s side. However, at recent seminars on U.S.-China relations in Washington, U.S. experts have pointed out that the Chinese Communist Party actually faces multiple challenges. The authoritarian system is one of the major challenges.
Xi Jinping’s Centralization and Authoritarianism Could Trigger a Crisis in the CCP’s Leadership
On January 11, in an important speech to key CPC cadres at the provincial and ministerial levels, CPC General Secretary Xi Jinping said, “Today the world is experiencing a great change unprecedented in a century, but time and momentum are on our side, and this is where our determination and bottom line lies, as well as our resolve and confidence.”
However, U.S. experts on China argue that Xi himself is the most uncontrollable and uncertain factor for China’s future development.
At a recent hearing on U.S.-China relations held by the USCC, a congressional subcommittee on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Jacqueline Deal, president of the U.S. Long Term Strategies Group, said that while public health, infrastructure, and environmental issues could be the most important factors affecting While public health, infrastructure and environmental issues could all be variables that affect China’s development, the most uncontrollable variable in China right now is Xi Jinping,” she said.
She said, “If something were to happen to Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party would potentially face instability because he is unlikely to name a successor acceptable to all factions.”
According to Chinese political practice, Xi was already supposed to appoint a successor and prepare to step down at the next party congress, scheduled for the end of 2022. But he has so far not done so. Instead, in 2018, he removed official constraints on the length of his term, such as term limits.
As the 20th Communist Party Congress approaches, Xi is still laying out his power and working to further consolidate his “core” position. Analysts believe that the “Circular on Serious Discipline in the General Election and Strengthening Supervision of the General Election”, jointly issued by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and other departments in January, is intended to further consolidate Xi’s power.
After the death of former CCP leader Mao Zedong in 1976, the CCP had to rely on a coup-like action to change the course of modern CCP history.
At that time, Hua Guofeng, then First Vice Chairman of the CPC Central Committee and Premier of the State Council, together with Ye Jianying, then Vice Chairman of the CPC Central Committee, and Wang Dongxing, then Director of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee, arrested five people, including Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, Jiang Qing, Yao Wenyuan and Mao Yuanxin, then members of the CPC Central Committee’s Politburo, under the guise of “isolation censorship”. Later, when Hua Guofeng became chairman of the CPC Central Committee, Wang, Zhang, Jiang and Yao and their main followers were all politically purged and some were criminally prosecuted.
An article in the New York Times last November expressed a similar sentiment. The article said, “Where Xi Jinping’s power is strong, it is also his greatest weakness.” The state of Xi Jinping, who now holds so tightly to the party’s power, with no obvious opponents and no known succession plan, is also brewing a leadership crisis that could erupt fully in the future.
Autocracy is more likely to make huge mistakes and fail to correct itself in time
In 2020, after China’s brief containment of the New Crown (CCP virus) Epidemic, and especially after a series of chaotic U.S. presidential elections, the CCP media has been relentlessly playing up the failure of American democracy and the decline of the United States, and emphasizing the superiority of the socialist system with Chinese characteristics, especially the superiority of China’s ability to concentrate its efforts on doing great things.
However, what the CCP media has kept quiet about is that it was the CCP’s authoritarianism and control of information that caused the early concealment of the epidemic and in a sense ultimately led to its spread in China and around the world.
A year ago, on February 7, Li Wenliang, the earliest “whistle blower” in the early stages of the Wuhan outbreak, died. One year later, Li Wenliang is still alive in the hearts of the Chinese people, who remember him. His words before his death, “A healthy society should not have only one voice,” were particularly striking. Although China later posthumously named Li Wenliang a “martyr,” officials and the media have remained silent on the anniversary of his death.
Li Wenliang was interrogated by the local public security bureau for being the first to report the discovery of a new, highly contagious Sars-like coronavirus in Wuhan in his WeChat circle of friends, breaking official discipline on so-called outbreak reporting, for which he was forced to publicly admit his wrongdoing and sign a letter of reprimand.
To further control speech, the “Regulations on the Protection of the Rights of Party Members of the Communist Party of China” issued by the CPC Central Committee on December 25, 2020, prohibits party members from publicly discussing dissenting views, and all “party members who criticize, expose, report, and make requests for treatment or discipline shall do so through organizational channels” if Those who disclose problems “without following organizational principles and procedures” will be punished.
All of these measures could ultimately hamper China’s ability to address future challenges, said Dill of the U.S. Long Term Strategy Group, because under such a system, policymakers are more likely to make major mistakes without being able to immediately correct them.
The reduced space for criticism increases the chances that the country could move in the wrong direction,” she said. While many of China’s major policy issues are debated by Chinese scholars and policy experts before decrees are issued, disclosure requirements suggest that these expert opinions may be based on incorrect or incomplete information.”
Dill said there is precedent for such errors in the history of the CCP. Because of the excessive power of the CCP’s former Mao Zedong, during the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1960, few Chinese elites dared to produce evidence that the Great Leap Forward was triggering the Great Famine. During the “Great Leap Forward” from 1958 to 1960, few Chinese elites dared to produce evidence that the “Great Leap Forward” was triggering the “Great Famine” against Mao.
The authoritarian system was repressive internally, and it was hard to find allies externally
Mathew Kroenig, a professor of government at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and author of “Returning to Great Power Competition: Democracy Versus and Authoritarianism, from the Far East to the U.S. and China,” told a Georgetown University seminar Friday on U.S.-China great power competition in the Biden era that China’s authoritarian regime is a fundamental obstacle to great power competition with the United States.
Authoritarian regimes worry more about their own citizens than they do about the security threat their opponents might pose to the country,” he said. That was true of the ancient Spartans, and it is true of China now. Internally, China spends more on maintaining stability than it does on building its military. Externally, it is also difficult for the autocracy to build its own system of allies. …… We saw it with Napoleon and Hitler, and we see it with contemporary China, with the backlash that President Xi Jinping’s strong diplomacy has already created.”
Cronin added that political control is more important to authoritarian governments than economic performance. This is also evident in Xi Jinping. Xi has even gone so far as to nationalize some businesses at the expense of economic growth.
While it is too early to determine the outcome of the U.S.-China rivalry, Cronin said, history from ancient times to the Cold War onward also shows that democracy has the edge over autocracy in the long-running competition between democracy and autocracy.
Speaking on the issue of U.S. democracy, he said it does have its own problems, such as being slower (to deal with issues), polarized and even creating gridlock, but the greatest advantage of democracy is that it does not make major mistakes.
We don’t make stupid mistakes,” he said. Our executive branch doesn’t wake up and scream about going in a new direction. They have to get the legislature and the public to accept it first. It’s true that we’re slower, more polarized, and even have gridlock because of the checks and balances in the system, but that also means we don’t make major, stupid mistakes. We forget that there are benefits to bipolarity.”
He said the United States has weaknesses and has always put itself on display for all to see, but at the same time it has always demonstrated its ability to recover and recast.
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