Xi Jinping and China’s Downhill Sprint

‘90s rap is a trove of wisdom and quips.  Coolio coined the phrase “Ain’t no party like a West Coast party / ‘Cause a West Coast party don’t stop” back in 1995.  In homage to Professor Coolio and in line with the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, I present the following adaptation: Ain’t no party like a Chinese Communist Party, because a Chinese Communist Party can’t stop.

The CCP hosted its every-five-year Congress this week, and President/Party Secretary Xi Jinping has followed in the path of dictators the world over by functionally declaring himself President for Life.  This comes as no surprise, as he lit groundwork for this move with strobing neon lights.  One fun example is how last year, Xi went ahead and removed pesky reminders of the threat behind cults of personality and the need for collective leadership in a document meant to enshrine how the CCP views its own history. 

What is driving President Xi to make such a radical shift?  The trite answer is that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, yada yada.  And to be fair, there could be an element of that involved.  Xi obviously thinks he alone has the vision to usher China into global dominance.  But I think the environment he finds himself in drives him as much—if not more than—overweened pride.

First, a caveat.  People making grand proclamations of how the Chinese system works ooze out of Western sources like leftover orange chicken sauce from the dumpster behind a Panda Express.  Chinese culture and practices are complex, having been formed over thousands of years of tradition and oppression.  Take any claims otherwise with a shaker full of salt.  That said, I’m going to go ahead and do that now anyways.

Modern China revolves around the Chinese Communist Party and its primary goal: survival.  Any political power or regime fights for its survival, of course, but to the CCP, it is an all-consuming priority.  I am not knowledgeable enough in Chinese history to know where that comes from, but my guess is millennia of violent dynastic overthrows mixed with decades of civil war and a Japanese invasion during its formative years means the CCP has a paranoia streak that would make a doomsday prepper want to pump the brakes.  Historically, China has been difficult to hold together in a unified whole without excessive force (there’s a Romance about it and everything).  As the leader of the CCP, Xi must pursue regime survival at all costs or risk losing support of the Party that gives him his power and legitimacy.

The CCP has a long and storied history of purging those who don’t toe the Party line to maintain internal order, and maybe I’ll cover that in a future Wandering.  What I find more interesting is the rest of China.  The vast majority of Chinese citizens are not members of the CCP, but hold the ultimate “torch and pitchfork” threat over the CCP should they get sufficiently riled.  How does the CCP maintain control over a billion-plus people?  Bread and circuses at gunpoint.

Let’s start with the bread.  China has made remarkable progress lifting its citizens out of poverty.  Over the last four decades, China was responsible for three-quarters of the global poverty reduction by bringing wealth into their country.  Between 1990 and 2005, GDP per capita increased 400%.  This has also resulted in significant wealth consolidation amongst CCP elite, with Party officials making bank as money pours into China.  The CCP likely thinks that so long as it keeps people flush with cash, they’ll stay content enough to never pose a threat.

I’ll roll in the general thought of circuses as leisure entertainment into the bread points above and focus on a different sort of pastime China enjoys: nationalism.  Internal Chinese narratives love to use foreign entities as whipping posts to focus Chinese citizens on external threats over internal issues.  That said, they use such a tool strategically—allowing protests in some cases to exert political pressure on foreign governments, while stifling them in other areas when it suits them.  This gives them an unwieldy pressure valve to help manipulate and control the populace, but one that carries significant risk as we’ll talk about later.

Finally, the gun.  One of the convenient bits for writing negative articles about China is the Chinese are very good at providing extreme examples of just how oppressive they can be to their own people.  Here are some of the highlights from just the past few decades: the Uyghur genocide, crushing agreed upon democratic freedoms in Hong Kong, continued oppression in Tibet, disappearing inconvenient critics, forced organ harvesting from persecuted minorities, and the wholesale massacre of peaceful protestors.  When you put it all in one place like that, it’s clear that the CCP has yet to encounter a problem they didn’t think a boot on the neck would suffice to solve. 

So the CCP has things on lock, right?  Well, maybe not.  The issue with maintaining absolute authoritarian power is that it’s an all or nothing gamble.  The moment enough cracks show up, everything comes tumbling down.  And while I am not predicting the imminent downfall of the CCP, I think it’s fair to consider the numerous issues across China that may have driven Xi to trump tradition to maintain power.  The slowdown in economic growth means the quality of life increases the average Chinese citizen has come to expect may slow as well.  An ongoing collapse of major firms like Evergrande is wiping out savings across the country and leading to widespread protests.  The populace has been worked up into such a frenzy over Taiwan that the CCP might be forced into an armed invasion to satiate them.  When you run out of bread and the circus is out of control, how much longer can you maintain things with just a gun?

Allow me one more strained metaphor, dear reader.  The gentle folk of Gloucester, England, have a tradition.  Every year, men and women line up at the top of a 200-meter hill with a 50-degree slope and chase a rolling wheel of cheese to the bottom at full tilt.  Injuries are, of course, frequent.  But a few lucky souls occasionally make it down unscathed, keeping their footing the entire time. 

Xi is at the 100-meter point in his sprint downhill chasing after CCP survival cheese.  He has kept his footing so far, but like anyone who has run downhill before knows, stopping is no longer an option.  As he faces looming hillocks and gopher holes like economic collapse, North Korean instability, and a demographic crisis, he must somehow stay upright or crash terribly.  And the thing about making yourself President for Life?  When you crash and burn, you tend to take a lot of people down with you.