There will be no surprises. The historic XX Congress of the Communist Party of China that begins this Sunday will consecrate President Xi Jinping as a virtual sovereign with claims for life.
This dissolves part of the legacy of the pilot of the capitalist transformation of the Asian giant, Deng Xiao Ping, who had arranged only two terms to avoid the return of Maoist personalism. Xi ignored that clause and even dressed as Mao, a sign of ambition or pragmatism, which even forgets the brutal persecution to which that communist leader subjected his family.
Xi places the containment of the political tensions that the economic opening entails in a decision-making system without intermediate, union, judicial or institutional obstacles, in a strict verticalism. A control criteria which is exacerbated in a scenario of difficulties such as the current ones.
The Chinese head of state, in power for ten years, is the second son of a central ally of Deng, Xi Zhongxun. This other Xi reached important positions in the Party, but was trapped in the relentless purges of the Maoist stage paying for their opening visions with confinement in forced labor camps.
Rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution, Deng commissioned this peculiar man to build China’s first free-market experiment.
A capitalist test tube which was launched with a Special Economic Zone in Shenzhen. Over time, that original outbreak would absorb the entire national structure, surprising the very helmsman of change with the depth and speed of that mutation.
These antecedents fill the current president with contradictions. Sidney Rittenberg, the legendary North American journalist who was Mao’s translator and lived in that China for 40 years, welcomed Xi Jinping with a comparison that turned out to be meager: “I got to know his father a lot, a good man, the most democratic of the old leadership of the party”sentenced.
Hardness and control
The truth is that in this decade of power, the president moved away from that moderation, revitalized the PC’s coercive force and even rescued Confucius, repudiated by Maoism, out of respect for the authority emanating from the lyrics of that ancient philosopher.
That rigor is there to guard the political limits of a model that deepened its suitability by building an immense and active middle class, today the largest in size in the world.
The purpose is for domestic consumption to explain most of China’s GDP, as is the case in the US economy. One dimension of this capitalist transformation is an exacerbated nationalism as a device that maintains the unity of the country, avoids internal struggles and expresses the new China on its way to occupying the planetary hegemonic seata goal that the Chinese consider indisputable.
In this frame, an aggressive and proud diplomacy is installed, distant from another advice of Deng on “a prudent and cautious foreign policy”, which Xi understands reflected another era.
For all this the president is billed, not only in the West but also in his country and in his party, which has not been the reformist that was expected, but a restaurateur that exposes the rights of China to be the empire that it was throughout the centuries since King Ying Zheng, the first emperor, unified all that space in the year 221 BC
Those goals are now filtered by a complex reality due to the stoppage of the world economy. An alliance with the US, the empire with which China maintains an unprecedented economic interrelationship, would ease the calamities that the global system suffers due to the costs of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
But there is no such alternative. The embrace of the two capitalist powers, one democratic and the other authoritarian, occurs in any case in a swamp where both structures lose footing.
With his own share of protectionist nationalism, Joe Biden kept the threatening attitude and the tariffs against the Central Empire promoted by his predecessor Donald Trump.
It has also accentuated the precautions about the fate of Taiwan, on the assumption that in the face of the challenge of the Twentieth Congress, China could try to invade the island as a sign of the solvency of the leader. pressed by enormous challenges.
The challenges
The People’s Republic will grow only 3.2% this year, perhaps it will reach 4.4% in 2023, announces the IMF, far from the magic numbers of the recent past. Inflation of 2.8% in September was the highest in two years. Unemployment increases and reaches 19.9% among young people and the population ages due to resistance to having children due to doubts about the future.
The coronavirus crisis continues to hit the system and put the Silk Road on hold, the spectacular investment structure to chain Beijing’s influence from Asia to Europe and Latin America.
That uncomfortable reality fuels debates among influential regime bureaucrats, some of whom assume that China should open up more to the West, entice investment, and move away from, among other spheres, the russian war madness. That is not Xi’s vision, nor does it allow for challenges.
One problem with personalism and the concentration of power, taught the American George Kennan, a fine observer of Stalinism, is that it translates the refutation in terms of threaten the leader and not, as it is, an addition of wealth to the decision system.
At the top of China’s power there is broad agreement with respect to maintaining openness and developing consumption. But frictions have been strong over how deep the change should go. These disagreements have been reflected in waves of purges since Xi took control in early 2013.
Central figures such as Zhou Benshum, head of the party in the very populous province of Hebei, and General Guo Boxiong, arrested and expelled from the CP, fell into this political extermination. the highest-ranking censored military chief.
The arrest shortly beforehand of Zhou Yongkang, former national general secretary of the party and member of the Political Bureau, added to the list of demoted the most important personality of the communist structure since Mao’s death in 1976.
Yongkang was a key ally of Bo Xilai, Xi’s main competitor in the bid for power, which also ended imprisoned and disgraced. Both questioned the rite that the opening had acquired.
The process of liberalization and privatization of the powerful state enterprises and of the banking and financial system foreseen in the so-called China 2030 Report of 2012, in which the World Bank and particularly Premier Li Keqiang had extensive participation, was objected.
There it was suggested weaken the grip of the state in companies as well as letting the market set interest rates. Those who criticized these measures opposed Bo Xilai’s so-called Chongquin model aimed at turning these firms into untouchable national values. For Xi and Li Keqiang that was unacceptable.
Although there have also been changes. Li Keqiang, an economist who comes from the youth of the CP and accompanied Xi during his two terms, will be relieved in this XX Congress.
The relationship deteriorated because the prime minister considers a Xi’s alliance with Vladimir Putin was a mistake and also the Covid zero policies, with closure of cities, which have added greater problems to the economy. But in the main, the president intends to have total control of the economy, a feud that the premier managed.
In this effort to concentrate power, Xi Jinping has just cleared the way for his perpetual installation with another huge purge that has been shaking the country since last September. Characterized by such means as The Guardian as “one of the largest in years” this cleanup has already swept away relevant leaders.
One of them, very significant, is the former Minister of Justice Fu Zenghua who, however, in 2015 provided a great service to the president precisely to take down Yongkang and his ally Bo Xilai. Proof that immunity and less mercy should not be expected in those Jacobin structures.
The intensity of these disputes indicates both the depth of the present challenges and the rigor with which Xi Jinping intends to exercise his command and defend his restoration project, convinced –and it will be seen to what extent, accompanied– that it will be up to the Central Empire sooner rather than later to set the rules in a convulsed world.
© Clarin 2022