SOURCE: ( ) https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/features/cpc-chinese-president-xi-jinping-emerges-all-powerful-444012
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“China’s financial bloc is about to be crushed. The defeat of the pro-US camp in China ends with a public flogging of their leader. This is not only a bad signal for Taiwan, EU, Ukraine & US. It is a bad signal for the Russian 5th column” — Elena Panina https://twitter.com/i/status/1584007816234565632
( ) The Prince: Searching for Xi Jinping : https://www.economist.com/theprincepod?utm_campaign=a.22chinapod_fy2223_q3_conversion-bau-dr_hot_apac_auction_aai_rm-abo-lc-roa-22chinapod&utm_medium=social-media.direct-response.pd&utm_source=facebook-instagram&utm_term=sa.rt-web-1v90d&utm_content=conversion.direct-response-retargeting.non-subscriber.dr_staticlinkad_np-22chinapod-r-sep_nonotebook-na_sub_na_na_na_ad154-20220926-20221015&fbclid=IwAR1SiXm_9Okj6mfqNPhVINkte0nA63xw5qxn4-IeChb-lA-ijBTH1KO6gTA
All-Powerful Emperor Xi
CPC: Chinese President Xi Jinping emerges all-powerful
President Xi Jinping, after securing a historic third term as CP chief, will elevate his status to the same level as Mao Zedong
President Xi Jinping has abandoned his dictum of “hiding your strength, biding your time”. For Xi, the time has come for China to flex its military muscle, which it has done with abandon. AP/PTISandeep Dikshit
Oct 23, 2022
Party Congresses, the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) version of a Kumbh or a Haj after every three or five years, were once tumultuous affairs in China in which the future course and leaders till the next cycle were decided. If it was a fight over a radical change in party line or a contest between equals for the coveted post of General Secretary, a no-holds-barred purge would follow.
The massive ornate doors of the Great Hall of the People — five minutes of walking distance from Tiananmen Square where an unequal clash between tanks and students occurred in 1989 — define the CPC today. The world will never get to know if there were heated discussions or raised voices during the week-long 20th CPC Congress that began on October 16. Was Xi berated for the severe Covid lockdowns or the economic slowdown? Or for falling property prices or his three-front military confrontation with Japan, Taiwan, and India, all backed by the US, by far the biggest military power on the globe notwithstanding its repeated inability to cow down cocky insurgents with AK-47 rifles?
Despite the curtain of opacity, this conference has all the signs of being epochal. Xi is now supreme. He breaks the pattern of a streamlined transfer of power after two five-year terms that Deng Xiaoping had hammered out. Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, along with most of their top-rung team, dutifully handed over power after 10 years. Xi, when he took over at a CPC conference in 2012, had other ideas. But he kept them close to his chest till 2018 after he had sorted out those who ranked nearly equal to him and thereby posed a threat to his leadership.
As a result of the purges, the Great Hall of the People on Saturday repeatedly chorused ‘no objections’ as all the resolutions were passed one by one. The fanciful stories of a PLA coup in September against Xi were pure fiction.
For, Xi had also tamed the military quite early in his term. Generals Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou were purged on corruption charges right after he took over. Thereafter, he took up with gusto China’s first reformist Prime Minister Zhu Rongji’s slogan: “To fight corruption, one must go after the tiger first, then the wolf.” Several PLA tigers were slain along with his political contemporaries. By the time the last CPC Congress was held in 2017, former Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale remarked, ”It seemed at that Party Congress as if all that China had become was due to Xi.”
But before hunting down corrupt or overly powerful PLA tigers, Xi first sorted out his contemporaries. First, of course, was the Bo Xilai affair, which also gives insights into the carrot-and-stick policy of the CPC leadership. Xi and Bo, as is well known, trace their lineage to the “eight immortals” of the Communist Party for their stupendous role in bringing it to power.
A Red Prince like Xi, Bo, Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2010, was heading China’s most prosperous province when the 18th Party Congress of the CPC was on the horizon in 2012. He was tipped to join the topmost rung of the CPC — the Politburo Standing Committee — which would put him in contention for the post that Xi holds today. But a murder of a westerner was traced to his wife, precipitating his downfall. In the process, the affair exposed the rotten core of the Communist Party which had partly siphoned off the cream of the economic miracle. An embarrassed CPC leadership then opted for Xi as General Secretary, another Red Prince.
Despite his railings against corruption and nepotism, Xi’s dealings with the other Red Princes show how the all-powerful CPC General Secretary needs to have allies who watch his back. Since Deng’s time, the consensus was that one member from each family of the “Eight Immortals” would have a plum post. Xi and Bo were among the three Red Princes who entered politics. One from each family of the remaining five heads gigantic state-owned enterprises — each in size equal to, say, all Indian oil PSUs combined with Reliance Petro also thrown in.
Once Bo was marginalized, Xi gently ensured that the scion of the third immortal, who opted for politics, was guided into heading another PSU. With two of the Red Princes gone, Xi then jailed powerful politicians Zhou Yonglag and Ling Jihua. In the process, he snapped whatever influence his two previous successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, had over the politburo. Zhou was Jiang’s protégée and Hu was Ling’s mentor. Xi was also practical. Besides allowing other Red Princes to continue as PSU chiefs, Xi even adjusted Deng Zhuodi, Deng Xiaoping’s grandson, to a public position. But once power had consolidated, even that incipient threat was seen off in 2016.
Emerging from behind the curtain with his chosen ones at the end of the 20th Congress of the CPC, Xi has unquestionably vanquished all dissidence and challengers. His contemporaries, who took power along with him in 2012, have been shown the door and the next generation, the sixth, is completely beholden to him.
But while humans can be made to disappear, issues and threats do not. The first reared its head and was quickly pushed down. For the first time in many years, China postponed the scheduled release of its third-quarter economic data which was predicted to show the second-weakest pace of economic growth in over four decades. Then corporate China, which was welcomed by the CPC, was allotted no delegates for the Congress. Jack Ma, the founder of e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, is out of public circulation. Clearly, at some point in the Chinese political structure, Xi will need to sort out the hint of friction between the rhetoric of a socialist economy and the ground reality of freewheeling economic principles.
The friction is greatly enhanced also with China’s neighbors ever since Xi took power. Along with burying Deng’s rule of handing over power after 10 years, Xi also abandoned his dictum of “hiding your strength and biding your time”. Clearly, for Xi, that time has come to flex China’s military muscle which it has done with abandon. This has brought a vicious western backlash. So poisoned are China’s ties with the West today that the time when Xi addressed the Australian parliament or the Chinese studied and worked en masse in cutting-edge western technological institutions is not even a distant memory.
In his opening address at the Congress, Xi did say that development was still his top priority. But what does the world make out from his opening speech last Sunday in which he mentioned security 91 times and economy only 60 times? Analysts noted that it was the first time that this has happened since the founding of the Communist Party of China in 1949.
If this is a portend, then with Xi as King, the world, and especially India, faces an unknown strategic trajectory.
No Party for Women
Who after “Lockdown Aunty” is a sought-after question at the CPC Congress. No woman has become a member of the topmost rung of the Politburo Standing Committee. But the lockdown czar Sun Chunlan and the 25-member Politburo’s only woman is now 72. A former worker in a watch factory, she was only the eighth woman in the CPC’s 100-year history to be a Politburo member, a second rung. A protégé of Hu Jintao, she is the next well-known woman leader after Chen Muhua, who was also the second woman to become Deputy PM. Sun had proved useful to Xi Jinping as she had taken on his rival Bo Xilai. Her predecessor in the Politburo was ‘Iron Lady’ Wu Yi, who had negotiated China’s entry in WTO.
The Power Structure
- 2,300 delegates gather at one-in-five-years party Congress. The ‘delegates’ ‘elect’ the Central Committee, which comprises around 400 members. The Central Committee ‘elects’ a 25-member Politburo. It also ‘elects’ the all-powerful seven-member Standing Committee of the Politburo, which elects the General Secretary.
- The Chinese ‘Parliament’, National People’s Congress (NPC), has around 3,000 members and holds a Full Session once every five years. The NPC Full Session is in March for two weeks as against the CPC Congress, which is in October-November and lasts for a week. This Full Session elects the President of China, who has been elected General Secretary in the previous October.
- The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference is also held along with the NPC and besides the Communist Party members, it has representatives from eight non-Communist Parties while some non-members are elected to its high positions. In theory, it represents a broader range of people.
- Much like Rudyard Kipling’s saying “Whoever holds Zamzama (the famous artillery gun) controls Punjab”, whoever heads the Central Military Commission (CMC) controls China. Xi Jinping as CMC Chairman has purged all the power centres that had formed in the PLA
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