New Hopes, Old Fears: China’s 19th Party Congress

During the Mao era, Communist Party Congresses happened infrequently and were largely irrelevant. Between the crucial years of 1956 and 1969, no Congress was held. Yet China during this time witnessed the Great Leap Forward, the years of the great famines, and Mao’s temporary decline in the early 1960s before the opening, dramatic years of the Cultural Revolution. Congresses were largely theatrical assemblies, convened long after policy had been agreed and implemented elsewhere – usually in the tiny inner circle around Mao himself.

In the era after 1978, one of the achievements has been to systemize Party Congresses, making sure they are held every five years. A corollary of this is that today, the Congresses are usually associated with some kind of meaning. This significance is found in two areas: leadership successions and formal confirmations of ideological position. The 14th Party Congress in 1992 saw market socialism written into the Party Constitution. The 16th in 2002 officially endorsed the “Three Represents,” which allowed non-state business people to join the Party, and also ushered in a transition between Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. 2007’s 17th Party Congress saw the affirmation of Scientific Development, Hu’s somewhat clunky catchphrase for a cluster of policy ideas. The 2007 Congress also gave clear hints as to who would be appointed as China’s leaders five years later.

The 19th Party Congress, likely to be held in the latter half of 2017 (usually in October, though in recent years the event has twice slipped into November) will therefore, if precedent is maintained, deliver two things: some clarity about what Xi Jinping’s leadership wants as their key ideological slogan and framework, and some notion as to who might step into leadership when Xi and his colleagues are meant to retire from their formal Party positions in 2022.

Xi’s Ideological Framework

Dealing with the matter of ideology first, it’s worth pointing out that despite occurring in a system where one party has a monopoly on power, transactional politics increasingly matter in China. Xi Jinping is seen as the core of a populist leadership, thus the emotionally-driven language about “China Dreams” and national rejuvenation have been used with increasing intensity since 2013.

The 2017 Congress will be the last before the achievement of the first centennial goal of achieving “moderate prosperity” for China in 2021, the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of China. This goal will be a point of relentless focus. China’s moment of fully achieving modernity with Chinese characteristics is within sight. That means there is every likelihood next year that whatever messages and ideological formulations are promoted, they will be laden with the delivery of this historic burden. It is a message that at least will reach beyond the grand confines of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, where the 3,000 delegates will gather, to the great mass of Chinese people outside. On this issue – achievement of a rich, strong country – the Party and the Chinese people are largely as one.

Fear plays a role in any political system. In China, fear of the hidden enemy, of the saboteurs, traitors, and wreckers, has been a feature since the earliest days of the People’s Republic. The enemy “sleeping at our side” was one of the refrains exhaustively replayed in the ten years of the Cultural Revolution beginning in 1966. These days, while the language against enemies has grown less terrifying and explicit, it is still important in leadership discourse.

For Xi and the current leadership, loyalty to Party, to its mission as the central entity to achieve national rejuvenation, has been central. This is particularly so as the economic narrative of this government has become more complex. Growth is slowing down. The country faces multiple challenges in terms of debt levels, productivity, and the need to build proper medical and pension systems despite not having adequate means to do so.

The emerging middle class – urban dwellers, service sector workers, and, in the future, possible taxpayers – are the core group that Xi needs to keep on the Party’s side. For this group, fears about future growth, the stable price of their properties, their jobs, and their children’s education are central. And while the Party continues to speak a strange hybrid language of Marxism-Leninism mixed with Chinese nationalism, somehow it has to reach out to these people, balancing manipulation of their fears with some food to feed their hopes.

Expect the 19th Congress to be heavy on addressing these issues, overtly or subliminally attacking those who, inside and outside China, seek to steal the country’s moment of imminent greatness. We should not be surprised at this move by the leaders. Any politician on the planet in their place would do the same thing. And as we have seen in the U.K. and United States in the last year, fear is a potent mobilizer. The temptation toward negative campaigning transcends cultural barriers.

There will be plenty who look on the language emanating from the Congress and start decrying it as Maoist, red, and retrograde. This would be a huge red herring. The China of 2016 is emphatically not the China of 40 years ago, in the era of Chairman Mao. The very fact that Xi and his colleagues insist so loudly that China’s pre- and post-1978 history are part of the same continuum shows that these eras are, in fact, utterly different. China today is economically, socially, and (though few would easily admit it) politically utterly different from its Maoist past. Its reliance on and integration into the global system, and the reliance of the global supply chain, financial, and economic systems on China, is vast.

Prior to 1978, China was an economic minnow. Now it stands close to becoming the world’s largest economy. It’s a grand success story for the Party, but it also means that Xi’s powers of influence and execution of policy are hedged and hemmed in by circumstances. He has the appearance of absolute power, because that is regarded as a pragmatic tool to convey the unity and cohesion of the Party. But in practice, his ability to influence issues ranging from government debt to the level of inflation to wages is as constricted as that of Western leaders. The only difference is that Xi does not, as yet, have to fear the disruption of the ballot box.

The Succession Question

The succession issue is given great weight by some analysts, who relentlessly go on about factions, about who might succeed Xi, and about what it would mean if in fact Xi decides to stay on. It is ironic that people show a high awareness of the circumscribed nature of “rule by law” in China, and yet seem to hanker after it in Party affairs. The Party, above all, is a law unto itself. Its regulations are written on water. Unwritten succession rules are the easiest to change. There have, after all, only been five leadership successions in the last four decades, three of which were messy, and only two of which – those of Hu and Xi himself – went roughly according to plan.

For the Xi leadership, which, after all, has shown itself to be deeply tactical and political, there is a trade-off between the reassurance of sticking to admittedly shallow precedents and the necessity to be pragmatic. Creating at least some measure of stability and certainty at a time when China will economically and diplomatically be entering choppy waters is paramount. The tools that the leadership have to strike this balance are to either expand or shrink the size of the Standing Committee (it has historically ranged from five to nine members) and to show high levels of flexibility about age limits. The leadership will likely invoke the need to preserve stability and order to justify their decisions.

If the onus is placed on preserving belief in orderly succession and Party predictability, then a clear leadership contender for Xi will emerge. At next year’s Congress, Sun Zhengcai, the favored current party secretary of Chongqing, which, ironically in view of its link with the felled Bo Xilai, is now being held up as a model administration, or Zhou Qiang, chief justice of the Supreme Court, might walk out from behind the red curtain in the Great Hall of the People in slots commensurate with their likelihood to replace Xi and Li. But there might also be a total rewriting of the informal rules, with an appeal to the need to respond to exceptional times and exceptional challenges with exceptional responses.

Wang Qishan, regarded as the finest economist of recent times, might, despite being close to 70, be imposed as premier, shifting his formidable focus to economic rather than anti-corruption issues. Li Keqiang might be moved to head of the National People’s Congress. For both of these moves, in fact, the Party can invoke strong precedents. Deng Xiaoping did his greatest work deep into his 70s. And Li Peng moved from premier to head of China’s parliament in 1992. Rules in this case are not being rewritten, just revised and made fit for the final stage of the strenuous, great march to the goal of Chinese modernity in 2021.  Why risk failing to achieve a dream for the sake of observing finicky legal niceties?

If there are unorthodox moves like these, the world will probably draw a sharp breath and start declaring that we now are witnessing the confirmation of Xi as an autocrat and dictator. Once more though, it would be good to take a step back and consider the fundamental purpose of leadership and Congresses in China today. They are meant to achieve clear political objectives. The most fundamental and important goal for Xi and the people around him is a very simple one: to make one-party rule in China sustainable. That comes first. That objective dictates the leadership and personnel – not the other way around. This is the single great point of consensus for all 3,000 attendees of the Congress and those whom they notionally represent. If the Party fails in this, then they all fall, no matter what their position on ideological or economic matters might be.

While appealing, directly or indirectly, to public fears is important in China at the moment, much of what the Xi leadership has been doing is much more about the Party’s fears. The main date that is driving everything these days is, of course, 2021 – the moment of almost certainly vast celebration, when the current force of 88 million paid-up Party members remembers the CPC’s humble beginnings in July 1921, when 13 people (two of them foreign), convened the first Congress in Shanghai.

But there is a more significant date hovering in the shadows behind this openly stated one. In 2023, the People’s Republic will finally have overtaken the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in leading the world’s longest lasting one-party Marxist system to have maintained itself in power with no political opposition. This benchmark matters deeply. Since the Russian system collapsed in 1991, the CPC has been haunted by the reasons for why this happened, seeking to discover what it can learn from the mistakes the Soviet system made and how the Chinese Party might be able to buck this trend.

Since 1991, the news for Communist systems has largely been bad. Color revolutions felled many of the former Soviet satellite one-party systems in the 1990s and 2000s. Uprisings in the Middle East in 2010 and 2011 swept away other autocratic systems. Political, multi-party systems for awhile seemed to be on an onward march to domination of the world. But in 2016, the CPC sees a world in which, as the Hungarian saying went, the only thing worse than Communism is what comes after it. Central Asia and Russia have been through traumatizing periods of slow growth and the collapse of human developmental indicators.

The Chinese people might be fed a number of narratives to cause fear and worry, but in some ways, the whole trajectory of the Xi leadership since 2012 has shown clearly that the most intense and searing fears in China are those of the Party, about the Party. In this context, Xi’s centralization of powers; his ruthless prosecution, through anti-corruption fights, of some the very elites who put him where he is; and his piling-up of titles and names, along with the brutal fight against dissidents, rights lawyers, and other figures seen as challenging the legitimacy of the Party, are not signs of strength. They are indicators of vulnerability and weakness.

In the Hu era, from 2002 to 2012, double-digit economic growth meant that most arguments against the Party could be closed down by pointing out that it was usually making China materially more prosperous and successful. During that era, tomorrow was better than today for most people. That kept them on the Party’s side. The Communist Party knows that this sort of model only produces fair-weather loyalty. While 10 percent GDP growth produces stronger fidelity to the current system, 6 percent growth waters this down. Political loyalty in China is fungible and transactional. It can vanish like a light mist on a sunny day.

Looking ahead to 2017, the Party strategists know that they have never before dealt with such a complex set of issues and outcomes. They have to consider how to restructure China to a more stable fiscal system, how to address growth in ways that are sustainable, and how, in the end, to create enough reassurance in the all-important middle class that they become stronger, more active consumers. Like politicians everywhere, Party policymakers are pulled in different directions, trying to square circles and create something from nothing.

The real issue for 2017 is how a Party that, under Xi, has promised so much in multiple plenums since 2012 starts to make these promises look real. The 19th Party Congress will need to talk about delivery, not just make more grand claims about what is coming. There has never been a more complex, difficult task for China, and one that matters so much not only to the country itself, but to the outside world. Simplifying this by focusing relentlessly on who appears in what slot in the final walk-out would be a mistake. Politics and policy matter above all in 2017. How well the Congress conveys these issues and balances fear and hope for the Chinese, and the global public, will determine whether the event is considered a success, or seen as the final swansong for a system that, like it or not, will have to change.