The 75-Year Quest to Make China Great Again

The transformation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over the past 75 years from an impoverished, war-torn nation to a global power is an impressive story of both modern state-building and the creation of a new center of power in the international system. At home, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has ruled without significant opposition since the country’s inception, hundreds of millions of Chinese have moved out of poverty, and the economy has grown on average 9 percent per year for over four decades. Internationally, the PRC has become the world’s largest trading power, boasts the world’s largest military, and is a leading innovator in critical technologies such as electric vehicles, 5G, and artificial intelligence.

For China’s preeminent leader, Xi Jinping, these achievements are important signposts on the road to realizing his vision of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Since he assumed the position of CCP general secretary in November 2012, Xi has unleashed a torrent of bold-faced initiatives – such as the Belt and Road, Made in China 2025, and “common prosperity” – that are designed to shape a new China. In Xi’s vision, this rejuvenated China will reflect a robust CCP at the forefront of the political system, a powerful and innovative economy that rivals that of the United States and other advanced industrialized nations, a military that is capable of “fighting and winning wars,” and a nation that has realized its sovereignty ambitions and reclaimed its centrality on the global stage.

Xi is not the first PRC leader to articulate a vision of a rejuvenated China. Every leader since the founding of the country has put forth a strategy or set of policies to realize China’s restoration and rejuvenation. Mao Zedong, for example, took as a priority the creation of a socialist (and later communist) political system. He saw China’s place in the international system as an epicenter of international communist revolution.

Mao sought unification with Taiwan through a model in which Taiwan would maintain control over its domestic political and economic affairs and even military, but the mainland would oversee its foreign policy. This, according to China’s Foreign Ministry, was the “the origin of the concept of ‘one country, two systems,’” embraced by Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping.

Deng introduced a fundamentally different notion of China’s rejuvenation. He concentrated on restoring Chinese economic and military power through the modernization of four sectors: agriculture, industry, defense, and science and technology. He also invited foreign capital and ideas into China in support of the country’s modernization effort and began the process of integrating China into international institutions and arrangements. Deng also supported a low-key Chinese foreign policy in order to create a stable international environment in which to focus on China’s domestic economic development.

On the surface, there is little that connects Xi Jinping’s PRC to that of Mao and Deng. But a closer examination of Xi’s rejuvenation strategy reveals that contemporary China is not only rooted in an enduring set of political and economic principles and institutions established at the inception of the country – the primacy of a highly centralized system of single party rule; extensive CCP control over political and social life, including the judicial system, media, and education; and an economy that reflects a mix of both market-based practices as well as the strong hand of the state in core sectors such as telecommunications and energy – but also reflects a high degree of policy continuity.

Xi himself has emphasized the importance of locating his tenure as CCP general secretary within a clear historical context. He often describes the job of a new Chinese leader as strengthening the foundations established by his predecessor but then setting his own agenda. Adopting the analogy of a relay race, he has argued that a successor has to “receive the baton properly” and then “run it past the line.”

After visiting an exhibition titled “The Road to Rejuvenation” during his first month in office in November 2012, Xi delivered a speech calling on his generation of CCP members to “inherit the past and usher in the future.” And at the 19th Party Congress in 2017, he described the evolution of the PRC as a China that has “stood up, become rich, and is becoming strong.” Implicit in his statement was the notion that Mao had enabled the country to stand up in 1949 by leading the communist revolution that created the PRC; Deng had led the country to become rich by driving the process of economic reform and opening; and he, Xi Jinping, would realize the ultimate aim of China becoming strong.

Historical precedent also serves an important legitimating function for leaders in a political system like China’s – one that operates without popular electoral accountability or the resilience to acknowledge leaders’ mistakes. At the same time, it can be a source of vulnerability, enabling critics to attack certain policies by referencing past practice. As a result, Xi has worked hard to make the case that CCP history represents a continuous path and not a set of oppositional ideologies and policies. In January 2013, for example, he stated that the Maoist period before Deng could not be used to deny the Deng reforms and the Deng reform period could not be used to deny the Maoist period.

In positioning himself and his own future legacy against the backdrop of PRC history, Xi most frequently places himself in the political tradition of Mao and the economic tradition of Deng. Yet looking across several core objectives of Xi’s rejuvenation strategy – a robust CCP, a powerful and innovative economy, and PRC sovereignty over Taiwan – and comparing his policies to those of Mao and Deng suggests a more complex picture of both the relative depth of the connective tissue of PRC and CCP history and the extent to which Xi Jinping may be considered a political heir to Mao or Deng.

Party Over All

A central element of Xi’s rejuvenation strategy is building a robust CCP at the forefront of the political system. When Xi assumed power, he identified several challenges to the continued viability of the party: it had lost much of its ideological rationale and had become, for many party members, primarily a stepping-stone to personal political and economic advancement. Western political values were permeating the CCP and Chinese society more broadly. And corruption, in Xi’s eyes, posed an existential threat to the party.

In responding to the weaknesses of the CCP, Xi adopted a number of strategies from Mao’s playbook. He dismantled the structure of collective leadership instituted by Deng, purging political rivals, upending the two-term limit on the presidency of China (which Deng had put in place precisely to avoid over-centralization of power), and fostering a personality cult in which his words and actions dominate Chinese political life. Much in the same way that Chinese citizens were expected to know and be able to recite Mao’s wisdom from his Little Red Book, CCP members are required to follow Xi Jinping’s speeches and activities on an app, Xuexi Qiangguo.

In 2022, Xi traveled to Yan’an, where he compared the historical importance of the just-concluded 20th Party Congress – where he had secured an unprecedented third five-year term as CCP general secretary – to the 1945 7th Party Congress, where Mao had successfully consolidated his leadership position within the CCP and had his thought included in the Chinese Constitution.

Xi also shares Mao’s deep-held concern over maintaining ideological correctness within the CCP. From the first years of the PRC, Mao focused on the potential of party members to fall prey to the classist politics, capitalist impulses, and bureaucratism that characterized pre-revolutionary China. He brutally suppressed dissent through a series of mass campaigns, political purges, and public humiliation. The Cultural Revolution, which he launched in 1966, threw the country into turmoil, as radicalized young people took over local governments and replaced them with revolutionary committees. Educated elites were sent down to the countryside, universities were closed, and cultural treasures and historic sites destroyed.

Although Xi rejects the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, like Mao, he views the CCP as engaged in an intense and ongoing struggle with incorrect values and ideas. He has launched ideological rectification campaigns in universities, as well as social science academies and think tanks, the propaganda apparatus, media, and state-owned enterprises. An investigation by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection led to a wholesale indictment of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for overemphasizing research at the expense of party building and marginalizing Marxism. Universities have banned Western textbooks; Xi has encouraged students to report on professors for “improper speech;” and Xi Jinping thought is now taught from primary school through university.

Finally, in launching his anti-corruption campaign, Xi invoked Mao’s language of “cracking down” on “tigers” (more senior officials involved in large scale financial crimes) and “flies” (lower-level corrupt officials). However, unlike Mao’s (and Deng’s) anti-corruption campaigns, which waxed and waned every few years, Xi’s anti-corruption campaign has continued for more than a decade and far exceeds any previous such campaign in scale and scope. According to official records, since Xi came to power, over 5 million corruption cases involving CCP members have been registered. In the spirit of Mao’s notion of “continuous revolution,” Xi has not signaled any plans to conclude the campaign.

An Economic and Innovation Superpower

While Xi’s policies and approaches in the political realm frequently reference Mao, in the economics sphere, Xi prefers to don the mantle of Deng as economic reformer.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Deng’s policy of economic reform and opening transformed the Chinese economy and put it on the path to become the second largest in the world. He unleashed the entrepreneurial spirit of the Chinese people in agriculture, welcomed foreign investment and expertise, and enabled the rapid growth of small-scale township and village enterprises that could produce and sell according to market demand. Deng withdrew the CCP from many of its traditional planning functions in favor of increasing the space for market activity, and reduced the number of state-owned enterprises.

For Xi, a robust and innovative Chinese economy is at the heart of his rejuvenation narrative. A strong economy serves as a critical source of his and the CCP’s legitimacy, enables the spread of Chinese economic and security influence globally, and supports Xi’s claim that China can serve as a development model for other countries to emulate.

From the outset of his tenure, Xi has pursued Deng’s mantle of economic reformer. In December 2012, Xi traveled to Shenzhen, where he echoed Deng’s 1992 “southern tour” (which signaled a renewed push for market-oriented economic reform) and stated, “Reform will not stop, and opening up will not cease.” As the Chinese economy has slowed, and consumer and investor confidence have weakened, the CCP has only increased its efforts to use Deng to burnish Xi’s reform credentials. China’s Xinhua news service published a profile of Xi in March 2024 calling him “another outstanding reformer after Deng Xiaoping” and making an analogy between Deng’s quest to modernize China in 1978 and Xi’s mission to do the same today.

Prior to the Third Plenum of the 20th CCP Central Committee in July 2024, which outlined the party’s economic strategy for the next three years, the CCP even released a documentary that not only promoted Xi as a committed economic reformer dating back to 1978 but also suggested that he played an important role in advancing the household contract responsibility system, one of Deng’s earliest and most important economic reforms.

Yet the reality of Xi’s policies suggests that he is not a natural successor to Deng. Xi has a low tolerance for the uncertainty, loss of party control, and income inequality that accompanied Deng’s market reforms. Xi’s first economic plan – released at the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee in November 2013 – promised both that the market would play a decisive role in the Chinese economy and that public ownership would retain its dominant position. Xi has also periodically undertaken liberalization of certain sectors of the economy, only to pull back when reduced control led to increased instability.

Xi’s approach to “common prosperity,” meanwhile, reflects a mix of both Deng’s and Mao’s understandings of the objective. It incorporates Deng’s notion that certain regions and groups of people would get rich first and then advance the economy in ways that would contribute to overall greater prosperity for the country. But like Mao – and not Deng – Xi is opposed to excessive wealth generation and views wealth redistribution as a means of addressing his broader concern of growing income inequality.

Overall, Xi’s tenure has been characterized more by constraining or even reversing rather than advancing many elements of Deng’s reform and opening. He has enhanced the role of the state at the expense of the market, prompting many observers to identify a trend in which as “the state advances, the private sector retreats.” The number of industrial state-owned enterprises more than doubled between 2012 and 2022. Xi has also increased the role of the CCP in private enterprises to ensure their alignment with the objectives of the party.

Amid the post-COVID economic downturn, he has resisted providing support to individual entrepreneurs and consumers out of concern that such assistance will promote what he terms “welfarism” – a situation in which direct government support breeds laziness and a lack of desire to work. And when discussing the problem of high youth unemployment, Xi has suggested that young people “eat bitterness” and go down to the countryside to serve the people, reminding many Chinese of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Yet Xi does not stand entirely outside the tradition of Deng. His efforts to transform China into an innovation and technological superpower reflect ideas advanced by both Deng and Mao. As Abigail Coplin has detailed, Xi’s 2020 speech on the CCP and science and technology echoed many of the themes raised by Deng in his 1978 speech on the same topic: an appreciation for scientific expertise, the importance of science and technology as a driver of a modern and prosperous China, and the importance of scientists advancing the CCP’s objectives.

Xi has remained less committed, however, to Deng’s initial push to integrate China more directly into the international scientific community. In 1978, Deng opened the doors for Chinese students and scientists to go abroad to study; almost 500 students were sent abroad to 28 different countries. Deng also welcomed multinational investment in research and development and manufacturing in China. As a result, Chinese scientists and companies have become deeply integrated into the broader global innovation and manufacturing ecosystem.

While Xi has supported China’s deeper integration into the international scientific community, like Mao, he also has championed policies that promote greater technological self-reliance. His initiatives, such as Made in China 2025 and dual circulation, are designed to reduce reliance on the international community for both innovation and manufacturing in core technologies. This turn toward greater technological self-reliance has also been accelerated by the reluctance in parts of the international community to partner with Chinese scientists and firms in sensitive areas of technology.

Xi has also begun to extend the notion of self-reliance to the education arena. Rather than sending Chinese students abroad, he has called for the creation of world class Chinese universities that would tackle the “frontiers of the world’s science and technology and major national strategic needs.” The goal is to attract not only the top Chinese talent but also the highest achieving students from around the world.

Taiwan Travails

At the 19th Party Congress in 2017, Xi Jinping announced that reunification with Taiwan was one of 14 “must do” items on China’s path to rejuvenation. And in an October 2021 speech at the Great Hall of the People, he asserted, “Taiwan independence separatism is the biggest obstacle to achieving the reunification of the motherland, and the most serious hidden danger to national rejuvenation.”

Both Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping agreed on the necessity of unification but offered a far more liberal interpretation of both the time and nature of that unification. In an October 1959 speech, Mao stated, “We have always said that the Taiwan question is an internal affair of China. China must liberate Taiwan. There are two ways of liberation: by peaceful means and by means of war.”

He further noted, “We do not want to take over Taiwan all at once. It does not matter if we leave Taiwan in Chiang Kai-shek’s hands for 10, 20, or 30 years. We don't have to take Kinmen and Matsu [referring to outer islands controlled by Taiwan] for we do not want to start a war over them.” In 1972, Mao reportedly told U.S. President Richard Nixon, “We can wait, maybe even a hundred years” for reunification with Taiwan.

Deng evinced a similar degree of long-term strategic patience. In June 1984, he commented, “If we cannot resolve peacefully [the Hong Kong and Taiwan questions], then [we] can only use force to resolve, but it would be disadvantageous to all sides. Achieving national unification is the nation’s wish, if not unified in 100 years, then unified in 1,000 years.”

In 1981, Ye Jianying, then chairman of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, issued a nine-point proposal in which he laid out a vision of a “one country, two systems” model, in which Taiwan could retain its armed forces, control its political and economic system, and maintain cultural and economic ties with other countries. Ye believed that burgeoning civil society engagement, investment, and shared political positions would promote gradual economic and political integration. Deng referred to Ye’s proposal as “one China, two systems.” And he later clarified that “Peaceful reunification does not mean the mainland will swallow Taiwan, or vice versa.”

While Xi has accepted a framework of one country, two systems for reunification, his vision for Taiwan’s independence within that framework appears more limited than that of Mao and Deng. A 2022 white paper issued by the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office stated only that the framework enables two social systems to coexist “in accordance with the law.” Moreover, the paper argued that the “two systems” are subordinate to the “one country.”

Xi also does not express the same degree of strategic patience that Mao and Deng demonstrated. He has voiced deep concern over the direction of Taiwanese independence and adopted a hard line toward the island nation. He has ramped up military exercises around Taiwan, meddled in Taiwan’s elections, halted formal political dialogue with Taiwan, and reduced tourism to bring economic pressure to bear on the island nation. Xi’s target date of 2049 for realizing the rejuvenation of China suggests Taiwan has no more than 25 years before Beijing may attempt to force accommodation.

Conclusion

As the PRC celebrates the 75th anniversary of its founding, Xi’s relay race analogy appears apt. He has clearly accepted the baton from Mao and Deng and is running in a direction that reflects

not only the enduring nature of the country’s institutions but also policies that originated with Mao and Deng. He has adopted Mao-originated strategies to centralize power and discipline the CCP, upheld elements of both Deng and Mao’s legacies to advance China’s scientific and technological prowess, and maintained the framework of “one country, two systems” for unification with Taiwan, but displayed a heightened sense of urgency regarding the timing of unification and a more constrained sensibility regarding Taiwan’s post-unification freedoms.

At the same time, Xi’s efforts to don Deng’s mantle of economic reform are less convincing. Few of the fundamentals of Deng’s economic reform and opening are actually reflected in Xi’s policies – a disconnect that is only becoming more pronounced as the Chinese economy slows and true reform and opening remain elusive. The potential exists, therefore, for Xi’s extensive use of Deng’s economic reforms as historical precedent to undermine his credibility and cause him to falter as he attempts to carry the baton across the finish line.