China: challenges for the new leadership

By S P SETH

With the confirmation of Xi Jinping as China’s new president this month at the National People’s Congress (NPC), the political transition from the outgoing leader, Hu Jintao, would be complete.  Indeed, the transition effectively had taken place last November when the Communist Party of China (CPC) chose Xi as its general secretary, because all political power in China flows from the party. With the formal NPC confirmation of Xi as the country’s new president, he will become China’s most powerful leader by combining the offices of the party general secretary and president of the country. Li Keqiang will become China’s new prime minister, replacing Wen Jiabao. The new team has many challenges facing them.

A important challenge facing Xi Jinping will be to clear the debris from the Bo Xilai affair who was removed from his position as the leader of Chongqing metropolis last March, around the time of the then party conclave. He is accused of a litany of crimes but his trial is still awaited. It appears that he is not ready to self-incriminate himself, as his wife Gulai did, and disappear from the political scene quietly. His pedigree as the son of a revolutionary veteran is reported to give him some protection from a forced confession.

Be that as it may, his brand of politics of reviving Maoist slogans did win him popular and powerful support at some levels. Even though he is almost finished politically, his Maoist brand has enough traction in the mist of high-level corruption and widening economic disparities.

The new leader Xi Jinping’s task will be to reconcile Mao’s revolutionary politics with Deng Xiaoping’s focus on economic growth. If he panders to the left wing of the party espousing Maoism to appease Bo Xilai constituency, he is likely to offend the liberal-right in the party that are for more economic reform in Deng Xiaoping’s tradition. To bridge this contradiction he has sought recently to emphasize continuity between Mao’s revolutionary politics and Deng’s reforms. The continuity claim is tenuous and problematic because Mao would have been horrified to see the loss of revolutionary and ideological ethos that was the hallmark of his times. It would be to ignore completely the Cultural Revolution in mid-sixties, till his death in 1976, that Mao launched to restore revolutionary purity, as he saw it.

Because of the highly uneven growth of China’s economy, with rich becoming richer and corruption thriving, a nostalgia for Mao’s times and politics, is very much there in sections of the party and the people. It is, therefore, not surprising that Xi is keen to take the Party’s left with him by emphasizing continuity between the Mao and Deng periods. At the present, however, it would seem that the CPC has lined up behind him to see how he would reconcile the irreconcilable of Mao’s politics and ideology with Deng’s pragmatism. When times are tough and social unrest gathers momentum, these contradictions tend to come on the surface creating complications.

 Another challenge for Xi will be to deal with the call from some sections of the party for political reform. The retiring prime minister Wen Jiabao was one of them. Without political reform, the argument goes, the system is lacking transparency and accountability leading to massive corruption. And corruption, if not tackled genuinely and seriously, has the potential of destroying the party, as people are increasingly cynical and losing faith. But any serious effort at eradication of corruption has to begin at the top. At the top, though, many party functionaries and their families are beneficiaries of the system with economic rewards flowing from political power. This is why, with all the talk of corruption eradication, nothing much seems to happen. Will Xi Jinping wield the broom to clean up the mess? That will remain to be seen.

At another level, the phenomenal growth of internet users in China (an estimated over 500 million Chinese have access to the internet), and its own social media and blogs, has put the CPC regime under scrutiny, with people demanding answers and a greater role in what goes on. Despite firewalls and strict censorship of the political debate, the savvy among the internet users, a small minority admittedly, is able to circumvent this by logging on to outside channels. This challenge has been building up for many years and is reaching a critical mass, requiring the regime to deal with pent up demand for political reforms giving people some voice in what is decided for them.

However, the CPC is against Western-style democracy, fearing this will lead to chaos and anarchy. But they also have no alternative political blueprint, except vague talk of democracy with Chinese characteristics--whatever that means. Indeed, their opposition to free wheeling democracy has been further reinforced since the fall of the communist system and collapse of the Soviet Union in the early nineties, attributed to Gorbachev’s hasty introduction of political restructuring (perestroika) in late-eighties. The Chinese leadership, from Deng Xiaoping onwards, fears that any introduction of perestroika might do to China what it did to the Soviet Union. And Xi Jinping is committed not to go the Gorbachev way.

Facing this herculean task of bridging China’s growing internal contradictions, both within the party and between the party and the people, will be the big challenge facing the new leadership. Which doesn’t mean that China will not continue to grow economically, though at a relatively slower pace, and make waves internationally. The only danger is that, at some point, these internal contradictions might explode with the party unable to contain, guide and channel them constructively.

We have seen this happening with the Arab Spring where a simultaneous social and political explosion has left the landscape charred because it was so sudden, unexpected and directionless. Chinese leaders are aware of it as they have tried to censor any reference to the Arab Spring and associated popular protests in their media and on the internet. Knowing that this could happen in China too, one would hope that the Chinese leadership would take the lead to initiate political change while they can still manage and channel it.

The change doesn’t have to be imitative of the Western democracy or Gorbachev’s perestroika. With their considerable inventiveness as shown in their economic growth strategy, it shouldn’t be beyond China’s leadership to introduce some sort of popular political participation to make it a double act of economic and political liberalism. Will they do it? That is the big question.