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.
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