Last year saw more attention to Chinese President Xi Jinping as China’s paramount leader, including what many observers have seen as a cult of personality. The economy may eclipse politics as a concern for Beijing in 2016, but in China the two are always closely intertwined. Here are the three major political questions that will loom over the Xi leadership in the months to come.
- Is it time for thelong-running anticorruption campaignto shift its focus?
In laying out a vision for his anti-corruption drive in 2013, Xi Jinping vowed to go after both high-ranking “tigers” and low-level “flies.” So far the campaign has been fueled by the takedowns of a procession of big cats – but there are signs that a change is in the offing.
There’s upside to an increased focus on local cadres and others at the insect level. For one, it would send a signal to doubters that the anti-graft campaign is genuine, not just a way to purge Xi’s political enemies. It would also help Xi score points with regular citizens and reform-minded officials outraged at the pervasiveness of corruption in China.
But there’s also a political risk. Already, the current crusade has compelled many officials to hunker down and sit on their hands to avoid attracting attention – a phenomenon that has slowed policymaking. Likewise, many developers remain wary of starting new projects that might aid an ailing economy because they’re still not sure what’s permissible in the new environment.
Broadening the anti-graft campaign could handcuff policymaking even further, because cadres will spend time looking over their shoulders, and entrepreneurs, wondering about political support, will wait until the dust settles before embarking on new commercial initiatives.
- What sort of politics does China want to practice?
Xi Jinping and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang agree on a great deal, but they have distinctive notions about how to build a better China.
Xi believes that China’s political future rests on a reassertion of the party’s rule, preventing potential challenges from social groups, and convincing citizens and cadres alike that the government stands for something more than just nationalism — that socialism is still relevant but needs to be recast in ways that appeal to society.
Li appears to see his political mission differently. In his eyes, ideological renovation is far less crucial to the country than administrative restructuring and being a more efficient and approachable government. It’s innovation, not rectification, Li argues, that will secure the Party’s legitimacy. From experimenting with new ways to measure China’s actual economic performance to making bureaucratic requirements easier for citizens to meet, Li has created a profile for himself that challenges the prevailing political course being set by Xi.
While Xi wants more control over society, Li argues for less oversight and regulation in China’s economy and bureaucracy–making it easier for businesses to start up and succeed as a way of preventing social pressure from becoming a political threat.
Thus far, the policy divide between Xi and Li hasn’t resulted in political warfare. But some lower-level cadres are increasingly perplexed about which template to follow: They’ve been quietly pressing for clarification about whether they should be focusing on being better Communists, or on building a more efficient and responsive government. It’s not clear how they can accomplish both, especially when they’re under the anticorruption microscope.
The economy could catalyze conflict here. If slower growth turns into a tailspin, Li and his allies will surely press to have their agenda for change adopted more widely, and argue that the current strategy of “politics before economics” championed by Xi isn’t working. Xi and his comrades won’t concede the political high-ground they currently occupy without a fight.
Xi and Li have been doing a fine job of sharing responsibility up to now, but the divide in their approaches is getting wider, and the challenges China faces will very likely compel one model to be adopted at the expense of the other.
- What happens if resistance to Xi’s reforms becomes active political opposition?
Xi’s efforts to centralize party control over the economy and society have been ruthless. Even the hint of organized opposition to party policies has brought out the truncheon swingers, with censorship or jail awaiting those who propose an alternative political path for China.
Observers who see Xi’s main opposition as coming from the Chinese street are looking down a now-empty avenue. They should be paying attention to disquiet within the ranks of officialdom.
The boldness and breadth of Xi’s reforms have led some in the party ranks to wonder privately about—and even openly question—whether his handling of China’s challenges has always been correct. For example, there are some who contend that the anticorruption campaign has placed too much power in the hands of discipline inspectors and unnecessarily disrupted the status quo (in Chinese).
Some of that scrutiny concerns Xi’s efforts to reinsert the Party more fully into economic and social life, a move that risks stoking discontent in a populace that has grown used to a certain level of leeway in recent decades. There are also those within the political apparatus who see Xi’s recent restructuring of China’s military as courageous but more aimed at quelling dissent from the armed forces than rejuvenating strategy and doctrine. Even Xi himself has noted in a recently released collection of internal speeches (in Chinese) that not everything he has been doing has been met with universal acclaim within the Communist party. Murmurs of discord have reached a level in recent months where a number of officials have been punished for “improper discussion” of Party policies.
Thus far, the angst, anxiety and antagonism within the government to Xi’s reforms remain unorganized. That’s because no one has proposed an alternative strategy for dealing with the nation’s many challenges that would unify the disaffected to act against Beijing. Social activists have little political support from above; annoyed cadres are afraid that any move to form a coalition could plunge the country into civil unrest.
Xi and his allies have been as determined as they’ve been daring in following their own reform path—and their success in getting their way politically has been remarkable thus far. The most pressing question for this new year is whether what has worked thus far will continue to do so—or whether the disaffected in China start believing that their leadership may have begun to run out of answers.
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 