Xi Jinping to Take China Back to ‘One Leader Rule’ Era? Communist Party’s Key Congress Meet Begins Today

The Chinese Communist Party is set to hold a once-in-a-five-year Congress on Sunday with all its 2,296 delegates elected under the ideological parameters set by 69-year-old President Xi Jinping in a meeting that is widely expected to endorse his continuation in power.

Speculations are rife that President Xi Jinping will break the decades-old 10-year term rule to cling in power and perhaps for life, amid mounting pressure from the US-led West against Beijing’s aggressive quest to become a dominant world power.

The outcome of the in-camera Party Congress is expected to end two very strict five-year term limits followed by Xi’s predecessors to avert the danger of the one party state becoming a country with a single leader dominating the political scene.

The congress will name a new Standing Committee, China’s inner circle of power, and other party leaders.

CPC’s Avalanche of Challenges

Over three and half decades later, the party which controls all limbs of governance including the military, the judiciary and legislature are in the cusp of returning to the ‘One Leader’ rule amid its toughest period of economic slowdown exasperated by the ‘Zero COVID’ policy, increasing adversity with the US and the West besides uneasy relations with neighbours like India and Japan.

Apart from the rising of the anti-COVID strategy, the party’s other challenges include a tariff war with Washington; curbs on access to Western technology; a shrinking and aging workforce, and debt that Chinese leaders worry is dangerously high.

Economic growth slid to 2.2 per cent over a year earlier in the first six months of 2022, less than half the official target, sapped by a crackdown on debt in China’s vast real estate industry and repeated shutdowns of major cities to fight virus outbreaks.

Beijing opened its auto industry to foreign ownership and carried out other market-oriented reforms. But it has failed to follow through on dozens of other promised changes. Meanwhile, the party is pouring money into creating computer chip, aerospace and other industries.

Party Leaders, Potential Premiers

Li, the No. 2 leader, is due to step down as premier next year but at 67 is a year below party retirement age. It isn’t clear whether he might stay on the Standing Committee and take a different government post. Other regulators and policymakers, some foreign-educated and experienced in dealing with foreign markets and governments, are due to leave office over the coming year if retirement ages are enforced.

They include Vice Premier Liu He, a Harvard-trained reform advocate who is Xi’s economic adviser and the chief envoy to trade war talks with Washington. Yi Gang, governor of the central bank and a former Indiana University professor, Finance Minister Liu Kun and bank regulator Guo Shuqing also are due to go.

Possible candidates for premier include Wang Yang, who already is a Standing Committee member, according to political analysts. Others are Hu Chunhua and Han Zheng, both deputy premiers, a role that is seen as training for the top job.

Wang, a former party secretary of the southern manufacturing powerhouse province of Guangdong, and Han, who was party secretary of the business capital Shanghai for many years, are seen as politically close to Xi and might represent little change in economic direction. Hu might represent a potential change. He is seen as politically closer to Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao. Hu Chunhua, 59, lobbied for the job in a July 27 article about farm policy in the party newspaper by citing Xi in every sentence.

That showed Hu is very eager to get that position, said Lam. He said Hu has less economic experience than Li, the premier, but at least he comes from a different faction than Xi, which would add to diversity of views. Potential dark horse candidates include party secretaries Li Qiang of Shanghai or Chen Min’er of the populous city of Chongqing in the southwest.

CPC Through the Years

In the century-old history of the CPC, Mao remained at the helm until his death in 1976, ruling the most populous country and subjecting it to his ideological experiments like the Cultural Revolution during which millions of intellectuals were exterminated and wiped out much of the country’s civilisational past to create a new socialist order.

Mao’s mercurial leadership was marked by brutal campaigns to purge the remnants of the capitalists and traditional elements from society and implement his brand of Communism called Mao Zedong Thought. It ended up disastrously driving the communist nation to near bankruptcy.

Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, who earned the title of Paramount Leader for his sedate and pragmatic leadership putting the country on the path of economic development reversing Mao’s hardline policies, introduced the collective leadership system with a ten-year term limit and 68-year age limit to avoid the ills of the one leader domination of the party.

The 12th Congress of the CPC back in 1982 under the leadership of Deng set China’s political and ideological direction for the next 35 years. The same Congress set a new ideological direction for the party giving high priority to economic development through market reforms and opening to the world.

It adopted the “Resolution on Certain Questions on Party History,” which concluded that Mao had committed profound errors for having departed from the party’s official line in 1956 on the primacy of economic development, continuing the political class struggle for two more decades.

The 1982 Congress also resolved formally to repudiate Mao’s personality cult, absolute power and leadership-for-life and restore the principles of collective party leadership, including an evolving convention of term limits.

Since then, all of Xi’s predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao followed the 10-year norm. Incidentally, China recorded extraordinary economic growth during their tenures, propelling it to become the second-largest economy after the US.

The opening up of China during those decades helped China to get unfettered global access and engagement, including becoming a member of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

“That era has now passed. And the new era of Xi Jinping has begun,” said former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in one of his recent lectures in the US on China.

“This is not simply an analytical assertion on my part. It is what Xi himself has proclaimed: as Mao’s era of China standing up was followed by Deng’s era of China becoming prosperous, now followed by Xi’s self-proclaimed new era of Chinese national power,” Rudd, a fluent Chinese language speaker and widely acclaimed expert on China and the CPC, said.

(With agency inputs)

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