Xi often speaks of the importance of the “rejuvenation” of the Chinese nation, and of the ambitious and tricky tasks the country must navigate over the next 15 or so years: become more uniformly prosperous, repair the environment, and turn China into the world’s biggest power. To do all that, Xi believes that the party must be at the center of everything, and he himself at the center of the party. [...]
After Mao’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping, who had been a political target, returned to the inner circle of the party, and soon maneuvered his way into becoming its most powerful leader. He quickly decided to introduce collective leadership—highlighted, among other things, by a power-transfer mechanism—to prevent the rise of another Mao-like personality cult. In a new constitution ratified in 1982, the presidency was restored with a two-term, 10-year limit. A retirement rule for Chinese officeholders was put in place for the first time, and China was set apart from other authoritarian regimes by having a process for orderly leadership succession. [...]
Xi, who spearheaded a dramatic crackdown on corruption and dissent, as well as a slew of legal reforms under the rhetoric of “rule of law,” may not want to do things that way. “It might be that he has less faith in the efficacy of informal power versus more formal institutional power, and that might be a lesson he learned from Deng’s experience,” Sam Crane, a Chinese politics expert at Williams College in Massachusetts, told Quartz. [...]
Xi’s move “makes sense with how he views both Gorbachev’s and [his predecessor] Hu’s [Jintao] governance failures—basically that they allowed the state to strengthen at the expense of the Party, straining the linkage between the two and allowing for the existence of a state without a Party,” wrote Jessica Teets, a political scientist at Middlebury College in Vermont.
No comments:
Post a Comment