Rethinking Chinese Politics

Abstract

The Chinese Communist Party’s 20th Party Congress, held in October 2022, was seen by many observers as a norm-smashing event. As expected, Party Secretary Xi Jinping broke with prior precedent and was appointed to a third five-year term. Other seemingly well-established norms were broken as well: the age 68 retirement rule was suspended for Politburo members Wang Yi, 69, and Zhang Youxia, 72, as well as for Xi himself, also 69. The informal norm that those who hadn’t reached retirement age would hold onto their Politburo seats was also dispensed with, which meant that key figures like Wang Yang were unceremoniously shoved into early retirement. Premier Li Keqiang’s departure signalled the end of the prior norm of balancing among groups or factions on the Standing Committee – Li was a member of the Central Party School faction, which had served as the path to power for many senior leaders prior to Xi’s tenure. Perhaps most crucially, the lack of any relatively young officials on the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) meant that Xi had declined to anoint a successor. (Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin had been forced to do so, in both cases years before they stepped down.) The results of the Party Congress made clear Xi’s intention to rule China indefinitely, perhaps for life. Only Chairman Mao, alone among PRC leaders, has been able to accomplish that feat. But are Xi’s appointment to a third term, and his moves to stock the Politburo with loyalists, in fact unprecedented? Or would the outcome of the 20th Party Congress be better described as a reversion to the CCP’s historical pattern? In his important new book, Rethinking Chinese Politics, Joseph Fewsmith argues that the extent of institutionalization of elite Chinese politics has been overstated, and that the norms governing promotions, transfer of power, and powersharing that emerged over the past forty years were in fact quite weak. A better account of Chinese politics would focus instead on the efforts of senior leaders to hold onto as much power as possible, and on the CCP’s desire to preserve the flexibility and responsiveness that are a key part of its Leninist structure. To be sure, nascent norms did emerge in the 1980s, and have played a role in shaping elite politics since then. After the calamity of the Cultural Revolution, the CCP leadership embraced reforms that would, they hoped, turn the page on a disastrous decade. Importantly, however, these reforms were meant to strengthen the Party’s hold on power. They were simply not meant to turn China into a multi-party democracy, or to turn the Party-state into a Weberian-style technocratic bureaucracy. At first glance, the Deng-era set of reforms seemingly worked: Jiang Zemin was elevated to the chairmanship of the CCP in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, and went on to serve two terms as Party leader, from 1992 to 2002. His successor, Hu Jintao, was elevated to the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) in 1992, allowing him to gain administrative experience and build relationships with other senior leaders before he himself took the reins from 2002 to 2012. Hu’s elevation also made clear to the Party leadership that Jiang would be term-limited, and that he would not be allowed to choose his own successor. The