Xi Jinping's historic power grab in China

[citanon]

Since economic development is key to the CCP's survival. i was thinking this consolidation would make it easier to push through reforms that would otherwise be stymied by vested interests and there are plenty of those in every country. Who like things as they are and resist change

This sounds like commanding heights socialist thinking. Or are they speculating it will be like that. No way is China switching from a market economy to a command economy

What i'm thinking of is US WW2 war effort, substitute war with some other objective. And the Apollo program. Now you can marshall resources from the entire country as everything is more in sync now, in theory anyway. Proof that it works is again the US. This is building world beating SOE's that can undercut anyone because they have seemingly endless resources. Take over the world in as many sectors as possible.

This is the challenge that runs counter to the previous para

putting party aparratus into every company is the opposite of removing entrenched interests. they just introduce the party as a very disruptive entrenched interest in every organization.

also, China is not a market economy. it is a command economy with market characteristics. the vast majority of economic power is still under state control or attached to state controlled entities.

this is actually the current model already, and
this worked well when infrastructure investment was the primary and productive mode of economic output. infrastructure was really the Chinese Chinese Apollo project.

but today the infrastructure side is over invested and China needs nimble private companies to take the lead.
however, party penetration into private companies has a detrimental effect on nimbleness. the companies better hope the ccp will not push the party organization thing too far.

china has been supporting the development if high technology companies at home and pushing infrastructure development abroad as the prescription for the next phase of economic development, but with this growing xiest cult of personality and a clamp down in free expression and increasingly rigid social controls, those high tech enterprises enterprises are going to suffer.

[Double Edge]

This renewed push to insinuate the party into every corner of economic life will undoubtedly harm economic development. How bad will depend on how strong the push.

Since economic development is key to the CCP's survival. i was thinking this consolidation would make it easier to push through reforms that would otherwise be stymied by vested interests and there are plenty of those in every country. Who like things as they are and resist change

“Companies are concerned establishment of a party unit in the company means the party would play a role in companies’ operational decision making -- leading to decisions made for political rather than business reasons,” said Jacob Parker, vice president of China operations at the U.S.-China Business Council. “We are concerned about that. Introducing political objectives and management roles into foreign invested enterprises is not a positive step for businesses.”

This sounds like commanding heights socialist thinking. Or are they speculating it will be like that. No way is China switching from a market economy to a command economy

What i'm thinking of is US WW2 war effort, substitute war with some other objective. And the Apollo program. Now you can marshall resources from the entire country as everything is more in sync now, in theory anyway. Proof that it works is again the US. This is building world beating SOE's that can undercut anyone because they have seemingly endless resources. Take over the world in as many sectors as possible.

“Political and economic control is in the DNA of the party, whereas entrepreneurship and innovation require robust amounts of flexibility, unpredictability, and a tolerance for uncertainty,” said Blanchette, of the Crumpton Group. “If the party wants to foster innovation, it will first have to release some of its grip over how resources are allocated.”

This is the challenge that runs counter to the previous para

Am ignoring all the propaganda here, its just optics to enable objectives also a distraction to understanding

[citanon]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...luence-expands

One of the most annoying and economically destructive aspects of deep party control before full opening in the late 80s was the grating stupidity of it all. People's time were taken up with endless meetings to align thoughts and actions along principles that few genuinely believed. Effective management was often hamstrung by party apparatchiks who were not sufficiently vested in business success.

This renewed push to insinuate the party into every corner of economic life will undoubtedly harm economic development. How bad will depend on how strong the push.

[tantalus]

So what is the problem here ?

Xi being able to hold control of the CCP or CCP being able to hold control of China

If Xi grabs all these titles means he is weak and by centralising everything it means the CCP is too

Like

The CCP may be giving it a better shot than anyone else managed and also better than most imagined but they are still juggling and you can't juggle forever.

Personal wealth can clearly decrease people's desire for accountability and democracy, yet since progress in personal wealth seems intrinsically tied to technological advancement, and that advancement is also supposed to facilitate a desire for democracy its hard to see the trend. I think we have overestimated the link between technology and democratic values spreading. People do not inherently value democracy, they have to learn it. They do inherently value wealth, they don't need to learn that.

In the medium term It may be very difficult for the CCP to provide the wealth as expectations explode once people reach a certain standard of living. Only major breakthroughs in various fields of technology can lead to a major increase in the standard of living that can meet that explosion in expectation. And they may get those breakthroughs. They are certainly very aggressive on ai, computing, solar. They will clearly need to clean up their environment like the US did with regulation in the past to keep their swelling middle classes happy.

If the CCP can continue doing a job better than anyone else managed or most imagined, external trends may interact to continue to allow the CCP to ride a new economic wave generated by breakthrough tech that allows them to survive for a long time to come.

[DOR]

Xi seems to place a lot on person to person relations when dealing with heads of states, more so than Hu or Jiang did.

Perhaps, but, that’s not what I wrote about.
It isn’t about whether Xi deals with foreigner leaders head-to-head (they’ve all done that).
It’s about whether how one deals with foreigners matters in inner party machinations.

[Skywatcher]

Dealing with foreigners is very low on the list of priorities; it’s usually left to the Chief Barbarian Handler (Foreign Minister).

Xi seems to place a lot on person to person relations when dealing with heads of states, more so than Hu or Jiang did.

[Double Edge]

After Ma's post on Chinese social media went viral two weeks ago, the 70-year-old writer decided to switch to Twitter, which can only be accessed inside China using a virtual private network, to continue issuing warnings about China moving dangerously backward.

"The police have not visited me yet," he told The Associated Press on Friday from his Beijing home. "But I'm preparing for it."

Ma remains in the capital, but some well-known dissidents and potential troublemakers have already been "holidayed" - bundled off to faraway cities, their travel expenses paid by state security. Retired elders from the Communist Party's liberal wing have been warned to stay quiet.

I doubt anything will happen to him, if he requires a VPN to access Twitter and most do not have one then not many people inside China will see what he wrote. Just people outside China which the CCP isn't worried about

[Oracle]

China silences critics of move to make Xi Jinping president for life

BEIJING: The day China's ruling Communist Party unveiled a proposal to allow President Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely as Mao Zedong did a generation ago, Ma Bo was so shaken he couldn't sleep.

So Ma, a renowned writer, wrote a social media post urging the party to remember the history of unchecked one-man rule that ended in catastrophe.

"History is regressing badly," Ma thundered in his post. "As a Chinese of conscience, I cannot stay silent!"

Censors silenced him anyway, swiftly wiping his post from the internet.

As China's rubber-stamp legislature prepares to approve constitutional changes abolishing term limits for the president + on Sunday, signs of dissent and biting satire have been all but snuffed out. The stifling censorship leaves intellectuals, young white-collar workers and retired veterans of past political campaigns using roundabout ways to voice their concerns. For many, it's a foreshadowing of greater political repression ahead.

The result has been a surreal political atmosphere laced with fear, confusion, and even moments of dark comedy that undermines the picture of swelling popular support for the measure being peddled relentlessly by state media.

"There's a lot of fear," said Ma, who writes under the pen name Old Ghost. "People know that Xi is about to become the emperor, so they don't dare cross his path. Most people are just watching, observing."

Once passed, the constitutional amendment would upend a system enacted by former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1982 to prevent a return to the bloody excesses of a lifelong dictatorship typified by Mao Zedong's chaotic 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.

Party media say the proposed amendment is only aimed at bringing the office of the president in line with Xi's other positions atop the party and the Central Military Commission, which do not impose term limits.

After Ma's post on Chinese social media went viral two weeks ago, the 70-year-old writer decided to switch to Twitter, which can only be accessed inside China using a virtual private network, to continue issuing warnings about China moving dangerously backward.

"The police have not visited me yet," he told The Associated Press on Friday from his Beijing home. "But I'm preparing for it."

Ma remains in the capital, but some well-known dissidents and potential troublemakers have already been "holidayed" - bundled off to faraway cities, their travel expenses paid by state security. Retired elders from the Communist Party's liberal wing have been warned to stay quiet.

The government's censorship apparatus had to spring into action after the term limit proposal was unveiled, suppressing keywords on social media ranging from "I disagree" to "shameless" to "Xi Zedong." Even the letter "N" was blocked after it was used as part of an equation for the number of terms Xi might serve.

Yet, occasionally, dissent has surfaced through the cracks.

On Wednesday, International Women's Day, law students at the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing _ Xi's alma mater _ hung red banners that ostensibly celebrated the school's female classmates but also satirized national politics.

"I love you without any term limits, but if there are, we can just remove them," read one, while another banner declared that "A country can't survive without a constitution, we can't go on without you."

University administrators weren't amused. A student witness said the banners were quickly removed and notices posted requiring campus shops to register students who use printers to make large banners.

Chinese studying overseas have been more blunt. Posts in recent days popped up at the University of California, San Diego, with Xi's picture and the text "Never My President" and spread to more than eight overseas universities, said Lebao Wu, a student at Australian National University in Canberra.

To be sure, Xi's confident, populist leadership style and tough attitude towards official corruption has won him a significant degree of popular support.

Sipping on a Starbucks drink in Beijing's business district on Friday, a 56-year-old surnamed Zhang - who works in insurance - said citizens desired
freedom, but wanted a powerful leader who could deliver stability and wealth even more.

Letting Xi rule indefinitely "will strengthen the party's leadership and offer the quickest path towards development," Zhang said. "We need a powerful leader. People need an emperor in their hearts. The Western idea that you are not alive unless you are free has not taken root in people's hearts."

However, a 35-year old IT industry worker surnamed Huang said her friends were concerned about China returning to the Mao era.

"I saw on (state broadcaster) CCTV's evening news that they were saying everyone fully supports the constitutional amendments, but no one asked us for our opinion. Our opinion is quickly censored," she said. "This is China. What can we do about it?"

Neither would give their full names as is common among Chinese when commenting on politics.

Even some of the government's most outspoken critics have been reluctant to loudly criticize the constitutional amendment.

He Weifang, a well-known blogger and law professor at Peking University, limited his remarks this week to the observance that the constitutional amendment proposal contained 21 articles, and if a delegate supported some articles but opposed others, he or she was entitled to vote against it.

He, who lost his job once for supporting the late dissident writer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, declined to discuss the term limit amendment, saying the subject was "a bit sensitive."

Others haven't held back, driven by an urgent sense that their country is at a crucial point in its history.

Li Datong, a former editor of the China Youth Daily state newspaper and one of the few voices of open opposition, said delegates know the amendment is wrong but no one has the courage to speak out. He compared Chinese citizens to Germans who allowed Adolf Hitler to seize power in the 1930s.

"I know that just a few ordinary Chinese citizens coming out and expressing their opinion will not change anything, but I'm doing this so I can face the future generations," Li said.

"When they look back at this time, I don't want them to say, `Not a single person in China stood up and opposed this.' When people talk about Nazi Germany, they always ask why the people living during that time didn't do anything about it," Li said. "I want to be able to face my past."

In the run-up to the vote, Congress delegates have lavished extra praise on Xi. The party boss of a northwestern province that contains a significant Tibetan population compared him to a living Buddhist deity.

"If you do good things for the people, bring good lives to the people, you should be able to keep serving forever," said Zhou Shuying, an artist and delegate representing a rural county about 130 kilometers (80 miles) west of Beijing.

"I'm speaking from the bottom of my heart," she said, then paused to make sure reporters heard her clearly. "I'm really speaking from the heart."

[DOR]

So he can deal with foreigners, would be my guess.

It would have been a lot smarter just to extend the term limits to three, though.

Dealing with foreigners is very low on the list of priorities; it’s usually left to the Chief Barbarian Handler (Foreign Minister).

[Double Edge]

So he can deal with foreigners, would be my guess.

Now that just makes him look weaker still : (

There is a fair degree of autonomy going on in various parts and branches of govt. Not everything is sanctioned or in Beijing's control. This is the part that is hardest to grasp.

Welcome to the new Xi-tocracy

[Skywatcher]

So what is the problem here ?

Xi being able to hold control of the CCP or CCP being able to hold control of China

If Xi grabs all these titles means he is weak and by centralising everything it means the CCP is too

So he can deal with foreigners, would be my guess.

It would have been a lot smarter just to extend the term limits to three, though.

[citanon]

A conversation between David Drum and Minxing Or I:

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/554795/

[Double Edge]

Honestly, the Presidency is just symbolic, since holding control of the CCP is Xi's actual center of political gravity.

So what is the problem here ?

Xi being able to hold control of the CCP or CCP being able to hold control of China

If Xi grabs all these titles means he is weak and by centralising everything it means the CCP is too

[Skywatcher]

Honestly, the Presidency is just symbolic, since holding control of the CCP is Xi's actual center of political gravity.

[Oracle]

Xi Sets China on a Collision Course With History

There was always something different about China’s version of authoritarianism. For decades, as other regimes collapsed or curdled into dysfunctional pretend democracies, China’s held strong, even prospered.

Yes, China’s Communist Party has been vigorous in suppressing dissent and crushing potential challenges. But some argue that it has survived in part by developing unusually strong institutions, bound by strict rules and norms. Two of the most important have been collective leadership — rule by consensus rather than strongman — and term limits.

When the Communist Party announced this week that it would end presidential term limits, allowing Xi Jinping to hold office indefinitely, it shattered those norms. It may also have accelerated what many scholars believe is China’s collision course with the forces of history it has so long managed to evade.

That history suggests that Beijing’s leaders are on what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton once called a “fool’s errand”: trying to uphold a system of government that cannot survive in the modern era. But Mr. Xi, by shifting toward a strongman style of rule, is doubling down on the idea that China is different and can refashion an authoritarianism for this age.

If he succeeds, he will not only have secured his own future and extended the future of China’s Communist Party, he may also establish a new model for authoritarianism to thrive worldwide.

The Harder Kind of Dictatorship
If Mr. Xi stays in office for life, as many now expect, that will only formalize a process he has undertaken for years: stripping power away from China’s institutions and accumulating it for himself.

It helps to mentally divide dictatorships into two categories: institutional and personalist. The first operates through committees, bureaucracies and something like consensus. The second runs through a single charismatic leader.

China, once an almost Socratic ideal of the first model, is increasingly a hybrid of both. Mr. Xi has made himself “the dominant actor in financial regulation and environmental policy” as well as economic policy, according to a paper by Barry Naughton, a China scholar at the University of California, San Diego.

Mr. Xi has also led sweeping anti-corruption campaigns that have disproportionately purged members of rival political factions, strengthening himself but undermining China’s consensus-driven approach.

This version of authoritarianism is harder to maintain, according to research by Erica Frantz, a scholar of authoritarianism at Michigan State University. “In general, personalization is not a good development,” Ms. Frantz said.

The downsides are often subtle. Domestic politics tend to be more volatile, governing more erratic and foreign policy more aggressive, studies find. But the clearest risk comes with succession.

“There’s a question I like to ask Russia specialists: ‘If Putin has a heart attack tomorrow, what happens?’” said Milan Svolik, a Yale University political scientist. “Nobody knows.”

“In China, up until now, the answer to that had been very clear,” he said. A dead leader would have left behind a set of widely agreed rules for what was to be done and there would be a political consensus on how to do it.

“This change seems to disrupt that,” Mr. Svolik said. Mr. Xi, by defying the norms of succession, has shown that any rule could be broken. “The key norm, once that’s out, it seems like everything’s an option,” Mr. Svolik said.

Factional purges risk shifting political norms from consensus to zero-sum, and sometimes life-or-death, infighting.

And Mr. Xi is undermining the institutionalism that made China’s authoritarianism unusually resilient. Collective leadership and orderly succession, both put in place after Mao Zedong’s disastrous tenure, have allowed for relatively effective and stable governing.

Ken Opalo, a Georgetown University political scientist, wrote after China’s announcement that orderly transitions were “perhaps the most important indicator of political development.” Lifelong presidencies, he said, “freeze specific groups of elites out of power. And remove incentives for those in power to be accountable and innovate.”

What Makes Authoritarian Legitimacy
In 2005, Bruce Gilley, a political scientist, wrestled with one of the most important questions for any government — is it viewed by its citizens as legitimate? — into a numerical score, determined by sophisticated measurements of how those citizens behave.

China, his study found, enjoyed higher legitimacy than many democracies and every other non-democracy besides Azerbaijan. He credited economic growth, nationalist sentiment and collective leadership.

But when Mr. Gilley revisited his metrics in 2012, he found that China’s score had plummeted.

His data showed the leading edge of a force long thought to doom China’s system. Known as “modernization theory,” it says that once citizens reach a certain level of wealth, they will demand things like public accountability, free expression and a role in government. Authoritarian states, unable to meet these demands, either transition to democracy or collapse amid unrest.

This challenge, overcome by no other modern authoritarian regime except those wealthy enough to buy off their citizens, requires new sources of legitimacy. Economic growth is slowing. Nationalism, though once effective at rallying support, is increasingly difficult to control and prone to backfiring. Citizen demands are growing.

So China is instead promoting “ideology and collective social values” that equate the government with Chinese culture, according to research by the China scholar Heike Holbig and Mr. Gilley. Patriotic songs and school textbooks have proliferated. So have mentions of “Xi Jinping Thought,” now an official ideology.

Mr. Xi’s personalization of power seems to borrow from both old-style strongmen and the new-style populists rising among the world’s democracies.

But, in this way, it is a high-risk and partial solution to China’s needs. A cult of personality can do for a few years or perhaps decades, but not more.

‘Accountability Without Democracy’
China is experimenting with a form of authoritarianism that, if successful, could close the seemingly unbridgeable gap between what its citizens demand and what it can deliver.

Authoritarian governments are, by definition, unaccountable. But some towns and small cities in China are opening limited, controlled channels of public participation. For example, a program called “Mayor’s Mailboxes” allows citizens to voice demands or complaints, and rewards officials who comply.

The program, one study found, significantly improved the quality of governing and citizens’ happiness with the state. No one would call these towns democratic. But it felt enough like democracy to satisfy some.

This sort of innovation began with local communities that expressed their will through limited but persistent dissent and protest. Lily L. Tsai, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scholar, termed it “accountability without democracy.”

Now, some officials are adapting this once-resisted trend into deliberate practice. Their goal is not to bring about liberalization but to resist it — to “siphon off popular discontent without destabilizing the system as a whole,” the China scholars Vivienne Shue and Patricia M. Thornton write in a new book on governing in China.

Most Chinese, Beijing seems to hope, will accept authoritarian rule if it delivers at least some of the benefits promised by democracy: moderately good government, somewhat responsive officials and free speech within sharp bounds. Citizens who demand more face censorship and oppression that can be among the harshest in the world.

That new sort of system could do more than overcome China’s conflict with the forces of history. It could provide a model of authoritarianism to thrive globally, showing, Ms. Shue and Ms. Thornton write, “how non-democracies may not only survive but succeed over time.”

But Mr. Xi’s power grab, by undermining institutions and promoting all-or-nothing factionalism, risks making that sort of innovation riskier and more difficult.

When leaders consolidate power for themselves, Ms. Frantz said, “over time their ability to get a good read on the country’s political climate diminishes.”

Such complications are why Thomas Pepinsky, a Cornell University political scientist, wrote on Twitter, “I’m no China expert, but centralizing power in the hands of one leader sounds like the most typical thing that a decaying authoritarian state would do.”