On Tuesday Next week, to mark the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to deliver a speech that unreservedly celebrates the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) record since 1949.
However, despite Xi’s apparent confidence and optimism, the party’s rank and file are increasingly concerned about the regime’s future prospects — with good reason.
In 2012, when Xi took over the CCP, he promised that the party would strive to deliver great successes in advance of two upcoming centennials — the founding of the PRC and the CCP in 1921.
However, a persistent economic slowdown and rising tensions with the US will likely sour the CCP’s mood during the 2021 celebrations. Moreover, the one-party regime may not even survive until 2049. While there is technically no time limit on dictatorship, the CCP is approaching the longevity frontier for one-party regimes.
Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party retained power for 71 years (1929 to 2000); the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ruled for 74 years (1917 to 1991); and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) held on for 73 years (from 1927 to 1949 in China and from 1949 to 2000 in Taiwan). The North Korean regime, a Stalinist family dynasty that has ruled for 71 years, is China’s only contemporary competition.
Historical patterns are not the only reason the CCP has to be worried. The conditions that enabled the regime to recover from the self-inflicted disasters of Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) policies and to prosper over the last four decades have largely been replaced by a less favorable — and in some senses, more hostile — environment.
The greatest threat to the party’s long-term survival lies in the unfolding dispute with the US. During most of the post-Mao era, China’s leaders kept a low profile on the international stage, painstakingly avoiding conflict, while building strength at home.
However by 2010, China had become an economic powerhouse, pursuing an increasingly muscular foreign policy. This drew the ire of the US, which began gradually to shift from a policy of engagement toward the confrontational approach evident today.
With its superior military capabilities, technology, economic efficiency and alliance networks (which remain robust, despite US President Donald Trump’s destructive leadership), the US is far more likely to prevail in a Sino-American dispute than China.
Though a US victory could be Pyrrhic, it would more than likely seal the CCP’s fate.
The CCP also faces strong economic headwinds. The so-called Chinese miracle was fueled by a large and youthful labor force, rapid urbanization, large-scale infrastructure investment, market liberalization and globalization — all factors that have either diminished or disappeared.
Radical reforms — in particular, the privatization of inefficient state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and the end of neo-mercantilist trading practices — could sustain growth.
However, despite paying lip service to further market reforms, the CCP has been reluctant to implement them, instead clinging to policies that favor SOEs at the expense of private entrepreneurs.
Because the state-owned sector forms the economic foundation of one-party rule, the prospect that CCP leaders will suddenly embrace radical economic reform is dim.
Domestic political trends are similarly worrying. Under Xi, the CCP has abandoned the pragmatism, ideological flexibility and collective leadership that served it so well in the past.
With the party’s neo-Maoist turn — including strict ideological conformity, rigid organizational discipline and strongman rule — the risks of catastrophic policy mistakes are rising.
To be sure, the CCP will not go down without a fight. As its grip on power weakens, it will probably attempt to stoke nationalism among its supporters, while intensifying repression of its opponents.
However, this strategy cannot save China’s one-party regime. While nationalism may boost support for the CCP in the short term, its energy will eventually dissipate, especially if the party fails to deliver continued improvement in living standards.
A regime that is dependent on coercion and violence will pay dearly in the form of depressed economic activity, rising popular resistance, escalating security costs and international isolation.
This is hardly the uplifting picture Xi plans to present to the Chinese people. Yet no amount of nationalist posturing can change the fact that the unraveling of the CCP’s rule appears closer than at any time since the end of the Mao era.
Pei Minxin is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a non-resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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