At the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) this month, Xi Jinping (習近平) is almost certainly to be confirmed for a third term as the Party’s general secretary and China’s president. With that, he would become China’s longest-serving paramount leader since Mao Zedong (毛澤東), and the rules and norms that are supposed to govern the CCP regime would shatter.
Those rules and norms were put in place largely by Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), who took power in 1978. Deng knew firsthand the damage the party’s ideological fanaticism could do. During the Cultural Revolution, one of his sons was paralyzed by rampaging Red Guards. Deng himself was stripped of his official positions and sent to work at a factory in a remote province for four years — one of three times he was purged from government during his long revolutionary career.
To ensure that China would never again be gripped by such terror, Deng — with the support of other veteran revolutionaries who had survived the Cultural Revolution — restored collective leadership and imposed age and term limits for most senior CCP positions. In the decades that followed, China’s top leaders served no more than two terms and Politburo members respected an implicit age limit of 68.
Illustration: Mountain People
However, Xi has exposed just how fragile Deng’s “rules-based system” really was. For all the talk about Deng’s accomplishments, his record on reining in the CCP regime is mixed at best, not least because his own commitment to the rules was not nearly as robust as one might expect.
In practice, Deng disdained collective leadership and formal procedures. He seldom held Politburo Standing Committee meetings because he wanted to deny his main rival, a staunch conservative opposed to economic reform, a platform to challenge his policy. Instead, he exercised leadership through private meetings with supporters.
Moreover, in dealing with leaders sympathetic to pro-democracy forces, Deng frequently contravened the procedures and norms he had established. His dismissal of two liberal CCP leaders — Hu Yaobang (胡耀邦) in 1986 and Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽) (who refused Deng’s order to implement martial law during the Tiananmen crisis) in 1989 — defied the party’s bylaws.
At the same time, Deng sometimes avoided introducing a rule at all, if doing so could undermine his political interests. Most notably, he — together with other aging CCP leaders — did not impose age or term limits on Politburo members. Even if they could not hold formal government posts indefinitely, they would never lose their decisionmaking authority.
Likewise, Deng enacted no formal rules governing who could chair the Central Military Commission. This enabled him to continue to do so after he had resigned from his other posts. Following that precedent, then-Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) did the same in 2002.
As for Xi, while he had to go through the motions of getting the presidential term limit removed from the constitution in 2018, he benefited from the fact that the CCP had not imposed an official term limit on its general secretary.
There is nothing shocking about China’s struggles to uphold rules and norms. Even mature democracies such as the US face such challenges, as former US president Donald Trump’s tenure clearly showed.
However, should formal constitutional checks and balances fail, democracies can at least count on a free press, civil society and opposition parties to push back, as they did against Trump.
In dictatorships, rules and norms are far more fragile, as there is no credible constitutional or political enforcement mechanisms. Autocrats can easily politicize institutions, such as constitutional courts, turning such bodies into rubber stamps, and there are no secondary enforcement mechanisms. China has no free press or organized opposition. If a rule becomes inconvenient — as the constitutional limit on presidential terms did for Xi — it can easily be changed.
While trampling institutional rules and norms might benefit autocratic rulers, it is not necessarily good for their regimes. The CCP’s experience under Mao is a case in point. Unencumbered by any institutional constraints, Mao engaged in ceaseless purges and led the party from one disaster to another, leaving behind a regime that was ideologically exhausted and economically bankrupt.
Deng understood that a rules-based system was essential to avoid repeating that disastrous experience.
However, his conviction could not overcome his self-interest, and the institutional edifice he built in the 1980s turned out to be little more than a house of cards. Xi’s confirmation this month is merely the breeze triggering its inevitable collapse.
Pei Minxin (裴敏欣), professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, is a non-resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
The Executive Yuan recently revised a page of its Web site on ethnic groups in Taiwan, replacing the term “Han” (漢族) with “the rest of the population.” The page, which was updated on March 24, describes the composition of Taiwan’s registered households as indigenous (2.5 percent), foreign origin (1.2 percent) and the rest of the population (96.2 percent). The change was picked up by a social media user and amplified by local media, sparking heated discussion over the weekend. The pan-blue and pro-China camp called it a politically motivated desinicization attempt to obscure the Han Chinese ethnicity of most Taiwanese.
On Wednesday last week, the Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an article by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) asserting the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) territorial claim over Taiwan effective 1945, predicated upon instruments such as the 1943 Cairo Declaration and the 1945 Potsdam Proclamation. The article further contended that this de jure and de facto status was subsequently reaffirmed by UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 of 1971. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs promptly issued a statement categorically repudiating these assertions. In addition to the reasons put forward by the ministry, I believe that China’s assertions are open to questions in international
The Legislative Yuan passed an amendment on Friday last week to add four national holidays and make Workers’ Day a national holiday for all sectors — a move referred to as “four plus one.” The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), who used their combined legislative majority to push the bill through its third reading, claim the holidays were chosen based on their inherent significance and social relevance. However, in passing the amendment, they have stuck to the traditional mindset of taking a holiday just for the sake of it, failing to make good use of
As strategic tensions escalate across the vast Indo-Pacific region, Taiwan has emerged as more than a potential flashpoint. It is the fulcrum upon which the credibility of the evolving American-led strategy of integrated deterrence now rests. How the US and regional powers like Japan respond to Taiwan’s defense, and how credible the deterrent against Chinese aggression proves to be, will profoundly shape the Indo-Pacific security architecture for years to come. A successful defense of Taiwan through strengthened deterrence in the Indo-Pacific would enhance the credibility of the US-led alliance system and underpin America’s global preeminence, while a failure of integrated deterrence would
RSS