Succession of leadership has always been a major problem for Marxist-Leninist one-party states.
Why? The simple answer could be that ideology is one thing and governance is another, but that is not sufficient.
Ideology is open to interpretation and governance has different ways to face reality, but this fails to consider human factors: Ambition, hubris and even jealousy play their parts. Russia and China, the two largest Marxist-Leninist states, illustrate this well.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) bold move to seize a third five-year term beyond the previously established norm of two was done with aplomb and in full view at the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 20th National Congress. Just before being “crowned,” he had the previous two-term president, Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), visibly and unceremoniously escorted out.
This was clearly telling all present that “a new sheriff is in town.”
Xi’s act could even be interpreted as a “killing a chicken to frighten the monkeys” warning in case other CCP officials considered objecting.
Did Xi feel that he alone was capable of guiding China to where it should be?
Xi was not the first of his ilk, he had plenty of dramatic precedents. For example, when then-Chinese vice premier Lin Biao (林彪) died mysteriously in a plane crash in Mongolia on Sept. 13, 1971, several victims’ bodies apparently had bullet wounds, ensuring their demise.
Lin had once been designated as former CCP chairman Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) successor; he had survived Mao’s 1956 purge to “let 100 flowers bloom,” as well as the 1966 Cultural Revolution. Disagreements about leadership style and that Mao was cozying up to US capitalism forced the matter of “kill or be killed,” with the ironic touch of Lin being branded a “secret admirer of Confucius (孔子).”
A later case, and one worthy of a John le Carre novel, is that of former Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai (薄熙來), a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and a potential competitor to Xi’s rising star. Bo fell from grace when he became tied to British citizen Neil Heywood’s death in a Chongqing hotel in November 2011.
That unraveling led to the further realization that Bo had been taping private phone messages of politburo members, with Bo’s Chongqing police chief, Wang Lijun (王立軍), seeking asylum at a US embassy in 2012.
Russia had already demonstrated its own leadership succession problems beginning with Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924.
Ideological and personal power struggles emerged between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. Trotsky went from losing his war commissariat position (1925) to being expelled from the politburo (1926) and finally from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1927).
In 1928, he had to flee into exile, but even then was relentlessly pursued until his 1940 assassination in Mexico.
Trotsky was no isolated incident. Stalin employed numerous purges throughout his “reign,” the greatest being the 1937 Great Purge — also known as the Great Terror — which sent thousands to either death or Gulag prisons.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is following suit. He has already manipulated the system to remain in power since 2000. With new changes, he has the possibility of serving until 2036, when he would be 84 years old.
Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most recent critic, survived poisoning only to be imprisoned for failing to report from his absence in Berlin, where he was receiving treatment.
All this drama is grist for the mill for Taiwan, which only recently emerged from the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) one-party state.
Taiwan’s president has been elected by popular vote since 1996, and its leadership has successively and peacefully crisscrossed between the KMT and the Democratic Progressive Party.
In China, people have simply traded an emperor for a despot; Russia has traded a tsar for the same.
Democratic Taiwan has had no purges, and no president has sought to hang on to power. Taiwanese choose who rules next.
This is the freedom that Taiwan and all democracies, including Ukraine, possess.
Democracies should ask these simple and basic questions: Why do China and Russia have such problems in leadership succession and we do not? Why would we want to return to the vicissitudes of a one-party state? What freedoms could it possibly offer that we do not already enjoy?
The answers should be obvious.
Jerome Keating is a writer based in Taipei.
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
After “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the US joined Israel on Saturday last week in launching “Operation Epic Fury” to remove Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime leadership team. The two blitzes are widely believed to be a prelude to US President Donald Trump changing the geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, targeting China’s rise. In the National Security Strategic report released in December last year, the Trump administration made it clear that the US would focus on “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,” and “competing with China economically and militarily
RSS