Last year was a challenging one for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) top leadership.
The party’s 20th National Congress in October last year marked the beginning of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) third term, making him the nation’s most powerful ruler since Mao Zedong (毛澤東), with his loyalists dominating the new politburo, the CCP’s leadership circle.
This development merges the success of a ruler with the fate of the nation, and signifies an intensifying trend toward greater control over the government, national security, society and the economy.
Gone is the old concept of pragmatism that had prevailed under former leader Deng Xiaoping’s (鄧小平) economic reforms. From the 1980s onward, economic development and growth, rather than ideological purity, has become people’s desire, and thus the road to the CCP’s legitimacy.
Although Deng’s four modernizations improved the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, the CCP never relinquished its monopoly on political power. When people challenged the legitimacy of the party-state, Deng did not hesitate to call in the troops to restore control.
This is exactly what happened during the deadly 1989 crackdown on the Tiananmen Square democracy movement. The tension between state and society remains an integral part of Chinese politics.
The Tiananmen Square Massacre remains the darkest stain on Deng’s otherwise extraordinary career, and a handful of CCP hardliners almost derailed his economic legacy.
Deng eventually neutralized his opponents and rescued the reform programs through an orchestrated, quasi-imperial “southern tour” of coastal economic zones in 1992.
Deng’s appointee, former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民), who died in November, was thought to be a transitional figure, but he stabilized the Sino-American relationship, ensured a steady period of economic recovery, and continued to operate behind the scenes after handing his authority to former Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) in 2002.
Compared with Deng and Jiang, Hu was a technocrat who faithfully carried out effective policies to attract foreign capital to support China’s transformation and industrial growth. The Hu administration enabled China to quicken the pace of modernization and win support from nations the world over.
However, before Xi took the reins of power in 2012, the CCP had tightened control over domestic dissent. Xi has simply accelerated dictatorial trends in China and distinguished himself from his predecessors on the ideological front.
“Like other nationalist/populist autocratic leaders, Xi absolutely and unapologetically rejects the linkage of progress with liberalism,” US political scientist David Shambaugh wrote in his 2021 book, China’s Leaders: From Mao to Now.
Xi’s adherence to the power and control administered by the CCP resonates with Maoist politics.
Worse still, he has changed the CCP into “a military organization by giving orders to be followed, rather than as a collective organization with collegiality, feedback mechanisms, and procedures to curtail dictatorial practices,” Shambaugh wrote.
In times of peace and stability, this vertical ruling style projects an image of commanding leadership and guarantees an efficient control of public decisionmaking.
However, at the horizontal level, when everything begins to fall apart, this style of autocratic governance stifles the steady flow of credible information departments and agencies, and weakens the state’s ability to respond to crisises.
Ever since the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan in late 2019, and a few months later when it became a global pandemic, Xi was determined to demonstrate the superiority of China’s crisis management against the West’s.
The Chinese state employed patriotic rhetoric and party propaganda to justify the use of stringent policies such as mass testing, regional lockdowns and travel restrictions as preventive measures during China’s periodic COVID-19 outbreaks in 2020 and 2021.
However, following weeks of urban protests against the stringent pandemic restrictions this winter, Xi early last month abruptly ended Beijing’s “zero COVID” policy in the midst of an explosive surge in infections.
As most Chinese welcome the loosening of COVID-19 restrictions, high-risk individuals are still faced with a rising rate of infections.
While popular grievances persist and lurk under the surface of a seemingly stable regime, time will tell if Xi and his loyalists possess the tenacity for sustained governance.
Joseph Tse-hei Lee is a professor of history at Pace University in New York.
The government and local industries breathed a sigh of relief after Shin Kong Life Insurance Co last week said it would relinquish surface rights for two plots in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投) to Nvidia Corp. The US chip-design giant’s plan to expand its local presence will be crucial for Taiwan to safeguard its core role in the global artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem and to advance the nation’s AI development. The land in dispute is owned by the Taipei City Government, which in 2021 sold the rights to develop and use the two plots of land, codenamed T17 and T18, to the
Taiwan’s first case of African swine fever (ASF) was confirmed on Tuesday evening at a hog farm in Taichung’s Wuci District (梧棲), trigging nationwide emergency measures and stripping Taiwan of its status as the only Asian country free of classical swine fever, ASF and foot-and-mouth disease, a certification it received on May 29. The government on Wednesday set up a Central Emergency Operations Center in Taichung and instituted an immediate five-day ban on transporting and slaughtering hogs, and on feeding pigs kitchen waste. The ban was later extended to 15 days, to account for the incubation period of the virus
The ceasefire in the Middle East is a rare cause for celebration in that war-torn region. Hamas has released all of the living hostages it captured on Oct. 7, 2023, regular combat operations have ceased, and Israel has drawn closer to its Arab neighbors. Israel, with crucial support from the United States, has achieved all of this despite concerted efforts from the forces of darkness to prevent it. Hamas, of course, is a longtime client of Iran, which in turn is a client of China. Two years ago, when Hamas invaded Israel — killing 1,200, kidnapping 251, and brutalizing countless others
Art and cultural events are key for a city’s cultivation of soft power and international image, and how politicians engage with them often defines their success. Representative to Austria Liu Suan-yung’s (劉玄詠) conducting performance and Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen’s (盧秀燕) show of drumming and the Tainan Jazz Festival demonstrate different outcomes when politics meet culture. While a thoughtful and professional engagement can heighten an event’s status and cultural value, indulging in political theater runs the risk of undermining trust and its reception. During a National Day reception celebration in Austria on Oct. 8, Liu, who was formerly director of the
RSS