Rowan Callick
The Australian
April 2, 2015
Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. Source: AFP
The surprisingly rapid dominance of President Xi Jinping has not yet subdued China’s political factions, which effectively have called the political shots for two decades.
Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Centre at the Brookings Institution in the US, did most to expose to the world the factions that kept the country’s leadership balanced but tentative following the death of the last all-powerful Communist Party figure, Deng Xiaoping.
Now Li, who on Tuesday delivered the Lowy Institute-AMP China Lecture in Sydney, is turning to the country’s elite politics — which he says is no less important, and no less vicious.
He told The Australian that in late 2012, on the eve of the five-yearly national party congress, “I divided politics in two camps” — the taizidang or princelings and the tuanpai or Youth League followers, broadly led by successive party general secretaries Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao respectively.
The Politburo Standing Committee, China’s peak decision-making group, that emerged at that congress was no longer balanced, Li said. Of the seven members, six were from the Xi-Jiang princeling faction, and only Li Keqiang, who became Premier, from the tuanpai. “Xi received tremendous support from the top leadership. What happened next was quite dramatic.”
Some of the most powerful figures in the Chinese firmament fell or were dragged down by corruption investigations, including Bo Xilai, the principal princeling rival of Xi; Ling Jihua, Hu’s chief adviser and head of the party’s United Front Work Department; and Zhou Yongkang, former chief of China’s security structure and member of the PBSC whose family and friends ran the country’s strategic oil and gas industry.
The anti-corruption campaign has targeted “tigers” — heavyweight figures — and less important cadres, “flies”. Li said four of the tigers brought down were formerly associated with the princeling faction, “so you can’t say the campaign is driven purely by factional politics”.
But the campaign had created gaps in the ranks that could be filled by the next generation from within the faction, Li said.
“Xi’s real challenge now is the consolidation of power so that he has his own people within both civilian and military hierarchies. That’s still very slow to take place.”
He pointed out that while Xi’s allies clearly controlled the Politburo and its standing committee, the central committee of the party, comprising 376 people, presented a different picture, with Hu’s tuanpai camp holding a majority.
“In that regard, Xi still has an uphill battle. His relationship with Jiang and Hu remains complicated.” It was too early to say how the dynamics of top-level politics in China will play out, Li said.
“Everyone in power is interested in maintaining the party’s rule, and recognises the importance of dealing with corruption,” he said. But a debate was being triggered about whether it might be becoming excessive, and whether and how it might have an endgame. “And no one wants it to undermine their own or their family’s or their proteges’ interests.”
Xi faced the challenge, he said, that those next in line for promotion to the top jobs tended to be allies of Jiang’s faction, rather than his own supporters, who are moving into position — but at lower levels for now because they are younger.
Xi was changing the governance structure already, though, Li said, evolving away from the collective leadership style of Jiang and Hu, who were first among equals. “Xi is clearly already the boss, like Deng and Mao.”
But he said it was too soon to assume this meant the longer-term return to the Chinese system of “strongman politics”.
“Some say his assumption of control of ‘leading groups’ that determine policy is a sign of weakness rather than of strength. In Deng’s later years the only body he chaired with China’s Bridge Association,” he said.
Such consolidation of power, Li said, meant that Xi would have to shoulder the blame as well as take the credit, as policies worked their way through. “Twenty years of collective leadership have established a framework of retirement ages and of other rules and norms that will be difficult to change.
“Xi still has to follow some of the rules of this game. He still can’t direct, for example, who goes to which positions in every case, as Mao or Deng could do.”
Even the Mao and Deng eras, he said, had factions that required a share of power, and today China was becoming more pluralistic, and regional representation was becoming more significant.
Li said he wondered if Xi’s brilliance as a politician might be directed towards improving China’s collective leadership rather than replacing it — “using his political capital to contribute to institutionalisation rather than taking the strongman route”.
“Xi is a man of contradictions. Yes, he comes from a very prominent family, he grew up in Zhongnanhai (the party’s HQ in Beijing) but he’s also become quite dramatically a man of the people, extremely popular among the Chinese public,” he said.
Li said “monopolised power”, which some commentators were already pronouncing as the hallmark of the Xi epoch, “brings with it huge costs and dangers, false friends and enemies”.
But Xi might surprise with legal reforms as he “searches for his agenda, for his legacy”.
China’s political structure was not sufficiently accommodating or flexible, he said, adding he would not rule out Xi considering institutional development.
Xi and his supporters “have made a lot of enemies” through the anti-graft campaign, and “it’s not difficult to imagine some forces trying to undermine them”.
“That’s why their chief challenge is to consolidate and develop their legal, economic and political reforms — for which they are buying time by applying old methods, such as the corruption campaign, that deal with symptoms rather than causes.
“That makes sense. No country can change overnight, and to make changes you need first to consolidate your own power. People can debate whether or how Xi is implementing it, but few say he’s got the wrong agenda. China is thus at a very critical moment.”
