Russell Leigh Moses
The Wall Street Journal
May 22, 2015
Chinese President Xi Jinping addresses a meeting of the united front work in Beijing, capital of China. The meeting was held in Beijing from May 18 to 20. ZUMA PRESS
After a successful month spent selling Russia, India and Pakistan on his vision of a rejuvenated China with billions in infrastructure and trade deals, Chinese President Xi Jinping has turned his attention back home.
There, the sales job appears to be tougher.
Xi gave two major speeches this week: one to meeting of security agencies, which placed a heavy focus on loyalty, and the other to the Central United Front Work Department in which he emphasized unity. In both cases, his language was strident and insistent – a signal that neither political loyalty nor Communist Party unity have been bountiful of late.
In the first speech on Tuesday, Xi called for the “absolute loyalty” of national security agencies. He added that security agencies should be disciplined, forging a single force that is “determined, pure, trustworthy, devoted and competent,” describing members of the agencies as national heroes when they do possess such attributes.
Lurking in the background of this plea by Xi is former security czar Zhou Yongkang, who has yet to be brought to trial despite being ousted from the Communist Party in December. Zhou is alleged to have accepted bribes, leaked national secrets and abused his position of power to create private alliances that undermined the Communist party’s authority. While the formal case against Zhou is ostensibly part of Xi’s anticorruption crusade, the more worrying issue for Xi is Zhou’s purported effort, hinted at in official media reports, to form his own political clique—essentially, a party in opposition to Xi.
In fact, Xi’s call for devotion to the current party line reflects lingering anxiety in the leadership that the ties that connect the security apparatus to Zhou Yongkang could well be stronger than those that bind it to Beijing. Zhou’s networks were deep and extensive, according to various accounts in Chinese media outlets, and, by implication, not easily dismantled.
Taking down Zhou even after he retired was supposed to send a message to Zhou’s supporters that Xi not only wouldn’t tolerate dissent within the party, but that the new leadership was following a fresh path where potential social unrest was concerned—that the party would seek to win the hearts of the people by “going the last mile” to find out what they were upset about, instead of beating on their heads when they marched miles to vent their anger. Judging from Xi’s speech to security officials this past week, that strategy to cultivate political devotion doesn’t appear to be working very well.
Xi’s speech the following day to the Central United Front Work Department wasn’t a look to the future but a blast back to the past. Waving the flag of national rejuvenation, he urged Communist Party officials to “befriend” non-Communist Party intellectuals, better incorporate religions into society and take other steps to, as one media report put it, “unite forces and mobilize all positive factors on the behalf of the party” (in Chinese).
Dating back to the early years of the Communist revolution, “united front work” has historically been an effort by Beijing to mobilize allies outside the Communist Party—students, intellectuals, overseas Chinese, and political associations and organizations in China and abroad–to promote the prevailing political line. It’s been largely quiescent in recent years, but Xi’s has displayed a reverence for old campaigns that he and like-minded comrades see as rejuvenating China’s political spirit.
The theme of unity is a crucial one, because it needn’t be mentioned as something to strive for if it was a goal that the Xi leadership had already attained.
One lagging area is the party’s persistent disconnect with a society that is increasingly diverse and distrustful. As a widely-reprinted commentary in The Beijing News pointed out on Thursday, to remedy that shortcoming means that the party will must “move to strengthen and improve the working of ‘new media representatives’ who establish regular channels, strengthen online interaction, and use existing line of communications, to purify cyberspace, promote leading themes, and show positive energy”—all code-words for greater supervision of social media, including using the Internet to penetrate society for the sake of pushing politics from the top.
But it’s the second realm of united front work mentioned by Xi that points to his most stubborn political challenge.
Xi argues that, “while giving full play to democracy, and having respect and tolerance for different views,” collective efforts to rejuvenate China “must correctly handle the relationship between uniformity and diversity, continue to consolidate the common ideological and political basis, and, as far as possible through patient and painstaking work, find the common denominator…in order to expand the power of the common struggle.”
Party cadres will rightly read that passage as a command to locate common political ground—to forge a unity among Chinese leaders and officials that just isn’t there to the degree that Xi thinks it urgently needs to be.
With these speeches, Xi isn’t celebrating progress–as his predecessors were wont to do–but highlighting problems that he and his colleagues believe are best resolved by further tightening the party’s grip on society, and trying to convince skeptical comrades to support his focus, not someone else’s.
Xi’s speeches this week weren’t born of desperation, so much as disquiet. But they could well turn out to be less a sales effort than the sound of a larger struggle getting started.
Russell Leigh Moses is the Dean of Academics and Faculty at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies.
