China’s "Gorbachev" Is Tearing the Communist Party Apart

So far, Xi’s efforts have been sweeping, taking down at least thirty-six officials of vice-ministerial rank or higher in his first twenty months in power. The Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said that last year itpunished 182,000 officials. Among Xi’s collection of felled tigers are Bo Xilai, a charismatic Politburo member; Xu Caihou, once one of the country’s most powerful generals; and Zhou Yongkang, who stepped down as the country’s internal security czar in 2012.

The announcement of the investigation of Zhou, made July 29, marked what some think is “an end to the first major phase of Xi’s anticorruption campaign,” yet it is far more significant than that. The unprecedented prosecution probably marks the last days of a two-decade period of stability, a time that permitted China to recover after Mao’s disastrous twenty-seven years of rule.

The investigation of Zhou violates the Party’s generation-old taboo prohibiting prosecutions of members or former members of the Standing Committee. If leaders knew they would not be hunted down, as they were in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, they would be willing to withdraw gracefully after losing political struggles. In other words, Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s crafty successor, reduced the incentive for political figures to fight to the end and tear the Communist Party apart. As such, the prohibition was an important element in restoring calm after Mao’s zany, decade-long campaign.

Xi Jinping, however, is reversing the process and upping the stakes, something evident in the probe of Zhou and the life imprisonment of Mr. Bo. Those are signs China is returning to a period that many thought had long passed, as Xi rejects the politics of the era dominated by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. During that mostly permissive span, powerbrokers tried to maintain a delicate balance among the Party’s competing factions. Xi’s motto, however, is“You die, I live.”

As Renmin University’s Zhang Ming says, “combat” between Xi and others “has been white-hot.” The question, however, is whether the fighting subsides or intensifies in the months ahead.

Veteran China watcher Willy Lam, for one, thinks the worst is over. He cites a piece by Deng Yuwen, a former deputy editor of Study Times, the Central Party School journal, in the July 26 edition of Ta Kung Po, a Hong Kong newspaper often reflecting Beijing thinking. “Many people want to know if other ‘big tigers’ or ‘old tigers’ will be ensnared,” Deng writes. “The possibility of this happening in the rest of the first five-year term is close to zero.” He believes Xi reached a deal with Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and other Party heavyweights to permit Xi to do whatever he wanted with Zhou Yongkang, as long as he did not go after either them or their kids.

Not everyone agrees that such a deal exists. At the moment, there are a multitude of predictions as to what will happen, but in all likelihood, Deng Yuwen’s is wrong.

First, Xi is said to be using his corruption campaign—in reality a political purge—to clear out opposition to fundamental economic restructuring. If that is true, then the bargain described by Deng Yuwen is most unlikely. After all, any agreement with conservative figures, who would be disadvantaged by change, will leave them in a position to block most reforms. Xi Jinping, however, is a figure who obviously craves a legacy—the man who saved the Communist Party and fulfilled the “China Dream”—and it’s unlikely he would essentially trade his future away. To get what everyone says he wants—or at least to get supreme power—he needs to defang all competitors, all the tigers still on the loose.

Second, everyone, it seems, is losing patience with Xi or is being disadvantaged by his policies. This means, as a practical matter, that he has a big incentive to do something dramatic to regain support in society, like bag the biggest tiger of them all, Jiang Zemin. Beijing insider Li Weidong believes Xi will target Jiang’s patronage network and then make sure the other nineteen former Standing Committee members will be so intimidated that they submit to his will.

Third, even if there is such an arrangement between Xi and the old tigers, it cannot last. Xi undoubtedly understands that he has created expectations among the Chinese populace that he now has to fulfill. People demand that the venal and greedy be brought down, to see the breeze blow away “the evil air,” as one long-time friend of Xi told journalist John Garnaut. So the corruption campaign is not Xi’s to trade away, even if that was something he wanted to do. In the increasingly complex Chinese society, there are new stakeholders who cannot be ignored.

Xi, like Gorbachev, is a figure wanting to accomplish great deeds in reforming an ailing system. And like the last Soviet leader, Xi has started something he cannot control. He has chosen to attack corruption, but this ill is so embedded in the Chinese communist system, that vigorous anticorruption efforts cannot be managed. Unfortunately for Xi, he has created great expectations in society and even in elite circles. So he cannot stop his campaign, and that ultimately means any deal he may have stuck with the old tigers will surely come undone, one way or another.

A fragile political system cannot contain the willful men who are now fighting.

Politics now may not be as brutish as they were in the early years of the People’s Republic, but they do not allow a leader to accept a draw. A leader can either win or lose, especially someone like Xi who has already started what looks like a war of political extermination.

With the stakes so high these days, no one can look weak, least of all the general secretary of the Communist Party. Xi initiated a fight to the finish, and he must see it to the end. Unlike constitutional systems where institutional mechanisms restrain impulses, China’s brand of authoritarianism rewards the worst behavior in times of stress. Xi’s winner-takes-all politics has a nasty logic he cannot escape.

In these circumstances, Guo Wenliang of Zhongshan University in Guangzhou thinks “the risk of a joint counterattack by the tigers is very, very great” because senior officials will not wait to let Xi pick them off one at a time. And Xi cannot afford to wait for them to attack.

Xi Jinping, a strongman in the making, has already changed Chinese Communist politics—and for better or worse, there is no going back for him.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China.  Follow him on Twitter: @GordonGChang.

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