Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Communist Party

Willy Wo-Lap Lam, Willy Wo-Lap Lam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134847440
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Whilst the Chinese Communist Party is one of the most powerful political institutions in the world, it is also one of the least understood, due to the party's secrecy and tight control over the archives, the press and the Internet. Having governed the People's Republic of China for nearly 70 years though, much interest remains into how this quintessentially Leninist party governs one-fifth of the world and runs the world's second-largest economy.

The Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Communist Party gives a comprehensive and multi-faceted picture of the party's traditions and values – as well as its efforts to stay relevant in the twenty-first century. It uses a wealth of contemporary data and qualitative analysis to explore the intriguing relationship between the party on the one hand, and the government, the legal and judicial establishment and the armed forces, on the other. Tracing the influence of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, as well as Mao Zedong, on contemporary leaders ranging from Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, the sections cover:

• the party's history and traditions;
• how the party works and seeks to remain relevant;
• major policy arenas;
• the CCP in the twenty-first century.

The Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Communist Party will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese Politics, Asian Politics, Political Parties and International Relations.

Go to https://www.bookshop4u.com/lw1 to see Willy Lam introduce the book.

PART I

Overview and introduction

1
THE AGENDA OF XI JINPING

Is the Chinese Communist Party capable of thorough reforms?

Willy Wo-Lap Lam

Introduction: China’s authoritarianism goes global

Despite the virtual end of the “Chinese economic miracle,” China’s global footprint has increased by leaps and bounds since Fifth-Generation leader Xi Jinping took over the helm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2012. The Chinese economy accounts for more than 25 percent of total global growth. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the largest contributor of troops to United Nations-mandated peacekeeping missions. China is a major player in global forums such as the G20 and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). More significantly, Chinese outbound direct investment (ODI) has since 2015 exceeded inward capital flow – to the extent that “China buys the world” has become the rallying cry of PRC multinationals snapping up oilfields, farms and hi-tech firms around the world (China Daily 2016; Reuters 2016a). President Xi’s “One Belt One Road” gameplan is a bold attempt to bond China with dozens of countries in Asia, Central Asia, Europe and Africa via infrastructure projects such as bridges, ports and high-speed railways, many of which are financed by Chinese banks and corporations. This is despite worries that with the country’s shrinking foreign exchange reserves – and the CCP administration’s fears about uncontrolled capital outflow – Beijing’s ability to buy influence or project power through means such as ODI and bankrolling infrastructure projects could soon run into serious hiccups (CNBC.com 2017; Xinhua News Agency 2017a).¹

While President Xi and his Politburo colleagues have emphasized that Beijing has no intention of challenging the international order laid down largely by the United States after WWII, it seems evident that the CCP leadership is exploiting weak links in the status quo so as to lay down its own rules. The protectionist and nationalistic posture of the Donald Trump administration has provided President Xi with an opening to boost China’s rule-making potentials in the global arena. At an early 2017 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Xi criticized unnamed world leaders for “locking oneself in a dark room.” The supreme leader of one-fifth of mankind reassured WEF delegates that China “will keep its door wide open and not close it.” In a veiled reference to Trump’s decision to renege on America’s commitment to fighting global problems such as climate change, Xi pledged to redouble China’s efforts to cut carbon emissions, saying that this was “a responsibility we must assume for future generations” (Reuters 2017; Xinhua News Agency 2017b).

Apart from the OBOR, Beijing is behind the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the BRICs Bank, on which the Xi leadership hopes to anchor a Sinocentric global financial structure. The PRC displaced the U.S. as Africa’s largest trading partner and investor several years ago. And in the wake of the Trump administration’s abandonment of the Transpacific Pact (TPP), Beijing is putting extra efforts to persuade Asia-Pacific countries to join China-led free-trade arrangements such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).² A dozen-odd countries ranging from Laos and Cambodia in Asia to Angola, Zimbabwe and the Sudan in Africa have become virtual client states of Big Brother China. Sinologist Andrew Nathan cited a “growing worry among Western analysts about the extent to which China, as its power grows, will seek to remake the world in its authoritarian image” (Nathan 2016: 23; Brown and Huang 2016). China’s Great Leap Outward prompted former president Barack Obama’s famous line that “we can’t let countries like China write the rules of the global economy” (The White House 2015). In a similar vein, British Prime Minister Theresa May zeroed in on the consequences of the Western alliance’s failure to provide global leadership. While touring America in January 2017, she cautioned that the U.S. and the U.K. “have a joint responsibility to lead.” In a thinly veiled reference to China, May warned of an “eclipse of the West” when rising Asian powers “step up and we step back” (Financial Times 2017). (See Chapter 24, “China and the World: From the Chinese Dream to the Chinese World Order.”)

The leap forward in China’s international clout has been made possible by the viability of the CCP, which is the brains and the brawn behind President Xi’s “Chinese dream,” namely, that the PRC will attain superpower status by the late 2040s. Despite stunning aberrations ranging from the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and the Tiananmen Square massacre (1989), the party seems to have morphed into a gritty and aggressive behemoth that is the envy of political institutions around the world. As Orville Schell and John Delury point out,

in contemplating the future, it is always important to remember that, despite all its rigidities and infirmities, the CCP has repeatedly surprised the world with its ability to change course and prevail, including the most recent feat of steering China into the twenty-first century as a nascent superpower.

(Schell and Delury 2013: 384)

Yet chinks in the armor of the mind-set and policies of the CCP leadership are also becoming obvious. Beijing has taken a cavalier attitude toward international law. This is demonstrated by the large-scale reclamation works undertaken by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) engineering corps on several islets in the South China Sea whose sovereignty is disputed by China’s neighbors. These artificially enlarged islets have since been converted into air and naval bases. The Xi leadership simply ignored the July 2016 ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague that its territorial claims to the South China Sea were without legal basis (Foreign Policy 2016; Rapp-Hooper 2016). Yet another example of Beijing violating international law is the kidnapping in October 2015 of Swedish national Gui Minhai – a Hong Kong-based publisher specializing in political-gossip books that Beijing finds embarrassing – in Thailand by Chinese state security agents³ (Gui 2016).

Other notable transgressions of international diplomatic norms, which are observed by both Western and “non-Western” nations, include using economic weapons to punish countries which have allegedly challenged China’s “core national interests.” European leaders who had met the Dalai Lama were warned that they would suffer consequences such as a reduction of Chinese investment. In reaction against human rights icon Liu Xiaobo being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, Beijing froze relations with Norway for six years (Reuters 2016b). This was despite the fact that the Norwegian Nobel Committee is an NGO whose members are appointed by the Storting (Parliament), not the government. And in retaliation against Seoul’s installation of America’s THAAD missile defense system, Beijing has instigated a large-scale “boycott Korean products” campaign that could result in a trade war between the two neighbors (Huang 2016; Sun 2017).

The glaring self-righteousness in Beijing’s global posture can be understood by looking at the mentality and governing philosophy of the CCP. This chapter examines the values and norms that have sustained this political party of close to 90 million members. What is the rationale behind the party’s monopolization of political, and to a considerable extent, economic resources of this mammoth country? What undergirds the official dogma of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – and is it incompatible with universal values? How potent and sustainable is the “China model” that the party has licked into shape since late patriarch Deng Xiaoping unleased the reform and open-door policy 40 years ago? Are ordinary Chinese enjoying the fruits of the party’s apparent success? Above all, is the CCP under current supreme leader Xi capable of thorough-going political and economic reforms? This chapter also serves as an introduction to the 23 other chapters in this Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Communist Party.

What the party stands for

At the heart of the quasi-superpower’s global projection of hard and soft power is the CCP, the most powerful political organization on earth. What does the CCP stand for? For a party whose devastatingly erroneous policies accounted for the death of at least 40 million Chinese, what are the reasons behind its stunning longevity? Is the party capable of far-reaching reforms which could enable it to tackle the challenges of the twenty-first century?

The priorities of the CCP, as laid down by President Xi, who is expected to run the country at least until 2027, are preservationist rather than forward-looking.⁴ The foremost task of Xi (born 1953), who gained the penultimate title of “core of the leadership” in late 2016, is holding down the fort of party predominance and not venturing into the unknown and potentially dangerous terrain of reform. Xi’s oft-repeated mantra is that officials and people alike must have “self-confidence in the path, the beliefs, the institutions and the culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics” (Xi 2013a, 2016c). Xi further cautioned on the 95th birthday of the CCP on July 1, 2016 that “the decline of political parties begins with a deficit in the beliefs in the ideals [of the party].” “Vacillations about our ideals and beliefs are the most dangerous vacillations,” he said, adding that “the downhill trajectory of ideals and beliefs” could not be tolerated. Earlier, the General Secretary had warned party members against “a deficiency of calcium” in their conviction about the CCP’s auspicious future (China News Service 2016; Wang, X. 2013).

That Xi’s philosophy is retrogressive – rather than progressive – is also evidenced by his paranoia about the party losing power. Way back in 2008, when Xi was vice-president and president of the CCP Central Party School, he underscored the imperative of the party’s preserving its quasi-omnipotence: “Whatever [powers] we possessed in the past we may not possess now; whatever [powers] we possess now doesn’t mean we can possess them forever,” Xi said in 2008 (Xi 2008b).

This sense of insecurity is due to the fact that party leaders of Xi’s generation are obsessed with the pitfalls of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), which collapsed suddenly after having been in power for 74 years. This monomaniacal streak was revealed by Xi on an inspection tour to Shenzhen in December 2012, one month after taking power. Xi warned in an unpublicized speech that the party could disintegrate if it failed to heed the lessons from the demise of the CPSU. According to Xi, the Soviet party collapsed because “their ideals and convictions wavered.” The Fifth-Generation titan indicated that first, the CCP must never denigrate its founding fathers, particularly Mao. Second, the party must weed out dangerous Western ideas. Third, it must be in control of the military and the police (Buckley 2013). Xi’s psychology is very typical of members of his generation. As the People’s Daily noted in early 2013: “Today, the Soviet Union, with his 74-year history, has been dissolved for 22 years. For more than two decades, socialist China has never stopped reflecting on how the Soviet Communists lost their party and country” (Ren 2013).

Given this background, it is not surprising that Xi has presided over the large-scale resuscitation of Maoist norms (see Chapter 2: “The Legacy of Mao Zedong”). In a 2013 speech marking the 120th birthday of Mao, Xi praised the Great Helmsman for “establishing the fundamental socialist order, obtaining the fundamental achievements of socialist construction, as well as accumulating the experience and providing the conditions for our exploration of the path of building socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Xi added that party members would “sink into the quagmire of historical nihilism” if they were to denounce Mao because of his mistakes⁵ (Xi 2013f). At the same time, Xi – and his predecessors such as ex-president Hu Jintao – have argued that the so-called “Western democracy system” is not suitable for China. Both Xi and Hu waxed eloquent on the fact that the CCP “will not go down the xielu [alien and treacherous path] that will lead to the changing of the flags and standards [of the party]” (Xi 2016d). The CCP’s propaganda machinery has stepped up ideological movements to warn citizens about “anti-Chinese forces” in the West trying to subvert the socialist order through infiltration and espionage. In April 2016, Chinese authorities ran a so-called “dangero...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• List of acronyms
• Part I Overview and introduction
• Part II History and traditions
• Part III How the Party works and stays relevant
• Part IV Major policy arenas
• Part V The CCP in the twenty-first century
• Index