Will Xi Jinping’s new era of one-man rule bring the progress China desires?

Cary Huang says President Xi Jinping is meeting the demand for a return to ‘strongman’ politics, but this also risks repeating the tragedies of the Mao era. In today’s world, no nation can truly modernise under such a system

Cary Huang

Published: 2:43pm, 31 Oct 2017

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China’s party congress every five years has often been a defining moment for the country’s development. At the just-concluded 19th congress, President Xi Jinping heralded a “new era” of Chinese politics, suggesting the start of a new political cycle.

State media has immediately indicated that this is “Xi’s era”, the third in China’s communist-ruled history, with Mao Zedong’s rule between 1949 and 1976 the first era, and the post-Mao era under Deng Xiaoping and his successors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, the second.

Members of China’s new Politburo Standing Committee, including President Xi Jinping (centre) stand on stage in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on October 25. Photo: Bloomberg

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This new era marks the resurrection of Mao’s one-man rule and symbolises the death of Deng’s two most important political legacies: the consensus-building “collective leadership” and an orderly power succession mechanism.

The congress opens the door to Xi’s long-term rule, as his stature was elevated to a status parallelling Mao, getting his name and thinking enshrined in the party’s theoretical pantheon. Also, with no clear successor, Xi is set to dominate decision-making for years to come, putting 1.4 billion people, the world’s second-largest economy and an emerging nuclear-armed military power largely in the hands of one person.

Former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 1985. Hailed as the author of China’s economic reform and opening up, Deng also moved the Communist Party away from one-man rule. Photo: Reuters

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Before Xi, Jiang and Hu were among the world’s most powerful politicians, even compared with their peers in the Group of 20. Yet Xi has amassed much more power than his predecessors and showed that he is a decisive leader. State media has propagated the need for strongman politics, not only to manage but to transform China and meet the many unsolved challenges at home and abroad at this historic juncture. Xi has also cited the lack of a strong leader as the reason behind the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Xi might aim to outshine Mao and Deng by leading a “Chinese rejuvenation”.

But such an effort goes against the trend in political restructuring since Deng, who on several occasions warned that an overconcentration of power is liable to give rise to arbitrary rule by individuals at the expense of the collective leadership.

Former presidents Hu Jintao (left) and Jiang Zemin at a ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army, in Beijing in 2007. Photo: Reuters

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Jiang and Hu aimed to expand “intra-party democracy” as their goals of limited political reform. Xi’s populist-style rule and charismatic leadership prove that the party is unable to institutionally limit such centralisation of power.

Unlike Mao, who founded the republic, and Deng, the architect of China’s reform, Xi, with just five years in power, lacks the achievements and charm needed to gain respect among party elites. Thus, Xi may rely on fear rather than love to maintain his grip on power. Such a structure is likely inject political instability and uncertainty into the system, and risk a power vacuum should the strongman leader suddenly become ill or die.

Employees of a Beijing hotel build a small, rudimentary steel smelting furnace in the hotel courtyard in 1958 as part of the Great Leap Forward. Designed to rapidly increase China’s industrial output through mass mobilisation and collectivisation, the Great Leap Forward ultimately caused the great famine due to economic mismanagement, government repression and inclement weather. Photo: AFP

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It was Mao’s brutal dictatorship, resulting in millions of deaths due to famine and political purges, that prompted the leadership as a whole to end “one-man rule” and install collective leadership following his demise.

In political science, there are many terms synonymous with “one-man rule”, including authoritarianism, autocracy, tsarism, absolutism, totalitarianism, dictatorship, Stalinism and tyranny. These all suggest a political system governed by a single individual, but also indicate that under such a system, freedom, civil rights and rule of law hardly exist. The worst fear is that a nation under such a system might face an Orwellian nightmare, repeating the tragedy of Mao’s reign.

A Chinese man looks at cloth portrait of Mao on a Beijing street. Photo: AP

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In the real world, no country can modernise economically and socially under a system of one-man rule, as all developed economies are free democracies underpinned by constitutional checks and balances.

Cary Huang is a senior writer at the Post

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Xi’s one-man rule may not bring the progress that China so desires

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