Are You Ready For the Party Congress?

Xi is the most ambitious, aggressive, and ruthless leader China has seen since Mao Zedong.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

The 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will officially kick off on October 16. The CCP holds a party congress every five years to announce changes in party leadership. Observers like me will watch the new leadership list closely and try to predict any policy implications for the future. 

One thing we know for sure is that the CCP's current leader, general secretary Xi Jinping, will keep his position. Even though this year was supposed to be the end of Xi's second term, he made a Constitutional amendment in 2018 to remove the term limit of his position so he could be the leader for life, just like Communist China's founder, Mao Zedong once did. 

Many expect the rest of the top Party leadership (the same as the top leadership of the government), including the 25-member Politburo and the 7-member Politburo Standing Committee, will change. Who will be the new members of these top decision-making bodies will give us a clue of how much control Xi exerts. Many people believe that Xi wants to solidify his power at this party congress before he tries to launch some ambitious projects, i.e., the "reunification" with Taiwan. Therefore, the party congress is an essential milestone for Xi, China, and the rest of the world. 

Below is an excerpt from my book, "Backlash: How China's Aggression Has Backfired." It is a profile of Xi, who is often regarded as an enigmatic figure. I hope this profile sheds some light on him.

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Xi: The Most Powerful Leader Since Mao

Xi is one of the handful of “princelings,” a Chinese term for the children of China’s most powerful CCP elites. His father was Xi Zhongxun, a communist revolutionary who fought alongside Chairman Mao and later became a vice premier of the People’s Republic of China. With this connection, Xi had a privileged childhood. He attended schools that exclusively catered to the children of high-ranking CCP officials and spent part of his youth at Zhongnanhai, the power center of China, where the most senior CCP leaders reside.

Xi’s privileged life came to an abrupt end in 1962, when Mao, who became insecure about his control, purged a number of communist com­rades including Xi’s father. A few years later, in 1968, when Mao initiat­ed his “up to the mountains and down to the villages” movement, which called for millions of urban youths to end their education and go to rural villages and frontier settlements to get reeducated, the 15-year-old Xi was sent to a small village in rural Shanxi province and stayed there until he was 22.

Such a drastic change in life could have turned someone into an anti-communism warrior or a freedom seeker. But that’s not what happened with Xi. Instead of harboring resentment toward the CCP, he decided that he would work within the system, learn from the most relentless dictator in Chinese history, Mao Zedong, and seek the highest power.

Throughout his entire ascent, Xi remained relatively quiet, keeping his mouth shut and hiding his own ambitions behind his enigmatic grin. Most observers mistakenly assumed that Xi would faithfully continue China’s economic reform and maybe even some political reform, given his relatively young age (Xi was born in 1953) and his own life experi­ence. Some were even under the presumption that he would be a rela­tively weak ruler like his predecessor, Hu.

Once in power, however, Xi showed his true colors: he is the most ambitious, aggressive, and ruthless dictator China has seen since Mao Zedong. In many ways, Xi models his leadership style directly after Mao. He launched a sweeping anti-corruption campaign, which helped him purge his political rivals, cement his control of power, and win popular support from the Chinese public. Taking Mao’s saying, “power comes from the barrel of a gun,” to heart, Xi had the People’s Liberation Army firmly under his control through a series of reorganizational measures. A control freak, Xi put himself in charge of almost every key government body, which earned him the nickname “the chairman of everything,” a title coined by foreign media. Xi demands absolute obedience and loyalty not only from his party members but also from the general public. That’s why the Chinese people have seen increased surveillance, censorship, and the worst crackdown on dissent since Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).

Xi is a fervent nationalist and socialist. To him, socialism and China’s national identity are inseparable, and any attempt to criticize socialism is an attempt to deny his and the CCP’s legitimacy, and such attempts must be “nipped in the bud.” He demands that “the party- and govern­ment-run media are a propaganda front and must be surnamed ‘party.’” Since he rose to power, the scale and intensity of China’s “red education,” which promotes unyielding loyalty to CCP, has reached a level last seen during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Songs praising the CCP and China have become popular once again. Movies that glorify the CCP’s deeds during the anti-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War have become blockbuster hits.

Unlike his predecessors, Xi brazenly embraced efforts to build a cult of personality last seen in China under Mao Zedong. There are songs including lyrics such as “To follow you [Xi] is to follow the sun,” and videos presenting him as a “man of the people” and a great leader. The Party’s propaganda machine showered him with great titles: the “Core of the Party,” the “Helmsman of the Nation,” the “Leader of a Great Country and Architect of Modernization in the New Era.” These were superlatives last used to address Mao. The entire nation has been called to “unite tightly around President Xi.” Like Mao’s, Xi’s portraits are ubiquitous. Like Mao’s little red book, the collection of Xi’s speeches and instructions has been a national bestseller and is compulsory reading even for schoolchildren.

In 2017, “Xi Jinping’s Thought on Socialism with Chinese Character­istics for a New Era” was included in the CCP’s party constitution, and later the state constitution. In 2018, Xi eliminated the constitutional term limit and became China’s leader for life, just like Mao Zedong once had been. Throughout China, portraits of Xi can be seen hanging side by side with portraits of Mao.

Xi coined the phrase “China Dream” when he went to an exhibition in Beijing on November 29, 2013, and exclaimed that “to realize the renaissance of the Chinese nation is the greatest dream for the Chinese nation in modern history.” Since then, Xi has spoken often about the China Dream and China’s rejuvenation. Xi believes that China is not a rising power but a nation returning to world power, and that being a superpower in the world is a natural state for China because China had been in that position before—therefore, it’s the rightful place that China should occupy again. Xi isn’t the first one who has held this belief, but no Chinese leader has pushed this narrative as far as he has. His domes­tic and international policies have been driven by this belief.

If you like to read more about Xi and China, please get your copy of “Backlash: How China’s Aggression Has Backfired” here.