CPC AT 100 - XI JINPING IS THE MAN

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 CPC AT 100 - XI JINPING IS THE MAN

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Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment

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• The story: As the Chinese Communist Party celebrated its 100th anniversary on 1st of July 2021, nothing else seemed to matter except the “Xi Jinping Thought.”  
• No military parade this time: China’s tech-savvy commissars don’t really need real-life parades to celebrate the party’s centennial. With digital effects and 22,000 spectators filmed by drones, Beijing’s centennial celebration at the National Stadium evoked Chinese triumphs through elaborately choreographed scenes playing out onstage and onscreen: engineering marvels, space probes, precision fireworks, submarines, 2008 Olympics highlights, doctors battling COVID-19, and at one point real-life vintage cargo trucks. The idea is to inform the world "We have arrived".
• From past to future: While some anniversaries appear fixated on the past, this one was focused on the future: not just the future of China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) but the future of the party leader and president, Xi Jinping. For the first time in decades, ordinary Chinese are being shown that those futures all boil down to the same thing: Xi.
• From Mao to Xi: Not since Mao Zedong died in 1976 has the fate of the Chinese nation seemed to balance so intentionally on a single individual. 

1. It seems likely that Xi Jinping’s campaign to jettison the final remnants of a “collective leadership” style and the self-imposed checks and balances on power that China’s post-Mao leaders had observed, will now accelerate.
2. The Communist party itself, with 92 million members, makes up just 6.6 percent of China’s population. Yet of the 2.1 million party members recruited in 2018, only 5,700 came from the army of rural-born migrant workers who represent a third of working-age Chinese. The CCP has thus become a repository of technocrats and business elites. And in the absence of national elections, CCP cadres often equate legitimacy with economic performance. 

• No elections, hence economy: Centenary-linked achievements include the opening of a second airport in Chengdu, the inauguration of a high-altitude bullet train in Tibet, and the firing up of two of the world’s largest hydropower turbines in the Baihetan hydropower plant.
• No nihilism please: China is cracking down online on hints of “historical nihilism,” meaning anything that fails to toe the party line. They are doing the same for international criticism of reported human rights abuses in Xinjiang and heavy-handed implementation of national security legislation in Hong Kong, including the recent closure of the pro-democracy Apple Daily. U.S. President Joe Biden called a “sad day for media freedom.” July 1 is also the anniversary of Hong Kong’s reversion to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.
• One man show: Since becoming party head in 2012, Xi Jinping consolidated power quickly, rooting out political rivals, corruption, and political dissent. He’s expected to try to stay on for an unusual third term as head of the party, clinging to power as Mao had done. Today Xi is called “The People’s Leader,” a title previously bestowed on Mao alone. The promotion of “Xi Jinping Thought” is akin to building a personality cult around Xi (second only to that of the late Great Helmsman). 

1. 'Xi Jinping Thought' is now the guiding ideology for China. 
2. The next year will feature intense political maneuvering and is expected to climax publicly at the 20th Communist Party Congress slated for the fall of 2022. Normally held every half-decade, this gathering is where the party’s succession strategy comes together (and where changes to the all-important Politburo Standing Committee (China’s top decision-making group) are done [today it has seven members]
3. Under Xi, China’s constitution was changed in 2018 to abolish the two-term limit for the office of China’s president, a government post that Xi also holds. The big question now is: Can he hang on as leader of the CCP and head of the party’s Central Military Commission while still dragging his feet over the naming of an heir? 

• Transitions are tricky: Political transitions in Western democracies can be messy as seen in 2021. Over the past 100 years, moreover, succession has been the Achilles’ heel of the CCP. In 1976, Mao’s death caused a tussle between the so-called Gang of Four—leftist leaders, including Mao’s wife, who had risen to power with Mao’s blessing during the Cultural Revolution—and his eventual successor, Hua Guofeng, which ended in the Gang’s arrest and trial. 
• Summary: Xi Jinping is focusing on internal power consolidation, and it is reflecting in the external aggression shown in recent months. The repeated announcements of a glorious 100 years of the PRC's founding - set to be celebrated on 01st of Oct 2049 - make one wonder if Xi indeed is planning to hang on till then, when he'd be 96 years old (Deng was 92 and active, when he died in 1997).

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