Culture | China’s future

On its centenary, five authors assess China’s Communist Party

What happens in China after Xi Jinping’s rule will shape the world’s future, too

The Party and the People. By Bruce Dickson. Princeton University Press; 328 pages; $29.95 and £25

Rethinking Chinese Politics. By Joseph Fewsmith. Cambridge University Press; 230 pages; $25.99 and £19.99

China Coup. By Roger Garside. University of California Press; 256 pages; $23.95 and £20

From Rebel to Ruler. By Tony Saich. Belknap Press; 560 pages; $39.95 and £31.95

China’s Leaders. By David Shambaugh. Polity; 416 pages; $29.95 and £25

“THE WORLD cannot be safe until China changes.” In many ways, China has changed beyond recognition since Richard Nixon wrote those words in 1967. The country was then in the grip of Maoist madness, desperately poor and cut off from the Western world. But to many leaders in the West today, the warning rings as true as it did for Nixon, who was then preparing to launch a successful campaign to become America’s president. Their only quibble might be with his next assertion: “The way to do this is to persuade China that it must change.” The West has tried that, and failed. All it can do now is try to guess whether, and how, China might eventually change itself.

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For many observers, the omens seem inauspicious. On July 1st China’s leader, Xi Jinping, gave a speech at Tiananmen Square to mark the Chinese Communist Party’s 100th birthday. It was tinged with resentment of the West and defensive about Chinese communism (“a new model for human advancement”). It looked forward to 2049 when the party will hold its next centenary celebration—that of 100 years of Communist rule. By then, he promised, China will be a “great modern socialist country”, under the party’s “firm leadership”. How modern it will be in comparison with the rich world is debatable; its GDP per person may still lag far behind. But unlike 30 years ago, when, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the crumbling of China’s party within a generation seemed plausible, even likely, few would bet much on that now.

Some cling to hope. Roger Garside is a former British diplomat whose first book on China, “Coming Alive: China After Mao”, published 40 years ago, remains one of the best eyewitness accounts of the start of China’s era of “reform and opening”. His new one, “China Coup”, begins and ends with a fictional account of a political struggle that topples Mr Xi and launches China on a path to multiparty democracy and rapprochement with the West. The central chapters analyse tensions that may induce such change. Mr Garside points to dissatisfaction among the elite with Mr Xi’s autocratic, West-baiting style of rule, as well as “broad and deep currents” of support among ordinary people for reform.

A coup is not an outlandish idea. Chinese politics has a long record of intraparty struggle, including the arrest of Mao Zedong’s widow, Jiang Qing, and other members of the “Gang of Four” shortly after the chairman’s death. Two years later a power grab by Deng Xiaoping toppled Mao’s anointed successor, Hua Guofeng. But then there were obvious divisions in the party over whether to persist with Maoist radicalism. Public contempt for it was clear even before Mao’s death. In April 1976 the authorities had crushed large displays of mourning that erupted in Beijing and other major cities for the late prime minister, Zhou Enlai. Many ordinary Chinese saw him as a pragmatist who had been unfairly attacked by Gang of Four dogmatists.

There may now be leaders who want to oust Mr Xi—he is sure to have angered some, not least with his sweeping anti-corruption campaign. But it is far from evident that anyone at the top of the party would support a push for real democracy, or even whether most Chinese would back such a potentially destabilising move.

Bending the rules

Before Mr Xi took power in 2012, there had been occasional signals that some in the leadership believed the party should loosen its controls. In “China’s Leaders”, David Shambaugh of George Washington University describes the role played by one senior official, Zeng Qinghong, in promoting political reform under Mr Xi’s two immediate predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Mr Shambaugh says reformers of that era believed the chief problem with Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies in the Soviet Union of the 1980s was that they had been introduced too late and were implemented too fast. As Mr Jiang’s right-hand man, Mr Zeng set about promoting a modicum of openness and even a smidgen of democracy in the party’s inner workings. But, as Mr Shambaugh notes, such efforts came to an end after Mr Zeng retired in 2008. Conservatism reasserted itself.

Influential people like Mr Zeng may be waiting, unseen, for a chance to restart such limited reforms. But it is probable that, under Mr Xi, the party’s more conservative wing has grown stronger—bolstered by a sense that many Chinese approve of how he is running the country, in contrast to what they see as Western feebleness. In “The Party and the People”, Bruce Dickson, also of George Washington University, argues that China’s retreat from liberalisation “has not triggered pushback from large segments of society, at least not yet”.

Mr Dickson does envisage potential threats to the party, from an economic crisis or split in the leadership to a nationalist backlash against a perceived failure to defend the country’s interests. But what would follow regime change? As he observes, the most common pattern around the world in the past 25 years has been the replacement of one authoritarian regime with another. “We should not assume the outcome will be different for China,” he warns. Tony Saich of Harvard University makes a similar point in his book about the party’s past 100 years, “From Rebel to Ruler”. He suggests that “some within the party might be able to enable the shift back to a softer form of authoritarianism”. But there is, he considers, “no reason to expect China to follow its East Asian neighbours in South Korea and Taiwan and develop into a robust democracy”.

Optimists might have hoped for a return to softer authoritarianism as early as 2022, when, if he were to follow precedent, Mr Xi would step down as party leader at a five-yearly party congress. But he has plainly signalled that he plans to keep his jobs, including the presidency and, most crucially, the post of commander-in-chief of the armed forces, for at least another five years beyond that meeting. To many, Mr Xi’s efforts to stay in power have suggested an unravelling of what had been widely regarded as the “institutionalisation” of Chinese politics in recent decades: the gradual introduction of rules ensuring a predictable, regular turnover at the top.

Joseph Fewsmith of Boston University disagrees with this analysis. In “Rethinking Chinese Politics”, he argues that the system never really became more institutionalised. On the contrary, the party’s longevity “has occurred through manipulation and violation of the rules, not through the creation of binding institutions”. Mr Xi has proved a keen rule-bender; but, says Mr Fewsmith, he is also trying to strengthen party mechanisms. His aim is not to restrain his own power, but to magnify it by turning the party into a far more disciplined force, which is utterly subservient to his will.

His accumulation of so much power may create a dangerous vacuum when he leaves the political scene. It should be noted, though, that the party has survived several stormy transitions since Mao’s death. The one that led to Mr Xi’s own accession involved fierce political struggles.

Different and the same

Nixon’s warning reflected the worries of another time and a different world. In America the perceived threat from China was its support for global communism, particularly in Asia; Chinese troops were pouring into communist North Vietnam to help its fight against the American-backed South. Today China no longer wages such proxy wars or backs insurgencies. But America is fearful again—these days of a China that is a wealthy global power, capable of bending others to its will without resort to arms, yet also posing a far more serious challenge to the United States militarily. Nixon’s words have taken on “a new urgency”, as Mr Garside puts it.

He wrote them at the height of the vicious conflict of the Cultural Revolution—a horror hard to imagine in Mr Xi’s stability-obsessed era. But a key feature endures: commitment to communism. The spectacle on July 1st of tens of thousands of people singing “socialism is good, socialism is good” in Tiananmen Square was Mao-style pageantry. The centenary celebrations in China have been a reminder of how, for all its weaknesses, the party is not only a remarkable survivor, but unabashed about its illiberal ideology. The West can draw little comfort from predictions of how China might change when the regime eventually falls.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Party on"

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