Xi consolidates power but still faces an uphill battle
open up new prospects for socialism with Chinese characteristics,” it said.
Xi is also head of the party and the military, and has worked constantly to consolidate power since taking office in 2013.
This week’s plenum was another step in that process, setting the tone for a party congress in 2017 that will not only grant him five more years in power – but also elect those who will stand beside him on the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee. It also appeared to back his campaign to clean up the party from within and battle corruption.
The term “core” leader was first coined by strongman Deng Xiaoping, who conferred it posthumously on Mao Zedong but also on himself and his effective successor Jiang Zemin. It is supposed to mean that their author- ity should not be questioned.
It was not a title Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao was ever granted
“Xi has achieved his minimum goal,” said Ye Fei, a political analyst at China Policy, an analysis and advisory firm in Beijing. “His notional authority has been established. But how substantial it is has yet to be observed.”
In the months to come, it will become more apparent whether Xi has also been successful in promoting loyalists within party ranks, paving the way for the 2017 congress, he said.
Xi’s elevation to the “core leadership” was not a surprise. Indeed, in the weeks leading up to the plenum, state media issued a steady drumbeat of articles underlining the need for loyalty to the leader and to the party. China’s people, it cited one poll as showing, are demanding strong central leadership under the “pioneering figure” of Xi Jin- ping. But experts say that emphasis is revealing in itself, showing Xi’s frustration at his inability to force through his agenda.
“China has a saying, that whatever you make a noise about is what you lack,” said Zhou Xiaosheng, a sociology professor at Renmin University of China in Beijing. “It is obvious that all this noise about loyalty is because there is a lack of loyalty.”
That is partly because of the scale of the task Xi has set himself: to clean up a deeply corrupt Communist Party whose moral atrophy threatens the very existence of the one-party state, and to stop the rot without bringing the whole structure crashing down around his ears.
Xi, experts say, has been facing growing resistance and resentment from within the party itself, coupled with an increasingly cynical public mood.
The government announced Monday that more than a million officials, out of 88 million party members, have been investigated in the past three years during an intense campaign against corruption.
State media has railed against la z y, foot-dragging of f icia ls, complaining some were too scared of do their jobs for fear of being accused of taking bribes, while others were unwilling to ac t u n less t he k ickback s resumed. And those who complain or are nostalgic for the good old days? Well, they are just “rotten with corruption”, the People’s Daily wrote.
Xi’s signature anti-corruption campaign is both an attempt to clean house and restore public trust, and a tool to be used against opponents to scare them into submission. But on both counts, it is also a double-edged sword: it has earned him many enemies within the party, experts say, and exposed to the general public just how deeply the cancer of corruption has penetrated.
“Xi is fighting on his own on a rotten stage,” said Zhang Lifan, a historian and prominent critic of the president. “He has hit and hurt everybody, he has insulted everyone. In their hearts they [party members] want to drag him down.”
Nor has the anti-graft campaign reassured the general public. Indeed, the constant drip of news about crooked officials may have had the opposite effect.
“People have become burned out,” said Hu Xingdou, a governance expert at Beijing Institute of Technology. “They are not fools. They can see very clearly there are far more corrupt officials at large who have not been caught.”
The fact that the anti-corruption campaign’s high-profile victims have been from rival factions within the party – and never from Xi’s own inner circle – has not gone unnoticed.