Xi’s insatiable desire for power
CHINESE Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping’s concentration of power in the party has become clear.
The party’s Central Committee has wrapped up its plenary session, the sixth under Xi, who also serves as China’s president, after adopting a communique that included the phrase “the Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core” for the first time.
“Core” is a term applied to the Communist Party’s leader when he is regarded as an “exceptional presence”. The word was used for Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and former general secretary Jiang Zemin, but not for former general secretary Hu Jintao.
The Xi administration will see a major change in the party leadership lineup. Xi likely aims at positioning himself at the same level as Mao and other past leaders.
At the plenary session, the party also decided on rules to be used as guidelines for the political activities of party members, placing priority on tightening the discipline of elite senior executives, such as members of the party’s Central Politburo, Politburo Standing Committee and the Central Committee. It is clear that Xi will continue to use his anti-corruption campaign to maintain his administration’s centripetal force.
With its single-party rule, China embraces “the rule of law” but does not allow an independent judiciary. The crackdown on corrupt senior party members is carried out by the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, a supralegal supervisory body. The “anticorruption” concept is nothing but a tool used in a political fight.
Since becoming the party’s general secretary, Xi has excluded political enemies, including former uniformed military executives who supported Jiang and former aides of Hu, to consolidate power. Xi has punished more than 1 million party members.
Just before the plenary session, Xi launched a special TV program in which ousted senior party members made such confessions as, “I betrayed the party and the people”.
As the crackdown on prominent figures, which drew considerable attention from the people, has slowed down, Xi probably decided to make his anti-corruption campaign a political show so he could use it to win the people’s support.
In mid-October, several hundred veterans gathered from around the nation in a protest in central Beijing.
Veterans have staged demonstrations repeatedly at various locations in the country to seek better treatment, such as a pension allowance and re-employment. However, the protest in Beijing was of an unprecedented scale.
Hardships are becoming more serious for the poorest citizens, including migrant workers, who are in a weaker position than veterans.
Xi, who has acquired enormous power, has cracked down on human rights lawyers who support the socially weak and forcefully suppresses people who hold different opinions. If he continues to govern in such an authoritarian manner, the unbecomingly deformed condition of the world’s second-largest economy will become conspicuous.