As China’s ruling Communist Party is set to celebrate its centenary on July 1, experts warn that the potential of President Xi Jinping’s continuation in power, unlike his predecessors, could potentially be “very destabilising” for it in the future in the absence of a successor.
Ironically, in its 100th year, the Communist Party of China (CPC), as it is officially called, relies on Xi just as it depended on its founder leader and principled ideologue ‘Chairman’ Mao Zedong, who held a vice-like grip on it until his death in 1976 after the party was established in 1921.
On the brink of collapse after his disastrous ideological experiments like the 1958 “Great Leap Forward”, mass mobilisation of labour to improve agricultural and industrial production but ended with a string of poor harvests resulting in famine, and the 1966 ‘Cultural Revolution’, which resulted in the deaths of over 1.5 million people, the party was revived by moderate “paramount leader” Deng Xiaoping.
Deng, who won the bitter power struggle against the ‘Gang of Four’ headed by Mao’s widow Jiang Qing and guided the party till 1997 had overturned Mao’s hardline Marxism, replacing it with a pragmatic ideology of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” and undoing the harm caused by Mao that helped China to unleash the potential of the world’s most populous country to emerge as the second-largest economy.
Deng’s other political invention of collective leadership structure which kept the party intact accommodating all groups and sections of the 90 million-strong member CPC after his death in 1997 has gone back to one leader party with the emergence of Xi at the helm in 2012.
China in 2018 approved the removal of the two-term limit on the presidency, effectively allowing Xi, 68, to remain in power for life.
While Xi’s supporters projected his leadership as the need of the hour for China which is facing global adversity, analysts warn that his continuation in power after two terms unlike predecessors is potentially destabilising.
It was normal practice that a successor to the General Secretary of the CPC is named during the second tenure of the party leadership.
With no clear successor in sight, observers expect Xi to remain as a paramount leader during the reshuffle of the party’s governing bodies as the twice-a-decade Party Congress next year will shed light on how he plans to tackle succession and avoid a crisis within the party.
It could prove to be his biggest challenge and will shape the party for decades to come, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post said in its report on Friday.
Xi has said that one way to evaluate a political system is to see whether the leadership succession is “law-abiding and orderly”.
But unlike his predecessors, Xi did not endorse a successor at the end of his first term in 2017, and observers do not expect one to emerge in the new leadership line-up next year as well.
That could spell trouble for the party, according to Steve Tsang.
“When succession finally looms, it can potentially be very destabilising if the structure and/or process is not clear and well defined,” Tsang told the Post.ll trouble for party’s future: Experts