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    The Matter of Xi’s Succession

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    At the all-important two sessions (lianghui) meetings last month, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials adopted a new and surprisingly unambitious Five-Year Plan, reoriented the country’s technology strategy and redoubled the crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong. All of this was documented in the English-language media. But another crucial CCP announcement flew below the media’s radar. An innocuous-sounding procedural change gave President Xi Jinping the authority to dismiss vice premiers of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, one of the last potential bastions of elite opposition to his rule. Premier Li Keqiang, nominally the second-most powerful man in China, has now been effectively sidelined. Furthermore, Hu Chunhua, Xi’s charismatic potential successor, can now be fired at will.

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    Xi was already on track for a third term. First, he was “reelected” to a second term at the 19th Party Congress in September 2017. A few months later, the pliant National People’s Congress (NPC) lifted the two-term limit for the presidency. Despite acquiring total control, Xi remains wary of potential rivals, particularly Li Keqiang, his second-in-command. At the 19th Party Congress, Xi kept Li on largely as a figurehead, calculating that elevating anyone else to the number-two job would have anointed them as a potential successor. Since 2017, Xi repeatedly sought opportunities to undermine Li, cannily dispatching him to Wuhan in January 2020 to associate the premier with the botched response to COVID-19.

    Neutralizing Potential Challengers

    Xi is now looking beyond Li with the goal of neutralizing all potential challengers. Li has little practical influence in the CCP’s top echelons, but he wields formidable power on paper. Formally speaking, the CCP and the Chinese state are separate institutions. Xi Jinping is both general secretary of the CCP and president of the People’s Republic of China. Li is ostensibly the second-ranked official in the CCP, but his position as the head of the State Council, the executive branch of the Chinese state, is more important. Until the recent rule change, Xi had no formal authority to order direct personnel changes in the State Council. That meant Li’s four main subordinates, known as vice premiers, had some level of job security and could potentially use their position as a springboard to challenge Xi.

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    All of that has changed at this year’s lianghui with a legislative amendment. The law in question is Article 32 of the Organic Law of the National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China. The NPC meets only once per year, at the spring lianghui. Under the new rules, the Standing Committee of the NPC, which answers to Xi, can remove any official on the State Council, except the prime minister, at any time. This means that Xi does not have to wait for the next lianghui to get rid of Li’s subordinates.

    In strict formal terms, if Xi wanted to fire a vice premier, Li would still have to consent. In practice, Li’s hand would be forced by Xi. The NPC is China’s top legislative body, a rubber-stamp parliament that exists to legitimize the CCP’s actions. If the NPC recommends personnel changes on the State Council, the premier of the State Council cannot resist. If Li were to do so, that would be tantamount to overriding the “democratic will” of the people of China.

    Why is Xi bothering to amend the law if his third term is not in doubt? We do not know for sure, but we can speculate. Perhaps Xi is just generally wary of Li. But there might be another reason. There was widespread grumbling among the top brass of the CCP when Xi eliminated term limits three years ago. Rumors tell us that there is still some level of semi-organized resistance, with Li potentially involved. It might also be the case that Xi tried to replace one or more vice premiers, but Li resisted. Vice premiers of the State Council are all members of the CCP Politburo, the 20-member body that is the second-highest organ in the party bureaucracy.

    Xi probably wants total control of the Politburo. Of course, Xi has other ways to take out such senior officials. In the past, “anti-corruption” crackdowns have cut many down to size. However, this anti-corruption process is disruptive and could send a signal that Xi’s control is shaky. Therefore, a sneaky legal change might be a better alternative.

    Succession Matters

    We suspect that Xi is targeting a particular leader. China has four vice premiers: Han Zheng, Liu He, Sun Chunlan and Hu Chunhua. Han is a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the CCP’s top body. This legal amendment would not be enough to get rid of Han. So, he is not the target of Xi’s ire. Neither is Liu, Xi’s personal friend who won the economic policy argument in the 14th Five-Year Plan. In the shady world of CCP politics, Liu’s job seems safe as of now. Sun, the highest-ranking woman in the modern history of Chinese politics, is past the mandatory retirement age and poses no threat to Xi. This leaves Hu as the only possible target for the amendment. The fact that he is the most charismatic and popular of the vice premiers makes him a potential threat to Xi.

    From 2012 to 2017, Hu was the party secretary of Guangdong, China’s most prosperous province. For decades, this position has been a stepping stone for national leadership. Ironically, Xi’s father served as party secretary of Guangdong, as did other CCP luminaries such as Zhao Ziyang, Li Changchun, Zhang Dejiang and Wang Yang. Hu is the youngest official at his level of seniority in the CCP. He is also connected, though not related, to Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao. Before the 2017 NPC, there was widespread speculation that Hu Chunhua would leapfrog straight into the Politburo Standing Committee and be groomed as a putative future leader. Xi prevented this, giving Hu the position of vice premier instead. Now, Xi has gone further and hung a sword over Hu’s head.Xi is determined to ensure an orderly confirmation of his third term at the next NPC in 2022. For three years, the Chinese media have humored Xi by resolutely avoiding the topic of his succession. Xi knows that it cannot be avoided indefinitely. According to longstanding CCP custom, anyone featuring in the succession sequence needs experience in the positions of vice premier, national vice chairman and vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. Those who currently occupy these positions are either too old or not close enough to Xi to be considered successor material. The only exception is Hu who now holds office at the pleasure of Xi.

    The study of Chinese elite politics is as much an art as a science. Like Kremlinologists at the height of the Cold War, China analysts make educated inferences from a small number of highly choreographed public events and documents. As a result, the line between speculation and analysis is often blurry. Nevertheless, as US-China relations deteriorate, the CCP’s succession plans are more important now than at any point since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976.

    Coming out of the lianghui, all signs indicate that Xi remains at the height of his power at home. Furthermore, he is likely to enter his third term in 2022 with a new suite of tools to deter — and, if necessary, eliminate — potential elite rivals. In this context, pushing for Xi’s ouster, as one anonymous senior US official recently recommended, would be reckless as it is likely to backfire.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Mount of Autocrats

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      Donald Trump would dearly like to add his face to Mount Rushmore as the fifth presidential musketeer. His fireworks-and-fury extravaganza on July 3 was the next best thing. Trump’s dystopian speech was almost beside the point. Much more important was the photo op of his smirking face next to Abraham Lincoln’s.

      More fitting, however, would be to carve Trump’s face into a different Rushmore altogether. This one would be located in a more appropriate badlands, like Mount Hermon in Syria near the border with Israel. There, Trump’s visage would join those of his fellow autocrats, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. To honor the illiberal locals, the stony countenances of Bashar al-Assad and Benjamin Netanyahu would make it a cozy quintet.

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      Let’s be frank: Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are not the company that Trump keeps, despite his “America First” pretensions. His ideological compatriots are to be found in other countries: Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Narendra Modi of India, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Viktor Orban of Hungary and so on. Alas, this global Rushmore of autocrats is becoming as crowded as a football team pressed together for a selfie.

      But Putin and Xi stand out from the rest. They get pride of place because of their long records of authoritarian policies and the sheer brazenness of their recent power grabs. By comparison, Trump is the arrogant newcomer who may well not last the season, an impulsive sprinter in the marathon of geopolitics. If things go badly for Team Trump in November, America will suddenly be busy air-brushing 45 out of history and gratefully chiseling his face out of the global Rushmore. Putin and Xi, however, are in it for the long haul.

      Leader for Life

      At the end of June, Russia held a referendum on a raft of constitutional changes that President Putin proposed earlier in the year. In front of Russian voters were over 200 proposed amendments. No wonder the authorities gave Russians a full week to vote. They should have provided mandatory seminars on constitutional law as well.

      Of course, the Russian government wasn’t looking to stimulate a wide-ranging discussion of governance. The Russian parliament had already approved the changes. Putin simply wanted Russian voters to rubber-stamp his nationalist-conservative remaking of his country.

      At the same time, a poor turnout would not have been a good look. To guarantee what the Kremlin’s spokesman described as a “triumphant referendum on confidence” in Putin, workplaces pressured their employees to vote and the government distributed lottery prizes. Some people managed to vote more than once. On top of that, widespread fraud was necessary to achieve the preordained positive outcome.

      Instead of voting on each of the amendments, Russians had to approve or disapprove the whole package. Among the constitutional changes were declarations that marriage is only between a man and a woman, that Russians believe in God and that the Russian Constitution takes precedence over international law. Several measures increased executive power over the ministries and the judiciary. A few sops were thrown to Putin’s core constituencies, like pensioners. Who was going to vote against God or retirees?

      But the jewel in the crown was the amendment that allows Putin to run for the presidency two more times. Given his systematic suppression of the opposition, up to and including assassination, Putin will likely be in office until he’s 84 years old. That gives him plenty of time to, depending on your perspective, make Russia great again or make Russia into Putin, Inc.

      The Russian president does not dream of world domination. He has regional ambitions at best. Yet these ambitions have brought Russia into conflict with the United States over Ukraine, Syria, even outer space. And then there’s the perennial friction over Afghanistan. Much has been made in the US press about Putin offering the Taliban bounties for US and coalition soldiers. It’s ugly stuff, but no uglier than what the United States was doing back in the 1980s.

      Did you think that all the US money going to the mujahideen was to cultivate opium poppies, run madrasas and plan someday to bite the hand that fed them? The US government was giving the Afghan “freedom fighters” guns and funds to kill Soviet soldiers, nearly 15,000 of whom died over the course of the war. The Russians have been far less effective. At most, the Taliban have killed 18 US soldiers since the beginning of 2019, with perhaps a couple tied to the bounty program.

      Still, it is expected that a US president would protest such a direct targeting of US soldiers even if he has no intention to retaliate. Instead, Trump has claimed that Putin’s bounty program is a hoax. “The Russia Bounty story is just another made up by Fake News tale that is told only to damage me and the Republican Party,” Trump tweeted.

      Knowing how sensitive the US president and the public are to the death of America soldiers overseas, Putin couldn’t resist raising the stakes in Afghanistan and making US withdrawal that much more certain. Taking the United States out of the equation — reducing the transatlantic alliance, edging US troops out of the Middle East, applauding Washington’s exit from various international organizations — provides Russia with greater maneuvering room to consolidate power in the Eurasian space.

      Trump has dismissed pretty much every unsavory Kremlin act as a hoax, from US election interference to assassinations of critics overseas. Trump cares little about Ukraine, has been lukewarm if not hostile toward US sanctions against Moscow, and has consistently attempted to bring Russia back into the G8. Yet he has also undermined the most important mechanism of engagement with Russia, namely arms control treaties.

      President Trump’s servile approach to Putin and disengaged approach to Russia is the exact opposite of the kind of principled engagement policy that Washington should be constructing. The United States should be identifying common interests with Russia over nuclear weapons, climate, regional ceasefires, reviving the Iran nuclear deal — and, at the same time, criticizing Russian conduct that violates international norms.

      Territory Grab

      China’s Xi Jinping has already made himself leader for life, and he didn’t need to go to the pretense of a referendum on constitutional changes. In 2018, the National People’s Congress simply removed the two-term limit on the presidency and boom: Xi can be on top ‘til he drops. Forget about collective leadership within the party. And certainly forget about some kind of evolution toward democracy. Under President Xi, China has returned to the one-man rule of the Mao period.

      So, while Putin was busy securing his future this past weekend, Xi focused instead on securing China’s future as an integrated, politically homogeneous entity. In other words, Xi moved on Hong Kong.

      Hong Kong once had great economic value for Beijing as a gateway to the global economy. Now that China has all the access to the global economy that it needs and then some, Hong Kong has only symbolic value, as a former colonial territory returned to the Chinese nation in 1997. To the extent that Hong Kong remains an enclave of free-thinkers who take potshots at the Communist Party, Beijing will step by step deprive it of democracy.

      On June 30, a new national security law went into effect in Hong Kong. “The new law names four offences: secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces,” Matt Ho writes in the South China Morning Post. “It also laid out new law enforcement powers and established government agencies responsible for national security. Conviction under the law includes sentences of life in prison.”

      The protests that have roiled Hong Kong for the past many months, from Beijing’s point of view, violate the national security law in all four categories. So, violators may now face very long prison sentences indeed, and police have already arrested a number of people accused of violating the new law. The new law extends to virtually all aspects of society, including the schools, which now must “harmonize” their teaching with the party line in Beijing.

      What’s happening in Hong Kong, however, is still a dilute version of the crackdown taking place on the mainland. This week, the authorities in Beijing arrested Xu Zhangrun, a law professor and prominent critic of Xi. He joins other detainees, like real-estate mogul Ren Zhiqiang, who was linked to an article calling Xi a “clown with no clothes on who was still determined to play emperor” and Xu Zhiyong, who called on Xi to resign for his handling of the coronavirus crisis.

      Meanwhile, Beijing’s treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang province amounts to collective punishment: more than a million consigned to “reeducation camps,” children separated from their families, forced sterilization. Uighur exiles have charged China with genocide and war crimes before the International Criminal Court.

      Like Putin, Xi has aligned himself with a conservative nationalism that appeals to a large portion of the population. Unlike Putin, the Chinese leader doesn’t have to worry about approval ratings or periodic elections. He is also sitting on a far-larger economy, much greater foreign currency reserves, and the means to construct an illiberal internationalism to replace the Washington consensus that has prevailed for several decades. Moreover, there are no political alternatives on the horizon in China that could challenge Xi or his particular fusion of capitalism and nationalism.

      Trump has pursued the same kind of unprincipled engagement with China as he has with Russia: flattery of the king, indifference toward human rights and a focus on profit. Again, principled engagement requires working with China on points of common concern while pushing back against its human rights violations. Of course, that’s not going to happen under the human rights violation that currently occupies the White House.

      And Trump Makes Three

      Trump aspires to become a leader for life like his buddies Putin and Xi, as he has “joked” on numerous occasions. He has similarly attacked the mainstays of a democratic society — the free press, independent judges, inspectors general. He has embraced the same nationalist-conservative cultural policies. And he has branded his opponents as enemies of the people. In his Rushmore speech on July 3, Trump lashed out against:

      “… a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us. Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.”

      He went on to describe his crackdown on protesters, his opposition to “liberal Democrats,” his efforts to root out opposition in schools, newsrooms and “even our corporate boardrooms.” Like Putin, he sang the praises of the American family and religious values. He described an American people that stood with him and the Rushmore Four and against all those who have exercised their constitutional rights of speech and assembly. You’d never know from the president’s diatribe that protesters were trying to overthrow not the American Revolution but the remnants of the Confederacy.

      Trump’s supporters have taken to heart the president’s attacks on America’s “enemies.” Since the protests around George Floyd’s killing began in May, there have been at least 50 cases of cars ramming into demonstrators, a favorite tactic used by white supremacists. There have been over 400 reports of press freedom violations. T. Greg Doucette, a “never Trump” conservative lawyer, has collected over 700 videos of police misconduct, usually violent, toward peaceful demonstrators.

      As I’ve written, there is no left-wing “cultural revolution” sweeping the United States. It is Donald Trump who is hoping to unleash a cultural revolution carried out by a mob of violent backlashers who revere the Confederate flag, white supremacy and the Mussolini-like president who looks out upon all the American carnage from his perch on the global Rushmore of autocrats.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More