This isn’t the first time Xi Jinping was said to have disappeared unexpectedly. And it isn’t the first time Xi was unaccounted for in the weeks leading up to a crucial Communist Party Congress. China’s entire government and political calendar revolves around these once-every-five years gatherings, making them really important.
To have the top guy to go missing amid circulating rumors of infighting even a possible hostile takeover, given the precarious situation across the world today and China’s place in it, how much it might be responsible for it, your heart skips a beat. As it turned out, at least what we know, the September 2022 coup didn’t happen, no more than an odd combination of coincidences spun into a narrative.
There is more than an undercurrent, though.
For one, Xi did go missing. Having come back from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization leadership summit in Samarkand, it seems likely China’s President was stuck in his own COVID protocol, quarantined for the requisite debugging period.
But while he was there, an ancient fellow by the name of Song Ping showed up out of nowhere – by video, anyway – to throw some harsh shade at the unseen Xi, and to do so using the latter’s own words. On September 12, while celebrating the upcoming 20th Party Congress (October 16), Song said political reform “has been the only path to the development and progress of contemporary China and the only path to the realization of the Chinese dream.”
It wasn’t just boilerplate, standard Communist propaganda, Song specifically referencing an important speech Xi Jinping had given just five years ago when honoring the 40th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s radical embrace of limited freedom and market capitalism.
This whole dustup is just drenched in weighty symbolism.
While he may be 105 years old, Song Ping isn’t just the oldest still-living Chinese Communist, he’s among the most influential. Having served at the highest levels, in the Politburo from back when Deng was around, Song’s voice remains a powerful attachment to the idealistic (some would say, others would call it straight propaganda) fundamental properties which had kept China united through its incredible transformation.
The number of living descendants who saw Mao’s destruction become Deng’s rapid ascent toward prosperity is down to almost none. These days, “common prosperity”, a new Xi Jinping slogan, aligns more with the first than the second.
A powerful kingmaker himself, it’s been said that eventual President Hu Jintao, Xi’s immediate predecessor, and Wen Jiabao, Hu’s Premier, were put on their path to the top when Song had brought each to Beijing to serve in important federal government positions. He doesn’t just dance for social media, Song wields influence.
Both Hu and Wen are also still living, though each has grown quite elderly, too. Thus, when Song’s damning praise went viral in China a few weeks ago, one reason it had was how it immediately appeared as if he was speaking for all three of these powerful former leaders.
Common prosperity, behind the buzzword, seeks to turn China back toward what Xi says is its proper roots in Maoist-Marxist principles; that the Chinese system having achieved the wealth and economic affluence Deng had been shooting for, the time has come to scale back the “necessary” excesses that program had led to in favor of splitting the fruits more equally.
Reading between the lines, this is more than just redistribution. It is a head-to-toe reorganization. Only, it won’t be done, it cannot be done quickly. Though there is urgency, there is also the reason Xi is gunning for his third time (and maybe anyone dissenting).
The thing is, something like common prosperity had always been the goal. Even Deng had said as much, though it was Jianng Zemin who at the 16th Party Congress in 2002 gave this ideal its official position and even a name: Three Represents.
Hitting the trifecta would mean: advanced productivity (or economy); advanced, staunchly pro-Chinese culture; and, representing the interests of the majority of China’s people.
Like all good intellectual descendants of Lenin, these later Chinese recognize that 20th century Marxism has been applied in all the places Marx said it could never work. Pre-industrialized societies would never be ready to accept true socialism because true socialism requires first the economic capacities for it.
Communism doesn’t create the wealth it intends to redistribute; that has to be made by others, capitalists first.
What Lenin later claimed was socialism couldn’t afford to wait. Instead, a small group of committed revolutionaries, the vanguard, would seize control of the government thereby the economy and shepherd any country through its economic conversion – at the point of the gulag.
Once completed, there would be no need for the vanguard and brutal authoritarianism.
A natural majority, an overwhelming consensus would naturally embrace the ideology and what it had gained “on everyone’s behalf.” Prosperity attained, socialism installed, the people would greet the formerly brutish oppressors as liberators, gratefully concurring with every whim and diktat. All Jeng had added was the bit on keeping it forever Chinese.
If Xi says common prosperity means China is now in sight of, if not already surpassed, that goal, Song, Hu, and Wen might naturally wonder where’s the place for majority in the supposed completion? If the Chinese communists really had accomplished two of the three “represents” as socialists there have been dreaming for an entire century, economy and China-4-real, what about number three?
Because by anyone’s rational and honest judgement, Xi Jinping’s government has been moving in the opposite direction from the finale. More authoritarianism, in fact the 20th Party Congress is about to become Xi’s coronation as dictator-for-life; a pathway he had opened up at the 19th and then in the plenums immediately following it which removed the longstanding Chinese tradition against Mao-like cults of personality and unlimited political officeholding.
This was in sharp contrast to the 18th Party Congress which had installed Xi, though not without major controversy. It had been widely believed Li Keqiang and not Xi Jinping would take over from Hu Jintao in 2013. Li had been a protégé of Hu and was reportedly well-liked and approved by Song Ping (probably Wen, too).
Instead, Li got the Number Two slot as the studious intellectual, while the brute “common man” Xi was elevated to President. Or, probably more apt descriptions, the technocrats (Li like Hu and Song) versus the so-called princelings, such as Xi.
The latter are those who, as the name implies, have come up from long established powerful families. Xi Jinping’s father was a victim of Mao’s insidious Cultural Revolution, but had been a top figure before then, boosting his son’s cache during Deng’s post-Mao environment.
Li was trained in the Western traditions, a Keynesian-like economist who thought central planning could be accomplished with computers and numbers rather than guns and godlike personas. The distance between neo-Keynes and communism is never all that far, not really in conflict for anyone committing to both.
Hu had allegedly viewed Xi as individually ambitious, a trait commonly associated with the princelings. The technocrats like Wen and even Song tended to be more reserved, and at least outwardly displayed the dislike for individual advancement.
Intriguingly, given what just happened in September 2022, ten years ago in September 2012, Xi had gone missing for about two weeks igniting speculation his nomination had been squelched; at the very least, something serious else was amiss. It has since been reported (who knows if true) that during this time Xi had come under direct attack from Party elders who supposedly viewed him as “unreliable.”
In what respect? The one which has emerged quite vividly in the second of Xi Jinping’s terms; how the guy once ensconced safely in his own nest of authority might turn his back on the work begun by Deng, given full voice under Jiang, and then brought to unbelievable heights (economy, anyway) during Hu’s two terms.
At one pre-Congress meeting held in Beidaihe, a “former editor” of a state news agency anonymously told Western media Xi was harshly criticized by many of the elders, most especially Qiao Shi and our old guy Song Ping. The specifics might have had something to do with protocols, Xi allegedly failed to meet with the Central Military Commission while Hu had been in Hong Kong that July, even then there seemed more to it than standards of government practice.
Another gathering reportedly at Xi Jinping’s house turned so hostile none other than Jiang Zemin had to step in to keep things civil – and when you’re talking about transitions of Communist powers in countries like China, not being “civil” goes to another level.
That level has a word: corruption. As old as Communism itself, predating the ideology going back to the Jacobins of Paris, a corruption charge has been the primary means of political authoritarianism. Stalin was an absolute master; so, too, Mao.
Xi isn’t nearly in that same class, but he’s been racking up quite the number of corruption convictions in his, again, second term. Some Western estimates put the number as high as 1 million Chinese officials, sorry, corrupt Chinese officials having been tried and then…something. Does anyone really know their fate?
Song Ping’s recent reappearance was therefore somewhat curious, as it might indicate the old, deep rifts yet alive inside the Party. To begin with, what is ZERO-COVID? It cannot truly be about the pandemic no matter how much the Communists insist otherwise. I’ve likened it, as maybe Song might, to ZERO-DISSENT.
Ahead of the Congress, this would make sense if only because of how China stands today. Prosperity? Compared to Mao, absolutely. Recently? Not so much.
You might understand why princelings like Xi would take China’s growing economic misfortune as the sign to move toward finishing his plans to do what Hu, Wen, and Song had always feared – going backward. The final stage in devolving would likely be the most uncertain, perhaps ruthless.
By Xi’s view, it wasn’t his choice – the global economic situation made the decision for him. Any dreams of continuing the pre-crisis way, the Deng way under that globalizing world was thrown out the window in the immediate aftermath of the Great “Recession.” There would be no recovery in the West, and there sure hasn’t been, therefore it would only be a matter of time before the finality reached China (2013, as it turned out).
The technocrats simply didn’t agree; there’s always a Keynesian-style “stimulus” plan which they’ll support, always claiming the next one will end up being the nick-of-time solution to every economic fix. As I’ve written before, these two views seemingly came to a head in 2015 and 2016, Li given room to implement one last try at the textbook, technocrat approach.
It failed. From there, the following year, the 19th Party Congress.
What gives Song’s pre-20th backdoor message to Xi its element of severity, therefore conspiracy, the Communist Party’s General Office only months ago issued a directive telling retired party members who might be thinking about criticizing current officials they’d face severe discipline should they follow through.
Did Song’s video rise to criticism?
Not for nothing, China enters October 2022 with – by far – the worst economic backdrop of its modern history. This is nothing like 2008 or 2009, barely a blip for the Hu-led juggernaut. Even 2020 was less dangerous in how quickly it spread and then, according to Xi, the spread stopped. Unfortunately, so, too, did China’s economy thereafter, a painful further depression begun almost two years ago all the while Western Economists celebrated “inflation” as if some renewed worldwide economic impulse.
But why? That’s really the question, one that hangs in the air among the confused Western media watching puzzled by the yuan’s plummet (without noting how CNY’s fall is being repeated worldwide), maybe even inside the Party politics intending to govern during one of the most potentially unstable periods since the late eighties.
The latter is famously the favorite topic for Mr. Xi, who knows only too well what happens when “represents” Number One goes backward long before Number Three gets going. The “horror” of Soviet Russia’s downfall isn’t just lamented by Mr. Putin.
There was no coup in China this month. However, these political affairs always generate intrigue, not just in socialist jurisdictions but wherever human imagination is active. Or while allowed to be active.
