https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/opinion/china-xi-revolution-red-aristocrats.html
All summer there have been uncommon signs that opposition to President Xi
Jinping may be growing in China, even Beijing itself. He featured less prominently than usual in official headlines. Important
members of the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) criticized his straitjacketed response to the trade war with
the United States. A national scandal over several hundred thousand faulty vaccines broke while Mr. Xi was on a tour in Africa to sell his pet project, the One Belt, One
Road initiative.
It was such an
extraordinary series of mishaps and policy errors and then complaints that one
wondered whether they were a concerted, if veiled, attack on Mr. Xi.
But who would dare
be the enemy of China’s most powerful leader since Mao? Mr. Xi has no known
ideological opponents. Many of the country’s most powerful officials have been jailed, felled by his signature
anticorruption campaign, or have died. Earlier this year, the Constitution was
amended to eliminate term limits, including for the president.
Just
over five years into Mr. Xi’s reign, the cast of characters in China’s power
struggles has come into focus. On the one hand are the so-called Red Aristocrats, with Mr. Xi as their flag bearer. On
the other stand the Plebeians — my phrase — headed by leaders from previous
administrations, most notably Jiang Zemin.
Red Aristocrats come from the families of the old-guard revolutionaries who
held top posts upon the founding of the Chinese communist republic in 1949.
Those revolutionaries mostly lived and worked together on the former imperial grounds of
Zhongnanhai, coalescing into a tight social group, until the
Cultural Revolution dispersed them. Officials with a direct lineage to those
founders, who claim to be the
republic’s rightful heirs, have experienced a resurgence under Mr.
Xi.
The term “Plebeians”
refers to officials without significant pre-1949 revolutionary pedigrees who
rose to the top of the ruling hierarchy or were catapulted there after Mao and
later Deng Xiaoping marginalized old-timers.
These two factions
now dominate China’s New Class, to borrow the Yugoslav Milovan Djilas’s phrase
for Soviet communist elites. Both are self-interested, corrupt and
authoritarian, but they exhibit significant policy differences and have become
dangerously antagonistic.
The Red Aristocrats
want the C.C.P. and the state sector to control markets and corporations, a
carry-over from their Marxist founding fathers. The Plebeians are more
pro-market, presumably because they consolidated power (and accumulated wealth
and privileges) during Deng’s overhaul of the Maoist economy in the 1980s.
Under
Mr. Xi, the Red Aristocrats have gutted the lie-low-bide-time approach favored
by Deng and his successors for an expansionist and hyper-nationalist position
reminiscent of Mao’s.
Lenin liquidated Russia’s Tsarist aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the affluent peasants known as kulaks. In the 1930s, Stalin killed off most of the first Bolsheviks. The New Class that subsequently emerged in the Soviet Union consisted mostly of technocrats with undistinguished political backgrounds.
Lenin liquidated Russia’s Tsarist aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the affluent peasants known as kulaks. In the 1930s, Stalin killed off most of the first Bolsheviks. The New Class that subsequently emerged in the Soviet Union consisted mostly of technocrats with undistinguished political backgrounds.
Mao was different,
and his legacy today is as well. He, too, liquidated landowners. And he
sidelined, humiliated and exiled many of his comrades from before 1949. But he
did not have them killed off. After he died in 1976, members of the old guard
returned to power. They were ousted again later, by Deng after the crackdown at
Tiananmen Square in 1989, for sympathizing with the pro-democracy students or
resisting Deng’s capitalistic reforms.
That year Mr. Jiang
became general secretary of the C.C.P. He wielded formal power or great
influence for nearly two decades, including long after he ceased being party
chairman, and planted many loyalists in key positions. His people, mostly
commoners, amassed personal wealth as China’s economy skyrocketed — to the
dismay and envy of many Red Aristocrats.
The Plebeian faction
expanded during the first decade of this century, under the leadership of
President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao: They tapped their power base in the
Communist Youth League, a boot camp for commoners wishing to be credentialed
for Party membership.
But then came Mr.
Xi, a high-carat Red Aristocrat whose father was a senior leader during the
republic’s early years. Like a Hamlet kicking out usurpers — a popular
comparison — Mr. Xi promptly went after each of the two Plebeian subgroups.
He
first aimed his anticorruption campaign exclusively at Plebeians — mostly, in
the beginning, at Mr. Jiang’s people but then later also at stalwarts of the
youth league. Then in 2016, he openly humiliated the league, cut its funding and
placed it under the C.C.P.’s — meaning, his own — control.
If Mr. Xi stays in power for more than two five-year terms, the ascendancy of the Red Aristocrats may become unstoppable. What then?
If Mr. Xi stays in power for more than two five-year terms, the ascendancy of the Red Aristocrats may become unstoppable. What then?
Some lament that
China under Mr. Xi is returning ideologically to the Maoist era. But if the
Red Aristocracy keeps rising, China’s politics may regress all the way back to
medieval times.
Chinese society
underwent radical structural changes between the Tang dynasty (618–907) and the
Song dynasty (960–1279). Naito Konan, a prominent Japanese Sinologist, noted in
the 1910s and 1920s that before the enlightened autocracy of the Song era,
China had for many decades been ruled by an informally hereditary aristocracy
whose emperors also filled top government posts and controlled the civil service
examinations. The emperors created a closed, self-serving and rapacious elite —
until the entire system suddenly collapsed.
Naito noted that for
decades the dynasties remained stable even as emperors were often overthrown by
other aristocrats. It was another historian, Nicolas Tackett, who recently
explained why the aristocracy was finally done in, and why so quickly. After
examining hundreds of epitaphs on graves from the ninth century, he concluded
that the Tang empire was brought down by Huang Chao, a disgruntled
salt-merchant-turned-rebel, who tapped popular discontent to wage a rebellion
that swiftly turned into a blood bath — a class genocide that physically
annihilated the entire medieval aristocratic class.
This is a precedent
that should worry China’s leaders today.
Mr. Xi’s camp may
seem powerful, but his base is quite small: The Red Aristocrats number only
about 40,000 people, according to one of them. And within his camp lurk
dangerous challengers. Mr. Xi came to power as a compromise candidate. A plot to snatch the C.C.P.’s
leadership by another, charismatic, Red Aristocrat — Bo Xilai — was foiled just
months before Mr. Xi took the party’s helm in late 2012. (Mr. Bo was then
sentenced to life imprisonment for corruption.) There have been rumors — and
sometimes official claims — of attempted coups, including just last year.
As the elite behind
Mr. Xi congeals into a political aristocracy, it is also overseeing the closing
down of Chinese society, through restrictions on the internet, social profiling
and extensive surveillance, or the extraordinary repression
of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang province. Corruption remains rampant, and
protests and other public expressions of popular discontent continue despite
more severe crackdowns.
If
in the years ahead Mr. Xi’s Red Aristocrats become even more entrenched and
social mobility is further obstructed by vested interests, economic
exploitation will intensify, fueling class differences. As the Plebeians head
toward defeat, strife among powerful oligarchs within the Red Aristocracy will
take center stage.
Whether a modern-day Huang Chao would then appear — and would know how to
galvanize a disgruntled population into rising up — no one can tell, of course.
But some people seem to worry about the possibility.
In
2012, Wang Qishan, a confidante of Mr. Xi’s and the head of his anticorruption
effort at the time, called on senior C.C.P. members to read Alexis de Tocqueville’s “The Old Regime and the Revolution,”
about the popular uprising that toppled the monarchy in France in 1789.
Mentioning Huang Chao probably would have struck too close to home.
Yi-Zheng Lian, a commentator on Hong Kong and Asian affairs, is a professor of economics at Yamanashi Gakuin University, in Kofu, Japan, and a contributing opinion writer.
