Security, Not Growth, Is Xi’s Focus
The Wall Street Journal
The following is an excerpt of Kevin Rudd's op-ed originally published in The Wall Street Journal.
The National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, held every five years, formally appoints the 25-member Politburo and its seven-member standing committee. The names of those elevated to senior positions have been of deep significance to China watchers since 1982, when Deng Xiaoping launched the era of “reform and opening.”
The 20th Congress, which gets underway Oct. 16, will be different. There’s only one appointment that matters now: Xi Jinping, China’s Chairman of Everything. The delegates will reappoint Mr. Xi to a third five-year term as general secretary by a vote of 2,296 to 0. He is also likely to be officially designated as the country’s “great navigator,” the “people’s leader” or even “chairman,” likening him to Mao Zedong and further entrenching his power.
Mr. Xi has changed the fundamental rules of Chinese politics. His rolling anticorruption and political rectification campaigns have produced a reign of terror among officials. And rather than a Politburo reflecting a balance of contending forces and interests across the elite as in the past, the new leadership will likely be overwhelmingly composed of Xi loyalists.
The big news from this National Congress won’t be senior personnel appointments. It will be the ideological content of Mr. Xi’s formal work report. In his regime, communist ideology is no longer a cosmetic formality draped over a de-facto system of unrestrained state capitalism. Mr. Xi is an ideological fundamentalist who has moved the Communist Party to the Leninist left, the economy to the Marxist left, and China’s foreign and security policy to the nationalist right. Throughout this process, shifts in ideological formulations by Mr. Xi have also been the best predictors of later changes in policy. Ideology, as under Mao, has become the embedded code language by which real policy change is signaled to China’s 96 million Communist Party members.
Read the full article in The Wall Street Journal.