Party time in China

"The Party Leads All" offers an in-depth perspective on the changes underway under Xi Jinping and how they could affect China in the long term

The Party Leads All: The Evolving Role of the Chinese Communist Party

Editors: Jacques Delisle & Guobin Yang

Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Price: $46.70

This timely volume attempts to discuss and analyse the changes within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under the leadership of Xi Jinping. The dictum “The Party leads all” has been adopted and promoted by Mr Xi. At the 19th Party Congress he had said, “Party, government, military, society, and schools, east, west, south, north, and center — the Party leads all”. It underscores a push towards increasing centralisation and concentration of power within the top leadership and especially Xi Jinping.

The various chapters in the volume examine this centralisation with respect to a range of themes, such as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), civil society, the media, CCP’s foreign relations, the space for religion, the judiciary. The book also provides a detailed insight into elite politics and its functioning and how this can and does affect the position and future of the CCP. The wide range of perspectives make the book deeply interesting for anyone intent on studying the functioning of the CCP under Xi Jinping.

To provide a nuanced understanding of the changes the book successfully juxtaposes the situation under the previous leaderships with that under Mr Xi. The major theme across the chapters is that there is a consistent reduction in the space for free thinking and criticism available to the Chinese people under him. In addition, Mr Xi has been consolidating power and appointing people who are close to him in prominent positions around him, an effort to reduce resistance and criticisms about his policies within the Party. This development is underscored by Cheng Chen. He argues, “The Party-strengthening process, comes at the cost of power centralisation at the top and excessive tightening of social control, and could potentially generate new challenges from nationalist and leftist forces.”

Another major challenge for Mr Xi when he became President of the PRC was to fight ever-pervasive corruption. Corruption has generally been accepted as a major existential challenge to the legitimacy of the CCP. However, a major long drawn and sustained effort to eradicate this had not been witnessed till Mr Xi. Under his relentless push to control and eliminate this challenge, he has not discriminated against the flies or the tigers. Party leaders and workers across ranks and organisations have been punished and publicly exposed.

The major stance here is that Mr Xi is not ready to tolerate corruption and that as it is an existential threat to the CCP, it needs to be stamped out. However, one of the challenges with this policy has again been the heavy concentration of power in Mr Xi’s hands. This point has been explained by Melanie Manion who argues that, “Xi has strengthened the Party organisationally in its management of corruption, but he has also weakened it as a ruling Party, by dominating its leadership thoroughly and personally.”

It is not far-fetched today to say that the CCP is driving and dictating every sphere of Chinese people’s life. The Party decides what the media can report and write, for instance, which Maria Repnikova highlights. She argues that “the combination of intensified control and commercial pressures on the media industry has undoubtedly weakened the traditional journalistic profession in China”.

Added to this, the Party decides which religions are legitimate and it is the Party that decides how the judiciary will function. The judicial changes under Mr Xi have been summarised successfully by Xin He, who writes, “It is possible that the status of the judiciary, as opposed to the status of the local government, has been slightly elevated. This is because the Party wants the judiciary to be not just an instrument for social control and dispute resolution but also a mechanism to check the behaviour of the government”.

To add to this, the CCP under Mr Xi decides which issues civil society can focus on and how rich a private sector entrepreneur can get before he becomes a threat to the Party. Though the private sector is necessary for the CCP to push economic growth, which is essential for the survival and legitimacy for the Party, the CCP is not ready to give it the same treatment as the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) receive. A number of prominent private entrepreneurs have been punished, adding a layer of complexity in the relationship between the Party and the private sector. The private sector must work within the direction of the CCP and also have their goals aligned with the Party.

Though the volume covers a huge range of themes, a chapter exclusively dedicated to the minorities is missing. In addition, some focus on the changes within the way cinema is perceived under Mr Xi would have made the chapter on media more nuanced. A concluding chapter would have rounded off the volume. But it still offers an in-depth perspective on the changes underway in China under Xi Jinping and how they have power to affect the Party and China in the long term.

The reviewer is assistant professor, O P Jindal Global University