At the CCP's 20th Party Congress, Party leader Xi Jinping not only secured, as expected, an unprecedented third term, but stands a very strong chance of ruling for life. Moreover, a lineup composed entirely of Xi loyalists seized every seat on the Politburo Standing Committee, shattering the power-sharing arrangement among competing bureaucratic factions that had prevailed since the Deng Xiaoping era, and making Xi the most powerful CCP leader since Mao Zedong.
With the Xi family dynasty now formally ascendant, there has been an outpouring of lament among the public, on the view that a restoration of Mao-style personal dictatorship will deepen China's future uncertainty and instability. We believe, however, that the opposite is true: the establishment of the Xi family dynasty marks a historic turning point for contemporary China. Xi Jinping has become the CCP's own gravedigger, and China's democracy movement now faces its greatest historic opportunity since the June Fourth student movement of 1989.
The CCP is a Leninist party. The defining feature of a Leninist party is that, while nominally holding power on behalf of the proletariat, it is in fact a one-party dictatorship in which power is monopolized by a small oligarchy. This fusion of party and state into one-party rule provides fertile soil for the rise of dictators — hence figures like Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot, whose red terror not only claimed countless innocent lives as sacrifice, but whose disregard for and trampling of rules also endangered one-party rule itself, stripping such regimes of legitimacy and consigning the vast majority of communist regimes swiftly to the dustbin of history.
For the CCP, its ability to escape the fate of dictatorial regimes that rise abruptly and fall just as suddenly owes much to Deng Xiaoping, who — having recognized through the Cultural Revolution the dangers of a personality cult and one-man dictatorship — left the Party a set of institutional arrangements and rules: term limits for leading cadres, age limits, collective leadership, and a cadre appointment system, among others. Even the worst rules are still rules. The rules of the game Deng left behind maintained a relative balance of power among competing interest groups within the system, thereby creating a degree of social space in which social energy could be released. Well-trained technocratic elites replaced the older generation of poorly educated peasant revolutionary leaders, and revolutionary-mobilization-style leadership gave way to reform-and-management-style leadership — together producing China's economic miracle.
The establishment of the Xi family dynasty represents a restoration of the old Leninist system, a wholesale abandonment of the rules Deng Xiaoping had set in place to prolong the CCP's life. To sustain his ambition of lifetime dictatorship, Xi Jinping had no choice but to negate and discard Deng's institutional arrangements and concentrate all power of party and state in his own hands — turning the party into a family affair, transforming "party rule" into "Xi's personal rule," and in the process ruthlessly gutting the very foundation on which the Communist Party's survival depended. Even the worst rules are still rules — but once even bad rules cease to exist, the CCP, nominally still a political party, in fact degenerates into a jungle-law beast devouring the weak.
In other words, Xi Jinping's interests are not the same as the CCP's interests. Traditional interest groups within the CCP — the Jiang-Zeng faction, the princelings, the Communist Youth League faction — have all been crushed and stripped of their interests in this overturning of the rules of the game. Even more damaging to the CCP, the only real winners to emerge from this political arena are those household retainers whose sole qualification is "political loyalty" to Xi Jinping personally; the well-trained technocrats who once propelled China's economic takeoff have been replaced by party functionaries valued for their "political stance, political attitude, political awareness, and political judgment." This has once again wiped out the foundation of development-based legitimacy on which CCP rule had relied, revealing the bleak future awaiting this century-old totalitarian party.
Even more damaging to Xi Jinping and the CCP is that the establishment of the Xi family dynasty has focused all of society's grievances onto Xi Jinping as an individual. That is to say, whenever governance fails, Xi Jinping must bear the full brunt of it, becoming the outlet for every social grievance; anger at the system inevitably concentrates on Xi personally, and anger at Xi personally is likewise inevitably projected back onto the CCP. Going forward, in every clash and rupture between state and society, both will serve as the vent for all social fury, producing a compounding effect greater than the sum of its parts — creating conditions favorable to social mobilization for the future democracy movement.
The transformation of "party rule" into "Xi's personal rule" also spells the end of the CCP's long-standing governing strategy of "taking economic development as the central task." Every dictator in human history has suffered from a profound insecurity, and Xi Jinping is no exception — in his work report to the CCP's 20th Party Congress, Xi used the word "security" as many as 89 times, revealing his fear for the safety of the regime and of himself personally. It comes as no surprise, then, that the governing strategy of "Xi's personal rule" is centered on "national security." Once economic development is no longer the center of governance, it becomes easier to understand why China's "zero-COVID" policy paid no heed whatsoever to the damage it inflicted on the economy and people's livelihoods.
This is to say that, beyond the many enemies Xi Jinping has single-handedly created within the CCP, this shift in governing strategy has also pushed him into opposition with nearly every stratum of society. Unsurprisingly, those hit hardest are China's capitalists, technocratic elites, and middle class. China's capitalists, technocrats, and middle class tend, by nature, to be conservative and dependent on the system — which is precisely why they were courted as the target audience of Jiang Zemin's "Three Represents." The shift from being courted under Jiang to being shunned under Xi will ultimately alter their cost-benefit calculations, forcing them to make new choices of values and behavior, and turning them into potential allies of China's democracy movement.
The establishment of "Xi's personal rule," then, comes at the cost of digging out the Communist Party's own roots. In a sense, the popular jibe calling Xi Jinping the "Chief Accelerationist" has indeed proven apt since the 20th Party Congress — the establishment of the Xi family dynasty has hammered the coffin nail into this zombie party, the CCP. It would be dishonest to deny that Xi's personal dictatorship is indeed darker and grimmer than collective party rule, and that the suffering of ordinary people has grown correspondingly deeper. But we can state with confidence, as a political judgment: Xi Jinping is the CCP's gravedigger, and we are now in the final darkness before dawn.