It is already next Sunday, October 16, that the Chinese Communist Party meets in congress to renew Xi Jinping’s leadership. The meeting, the most important event on the country’s political agenda, takes place every five years and a constitutional amendment in 2018 will allow the Chinese leader to start a third term.
A few days before defining China’s course for the coming years, the TSF listened to the journalist António Caeiro, author since 2004 of several books on the country – such as “Pela China Inside”, “Pilgrimage Red” or “Os Returned from Shanghai”, published in 2022 – and with almost 20 years of work in Beijing, that highlights a “great change” of paradigm in relation to the last decades of the country.
Xi Jinping “can literally stay in power as long as he has strength and health,” in contrast to the “economic reform and opening up to the outside world” policy adopted in 1978.
The Chinese idea was “to promote collective leadership” and “one of the first political translations of this orientation was the limitation of terms” instead of the “personality cult around a great leader”, as happened with Mao Zedong who ” ruled or reigned until he died.
That wish was fulfilled under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, but Xi Jinping is “preparing to break that tradition.” The leadership style he has been practicing in the Chinese Communist Party will contribute to this, exhausting any internal opposition and contestation with a “brand image of control and discipline.”
The Chinese leader studied from a very young age “why the Communist Party of the Soviet Union lost power and what was a great party was dispersed, eventually collapsing the Soviet Union itself.”
Hence came the conviction of Xi Jinping and his circle that “discipline is the most important thing”, rejecting “compromises, pluralism, contestation, police openness or transparency”. In the party there is not even “number two or number three, there is only one number one, which is Xi Jinping, and the rest of the leadership has disappeared”.
Among the topics discussed at the party congress will be the Taiwan issue and rising tensions between Beijing and Taipei, with Xi Jinping taking a “harder and more assertive line.”
The reunification of the territories “has become a bit more urgent and is officially regarded as an indispensable component of what is now called the Chinese dream of China’s national rejuvenation.”
Xi Jinping and his leadership know that “we have to keep this pressure on Taiwan, but we also know, on the other hand, that a forced or violent solution to this problem will have unforeseen consequences”, with costs “too high human, psychological and economic” for the country.
Source: TSF
