Towards bourgeois liberalization

China 3: Xi Zhongxun and the transformation of communism.

To add to my China theme, another outstanding biography that came out recently was Joseph Torigian's "The Party's Interests Come First", about Xi Zhongxun (pronounced She jong-shuhn). This book is, in style, quite a bit drier than the memoir by Chang Kuo-t'ao, but drama still seeps out. Of course, Xi Zhongxun is the father of Xi Jinping. But he had a tumultuous political career himself, purged twice, rehabilitated once, and working at the highest levels of the Communist state structure. He was another cadre with unshakable dedication to the revolution, almost Job-like in his faith and tribulations. The book has a chapter or two about Jinping, but mostly, it stays focused on the father.

Xi was a politician through and through. A personable and loquacious glad hander, he made friends easily. In the grand scheme of PRC politics, he tended to be on the "right" side, meaning the less doctrinaire, less controlling side of things, compared the hard-line "leftist" communists who pushed for collectivization, assimilation of ethnic groups, strict economic control, and, ultimately, cultural revolution. He attained political office very early, and tended to be the youngest of his leadership groups, up until his first purge, around 1963. 

As head of the Northwest bureau in the nascent PRC, Xi was a driving force behind the cultivation / co-optation of the Panchen Lama as a counterweight to the Dalai Lama, who so perfidiously fled the Communist embrace of Tibet. But by 1952, Xi was called to the central government, to help Mao play various political games in balancing other leaders like Deng Xiaoping. It was a difficult life, divining where the political wind was blowing, which is to say, always knowing Mao's shifting mood. China under the PRC has had, despite the formal succession of party leaders, essentially three emperors or paramount leaders: Mao, then Deng, and now Xi Jinping. Xi Zhongxun spent a good deal of his time refining (or setting up from scratch) the state's legal structures, to smooth governance despite the lack of clear legal / constitutional structure at the top. Unfortunately, due to a mishap of miscommunication, Xi approved publication of what amounted to a dissident novel, (Liu Zhidan)- which is to say, one that revealed various unpleasant truths about early communist history- by a real firecracker of an author. It was a decision that really hit the fan, and Xi was purged, as one of the opening moves of the Cultural Revolution, spending over a decade in exile, sometimes imprisoned in solitary confinement, sometimes sent to factory work in the hinterlands. His family was also punished, with Xi Jinping denied countless opportunities and abused by his friends and teachers. 

Xi Zhongxun in 1967, being humiliated as part of the cultural revolution, for being a rightist.

When he returned to the good graces of the Party, that is, of Deng Xiaoping, in 1978, he was assigned as governor of Guandong province, in the South. It is hard to over-emphasize the momentous effects and after-effects of the cultural revolution. True, the Chinese communists didn't murder their colleagues in Stalin's cold-blooded and wanton fashion. But just as the Kruschev era was a post-traumatic reckoning, so were the decades after Mao's death, when the first and foremost goal of the Party and its members was to never repeat the awful destruction, cruelty and chaos of the cultural revolution. One might say that the old cadres mellowed with age, going from the rabid enthusiasm of youth (egged on by Mao) to a more benevolent model of emperorship. The reaction accelerated economic opening, and one of the leading areas was Guangdong, which contains the vast Pearl river bay, host to Hong Kong on one side, Macau on the other, and Guangzhou at its head. A growing problem in the 70's, as Xi took over, was the flight of workers in Guangdong to Hong Kong. The book paints the fascinating contrast with East Germany, whose solution to fleeing workers was to build a wall and man it with dogs and machine guns. East Germany had put out appeal to China, back during the famines associated with the Great Leap forward, for butter, so that its people would be less antsy. That did not fall on sympathetic ears. Nor did Xi follow East Germany's playbook in this instance. His solution, backed by the central government, was to foster economic growth, using special economic zones to pioneer the general opening of China, into what one might call its novel form of Leninist capitalism. These policies (with due respect to the Western economic models and technologies they are based on) were stunningly successful. A little freedom can do wonders!

But then came even more opening. Gorbachev was letting things go in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, and the flowers of dissent were blooming in China as well. Xi was in the central government by this time (the early 80's), part of the sub-echelon that was not the CCP central committee, but among its immediate sub-organizations, including the parliament, which implemented the central committee's policies. 1989 brought the acceleration of these opening trends, culminating in the events of Tienanmen Square. Xi Zhongxun was very much on the rightist side here, urging dialog and adjustment to form a more open China. But while debates were raging among the leadership about what to do about the unruly students, (with the label "bourgeois liberalization" being applied to those favoring more Western-style mechanisms of government), Deng Xioping was moving as head of the military to quash the protests and save the system. He could see that this opening was going in an existential direction, and would spell the death of the one-party state, as it did in the Soviet Union two years later. 

Xi was not sent down to factory work, imprisonment, or public humiliation and "struggle sessions", but he was exiled again from Beijing, confined to Guandong for almost a decade before being allowed near the capitol. Deng himself had to unfreeze the Party a bit by making his "Southern Tour" in 1992 to re-assert the intention to open economically, while still repressing politically.

What really struck me about this whole story was the persistence of politics and its polarization in different systems. Just as we have our right and left poles, So has China had a range different views over its peculiar right-left spectrum, which reflects natural variation in people's temperaments, but also the natural process of politics by which we negotiate a middle ground given the ancient cultural patterns, and the overlaid political institutions and transient personalities. The big difference is the nature of control and rejuvenation of the PRC political system. Where we in the US have regular elections and turnover of political personnel, Communist China has never developed a formal and regular mechanism to transfer power. Nor is its power accountable to the people, again in any formal, regular way. \

There are 100 million members of the party, not to mention rigorous surveillance of the internet and all other modes of communication, so it certainly has its ear to the ground. But it also plies its population with relentless propaganda and curated news, and prohibits free speech in the political arena. Its governance amounts to a series of grand bargains- economic prosperity and relative freedom for political control; a single party state in exchange for relative long-term stability and rule by well-vetted, competent officials. While Western democracies are always on the political low boil, China's political system seems more pressurized. Modern technologies may allow such a pressure cooker to deliver good results, but if it blows, it is prone to dramatic results. The lack of a succession mechanism is particularly problematic, injecting uncertainty into everything, as exemplified by China's extremely high savings rates. Xi Jinping has blown through the weak succession mechanisms that had been in place, and what succeeds him is a great unknown- whether a lesser technocrat, or a great whirlwind. Xi Jinping thought, his intellectual legacy, (or, "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era"), boils down to two propositions: The communist party shall be in charge of China, and second, Xi Jinping shall be in charge of the Chinese Communist Party. The legacy of Xi Zhongxun, however, points to some hope that at the crucial juncture, some might favor a more open and legalistic path.

• A rare mutation, and lethal anesthesia.