Mao Zedong made the first modern Chinese revolution. He imposed Communist Party control on all aspects of Chinese life, centralized power in Beijing, and created a cult of personality around himself. Central planning rather than market principles governed Chinese economic life. Toward other countries Maoist China proclaimed its intention to foment communist revolutions, but in fact largely cut itself off from the rest of the world.
After Mao’s death his successor, Deng Xiaoping, presided over a second revolution, which set a different course. The Party relaxed its grip on the society and, in its wake, partly-independent organizations came into existence. Market practices largely replaced central planning and private enterprises appeared. China opened itself to the world, welcoming foreign capital, foreign firms, and foreigners coming to do business and, in the other direction, sending abroad Chinese tourists, students, and a wide range of products made in China.
Xi Jinping, the supreme Chinese leader since 2012, has brought yet a third series of major changes. The Party has reasserted control over much of Chinese life and publicly exalted the leader in ways not seen since the Maoist period. The state has increased its direct involvement in the Chinese economy. While continuing and in some ways broadening its engagement with the world, China has adopted a more expansive and, on occasion, even a belligerent approach to its home region, in contrast with Deng and his successors.
The motive for China’s first two modern revolutions was clear in each case. Mao was a convinced Marxist-Leninist, although by Western standards an eccentric one, emphasizing as he did the revolutionary role of the peasantry rather than the social class Marx had designated for this distinction: the proletariat. Mao aspired to create communism, as he understood it, in China. Deng sought to undo the damage that Mao’s violent political campaigns—especially the last of them, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s—had done to the country. He wanted above all to address China’s greatest problem, its mass poverty, by promoting economic growth.
The motive for Xi Jinping’s efforts to transform the country are less apparent. The China in which he inherited power was, to all appearances, doing very well: achieving rapid economic growth, providing ever-greater opportunities for its citizens, and enjoying a high and rising reputation in the international community. Why has he felt the need to make major changes, indeed to drag China back toward—although certainly not all the way to—the Maoist patterns of governance and foreign policy?
The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State by Elizabeth Economy, a thorough and informative account of China’s recent past and present, provides the basis for an answer to that question. The author is the C. V. Starr Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and her book is one of a series of timely and valuable volumes on international politics and foreign policy from the Council’s Studies Program. From her book the reader learns that while China may have appeared to the rest of the world to be flourishing, Xi, upon taking power, confronted what he saw as major threats to a feature of Chinese life to which he assigns the greatest value: the continued rule of the Chinese Communist Party. His own version of a Chinese revolution may be understood as having as its purpose the vanquishing of those threats.
One such threat comes from the corruption that, as Minxin Pei has shown, has become integral to the way the Party and the government function. Xi launched a major campaign against corrupt officials that has led, by one estimate, to the dismissal and even imprisonment of more than 1.3 million of them. The campaign amounts to a war by the leadership against significant elements of the Communist Party. In war, power tends to concentrate in the hands of the leadership, and that is what has taken place in China.
Western ideas and values, the political foundations of the Western democracies with which China has had increasing contact since Deng’s revolution, also threaten the communist monopoly of power. Xi has therefore moved to ban them from universities and keep them out of the media. Perhaps the greatest threat of this kind comes from the internet, which disseminates ideas more widely and more rapidly than any other medium. A large fraction of China’s immense population has access to the internet, and some Chinese have used it to organize public demonstrations of the kind that the Party seeks to prevent. The Xi regime has therefore created a vast system of internet censorship, employing an estimated 2 million people to suppress the transmission of impermissible information as well as to make the internet, like official newspapers, magazines, and radio, a vehicle for Party propaganda.
China’s heavily polluted air and water pose yet another threat to communist rule: people tend to lose respect for authorities whose policies are literally poisoning them. Xi has made the reduction of pollution a high priority. This, too, has led to the gathering of more power into his own hands: local authorities often fail to enforce the country’s anti-pollution laws because they gain financially from polluting industries.
Since Xi’s assumption of power, China has conducted a more aggressive foreign policy. Abandoning Deng’s injunction to proceed cautiously beyond China’s borders and emphasize its peaceful international intentions, China has trumpeted its status as a major power, accelerated the expansion of its armed forces, especially its navy, claimed as its own sovereign territory much of the western Pacific—against the competing claims of other Asian countries and contrary to international law as interpreted by the World Court—and built artificial islands in the South China Sea on which it has installed military facilities.
This newly assertive Chinese foreign policy stems from a deeply-rooted Chinese nationalism, which regards Chinese domination of East Asia as natural, normal, and just, based on the many centuries during which the Middle Kingdom held just such a position. It also stems, however, from Xi’s felt need to bolster the Communist Party’s standing among those it governs, by identifying the regime with the recovery of China’s rightful place in the region and the world. Nationalism remains a potent political sentiment in China as elsewhere, and the foreign policy on which Xi has embarked offers a way to tap it to strengthen Party rule. It also offers a way to generate hostility to the West, the source of the values that threaten that rule. The Chinese leadership blames the West (rightly) for weakening China in the nineteenth century and (wrongly) for trying to stifle China’s rise in the twenty-first.
Xi Jinping’s two revolutionary predecessors achieved their goals. Mao Zedong did create communism in China. Deng Xiaoping did make possible the remarkable expansion of China’s economy. Will Xi enjoy comparable success? That is far from clear. Mao made the concept of contradictions– conflicts between and among different forces and different goals, even within the Communist Party itself – central to this political thought, and Xi’s new policies risk saddling the country with two very large ones. The policies he has adopted to cope with the threats he perceives, that is, may well create new, different, and perhaps even more serious challenges to the communist regime.
The foremost goal of China’s government remains continued rapid economic growth, but the leadership recognizes that achieving this will require major changes. The strategy that brought double-digit annual increases for the better part of three decades, which has included the large-scale movement of people from farms to factories, a major Chinese role in assembling the component parts of products designed and sold elsewhere, and creating demand for its output through ever-increasing investment and exports, has reached its limit. Now China must rely more heavily on upgrading the skills of its urban workers, sustaining demand through domestic consumption, and especially on innovation to generate new and more sophisticated products. To this end the government is committed to making huge investments in technologically advanced fields such as artificial intelligence.
The kind of innovation on which the regime is basing its hopes, however, requires individual initiative, freedom from government controls, and the uninhibited flow of information. These are precisely the activities that the Xi program seeks to eliminate. The effort to acquire Western products while keeping out Western values—to have the hardware without the software of the West—has a long and not particularly successful history in China. In the twenty-first century, as well, Xi’s economic aspirations may prove to be incompatible with his political program.
Similarly, the Xi Jinping foreign policy may in the end diminish China’s power both in its region and globally. The country’s new assertiveness has, as Edward Luttwak has noted, alarmed its neighbors. They have, in response, begun to increase both their own defense spending and their military cooperation with one another. Deng and his successors reassured other countries, who welcomed the economic benefits of China’s remarkable rise. Xi has forced them to contemplate the political and military dangers that a resurgent China poses.
If Xi’s program has the unintended consequences of slowing growth and increasing international hostility, the obvious way to reverse these trends is to make China the kind of country its current leader is devoting himself to preventing it from becoming. An open, tolerant China that protects the free flow of information and restricts the power and reach of the government within its borders, and that cooperates with rather than threatening its neighbors, would be able to bring the country peace and prosperity.
That is the kind of China that, as James Mann has written, Western countries believed, or at least hoped, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, when extended and expanded, would ultimately create. When Xi Jinping came to power he steered it in a different, in fact in the opposite, direction.
Still, history takes unexpected turns, and China’s history is not finished. It is not impossible that the country will sharply change direction yet again and resume the path toward the embrace of Western values and the establishment of Chinese versions of Western institutions that it seemed to many to be following between the end of the 1970s and the second decade of the twenty-first century. That is what the West believed China’s next revolution would be. Perhaps that belief was not wrong but merely premature. Perhaps, in the fullness of time, the creation of a more liberal, democratic country will turn out to be not China’s third modern revolution, but rather its fourth.