How the CCP is Closing China

As China’s economy continues a tailspin that is increasingly obvious to outsiders, the rest of the world asks: what will happen? Will the government ‘reform’ the economy and make people happy again? Will the people revolt? Will there be a ‘lost decade’ (as in Japan)? China is reverting to greater social control, even at the cost of incoming investment. But is this reversion intended to be temporary? What lies in the near future?

The answer is likely more repression, impoverisation and control by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). China’s political system is fundamentally Marxist-Leninist and, as such, relies on atomisation of the public and isolation from the outside world to maintain power.

During China’s long period of economic growth and opportunity (1979 to 2019) the system was able to tolerate a degree of lateral connection among people and intercourse with other countries and their dangerous ideas. Some dissent emerged: there was, for example, the 2011 revolt by the people of Wukan in Guangdong, who forced CCP officials out of their village and elected their own leaders to protest the government’s confiscation of land. There was ‘Charter ’08’, the tract on democracy by the Nobelist and martyred dissident Liu Xiaobo. But the momentum of development made it possible for both the government bureaucracy and regular people to accept suppression – as long as they personally were getting richer.

When people no longer expect better things of the future, the inevitable emergence of dissident ideas must be repressed. Importantly, a slowdown in the economy also means that fewer government bureaucrats can be fed and watered at the levels they expect. They, too – mostly local government officials – must be brought to heel, while key bureaucracies, such as the People’s Liberation Army, are well taken care of. 

Mandate of heaven

A recent column by the British economist and Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf argues that this economic and political reality merely represents a reversion to China’s long history of imperial control. In ‘The future of “communist capitalism” in China’, published on 12 March, Wolf made the argument that China is strengthening a stable imperial system that relies on many centuries of experience. ‘It is also possible to argue’, writes Wolf, ‘that Xi’s reassertion of party control is perfectly rational. The alternative of moving toward an independent legal system, with entrenched property rights, and a more democratic political system was far too risky. In a country of China’s size and level of development, it could have created chaos.’

Wolf also recommends China’s World View, the latest book by the Chinese scholar David Li Daokui. Li is resident at the pre-eminent CCP-overseen university Tsinghua, and thus has reason to promote the view that China is not ready for democracy. Like Li, Wolf (with remarkable political tone-deafness) reports that the CCP is essentially a benevolent national party with a lot on its plate, including battling corruption and improving the environment. Fear not, they are achieving much, and economic development and social welfare remain important items on the agenda.

It is natural for captive academics such as Li to embrace this view of present-day governance as the inheritor of the paternalistic imperial system. After all, royal dynasties controlled the heart of modern-day China for about 2,200 years and provided many of the templates for the modern state. Communism, by contrast, is a European idea and surely must not have deep roots in China. It seems that the imperial system had its own safety valve in the hazy ‘mandate of heaven’, which stands as a corrective to the potential for tyranny; the people can always rise up.

But imperial China also relied on a social classification system to maintain control, reinforced by a Confucianist ethic that inculcated the idea that social classes were part of the natural order. Dynasties ruled in very different times; the Qing fell in 1911, well before social media and smartphones enabled people to exchange political ideas. There may have been a mandate of heaven, but when people tried to exercise it, millions died. The Qing’s repression of the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-19th century, one of the bloodiest wars anywhere, at any time, is a case in point. The possibility of uprisings is precisely why the CCP makes sure people cannot join together and develop ideas.

Big Brother Russia

Unlike the royal houses of the past, the CCP promised social mobility for peasants, women and other downtrodden groups. The CCP modelled the government it managed to take over in 1949 (by astonishing luck) on the Soviet Socialist Republics. China copied wholesale the Soviet economic model and Soviet ideology. More than 10,000 Soviet advisers arrived in China to assist with ‘building the country’, and the squat buildings those advisers designed, with thick walls and small windows to protect against Russian winters, as well as aspirational spires, still line Beijing’s broad avenues.

The official admiration for ‘Big Brother’ Russia ended in the 1950s, when the CCP under Mao decided the USSR was too soft. Khrushchev’s 1956 ‘secret speech’ criticising Stalin began a rift that was complete by 1960. The 1956 Hungarian Uprising reinforced Mao’s view and led directly to repressive campaigns in the late 1950s.

In present-day China, social organisation is the biggest threat to the Party. As in Leninist Russia – and not imperial China – Chinese law forbids the establishment of church congregations, football leagues or book clubs that are not overseen by the CCP. Any performance of music or theatre must receive pre-approval. Foreigners are mostly left alone, but, should a Chinese person turn up at an unapproved Sunday service, they would be subject to arrest.

As in the USSR, the civil government is a shadow, replicating CCP positions and existing largely to support the fiction that the CCP is one political party among many. Other political parties exist under the aegis of the CCP and play a role designed to present the image of openness.

Marx or Confucius

In a foggy, somewhat nostalgic attempt to assume the historical authority of empire, Xi Jinping, when he took CCP leadership in 2012, stage-managed an exhibition at the Museum of Chinese History on Tiananmen Square in Beijing that recast the history of the CCP as a native Chinese construct that owes more to Confucius than to Marx. The exhibition promoted the idea that Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek, who fled with his top brass to Taiwan upon losing China’s civil war, was merely misguided and that the mainland’s relationship with Taiwan is one of tragically broken brotherhood rather than antagonism.

The attempt to portray communism as a native ideology responded in part to the 1990 collapse of the USSR, an event whose fear value had been greatly reinforced by the fact that Gorbachev was visiting Beijing during the 1989 Tiananmen protests that nearly toppled the government. The top CCP leaders told themselves – and the Chinese people – that ending the CCP monopoly on governance would set free a wave of terrifying chaos.

Setting aside the purported benevolence of the imperial system, no one should mistake the CCP for anything but a communist party seeking totalitarian control. Wolf and Li’s argument that China actually achieves better social outcomes when the CCP is in control – as the inheritor of China’s imperial past – is the self-serving argument of autocrats everywhere: we know what’s better for you. Indeed, looking at the modern landscape of mob justice dispensed to tyrants globally, democracy would be terrifying to China’s leaders.

Open and shut

When Deng Xiaoping walked out of jail and into the Zhongnanhai ruling compound in 1977, he took over a country that was medieval in its standard of living. By 1979 he could barely scrape together enough money to send a delegation overseas. He knew that the economy needed to open to foreign trade. He also knew that he must negotiate such an opening without allowing too many dangerous foreign ideas to enter. They landed on the idea of creating a physical barrier between the great majority of the Chinese people and the foreign-facing factories that would be required. The ‘reform and opening’ metastasised and led to vast social changes, but it was always intended to be temporary, like an airlock on a spacecraft that lets a few astronauts out to repair the ship but is soon closed again to ensure that the crew remains hermetically sealed off from the cold universe outside.

But nearly a half century of opening to the world created expectations among the Chinese people. Chief among them is that assets matter. The CCP has long kept in place a rural-urban apartheid system designed in part to respond to economic downturn by forcing the huge rural workforce back to the farm to live off the land. By this logic, assets do not matter. Only in the last few years has the CCP woken up to the emergence of a monied middle class that cares about property values. Those property values cannot be sustained under the current system of economic governance. But these people can be demanding. The only possible response is repression.

No one really knows what will happen politically in China. What seems most likely, though, is that the CCP will remain in power for another decade. Incumbency is a powerful strut to power and so the current generation of incumbents must wither and die before change can occur.

But it is surprising that the entitled and monied classes that emerged in coastal cities during the ‘opening and reform’ period have tolerated lockdowns, repression and, in many cases, confiscation of assets. China may well have crossed a bridge where a continued crackdown by the CCP will not only fail to forestall chaos but might become the cause of it.

Anne Stevenson-Yang is the author of Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy (Bui Jones, 2024).