★★★★☆
The Political Thought of Xi Jinping by Steve Tsang, Olivia Cheung
Attempt of critically systematising XJP’s speeches and policy documents to explain the state ideology enforced upon the population of PRC. The ideology oddly named “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” is not coherent, full of contradictions and lies. This attempt on translating the obscure party speak into clear English offer any reader an overview of the dogmas used by the ruling class of China.
bookshelves: china, e-books, politics
294 pages Published December 7, 2023 by Oxford University Press ISBN 9780197689370 (ISBN10: 019768937X)
Kindle Highlights
At their present course, by 2040, China’s combined current and historical emissions will produce a cumulative carbon footprint larger than that of the United States over the preceding 190 years of industrial development.
— location: 406 ^ref-55747
Mao’s ideological position on left and right was clear. His definition of ‘left’ extended to those who stood on the side of revolutionary progress, as opposed to conservative reactionaries of the right who defended the status quo.
— location: 1040 ^ref-55975
In politics, I define Xi’s move to the Leninist left as the reassertion of the centrality of the party over everything, the concentration of Xi’s personal political control within the party, and the reification of ideology itself as a disciplinary mechanism to reinforce party control.
— location: 1093 ^ref-43473
Ernst Haas’s general definition of nationalism as an ideology that makes “assertions about the nation’s claim to historical uniqueness, to the territory that the nation-state ought to occupy, and to the kinds of relations that should prevail between one’s nation and others”.
— location: 1126 ^ref-59968
Deng now articulated Mao’s theory of the ‘three worlds’: the first comprising the two superpowers, whose struggle for global hegemony meant exploiting the rest of the world; the second world comprising the developed countries, who were fracturing under the oppression of their larger ‘allies’; and the third world comprising the developing countries united in their struggle against hegemony, colonialism, and imperialism. This formulation liberated China on a number of ideological fronts: first, it kept the Soviet Union as its principal foreign policy contradiction until its collapse in 1991; second, it was able to ignore a more distant America as an ideological, strategic, or political threat until the bloodshed on Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the beginnings of rapprochement with Moscow during the 1990s; and third, it enabled China to inhabit an ideological intermediate zone, hazily pledging to “warmly endorse and firmly support all just propositions made by third world countries”
— location: 1589 ^ref-14865
As Deng told the UN secretary-general in 1982: The primary task we have set as the initial goal for the realization of modernization is to create comparative prosperity by the end of this century… Within the ensuing 30 to 50 years, we shall approach the level of developed countries… Therefore, we cherish the hope for a peaceful international environment. Should war break out, our plan would be thwarted… At present, our domestic situation is fairly good. The Chinese people are wholeheartedly concentrating on economic development. Our foreign policy coincides with this magnificent goal.
— location: 1677 ^ref-48167
Deng’s strategy was precisely that: a tactical means to a strategic end that he had already articulated in his revised worldview of 1979, namely to build a strong state on the back of a strong economy without generating any unnecessary outside opposition by contesting the United States for regional or global leadership.
— location: 1701 ^ref-10119
Jiang formally elevated Deng Xiaoping’s Theory of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ to co-equal status with Mao Zedong Thought, forming a new trinitarian CCP orthodoxy of ‘Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory.’
— location: 1748 ^ref-3711
Beijing also saw the United States, Japan, and the collective West as essential sources of technology, investment, and markets to drive up Chinese living standards, modernize its economy, and build a powerful Chinese state: hence the sublimation of other Chinese strategic and political interests to this overriding domestic economic objective.
— location: 1908 ^ref-52128
This brings us back to a core question underlying this book: is ideology a precursor to policy change, a post-facto rationalization for changes already taken for more pragmatic reasons, or, as I argue, an untidy combination of both?
— location: 2364 ^ref-2146
These new ideological priorities have been reflected in: • a new expectation of political loyalty towards the party centre (most particularly, absolute loyalty to Xi himself), radically reducing the space for internal political and policy dissent, and purging any perceived political opponents; • empowerment of the party centre to deliberate on and execute policy (particularly economic policy), thereby diminishing the role of the more technocratic State Council; • the internal ‘cleansing’ of Xi’s Leninist party through a comprehensive anti-corruption campaign after 2013; • a wider political cleansing of the party through a ‘rectification campaign’ launched in 2020 across the party’s entire political and legal affairs apparatus; • a new agenda on the ‘securitization’ of everything, including reasserting party control over the PLA, relocating the People’s Armed Police from the organizational umbrella of the State Council to the party itself, and in the control and direction of cyber security and party surveillance systems; • the renewed centrality of the party to all domains of public policy and private life, including its institutional relationships with the media, universities, non-governmental organizations, arts and culture, as well as the institutions of religious governance; • and finally, instilling the paramount importance of ideological discipline for party members, as reflected in a new series of regulations and education campaigns aimed at resuscitating the CCP’s Marxist-Leninist core and enlivening a new community of secular faith around it.
— location: 2409 ^ref-17301
… hierarchy. The most obvious of these changes has been Xi’s chairmanship of a growing number of CCP Central Committee ‘Leading Groups’ to coordinate policy, rather than the administrative agencies of the Chinese state. While Hu Jintao headed four of these groups between 2002 and 2012, by 2021 Xi was chairing at least eight, spanning the breadth of all policy development across the Chinese system.
— location: 2427 ^ref-52278
Furthermore, Xi Jinping has the singular distinction of joining Mao Zedong alone in carrying the loftiest title of all—‘sixiang’, meaning ‘thought’—to describe the overall content of his ideological contribution. The ‘theories’ and ‘outlooks’ of Deng, Jiang, and Hu do not carry this title.
— location: 2499 ^ref-58653
The biggest institutional manifestation of these changes has been the absorption of the preexisting ‘National Academy of Governance’ into the Central Party School with the explicit objective of enhancing the political and ideological rigour of all senior party, state, and SOE cadres.36 The preexisting ‘bi-directional entrance’ and ‘cross-appointment system’, which had enabled the movement of staff between party and state institutions as well as state-owned enterprises,
— location: 2550 ^ref-16133
parallel series of ‘party education campaigns’ (dangde zhuanti jiaoyu huodong). These campaigns went by several different names: the ‘mass line’ (qunzhong luxian), the ‘three stricts and three earnests’ (sanyan sanshi), and the even more abstruse ‘two studies, one action’ (liangxue yizuo).
— location: 2631 ^ref-1733
These multiple new institutions, laws, and regulations on internet governance came together in China’s ‘social credit system’ (shehui xinyong tixi) overseen by the CCP’s Central Commission on Comprehensively Deepening Reform. This program was designed to aggregate positive and negative points for every individual Chinese citizen based on their level of compliance with party expectations. While the system was first piloted in 2009, preceding Xi’s elevation to general secretary, it has since been strengthened, extended across the country, and connected to a vast national network of physical and electronic surveillance. According to a 2020 report by the Supreme People’s Court, its net effect was to blacklist some 15 million ‘dishonest’ people, barring them from such ‘luxuries’ as air travel, high-speed trains, and holidays until they discharged their obligation to society.
— location: 2742 ^ref-30233
Requirements for journalists to pass courses in Marxism in order to have their press cards reissued, first introduced in 2014, were sharpened in 2019 to test loyalty to Xi personally:91 One question in the test asks, “What is the first priority when it comes to news and public opinion work?” The correct answer is “The leadership of the CCP.” Another asks for Xi’s policy for the news media, with the expected answer: “Unity, stability, and positive propaganda.” A third asks what the internet is for. The correct answer is “a new space in which the party can build consensus.”
— location: 2784 ^ref-43662
Deng Xiaoping himself by citing Deng’s admonition that “if systems are sound, they can place restraints on the actions of bad people, and if they are unsound, they may hamper the efforts of good people or indeed, in certain cases, may push them in the wrong direction”.
— location: 2941 ^ref-33278
The ‘dual circulation economy’ has focussed on the reassertion of party and state control over the macro-economy, the re-emergence of industrial policy to drive national self-reliance, and the role of state-owned enterprises in ‘steering’ the economy in this new direction.
— location: 3708 ^ref-50263
Xi’s doctrine of ‘common prosperity’ is qualitatively different, focussing on greater party and state intervention to deliver a more equitable redistribution of income.
— location: 3710 ^ref-13825
The consistent tenor of his writings from the beginning of his period in office has reflected Xi’s deep fear of two factors: an increasingly corrupt relationship between the party and the private sector, and a rapidly expanding private sector writ large that increasingly exceeded the party’s capacity to control it politically.
— location: 3862 ^ref-33321
The most important of these is Xi’s exhortation to build the ‘real economy’ (shiti jingji) based on manufacturing, as opposed to a ‘fictitious economy’ (xuni jingji) based on real estate, financial services, and speculative activity. Xi argues that these sectors misallocate resources and contribute to systemic financial risk.
— location: 4054 ^ref-49631
Rather than seeing “markets” and “planning” as standing on opposite sides of a spectrum, the Xi administration has forged a system that seeks to render obsolete the previous conceptual taxonomy.
— location: 4159 ^ref-36197
The elevation of ‘China’s outstanding traditional culture’ also forms a core part of Xi’s doctrine of the ‘Four Self-Confidences’, or ‘sige zixin’, launched in 2016 as a direct response to the array of spiritual maladies he diagnosed
— location: 4550 ^ref-34401
Moreover, Xi refers to Chinese culture as not only ‘outstanding’ (youxiu), but also ‘superior’ (youshi), in a clear reference to the inferior cultures of the West.
— location: 4587 ^ref-50011
Not only had China saved Marxism-Leninism after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the Chinese nation under the leadership of Xi’s CCP had now become the historical vehicle for a new Marxist international mission driven by the unerring laws of scientific socialism. Indeed, these same laws were now propelling the Chinese nation in this direction, accelerated by Xi’s bold ideological and political leadership. This born-again Marxist Nationalism and internationalism had also been on full display in Xi’s 2018 address on Marx’s bicentenary,
— location: 4788 ^ref-6140
including: ‘China contributing its wisdom and solutions to the world’ (weishijie gongxian zhongguo zhihui zhongguo fangan); ‘the reform of the global governance’ (wanshan quanqiu zhili); ‘China upholding the global order’ (weihu guoji zhixu); and, as previously discussed, ‘China moving to the centre stage of the world’ (zhongguo zouxiang shijie wutai de zhongxin). A common nationalist thematic across all these formulations is that China’s time has arrived to deploy its newfound national power to restructure the international system to better suit Chinese interests and values.
— location: 5334 ^ref-2145
As Xi put it in 2022: “The contrast between Chinese order and Western chaos has become even sharper.”
— location: 5433 ^ref-63067
While interviewees ranged far and wide in their observations, their conclusions can be grouped into five broad categories: • China taking a more active role in the drafting and final content of Security Council resolutions in areas beyond its usual core interests; • China’s more aggressive posture in redefining traditional UN human rights norms; • China’s efforts to leverage a greater role in UN peacekeeping operations to reduce their operational scope to ‘intervene’ in the internal affairs of states; • China’s new approach to UN resourcing, candidatures, and influencing the operations of the UN Secretariat—including influencing the voting patterns of other member states; • Efforts to insert language into UN resolutions derived from Chinese multilateral concepts and institutions such as the Belt and Road Initiative, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and CCD, thereby enhancing their normative status.
— location: 5657 ^ref-7290
to China’s systematic campaign under Xi to strip the Security Council of its traditional capacity to interpret major domestic human rights violations as stepping stones to potential threats to international peace and security.
— location: 5768 ^ref-37078
The interest of China is not to have a reform of the Security Council, because that would automatically lead to a stronger position for its Asian rivals, for Japan and for India . . . and therefore, they work very hard on the issue.
— location: 6050 ^ref-65445
once Western delegations began to recognize the language of Xi Jinping Thought—such as “all this ‘win-win’ cooperation stuff”—they had to argue “very hard” to excise it from future resolutions:
— location: 6090 ^ref-6559
China has vigorously advanced a campaign of multilateral ‘revisionism’, seeking to achieve concrete change by undoing consensus positions that other states had long regarded as settled international norms.
— location: 6127 ^ref-502
This is evident in China’s prosecution of a new global agenda to redefine human rights and democracy with Chinese characteristics. It is most clearly seen in the China-Russia Joint Declaration of February 2022 which contains an extensive section formally redefining the critical terms of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’.
— location: 6139 ^ref-7252
politics. His political message to reformers and conservatives alike was that repudiating either period was tantamount to historical ‘nihilism’, which would be disastrous for the party’s long-term claim to political legitimacy. In doing so, Xi was deeply mindful of the repudiation of Stalin under Khrushchev which, in Xi’s view, resulted in the long-term ideological unravelling of the Soviet Union. As Xi himself stated bluntly just after his ascension: “To dismiss the history of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party, to dismiss Lenin and Stalin, and to dismiss everything else is to engage in historic nihilism, and it confuses our thoughts and undermines the party’s organization on all levels.”
— location: 6279 ^ref-36074
new, three-part periodization of China’s post-1949 history into the Mao-era of ‘socialist construction’ (1949–1976), the Deng-initiated era of ‘reform and opening’ (1978–2017), and Xi’s ‘new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics’ (since 2017). The party now categorizes these three periods into the eras when China respectively ‘stood up’, then ‘became prosperous’, and finally ‘became powerful’
— location: 6401 ^ref-25079
The 2021 version added to the 2017 language in two respects. The first was through Xi’s new left-leaning concept of ‘whole-of-process people’s democracy’ (quanguocheng renmin minzhu)20 distancing the party even further from previous encouragement of internal party ballots and local elections for NPC delegates (including non-party candidates) as trialled under Jiang and, more intensively, Hu.21 Under Xi, these have been systematically replaced with what party journals describe as ‘whole-of-process democracy’ through ill-defined, rolling consultations with the masses, excluding any form of direct or indirect election.
— location: 6489 ^ref-2848
at a deeper level, it represents Xi’s return to an earlier conception of a role for the party that permeated Mao’s writings: namely, that the party must once again become a direct revolutionary agent for engineering profound economic and social transformation. And it must do so through its own, continuing processes of ‘self-revolution’.23 This is different to the view of other CCP leaders since 1978, who held that the party was primarily a vehicle for maintaining Leninist political control while allowing economic and social policy reform to be prosecuted through the professional, technocratic apparatus of the Chinese state. Deng, Jiang, and Hu, for example, saw the party much less as a vehicle to bring about direct social and economic change. They saw real transformation as the product of the reform and opening policy processes, initiated by the party, executed by the state, and delivered largely by the private sector—designed primarily to unleash hitherto underdeveloped productive forces and deliver people from poverty.
— location: 6502 ^ref-38146
Whatever the periodization might be, across the entire length of his leadership of the party, Xi Jinping had maintained two signature thematics. The first was the return of Marxist-Leninist ideology as defined and interpreted by Xi himself, together with a new and assertive form of Chinese nationalism, as the central driving forces of contemporary Chinese politics, economics, and foreign policy. The second was the disciplined deployment of both these ideological narratives through an audacious new political strategy to achieve Xi’s overriding party and national objectives: namely, the realization of a strong, powerful, and prosperous China as the fulcrum of a new international order, to be achieved through the agency of an all-powerful Leninist party which, far from fading away, would endure as long as the Chinese nation itself survived. This political strategy included Xi’s preparedness to: overturn long-established ideological orthodoxies; destroy core party conventions on collective leadership, term limits, and the relationship between the party and the state; marginalize (and, where necessary, eliminate) real, potential, or imagined political opposition; and smash through what he perceived as the bureaucratic inertia and entropy inherent to the system.
— location: 6783 ^ref-17294
The Four Consciousnesses were the need to: uphold political integrity (i.e. zero corruption); think in big-picture terms (i.e. in ideological and strategic terms); uphold the leadership core (i.e. Xi Jinping); and keep in policy alignment with the CCP central leadership (i.e. Xi again).38 The Four Self-Confidences referred to confidence in: China’s chosen path (i.e. socialism); China’s chosen ideology (i.e. Marxism-Leninism and Xi Jinping Thought); China’s political system (i.e. CCP leadership); and Chinese culture (i.e. the party’s campaign surrounding its definition of China’s outstanding traditional culture). The Two Establishes/Two Safeguards refer to Xi’s core leadership and that of the party centre.39 Taken together, these three campaigns have regularly been referred to as ‘4-4-2’ (sisier), embodying the core principles of political orthodoxy under Xi.
— location: 6890 ^ref-49831
Unlike with Marxism, Xi has rarely written about Leninism (lieningzhuyi) or explicitly examined the term in depth. Nonetheless, Xi has littered the party’s theoretical journals with a formidable body of work on ‘party building’ (dangjian).24 The same applies to his contributions on ‘party discipline’, ‘party rectification’, ‘party history’, ‘party style’, and ‘party education’.25 These are apart from his rolling program of reforming the party’s organizational structure and rules, personnel recruitment, and ideological training. In Xi’s belief system, the absolute power of a Leninist party remains axiomatic to the survival, strength, and success of both the party and the nation.
— location: 7306 ^ref-14234
Xi’s deep and enduring suspicion of the private sector is likely to endure, despite his need of them. His varied attacks—on capitalism, private monopoly, the disorderly development of capital, the ‘fictitious economy’ of private finance, speculators in the housing market, and simple greed—are too long-standing, widespread, and systematic to permit any fundamental re-embrace of a private sector as untrammelled as in the past. To do so would be for Xi to embrace an alternate ideological universe, surrendering his deep addiction to ‘common prosperity’ and its potential reforms in income tax, company tax, inheritance tax, capital gains tax, and social welfare. More fundamentally, Xi also fears that a Chinese economy increasingly dominated by the private sector would effectively yield the ‘commanding heights’ to forces beyond the control of a Leninist vanguard party.
— location: 7604 ^ref-33343
Indeed, this is taken up afresh in the Economic Work Report delivered to the March 2024 National People’s Congress and its emphasis on unleashing these ‘new productive forces’ (xinzhishengchanli) to power the next phase of economic growth under the New Development Concept.62 Collectively, these represent increasingly statist economic policy frameworks. They are also consistent with Xi’s adherence to the Maoist dictum of ‘top-level design’ (dingceng sheji). They reflect a deep predisposition for economic solutions driven by macro-engineering, political intervention, and keeping control of the commanding heights of the economy, rather than the flexible allocation of resources by markets.
— location: 7620 ^ref-55959
Xi’s international economic model will also become increasingly mercantilist—irrespective of any official rhetoric about China’s continued embrace of globalization. This will be expressed through the ideological orthodoxy of Xi’s concept of ‘the dual circulation economy’; his belief in ‘national self-reliance’; and the minimization of economic vulnerability in an increasingly adverse national security environment. Whatever the United States does in the decade ahead, Xi’s China has long embarked on its own program of ‘de-risking’, and what I have described elsewhere as ‘decoupling with Chinese characteristics’.63 Xi is already well on the way to making Chinese supply chains as resilient as possible (particularly for energy, critical minerals, and advanced technologies) against an expected wave of trade, investment, and financial sanctions if he decides to take unilateral military action over Taiwan. This will include a range of measures seeking to ‘sanction-proof’ (to the greatest extent possible) the Chinese financial system, its currency, and the county’s rapidly expanding global digital commerce network.
— location: 7626 ^ref-23309
The 19th Party Congress narrative that ‘under Mao, China stood up; under Deng it became prosperous; and under Xi it had become powerful’ (zhanqilai, fuqilai, qiangqilai)
— location: 7692 ^ref-58339
And within the eclectic ethical universe of Xi’s modernized and Sinified Marxism, whose values, concepts, and language will increasingly be drawn from a cocktail of Communist, Confucian, and even international sources, the CCP’s future mission will not only be a nationalist cause driven forward by the forces of historical determinism. In the eyes of the party, it will also be seen as pursuing a righteous, just, and morally empowered internationalist cause both at home and abroad.
— location: 7732 ^ref-48987
Indeed, it is the sheer scale of the CCP’s success in bringing a fifth of humanity out of poverty, at least within the worldview of the party’s propaganda apparatus, that means that this great national experiment in Chinese political economy now commands unprecedented respect around the world. Absolute poverty had been ‘eliminated’ within China, and now the party’s wider definition and vision of social justice was available to the world at large, delivered through the alternative international system that China was now building.4 For Xi, this will be China’s ‘city on a hill’.
— location: 7743 ^ref-30840
Over the longer term, Xi’s project may well be to construct a new global Marxism, still grounded in classical Marxist-Leninist theory, but clothed in more acceptable and internationally appealing language, thereby reaching new target audiences—within China, as well as among the peoples of the Global South.
— location: 8184 ^ref-8040
Here the objective appears to be to entrench Marxism within the more enduring forms of Chinese cultural identity, thereby widening its popular appeal over time, well beyond the acquired ideological tastes of the party’s narrow apparatchik class. Indeed, by reducing the risk of Marxism collapsing in on itself because of its essentially foreign character, Xi is seeking to reduce the risk of the party’s own long-term decline and fall. Xi’s second objective seems to be to avoid complete cultural discontinuity with the past, which he sees as a universal problem of Western modernity, together with the implanting of contemporary Western cultural forms as the essential ingredients of an emerging global culture.
— location: 8290 ^ref-4228
He seems blissfully unaware that communism, despite its relatively short footprint in the long history of the Middle Kingdom, has proved to be a more violently iconoclastic force in destroying traditional Chinese culture than almost any other foreign ideology or external political assault down through the ages.
— location: 8294 ^ref-37860
with the implementation of China’s $1 trillion-plus loans program under the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s reluctance to renegotiate debt (and instead to confiscate assets) was also becoming a growing foreign policy liability.
— location: 8467 ^ref-54296
at a much more personal level, Xi simply would not tolerate any attempt to diminish either his or the party’s hold on political power, to which any form of electoral democracy represented an elemental and existential threat. In other words, Xi saw this possible democratic (and increasingly capitalist) future—which his predecessors had been leaving deliberately open for nearly a quarter of a century—and moved immediately to close that option down, fully mindful of the costs it would entail. For him, the cost-benefit analysis of preserving China’s Marxist-Leninist nationalist model was self-evident.
— location: 8500 ^ref-39885
Metadata
- Author: Kevin Rudd
- ASIN: B0D2FC4JHR
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D2FC4JHR
- Kindle link