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On Saturday, the world watched one of the most extraordinary events in the gruesome history of purges in the People's Republic of China. Ruler Xi Jinping had his immediate predecessor, Hu Jintao, frogmarched from the 20th National Congress in Beijing. The forcible removal was timed to obtain maximum publicity.
The audacious move was "brutal and chilling," as Charles Burton of the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute told Newsweek, but it was not, as many have said, a show of strength. On the contrary, Hu's removal betrayed Xi's sense of insecurity and looks like a sign of weakness.
By Saturday, the last day of the Congress, it was clear that Xi had achieved complete dominance of the Party. His adversaries, like Premier Li Keqiang, had not been elected to the Central Committee and were thus not eligible to remain in high office.
Xi also knew on Saturday that during the following day at the First Plenum of the 20th Congress, he would secure a precedent-breaking third term as Communist Party general secretary and his loyalists would take all of the remaining six seats on the Politburo Standing Committee, China's highest decision-making body.
His control of the Party was virtually complete. Yet Xi chose to humiliate Hu with the forcible removal—by one of Xi's bodyguards, no less—after the international press had been admitted to the session, presumably to witness the event.
Why would Xi, a master of Chinese politics, engage in what looked like a completely unnecessary and gratuitous act? The best guess is Xi was likely concerned—rightly—that Hu and what remained of Hu's Communist Youth League faction in the Party could become a rallying point for growing disaffection with his policies.
After all, Xi's ideological domestic policies are resulting in simultaneous disasters. China is now afflicted by a debt crisis, plunging property prices, a stumbling economy, a falling currency, worsening food shortages, a deteriorating environment, and fast-spreading disease. Due in large measure to the events at the National Congress and First Plenum, money is fleeing the country.
At the same time, Xi's belligerent external policies are resulting in a loss of support around the world.
So nothing is going right, from a governance point of view, for the "all-powerful" Xi. No wonder he undoubtedly believes he must not only dominate adversaries, but also make sure they can never reemerge.
Eventually, bad policies catch up to leaders like Xi Jinping. That means Steve Tsang of the SOAS China Institute is only partially correct. "The future is bright for Xi Jinping and dark for everybody else," the highly regarded British scholar said to Time this fall, expressing a commonly held view.
Tsang is correct only in the short term because the Chinese supremo will pay a steep price for his audacious treatment of Hu. "Xi is playing a dangerous game by flouting deeply held Chinese cultural norms of respect for seniors," says Burton, who served as a senior Canadian diplomat in Beijing. "In ancient times, the emperor of a defeated dynasty was allowed to live out his life in dignity, writing the history of his ancestral rule. By overturning the norms of Chinese filial piety, Mr. Xi may have gone a step too far."
Strongmen always overstep. And a strongman, unfortunately, is inherent in the Communist Party's vicious system.
Mao Zedong, the founder of the People's Republic, turned what was supposed to be a regime run by committee into one run by one man. Mao then almost destroyed the Communist Party with harebrained campaigns like the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, regularized politics by developing norms, guidelines, understandings, and rules. Foreign observers gushed over the rise of what they called a "meritocratic" system. Especially in the first decade of this century, China watchers, even regime critics, marveled at the transformation—institutionalization—of the Communist Party, saying it had solved the problem of succession, the one weakness of all hard-line systems.
But Xi Jinping, in a Mao-like grab for power, has reversed the transformation, deinstitutionalizing the Party by seizing power from everyone else and then ignoring every norm, guideline, understanding, and rule.
Mao has been called an aberration, but he was not. China has been ruled by strongmen at both the beginning of the Chinese Communist period and now.
And the People's Republic has been ruled by a strongman during its middle period, too. The Party institutionalized politics because a strongman, Deng, demanded it. He along with elders picked Deng's successor, Jiang Zemin, and Jiang's successor, the now-disappeared Hu Jintao. In short, all the progress and all the reversal of progress in Communist China have been the result of strongmen exerting their will.
The Chinese Communist Party is not capable of reform. One-man rule is inherent in a system that idealizes struggle and dominance.
Xi Jinping is known for his "you-die-I-live" mentality. Today, it is Hu Jintao who has been removed. Next time, it could be Xi who is the one led away. Chinese Communist Party politics, it appears, have not really changed since the Maoist days.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China. Follow him on Twitter: @GordonGChang.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
