Fifty years ago this spring, Mao Zedong launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: a deliberately calculated upheaval to secure his power as supreme leader of the Chinese communist revolution. His primary target was the communist party itself: the party-state which he himself had played such a central role in establishing from years before taking power in 1949. Wielding the zealous youth movement of the red guards and a complete personal control of the PLA through subordinates such as Marshal Lin Biao, Mao managed in short order to all but wipe out this vast and well-organized apparatus, unleashing a nationwide reign of chaos and anarchy that ultimately left in its wake a trail of death and persecution from which Chinese society has arguably never fully recovered.
A half-century later, there are quiet but unmistakable signs that the CPC is about to undergo another internal self-purgation - nowhere near as costly or violent, but with potentially far-reaching consequences nonetheless for both state and society at large. Its architect, ironically enough, is a man who experienced the ordeal of Mao's Cultural Revolution firsthand as a teenager: president and party secretary Xi Jinping.
Mr. Xi stands at a crossroads in his expected decade-long tenure as China's paramount leader that began in late 2012 to early 2013. He has amassed enormous personal power widely reckoned as exceeding that of any Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping, but in his own estimation, he's only gotten warmed up so far. This year and next - when the nineteenth party congress will afford him opportunity to appoint his own loyalists to key positions in the central and regional governments - he will find out whether the supreme authority he seems to hold in theory actually translates into effective governance in practice, i.e. if it's more than puffs of hot air.
He is clearly in a crisis, if even a relatively slow-rolling one: especially since China's economic miracle seemed to really hit the rocks last summer, his position at the top has become chillingly isolated. His signature anticorruption campaign has alienated much of the bureaucracy that Beijing relies on to run its vast empire on a day-to-day basis: it has succeeded in striking fear into the officialdom, but now the trillion-dollar question has become, Will the gain of a less blatantly corrupt state apparatus be nullified by the paralysis, demoralization, and bitterness among party elites that accompanies it?
Post-Tiananmen China, after all, has fundamentally been built upon a foundation of graft, patronage, and rent-seeking by the communist ruling caste and its crony elements in the emergent private sector. For two decades, this arrangement of state capitalism, fusing as it did commercial and governmental interests as tightly as possible, was sacrosanct as far as Beijing was concerned: it was just the formula best suited to rapid economic growth and monopolization of political power, with each of the two mutually reinforcing the other, and creating enough general prosperity along the way to satisfy the masses with ever-bigger scraps and crumbs from the extravagant table of the 1 percent (or 0.1 percent). For these big beneficiaries of the gilded era, the sword of Damocles which ever hung over their heads was the prospect of popular regime change and democratization, for that would end their big feast of luxury which they paid for largely through the expropriation of productive value from the general population; what they never could have feared, however, was that their own leadership would somehow upset the status quo by undermining the whole premise of the rentier-state system in the name of internal socialist purification.
Yet Xi Jinping has, in effect, now passed the point of no return in this radical new direction, so far as the party elite sees it; had he limited his graft-busting crusade to the acceptable goals of purging rivals and scoring populist points with the media and citizenry, they wouldn't have been unduly disturbed; even had he been far more intensive and extensive in the breadth and scope of such efforts, the ruling caste would merely have scrambled to curry his personal favor to make sure they were in the "in" crowd of a much reduced plutocratic clique.
But incredibly, there seems to be at least a shred of authenticity to Xi's professed adherence to socialism and even Marxism - and this is what has shaken the post-Tiananmen CPC to its core, producing a gathering internal party crisis not seen in decades.
Much as Chinese reformers have been aghast at Mr. Xi's apparent re-embrace of communist orthodoxy, in practical terms it is the party's predominant status-quo element which has been even more petrified by it: it amounts to nothing less than a declaration of war on the post-Tiananmen party-state's de facto modus operandi.
As late as 2014, it would appear that the party's powerful vested interests - comfortably linked to the former regimes of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao - were still hopeful that Xi and his graft czar Wang Qishan weren't actually serious about attempting a full-blown heart transplant on the party-state. Surely, they were thinking, they couldn't be that crazy?
As of 2015, however, they could no longer have any illusions that it was still "business as usual" as they had grown accustomed to. By then, Xi was consolidating his personal control of the state security services and military, just as the anticorruption campaign, far from easing, instead intensified. It was obvious now that Xi wanted a thorough reboot of the entire leadership and administrative structure which had served China so well since the early 1990s: namely, he no longer wanted a collective leadership and rule by consensus in which he was first among equals; rather, he wanted to establish a degree and style of top-down rule flowing from one man that would take Beijing back to the pre-Tiananmen era.
This was simply crossing the line: Xi was basically putting his foot down and telling party apparatchiks that they'd better start thinking and acting like communists for a change. And if that meant they had to toe his personal line as a mini-helmsman in the pedigree of Mao himself, so be it. Party elites could not have helped but feel a deep sense of betrayal and disgust: they hadn't exactly pursued their careers with the expectation that their primary reward would be the mushy satisfaction of building a classless society.
While it was evident even in 2013 that Xi intended such a comprehensive overhaul, by 2015 he was clearly running out of patience. The dramatic meltdown of China's stock market in July and August, along with the unexpected devaluation of the yuan, brought into sharp relief the difficulty of transitioning the economy from manufacturing and heavy industry to services and consumption: it became clear that the urgently needed restructuring of the state enterprise sector had barely even begun, and that this was as ever a result of the central government's lack of muscle in enforcing its edicts at the provincial and local levels. But another big shift had clearly occurred: China's problems were now reverberating around the world via the financial markets, and just about everyone now realized that the fate of its $10 trillion economy would weigh heavily on their own fortunes. Unsurprisingly, with discontent at its own political and economic elite and a general sense of both physical and economic insecurity rising dramatically, much of the rich world now looked at Xi Jinping with dark undertones, as a broad narrative that China was hurtling towards an abyss because a committed Maoist who hated markets was now calling the shots greatly exacerbated the pessimism over its future prospects, which increasingly bordered on sheer doom and gloom.
Xi was infuriated by this. In his own view, he had always been clear about his commitment to retooling the Chinese economy and correcting the deep societal imbalances that had accumulated in the generation since Tiananmen; now, however, the chronic foot-dragging by the party-state's own vested and sectional interests was not merely threatening to snuff out this transition stillborn, but the very obstructionists appeared keen to capitalize on such a fiasco both to erode his authority and, even more seriously, destroy his credibility before an anxiously watching global community. By the end of summer 2015, judging by leaked revelations in state media - not all of which he personally approved of - Xi found himself virtually at war with the CPC bureaucracy.
That leads us to the current predicament. As of spring 2016, Mr. Xi finds himself in a spot that Mao himself would have recognized: unrivaled power at the apex of the giant party-state apparatus, yet a frustrating gap between desired versus actual control of policy implementation on an immediate everyday level; and much worse, a yawning chasm between the bureaucratic-inertial status quo and the perceived urgent shift that must be undertaken to maintain the CPC's long-term hold on power.
A half century ago, in the spring of 1966, Mao saw that China's recovery from the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) had been a material boon but was thereby becoming a major threat to the revolutionary character of the new society; he would rather push the Chinese people back into starvation than see them settle into a global socialist struggle fatigue on account of full bellies. It so happened, of course, that he also badly wanted renewed upheaval for his own interests: a flat and normal China was patently incompatible with his political nature and ambition, whereas a China that lurched from one existential crisis to another was, as ever, one that could only prevail under his wartime guidance.
Today, Xi Jinping's dilemma has a distinct "Mao lite" undertone to it. In stark contrast to the CPC as a whole which falls under his authority, Xi seems to genuinely believe that the future lies not in diverging even further from the Maoist founding principles of the party-state, but in actively re-embracing and retooling what can still be salvaged of that very legacy. Those who are still inclined to dismiss his professed desire to retrench Chinese communist political culture as a clumsy propaganda ploy now do so only at their own peril: what Xi aims for is nothing less than a massive redistribution of wealth from the corrupt party and party-linked elites to the broader population, and whatever technicalities of policy he ends up employing to achieve this, his basic strategy of enlisting mass support against the vested interests of the party-state apparatus and the party elite is such an obvious one that we can dub it as a kind of "Cultural Revolution lite" before it's even launched.
None of this is to suggest that the horror shows of the late 1960s are coming back to China in any meaningful way, shape, or form. Nor does it open any possibility that Xi can exceed his two-term limit as paramount leader. What it means, however, is that we have crossed another inflection point in modern Chinese history no less significant than that of 1949 or 1978: namely, that China stands on the cusp of a new wave of majoritarian-authoritarianism that seeks to redress the blatant minoritarianism of the go-go reform and opening era. Once more, it is the pure cadre of an incorruptible central leadership that will pose as the champions of popular will over and against the myriad structures of local and regional despotisms. Once more, the corruption of privileged individuals within the system will be used to justify more draconian control of all individuals, not less. And once more, the party will create and coordinate purportedly popular organizations and associations outside the formal power vertical of the state apparatus to squeeze out what space remains for grassroots or autonomous activity - that is, the post-Mao civil society.
Cultural Revolution lite will, like its antecedent, have the principal goal of promoting a communist identity as the essence of the "New China", but with a key augmentation in its arsenal to achieve it: it will seek to present the totality of modern Chinese history as one of such inevitability that even the costliest policy blunders and absurdest ideological contradictions since 1949 don't tarnish the party's good name but paradoxically bolster it even more. Such unabashed propaganda and spin-doctoring, which to date has relied primarily on outright censorship of incorrect views and inconvenient facts, will eventually morph into more nuanced defenses of "necessary evils" and more fervent and even more sophisticated attacks on "Western hypocrisy" - the latter which promises to be the easier the deeper the West plunges into its own identity crisis.
At the end of the day, even Xi Jinping appears to concede that China won't be a one-party communist dictatorship forever: even he envisions a "free" society at the PRC's centennial in 2049. But it will be a free and open society that owns the entirety of its checkered past, not just the parts that the black-and-white, absolute good-versus-absolute evil Judeo-Christian or "universal values" worldview deem acceptable. Indeed, that will be the ultimate triumph of communism in its Chinese incarnation: that communism didn't change China, but that China changed communism.
The battle lines have been drawn.
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