Unfortunately, just as these developments have been censored in mainland Chinese media, there has also been typically little critical assessment of the validity of the claims in the Western and overseas Chinese media - not surprising, given that the Western media is effectively a propaganda mill in its own right (especially judging by how the conservative and liberal outlets constantly accuse each other - very compellingly - of deliberate distortion and omission to promote their partisan agendas), and the overseas Chinese media has always been closely associated with liberal and dissident sympathies, which tend to view anything communist party-related as suspect and illegitimate.
However, it's absolutely crucial to dissect the claims of these purported loyal party dissenters that the cracks which have appeared in the Chinese edifice over the last year are Xi's fault; while it's true that as supreme leader, Xi bears ultimate responsibility for whatever happens in China, the crux of the demands for his resignation goes much further to suggest that he himself has personally caused the present predicaments. The fundamental truth or falsehood of this charge should be the analytical focus of anyone truly concerned with China's future.
The two letters contain similar though not identical lists of accusations. Both are premised on alarm over Xi's increasingly authoritarian bent. On this point, there's little to debate: Xi is a dictator more in the lineage of Mao than Jiang, Hu, and even Deng.
The thing is, it's clearly not the authoritarianism itself that the authors are primarily concerned with: it's the actual societal and economic problems that have intensified in recent months. Xi's personality cult and usurpation of national policy and economic management didn't start in 2015 or 2016: where were these party dissenters when the first danger signs were clearly visible in 2013, when it would've been a whole lot easier to stop him in his tracks (i.e. before he consolidated control of the military and security apparatus)?
The authors are basically arguing - whether they realize it or not - that things were basically fine in both the party and China as a whole until Xi came along and screwed it up from 2013 to the present.
Valid criticisms of Xi notwithstanding, that's a gross oversimplification at best, a dangerous distortion at worst - not least for its purveyors.
In all likelihood, these party opposition figures have struck out only now precisely because they didn't smell an opportunity to undermine Xi before - and in this, they've likely badly miscalculated.
Regarding the most central crisis of China's economic slowdown, it was Xi himself who embraced it as the "new normal", and it seems that the party ranks grudgingly accepted it and gave him the benefit of the doubt - until last summer's stock market crash and surprise yuan devaluation sent the economy into a perceived tailspin.
Is Xi to blame for the stock market debacle? Being a business simpleton, it's clear he encouraged ordinary Chinese to invest in the market mainly to boost economic confidence, and not for sound commercial reasons. He hoped this would provide both funding and a positive environment for many large SOEs to restructure and downsize - wishful thinking, it turns out, but hardly malignant intent. When the market crashed, he demanded an ill-advised rescue effort against the basic laws of supply and demand: this indeed ended up causing more harm to investors and government credibility than the crash itself could have, but in his own mind it was to protect the masses of mom-and-pop small investors from the corrupt elite of speculators in both the public and private sectors who were in effect pocketing even more national savings for themselves.
What of the currency, which has lately rallied after apparently being threatened with a massive collapse? Here, it's rather interesting that Xi and co. are the very ones doing what the world - and specifically the West and the US - desperately want them to do: keep the yuan strong, even artificially so against the market, at great short-term monetary and domestic economic cost. On the contrary, it's Mr. Xi's enemies - the vested interests of export-reliant SOEs - who secretly (or not so secretly) want a cheaper yuan for both more easy money to roll over their massive debts and also to dump even more excess capacity abroad - to the kicks and screams of the same Western countries that bash Xi for keeping Chinese economic freedom on a leash.
Has Xi's personal dictatorship worsened the prospects for much-needed reform of the SOEs, including the closing of the infamous "zombie" companies in the bloated heavy industrial sectors? Interestingly, the first open letter is rather blunt that it opposes such reforms:
Supply side reforms and production capacity policies have resulted in large numbers of layoffs at state-owned firms; and the closing of private firms have also led to many layoffs.But even apart from this, some would argue just the opposite: if not for Xi's persistent heavy-handedness against the powerful vested interests which control these enterprises - including silencing any internal party dissent with severe disciplines - they'd have even less motivation to actually start market-oriented reforms they've been putting off for years. Granted, we'll need at least a quarter or two to see if the SOE restructuring actually takes off - if the zombies are actually killed, their debts resolved and redundant workers transitioned. However, it's important to note that all Western and pro-Western commentary on this process is inherently ideologically skewed - anything short of all-out privatization of defunct state entities is considered heresy in Western capitalism (despite the contention one could make that much of the Western "free market" is even more beset by regulation, oligopoly and cronyism than China). Yet China has learned since the 1990s that it's not private or public ownership that counts: it's competition (or lack thereof).
In that light, the most valid criticism against Xi on the SOE reform front is that he's deliberately consolidating party and state control of crucial economic sectors into fewer and bigger "national champions" immune to autonomous private influence; this could in fact represent a major setback for China's long-term dynamism, but the gamble Xi and his supporters seem to be making is that many such sectors - energy, finance, transportation, communications, healthcare, etc. - are primarily "public services" anyway, and their focus should be on stability and predictability rather than profit. More to the point at present, though, China's overcapacity problem since the post-financial crisis stimulus has clearly been caused by too much competition between too many largely disjointed and mutually redundant enterprises scattered across its provinces and regions - not too little competition among too few behemoths. You might pick on Xi for being brutally opportunistic - using sound short-term economic rationale to bolster long-term centralized political power - but it's hard to not think that his most determined internal party opposition, i.e. the SOEs and provincial governments, are more motivated by the desire to preserve their own fiefdoms than any alleged commitment to democracy (internal party that is, never mind popular sovereignty). Political fragmentation is no more equivalent to democracy per se than political centralization is to dictatorship: Xi's party enemies relish the "good old days" (pre-2013) ostensibly because they were more open and enlightened; more practically because their authority was less personally accountable from either top or bottom.
Other than blame for the economic slowdown and the lack of reforms - which we have now thoroughly addressed - the other charges of failure against Xi in the open letters are comparatively insubstantial if not purely opportunistic.
An aggressive foreign policy? Xi has merely harnessed an entire (post-Tiananmen) generation of increasingly strident nationalism that no party leader with any political ambition above village magistrate could possibly question. More relevantly, global realities have simply changed - a lot. China can't hide its strength anymore - not when the very industries Xi is trying to rein in from vested interests are triggering 300+ percent tariffs on Chinese exports and blackening Beijing's image from Brussels to Tokyo, from Delhi to Sao Paulo, from Washington to Canberra.
Demoralization of the military? Xi has merely exposed more completely what had long been widely suspected and even known: that the PLA is a cesspool of corruption and rent-seeking utterly incapable of the vital missions the party has long made its mandate - and established as key elements of the legitimacy of its own unelected power.
Is this piece an apologia for Mr. Xi's regime and all its actions? It can't help but come off as such to his most determined critics. But let's set the record straight: China's censorship doesn't confer automatic solidity to the claims it doesn't like. Upon further examination, these stirrings of internal party dissent are deeply, even fundamentally flawed. They're not useless or meaningless - in fact, it's exactly the exposure Xi and his henchmen need to stay on top of the party's inner workings and possible intrigues - but let's not be so naive to simply brush off its seemingly disproportionate crackdown as weakness on the regime's part.
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