Wang Qishan, powerful head of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), China's anti-corruption and internal party policing watchdog, is probably the most important man in China right now. Since early this year, he may well have steered the ship of the administration of Xi Jinping safely away from what could have been a fatal impact with an iceberg that, like the one which doomed the Titanic, packed a far deadlier punch lurking below the waterline than was visible above it.
The CCDI's internal polemic, "A single honest official is worth more than a thousand 'yes' men", remains visible on the heavily censored Chinese Internet six weeks after its initial publication, which shows that Wang isn't merely fully supportive of it, but may even have had a hand in its creation.
This leaves China watchers with two tantalizing possibilities: either Xi Jinping has lost control over Wang and the CCDI, who have now gotten away with what's widely seen as an attack on his authoritarian overreach, or in fact Xi himself thought his sycophants in the party and especially its propaganda apparatus took his cult of personality too far - and thus needed a public, though intraparty, rebuke.
Both scenarios point to some degree of party strife at very high levels of the central government - in other words, nothing less than an existential threat to the survival of communist rule. The second one, however, would draw a decidedly unconventional conclusion: that the CPC has already avoided the aforementioned collision and is heading into safety, notwithstanding all outward appearances to the contrary.
Without doubt, the regime's liberal critics have hoped for the first possibility: a spat between Wang and Xi. After all, the context of the CCDI essay was the ugly row over the fate of Ren Zhiqiang, the outspoken party property tycoon who was swiftly silenced for questioning Xi's public demand of absolute obedience by state media to the will of the party's central leadership.
As Ren is a close friend of Wang himself, his apparently lenient punishment in late February seemed to be a defeat not only for Xi's neo-Maoist hardliner henchmen, but none less than Xi himself. Speculation stirred in overseas Chinese and foreign media that some power struggle was going on in Zhongnanhai, whereby Wang had succeeded in wresting enough Politburo and Central Committee support from Xi to effectively thwart him.
But six weeks later, this whole theory seems to be little more than wishful thinking - thanks to none other than the very "open letter" of party dissenters in early March that initially seemed to shake Xi's supposedly fragile administration to its core.
In the wake of that letter (and a follow-up one not so publicized), there have been absolutely no signs of deepening party elite discord - specifically, virtually no indications that Wang Qishan (or Li Keqiang for that matter) are actually gaining power at Xi's expense. There has been no association whatsoever of Wang with the still-phantom party dissenters: instead, whatever discontent may have actually existed has been broadly and thoroughly muzzled.
While this could be a temporary truce or stalemate instead of any conclusive resolution at the apex of Chinese politics, the increasingly plausible scenario is the aforementioned second one: that Xi and Wang were never in fundamental disagreement, and have actually coordinated to outflank their real enemies - those elements within the party that want to set up Mr. Xi for total and exclusive blame for China's massive problems.
In this account, Xi never wanted undue focus on his own personality, even though he firmly believed that absolute obedience to his "core" leadership was becoming imperative to China's successful transition. He needed to get the message out to both the party and the nation's citizenry that he knew exactly what policies China had to adopt, and that he himself, at least, was doing the utmost to ensure that these policies would be carried out by the inertia-inclined bureaucracy.
Unsurprisingly, though, other powerful party interests saw an opportunity to increase Xi's vulnerability to criticism: they knew that, very conveniently, liberal elements within both party and society at large would foment a backlash against the perceived concentration of power in a single individual's hands; they thus had every motive to magnify the increasingly personalized aspects of Xi's rule, even as Xi's own focus was very much on the actual implementation of central policy.
This tension erupted into the open with Ren Zhiqiang. Tellingly, Ren's gripe with Xi's public demand of loyalty from state media outlets was focused not on Xi personally but on the party: his attack was leveled against the implication that the party and the people - not that Xi and the party - were one and inseparable. In the prevailing climate, however, this was exactly what Xi's true rivals - of which Ren is in fact no more so than Wang Qishan - wanted: an opportunity to further conflate the party as a whole with Xi's own person, thereby making Xi himself more directly susceptible to a wider pushback.
From Xi's perspective, it would have been sufficient to deal with Ren's apparent insubordination on social media in the standard censorship methodology: simply scrub his controversial remarks from further online discussion, or perhaps even use the opportunity to "clarify" that the true party line emanating from the top was not at all suggesting absolutely blind obedience; but from the vantage point of the true hardliners and vested party interests, it was imperative to demonstrate that in the new Xi Jinping era, not even a hint of dissent would be tolerated. This somewhat echoes the kind of opportunistic extremism that always tends to follow closely on the heels of strongmen: like Mao's Gang of Four, Hitler's SA stormtroopers, and numerous other historical instances, the jackals always get carried away and ruthlessly seize every chance they get to sharpen their teeth with fresh blood, so as to ingratiate themselves further with their master tiger, even at the risk of exposing their ultimate ambition to tear the latter to pieces himself.
And so, Ren was not merely censored, but completely banished from cyberspace by the highest central propaganda authorities - effectively a premeditated preemptive strike by the world's most sophisticated information suppression machine in what it hoped would be an opening salvo of Cultural Revolution lite.
With this, Xi's campaign to discipline the party with a deepening propaganda purge, which he had intended to pursue with a measured yet determined persistence, suddenly and dangerously slipped out of his own hands. The whole party and nation - indeed, the whole world - instantly and automatically assumed that such a severe crackdown on inconvenient expression could only have been his personal order; if anything could tarnish his national and international image and confirm suspicions of his megalomania, this was it. But even apart from this, internal party politics meant there was simply no way for him to disown the abrupt gag on Ren: it may have been excessive, but it was very much in the spirit of zero tolerance for resistance in the ranks that he had been pushing for months. It wasn't merely that the propaganda ministry headed by fellow Politburo Standing Committee member Liu Yunshan was so crucial to Xi's grip on power: far more significantly, this was just the kind of tough crackdown that, if backtracked on, would only unleash the floodgates of further criticism of the central party leadership that was now anathema. Thus was Xi caught between the proverbial "rock and a hard place": the rock of having his credibility undermined by the very ones acting in his name, and the hard place of loss of wider party cohesion in case he personally appeared to vacillate.
In hindsight, it was at this juncture of real crisis that he would have turned to his most trusted friend, confidant, and mentor of sorts: once more, at Xi's behest, Wang Qishan stepped into the thick of the gathering storm to defuse a rapidly ticking time bomb with the stakes now bigger than ever - not just for China, but for the world. Wang had to roll back the excess severity of the suppression to salvage Xi's reputation, yet simultaneously minimize the inevitable fallout from such an obvious countermeasure to what Xi himself had, in the world's eyes, supposedly done. This naturally would have left him no recourse except to the kind of indirect, historical anecdotal and polemical plea which the February 29 CCDI memo turned out to be.
In centering its thesis on the well-known story of a common man giving prescient warning to an atypically discreet emperor, the CCDI piece first legitimizes authoritarian rule as not at all inherently evil in and of itself: the implication being that such tremendous power has its own prior justification to have even been acquired to begin with, yet in order to maintain such power, even the greatest ruler must himself be governed by a keen sense of his own fallibility and presumption. This would send exactly the proper message inasmuch as Xi's administration was concerned. By posing Xi as an enlightened autocrat who had absolutely no use for flatterers, it both struck back at the unruly propaganda machine which had damaged the regime's public image, even as it simultaneously underscored the autocrat's unquestioned prerogative to govern by his own fiat: in essence, claiming that precisely because the ruler is so open to unpleasant truth, that's why opposition to him constitutes such a diabolical treachery.
However, in any dictatorship there tends to be far more stupid, incoherent, even downright suicidal resistance to absolute power than there is carefully calculated and coordinated opposition. The former is based on undisciplined impulse and thus exposes itself to being wiped out instantly - in sharp contrast to the latter, which is so good at disguising its subversion with a facade of obedience that it's typically too late to stop it by the time it's finally recognized as a legitimate threat.
As such, the March 4 open letter first published on an overseas dissident site before somehow appearing on a state-run mainland one was clearly an instance of the first kind of internal rebellion: a pitifully pathetic putsch even by putsch standards. Of course, it's hardly surprising that any political party with so many operatives even in its upper echelons would have its fair share of practical political imbeciles who have no clue how power actually works in their rigidly hierarchical system. A month later, it's all but apparent that the letter's authors walked right into a trap which Xi and Wang set for them.
In other words, the CCDI memo which can only have been masterminded by Wang was badly misinterpreted as a green light to attack Xi, when in fact, as we have reasoned, it was a subtle and thereby particularly efficacious defense of the dictator. True, the discordant authors were also emboldened by the fact that Ren Zhiqiang had apparently gotten off with a lenient sentence - most likely with Wang vouching for his friend. Could the would-be coup plotters have been so silly as to think Wang would somehow cover them, too, in what would be (to them) a logical next move to undermine Xi just as the annual Two Sessions was getting underway? Unfortunately for Xi's perennial detractors whether Chinese or Western, the subsequent weeks are increasingly exposing the probability that his enemies are a bunch of simplistic nitwits.
Well, that is his acknowledged enemies (who in this case remain as yet unnamed). Xi and Wang, being anything but not extremely shrewd politicians far outclassing practically all their peers and subordinates, have probably long since known that it's their hidden enemies - hidden from those who don't have such thorough understanding either of the party's true inner workings or of the traditional subtleties of Chinese statecraft - which pose a far greater danger, and indeed the only credible one that can in fact derail their program for China's transition.
Who are they? Liu Yunshan? Remnants of Jiang Zemin's "Shanghai clique" or even former henchmen of the Hu Jintao/Wen Jiabo fourth generation leadership? Ironically, it's precisely those that, from the outside looking in, seem most fervently or faithfully in support of Xi's unquestioned authority that warrant the greatest caution and concern from his administration.
For this reason - that is, that Xi and Wang have now signaled to the party that they're on notice about potential wolves disguised as lambs - we might just about conclude that the CPC has already dodged one killer iceberg as it enters the most critical segment of its overhaul course. They have, it would appear, thoroughly robbed their enemies of the element of surprise and deception - a process that actually began long before the travails of early 2016. While nothing can be said with certainty, it's a good bet that a bet against fundamentally effective party rule in China will continue to be a poor one going forward.
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