As the last quarter of 2017 approaches, things are looking up for Xi Jinping. The 19th party congress, set to start October 18, now looks all but certain to cement his paramount power over the CPC state, which ever since his early days in 2013 has been likened to Mao's.
Indeed, it is now no longer unrealistic to consider that the Xi Jinping era will outlast whatever tenure as party secretary that Xi actually does serve: if, as appears increasingly the case, the coming years in China will be defined as much by raw politics as by technocratic administration, Xi's style and method of governance are likely to retain an influence on the top levels of the party-state to a far greater extent than any one official title or post could suggest. As such, the longevity of his reign at the apex of the world's rising superpower could eventually boil down to informal and behind-the-scenes authority and clout of the sort that Singapore senior minister Lee Kuan-Yew enjoyed for a full quarter-century after retirement from the premiership in 1990.
This critical two-year period from late 2015 to late 2017 will likely go down as China's true departure from what might be dubbed the "extended Deng Xiaoping era", namely the period of "reform and opening up" that was launched in late 1978 and continued throughout the length of the administrations of Deng's two immediate successors, Jiang Zemin (1993-2003) and Hu Jintao (2003-2013).
With the stock market crash and consequent currency instability of the second half of 2015, the post-Tiananmen contract that had prevailed since 1989 - that of continual economic liberalization even with persistent political control - finally came under a kind of existential strain that meant the end of "business as usual" with respect to the CPC's essentially techno-bureaucratic approach to governance as personified by the two "red engineers" personally handpicked by Deng, Jiang and Hu.
Though few have recognized it, what has transpired since late 2015 and early 2016 has been nothing less than a purge by Xi of the powerfully vested interests of the Jiang and Hu administrations - which collectively formed the "rent-seeking" upper caste of post-Tiananmen, market-Leninist China. Even in very short hindsight, it should be clear that this internal housecleaning is no less significant than what took place in 1989-91; and despite the fact that Xi's practical authority still lags that of Deng in that post-crackdown interlude, as of the imminent 19th congress, it is becoming apparent that even those elite apparatchiks that may never be considered "his own men" in any meaningful sense will necessarily be cowed to toe his line, if they haven't already.
While the outside world and especially the West continues by habit to look to the government side of the party-state - exemplified by its head, premier Li Keqiang - for cues as to China's direction, since 2016 it behooves China watchers to pay ever closer attention to the partisan aspect of the giant country's sociopolitical equation.
That's fundamentally because, during the extended Deng Xiaoping era (1978-2015), it was truly the case that economics and commerce took precedence over ideology and identity. For once the initial contradiction of economic reform under a communist regime was dealt with violently in 1989, the sheer underdevelopment of the nation as a whole meant that any deeper and more ultimate questions - of socialism versus capitalism, of autocracy versus democracy - could simply be deferred for a while as China feverishly (even frantically) closed the yawning material gap with the rich and Western world.
As of the early 2010s, however, China had essentially reached middle-income status (at least in purchasing power terms); by now questions of distribution and equity of wealth and prosperity had overtaken those of the aggregates accumulated. Being such a large continental economy with massive interior regions as well as a long ocean coastline, it was simply impossible for China to put off dealing with these problems that likely would have been far less pressing, even benign, were it the size of Korea or even Japan.
Xi Jinping came to power in 2012-13 with an acute understanding of the ideological-identitarian - not merely the administrative-practical - nature of China's governance crisis and more particularly the party-state's own internal crisis of confidence. Events since late 2015 have now revealed that his grasp of both the breadth and the scale of this conundrum greatly exceeded that of his critics - and indeed that which said critics were ever capable of noting in him (let alone crediting him with).
Indeed, it was the stock and currency travails of 2015 which - exactly contrary to the regime's opponents' and detractors' claims of being proof of the Xi administration's woeful incompetence in tackling complex market systems - instead vindicated the draconian approach of intensified centralized control that Xi had taken with both the anti-corruption campaign and the broader crackdown on sociopolitical dissent that began in his first year (2013).
As it turned out, what China truly needed was more control and authoritarianism, not less: it was precisely because Beijing refused to kowtow to the Western laissez-faire principle that markets shouldn't be tampered with by authorities - in effect, that greedy speculators and interest groups should have free rein because the only alternative is the greater evil of state repression - that the Chinese economy avoided panic and ultimately staved off the hard landing that Western and pro-Western neoliberal fundamentalists craved to see.
As such, Xi and his allies have every reason to view their perseverance and belated victory (to date) of the past two years as ultimately one of superior values and not merely one of better technicals: they see that the blanket rejection of Western regulatory minimalism has paid off - so well, in fact, that the rest of the non-Western world has taken increasing notice.
And Xi personally would like to take the lion's share of credit for this - at least eventually. The state's role as market and by extension social referee is now increasingly enshrined in China as the antidote to the perverted Western notion that seems to unduly exalt individual liberty as an end in itself; man is a social animal and as such it is the collective that must set boundaries for the individual and expand or contract them with the whole prioritized over the parts - not the other way around.
Of course, this throwback to the traditional Confucian value system of ancient China has been a feature of the post-Mao communist party-state from the get-go; even in the headiest days of the Jiang and Hu eras, characterized as they were by the unbridled pursuit of personal riches and status, the CPC has invoked it as a foundational societal organizing tenet. What differs now in the Xi Jinping era, though, is the sheer emphasis and confidence: because the individual simply can't be trusted to have the collective's best interests at heart, far be it from any self-respecting nation and culture (let alone one as old and venerable as China) to ever again entertain the subversive Western notion that one single human person can claim such a degree of legally sanctioned and morally enshrined autonomy and sovereignty.
This promises, then, to be the ideological sine qua non of Xi's China in his coming second term and beyond: a decisive counterpoint to Western hegemony in the realm of the mind and heart. While China's economic and technological development will continue apace throughout the 2020s - to create what's likely to be the world's largest economy even at market exchange rates by 2030 or thereabouts - this is also to be achieved in tandem with a clean break from the Western concept of "human rights", namely a clarification of the latter as more narrowly equated with "individual rights."
Indeed, as the West fractures and polarizes in the coming years - led by none other than its premier member, the now increasingly un-United States of America - a statesman as powerful and as ambitious as Xi Jinping will seek to make his impression on what will suddenly and drastically become a far more open battle arena of ideas and values which merely mirrors a far less Western-centered global economic order.
After all, the "Chinese dream" will not purport to limit itself to China's own restoration to the top of the family of human civilizations; it will and must eventually expand to encompass the actual Sinicization of that broader family itself - within the admittedly Chinese bounds of historic and cultural possibility, of course.
Xi envisions this dream to be realized by the year 2050; he has always envisioned its effective seal of guarantee to be secured far earlier than that, perhaps in the 2030s or even later 2020s. And as the 19th party congress comes round the corner, he most certainly intends to see to it that his own name is personally inextricably and indelibly associated with the ascent of the hope and the promise - by laying the foundations for a Xi Jinping era well past his transition off from official party leadership that will almost certainly happen in the next decade, whether early or late.
