A Strong Leader for A Time of Crisis: Xi Jinping’s Strongman Politics as A Collective Response to Regime Weakness. Nimrod Baranovitch. Journal of Contemporary China, Jul 13 2020.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2020.1790901
ABSTRACT: Seeking to explain the reasons for the swift shift from collective leadership to strongman rule during Xi Jinping’s early years in office, this article argues that it was the result of a widely shared consensus among China’s ruling elite that the regime was facing a severe crisis that necessitated a return to such rule. This argument challenges the widely held view that the dramatic centralization of power in Xi’s hands was the result mainly of his individual personality, motives, and actions. While many of the factual details that this article presents are not new, it is the first to systematically integrate many of these facts to create a coherent explanation of China’s surprising abandonment of the collective leadership model that goes beyond Xi’s individual role.
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How Strong Leaders are Made: A Combination of Structure and Agency
For many years, some Western experts and liberal Chinese intellectuals and reformist leaders have
urged China to adopt significant political reforms and promote democratization, arguing that this
was the only way that the country would be able to continue to develop and flourish and overcome
the many structural problems that it faced.70 However, as China’s politics under Xi Jinping demonstrates, for many Chinese and particularly among the majority of China’s top-level leaders, this option has obviously not been a desirable one. In fact, as one China observer has put it, the return to
strongman politics under Xi Jinping was actually a ‘return to a more normal political reality in
China’.71 Indeed, ironically, even many of the more liberal and reformist leaders in China of recent
decades have supported the notion of strong, authoritarian leadership, arguing that such leadership
is necessary to advance reform.72 Thus, the choice of the Chinese ruling elite to return to strongman
politics in a time of crisis should come as no surprise. After all, the tendency to centralize political
power in times of crisis is a well-known phenomenon and is certainly not unique to China. Many
dictators and less totalitarian strong leaders in world history have emerged and continue to emerge
in situations of national crisis. Moreover, as history has shown multiple times, in states of emergency,
even in democracies it is a norm, often anchored in the law, to concentrate more power in the hands
of the regime at the expense of citizens’ individual rights and liberties. In light of these general
tendencies, it should come as no surprise that the centralization of political power in a time of crisis
manifests itself in a more radical form in a non-democratic country like China that has always
preferred authoritative forms of government.
As the shift to personalistic rule under Xi Jinping seems to demonstrate, China’s ruling elite still
considered a strongman leader as the best mechanism to overcome the many challenges that their
country currently confronts. From the perspective of China’s political culture, a strong leader can
unite quarreling factions within the political elite by imposing his unchallenged authority. Very much
aware of this role, since he came to power, Xi has repeatedly criticized the cliques and factions within
the Party, and the continuing campaign against corruption that has been implemented under his
command has dealt powerful blows to both factions, signaling that he is above factional politics.73 As an all-powerful leader, Xi can also take decisive and drastic actions to radically transform
a problematic reality without the need to compromise or appease competing sources of power
and interest groups. Furthermore, a strong leader can also create a sense of security among an
anxious society and restore the legitimacy of the regime in the eyes of the public when this
legitimacy is challenged or eroded. Indeed, in authoritarian regimes, the charisma and popularity
of the top leader often serve as one of the regime’s main sources of legitimacy,74 especially in times
when other resources of legitimation are exhausted. In addition to all of these advantages, strong leaders can also project their personal power outward to deter external powers that already pose or
are about to pose a serious threat to their country.
The tendency in China to centralize political power seems to have been strengthened in recent
decades and even more so in recent years as a result of global events. As many of the sources cited in
this article illustrate, China’s leaders consider the collapse of the Soviet Union a disaster that took
place not only because the regime lost its legitimacy, but also because of political reforms and
because the leadership lost its faith in the dominant ideology and the political system. In a similar
vein, many Chinese look at the gloomy outcome of the Arab Spring in Syria, Libya, Egypt, and other
countries and see political chaos, civil war, mass death, and rising poverty, and they find nothing
attractive in this path of failed democratization.
It is quite possible that the return of strongman leadership to China would have taken place long
before Xi Jinping came to power. Favorable conditions for such a return were already in existence
during the years that followed the Tian’anmen crisis of 1989, when the Party’s legitimacy was at its
lowest point since the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, the ‘Mao Craze’ (毛çƒ) that swept China in the
wake of the violent crackdown, during which the country saw a surge of popular nostalgia for the
deceased leader, reflected the yearning of the public and many conservative members of the ruling
elite for an all-powerful leader who would restore a sense of stability, order, and security.75 The
yearning for strong leadership was not confined to popular fads but was also manifested in several
policy changes. Indeed, in the early 1990s the Party retreated from all of former general secretary
Zhao Ziyang’s political reforms, and contrary to the practice that Deng Xiaoping promoted of
decentralizing power in the higher ranks of the Party, all of the three highest political positions
(Party general secretary, chairman of the CMC, and president) were given to Jiang Zemin. Moreover,
after promoting collective leadership for almost a decade, as an immediate reaction to the
Tian’anmen crisis, Deng himself seems to have realized that this model of leadership had its
limitations. Thus, although he did not eliminate collective leadership, already in June 1989 he
came up with the new concept of the ‘core leader’ in a clear attempt to consolidate the authority
of Jiang Zemin and thereby ensure elite cohesion.76
These changes notwithstanding, several conditions prevented the return of strongman leadership
at that time. These factors included the memory of the disastrous Cultural Revolution, which was
still too fresh, Deng’s resistance to such a renaissance and his insistence on proceeding with reforms,
and no less importantly, the fact that the new Party general secretary, Jiang Zemin, did not possess
the personal qualities that are needed to make a strongman leader. However, contrary to the
situation in the post-Tian’anmen years, in 2012/2013 all of the factors that prevented the return of
a strong leader two decades earlier had disappeared. The Cultural Revolution had practically been
forgotten, Deng Xiaoping was not around anymore, China was richer and more confident that
material prosperity could be achieved without political reform, and Xi Jinping had more charisma
than Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, as well as the other necessary personal qualities that are needed to
make a strong leader and which were mentioned in the beginning of this article. Xi was the right man
at the right time, and once he had the support of enough members of China’s ruling elite due to the
severe crisis that the regime was facing, the way was paved for China’s return to one-man rule.
However, while provisional elite support certainly helped empower Xi Jinping in his early years in
office, his moves and actions in recent years suggest that he has taken this opportunity and
consolidated and developed his strongman leadership to a degree that is perhaps beyond the
intentions even of those who supported him. It remains to be seen for how much longer Xi will be
able to hold so much power and still maintain his legitimacy and the broad elite support that he has
enjoyed until recently.
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