It was a sign of the process of “Maoization” of Xi Jinping. As in the times of Great Helmsman, there are purges with demeaning scenes about the fall from grace of those to whom the leader gives the thumbs down.
cold as an iceberg, Xi he humiliatingly removed the former president Hu Jintao of the Great Hall of the People. The scene evoked the chilling moment in which two soldiers dragged from the Central Committee of the single North Korean party the hitherto powerful Jang Song-thaek. Days later, the uncle of Kim Jong-un was eaten by 120 hungry dogs, according to one version, executed with anti-aircraft shells, according to another version, after being found guilty on terrible charges ranging from treason against the regime to drug addiction, perversions and large-scale corruption.
It was not soldiers, as in the North Korean case, but two big men who forcibly lifted Hu Jintao from the seat he was occupying next to Xi Jinping, and they took him out of Chinese Communist Party Congress while, with pathetic indignity, none of the hundreds of delegates made any gesture in defense of the old man who was expelled in humiliation. They all looked petrified. Not even the other two senior officials who flanked Xi reacted: Prime Minister Li Keqiang and his number two, Wang Yang, who were also left out of the Central Committee for belonging to Tuanpai group, led by the purged former president.
The repercussion that the scene had in the world made the new almighty leader look for an alibi. It was assumed that Hu was ill and they took him out for treatment. But no one hesitated in the CCP that very serious accusations would fall on him, as Mao Tse-tung did with those defenestrated for his purges. He had learned it from Stalin, who with purges became the Louis XIV of the USSR. The same method was applied by the three North Korean leaders. The victims of the purges that were always carried out in plenary sessions of the Central Committee or in congresses of the single party so that the scene serves as an intimidating example, were normally those who promoted reformist positions or headed internal lines critical of the leader who accumulated power over the Politburo.
These totalitarian stagings ceased to be seen since the rise to leadership of two leaders who had been purged by Mao during the Cultural Revolution: Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Ziyang.
In the era of opening to capitalism that Deng initiated, the CCP committed the Tiananmen massacre when he felt that his hegemonic power was threatened by the student protests. But there were no longer purges like those of Mao Tse-tung because the power of the leaders was institutionally limited by collegiate bodies such as the Politburo and the Central Committee, retaining wall to personalism that is also manifested in the limit of two terms.
Serving ten years in office, Xi Jinping was supposed to finish his mandates in this CCP Congress but he altered the rule that limited personalist power. Hu Jintao’s expulsion was a sign of his accumulation of power in a Maoist format. With the institutional obstacles to personalist power, he did the same as with the old former president who was opposed to granting him another mandate: remove them by force.
Accumulating power with methods like those used by Mao meant Xi betraying his own history. He spent part of his youth in a “re-education camp” because his father, Xi Zhongzxun, promoter of the communist insurrection against the Kuomintang regime in the north of the country, he fell in one of the purges for having questioned the personalistic cult and the totalitarian experiments of Mao.
Xi Jinping’s Maoism has nothing to do with the centrally planned collectivist economy and the path of history towards socialism in which Mao Tse-tung dogmatically believed. What the current Chinese leader has in common with the creator of the communist state is the thirst for unlimited power, the mistake of considering himself enlightened by ideology and the megalomaniac delusion of feeling endowed with a wisdom of Confucian levels that deserves to be included in the constitution. of the country and in the party statutes.
After the death of Mao and the fall of the ultra-Maoist Group of Four, power came into the hands of Deng Xiaoping, Zhao Ziyang and other former victims of the inquisitive fanaticism known as the “cultural revolution”. So, the CCP congresses focused on limiting personalist power, reinforcing the authority of collegiate bodies, such as the Politburo.
That leadership leadership of the PCCh has 25 members appointed by the Central Committee, whose members are elected by the party’s Congress that is held every five years.
Under Deng’s influence, the CCP’s congresses limited power by, among other things, capping presidents at two five-year terms. With this rule Xi Jinping came to command after defeating Bo Xilai, another “prince of the revolution” for being the son of Bo Yibo, one of the “Eight Immortals” of the party.
Xi’s victory seemed to guarantee the course that made the economy take off with a capitalist turbine. But starting in 2018, he began to change the rules to accumulate power in his own hands.
In the last ten years, the economy had a gigantic growth, but due to the momentum that it brought from the previous decades. It remains to be seen if the Xi era maintains this growth. It will also be seen whether the strengthening of authoritarianism and control over private capital that has been carried out since 2018, with attacks such as the one that disciplined the billionaire Jack Ma, owner of the Alibabá group, has had a negative impact on economic growth.
Possibly, its decision to violate the agreement with London for the transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong, annulling its autonomy in various areas before time, together with the totalitarian features that its anti-pandemic policy had and has, add to the harassment of the large companies causing a slowdown in economic growth.
If growth at “Chinese rates” becomes a thing of the past, the risk of military action on Taiwan will grow to put an end to the de facto independence that the island had since, in 1949, Chiang’s defeated army took refuge there. Kai-shek.
Xi would try to compensate with the invasion of Taiwann the weakness that would be caused by the drop in economic growth. The old trick that Samuel Johnson described as “the scoundrel’s last refuge.”
