Xi Jinping and Challenges within China

These frequent and spontaneous lockdowns have caused severe disruptions in the supply-chain mechanism [1]. These economic circumstances are an essential threat to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) because the nation’s economic might is the bedrock upon which the Party consolidates or exerts power. It is in these circumstances that President Xi Jinping’s failure to mitigate new challenges has led to criticism of his leadership. This has led to the party being divided into two factions regarding China’s relations with other nations. As per the Centennial goals of China, the country aims to become well-off and prosperous as a society by 2021 and further become a fully developed nation by 2049. These two objectives are of prime importance to the CCP and therefore, Xi Jinping’s ability to meet these objectives will decide his further tenure.

Xi Jinping and the decaying of the CCP:

Xi Jinping has in the past stated that the CCP is not aligned with the people and that there should be absolute trust between the society and the government. He further stated that reforms and opening up are not the same as adopting external universalist values from the West. He added that the reform that China needs will have Chinese characteristics. In this regard, while it has been acknowledged that the Party needs public support to strengthen on credibility, it has not been done along the lines of democratic ideals. Xi Jinping is aware of the decisions made by the Soviet Union where Mikhail Gorbachev adopted the slogan of ‘qlasnost’ signifying transparency in the functioning of the government and allowing public criticism. Being careful not to repeat the same, Xi Jinping took a distinct course of action and consolidated sources of power at different levels [2].  Xi Jinping’s campaign against corruption is based on the understanding that it is crucial to manage the Communist Party appropriately if China is to be governed well and that the Party members aggrandizing themselves at the expense of the people will lead to its eventual downfall. Thus, Xi Jinping sees a challenge similar to the Soviet Union.

For the CCP, values from the West including democracy are fundamental threats considering them as external elements that weaken the Party and the broader governing system of the Chinese population. President Xi Jinping’s outlook towards the Party’s rule in China is influenced by the fall of the Soviet Union and has stated on multiple occasions that the Communist Party has a loosened its ideology and has allowed Western values to subvert and penetrate the political and societal affairs of China. Therefore, Xi Jinping concerned with the stability and cohesion of the country seeks to revive the ideological strength of Chinese society. This concern within the Party has led to a confidence crisis regarding the Chinese political system, the Party’s leadership as well as Chinese socialism [3].

China’s Economic Turmoil:

Recent data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) shows that the Chinese economy has risen by 4.8% in the first four months of 2022. However, this data seems to be unreliable given the inconsistency with the official data collected on a monthly basis during the same four months. Further, the Chinese economy only grew by 1.3% in the first quarter of 2022 from the last quarter of the previous year. This slowdown in economic growth also suggests that the 1.3% official increase in GDP during the first quarter showed strong growth in only the first two months of January and February. This suggests a downplay in the impact of COVID-19 on the economy which began in March. In this context, the NBS stated that due to the recurring waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, its impact on the Chinese economy is increasing. However, the six provincial-level jurisdictions of China which went through a rise in COVID-19 infections between the months of January to March lagged the national GDP growth rate in the first four months of 2022 [4]. In this context, it can be observed that China is still struggling to balance its pandemic preventive measures and the proper functioning of the economy.

Urban-Rural Gap:

Due to the reform and growth in the past 40 years, China has achieved steady urbanization with an urban population that has been increasing by 1 percentage point a year. At the beginning of the reform, the growth was 20% and has reached 60% today. This population includes urban migrant workers who are registered as rural residents in the hukou registration system. The hukou is a registry system through which residents in the region are entitled to and are ensured certain welfare benefits and public services. Although this migration has contributed significantly to the productivity growth and dynamism of the Chinese economy, the migrants face several constraints in their daily lives. For instance, in case of unemployment, they are expected to go back to their rural areas, and difficulties in bringing in children as the parents living in cities do not have adequate social benefits like healthcare, education, and pension benefits. This in turn has resulted in the separation of families where the parents end up working in cities while their children are raised back in the rural areas.

While the restriction to the process of registering to urban areas, particularly in smaller cities is gradually being relaxed with certain provinces like Jiangxi scrapping the restrictions entirely, the large centers with high economic productivity like Guangzhou and Shanghai still exercise tighter control. However, the urban-to-rural income ratio grew steadily despite the migration. In 2007, the workers in urban areas were earning 3.14 times more than those working in rural areas which happen to be among the top levels of rural-urban inequality globally. With about one-fifth of the global population, China possesses only 7% of the arable land. This makes the population lifestyle of about 500 million in the rural economy very difficult. Furthermore, even with including the rural migrant population, the urbanization rate of China is relatively low to its per capita income and population density. On the other hand, other fast-growing economies like South Korea achieved around 80% urbanization at this developmental stage. Although the income disparity has got low in the past decade with workers earning 2.71 times more, it is still high overall [5]. Considering all the challenging factors it can be said that the migrant population will benefit if the restrictions on internal migration are lifted. The population in rural areas is composed of children and older people. In this regard, cities have better education facilities that can be accessible to the children of the migrant workforce and older people can get access to better health and medical care. On the economic side, with an excess supply of workers in the rural areas, an eased policy on migration would be helpful in the maintenance of the urban workforce.

Poverty Issue:

With the objective of transforming China into a wealthy and prosperous nation by the year 2021, President Xi Jinping has publicly announced to reduce the poverty levels in rural China amidst the pandemic but reducing income inequality remains a critical challenge for maintaining social stability in China. This objective gets further difficult due to several factors both domestic and international. In an attempt to elevate rural China from below the poverty line, the Communist Party has devised a strategy to tap the spirit of revolution in Chinese society. In this regard, the government has promoted tourism to specific locations that have an underlying connection to the Communist Party, for instance, the Jianxi province which was home to Mao. The party has further categorized more than 33,000 monumental sites as “revolutionary sites”.

The government’s policy of forcing the population into transferring also worsens the poverty situation. For instance, between the years 2016 to 2020, the CCP relocated more than 50 million people living under the poverty line into newly built dwellings so that the vacant land can be used for real estate or industrial purposes [6]. However, this transferred population has limited access to basic livelihood opportunities that could further worsen the poverty situation in rural China. The income disparity between the populations in urban and rural areas makes elevating people out of poverty more challenging with certain policy measures creating a further divide.

China and the Russia-Ukraine War:

China’s support to Russia in its invasion of Ukraine has further threatened its relations with the West on one hand and tested the political alliance between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin on the other given that Russia relies primarily on China for Russian oil imports. The war in Ukraine has also allowed Western powers to come together which leads to geopolitical uncertainty for China. Prior to the invasion of Ukraine, Russia and China declared that their partnership had no limits and emphasized their stronger relations as a united front to counter Western influence. The scrutiny regarding China supporting Russia both economically and politically has raised concerns in China about a backlash in the international community. Politically, Xi Jinping would like to keep another strong autocrat as an ally but he also fears that the isolation that Russia faces could also be experienced by China in case China were to invade Taiwan [7]. Given that a faction exists in the Communist Party that is wary of China’s relations with other countries in the future, these circumstances give rise to another internal challenge for Xi Jinping.

Five Years and Beyond:

President Xi Jinping’s stating that the CCP is to plan for future risks in the next “five years and beyond” led to the speculation that Xi Jinping is trying to accumulate influence for his third term adding that the 20^th Party Congress was held at a crucial time for China. He mentioned that the CCP needs to set specific goals and policies amidst the backdrop of rapid global changes which in turn gives rise to more complex challenges, threats, and risks. Therefore, the primary objective is to run China’s internal affairs properly [8]. In 2021, Xi Jinping delivered a resolution on the CCP. This historic resolution is the first in the past 40 years and strongly suggests that he still has adequate power base to continue as President as only Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping have announced such historic resolutions. Here, it should be noted that Xi Jinping referring to complex risks suggests that he acknowledges that the country is going through a difficult time with a struggling economy due to the zero-tolerance approach to the pandemic.

Endnotes:

1.       Victoria Herczegh, “In China, a Challenge to Xi’s Power?”, Geopolitical Futures, 23 May 2022 https://geopoliticalfutures.com/in-china-a-challenge-to-xis-power/

2.      Kalpit A Mankikar, “Xi’s China, China’s Xi: Current Political and Social Challenges”, Observer Research Foundation, 11 December 2020 https://www.orfonline.org/research/xis-china-chinas-xi-current-political-and-social-challenges/#_edn1

3.      “Beijing’s Internal and External Challenges”, US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, 2019 https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2019-11/Chapter%202%20%20Beijing%27s%20Internal%20and%20External%20Challenges.pdf

4.     “Xi Jinping’s Year of Instability”, Asia Society Policy Institute, 10 May 2022 https://asiasociety.org/policy-institute/xi-jinpings-year-instability-4

5.      David Dollar, Yiping Huang, and Yang Yao, “Global Clout, Domestic Fragility: China’s long-term success will depend primarily on addressing its internal challenges”, International Monetary Fund, June 2021 https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2021/06/pdf/the-future-of-china-dollar-huang-yao.pdf

6.     Kalpit A Mankikar, “Xi’s China, China’s Xi: Current Political and Social Challenges”, Observer Research Foundation, 11 December 2020 https://www.orfonline.org/research/xis-china-chinas-xi-current-political-and-social-challenges/#_edn1

7.Stephanie Yang, “Troubles mount in China ahead of Xi’s bid to stay in power, Los Angeles Times”, 13 May 2022 https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-05-13/xi-jinping-covid-china-president-challenges-party-congress

8.“Xi Urges Plan to Tackle Risks for Next ‘Five Years And Beyond”, Bloomberg, 27 July 2022 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-27/xi-says-china-faces-more-complicated-challenges-xinhua-reports

Pic Courtsey-Pankaj Jha

(The views expressed are those of the author and do not represent views of CESCUBE.)