Xi Jinping definitely did not want such a situation to continue during his tenure. In the name of deepening the reform, the Third Plenum last year decided to establish two new bodies which can empower Xi.
First, the Plenum announced the establishment of the Central Leading Group on Comprehensively Deepening Reforms (zhongyang quanmian shenhua gaige lingdao xiaozu), which would be responsible for the overall reform. This move indicated Xi’s determination to push through the marketization process that had been halted since the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2008. Xi himself is the head of this body, which will probably override the Central Economic and Finance Leading Group (zhongyang caijing lingdao xiaozu), the highest economic authority usually chaired by the Premier.
More importantly, the Third Plenum also decided to set up a new National Security Council or State Security Council (guojia anquan weiyuanhui). Xi is also the head of this body, which will strengthen his control over the military forces, domestic security, propaganda and foreign policy. This new body is mainly based on the American model that includes a highly empowered group of security experts who can work the levers of the country’s vast security apparatus. But this Chinese body will differ from the American National Security Council in one crucial aspect: the Chinese version will have dual duties with responsibility over domestic security as well as foreign policy.
Before the establishment of the National Security Council, China’s highest-level decision-making concerning external relations and security issues was scattered among the Central Military Commission, which controlled the armed forces, and two separate but in some ways overlapping leading panels, i.e., the Foreign Affairs Leading Small Group (FALSG) and the National Security Leading Small Group (NSLSG) at the top. The strengths of these two LSGs have been constantly impaired by horizontal conflicts with other formidable institutional players at a time when Chinese foreign and security policy making has been undergoing dramatic changes, such as pluralization, decentralization and fragmentization.
In Hu Jintao’s time, much of the domestic security and stability maintenance (weiwen) jobs were done by the powerful Central Political and Legal Commission (zhongyang zhengfawei), which was presided by Zhou Yongkang, then PBSC member.
The CCP is confronting an increasingly demanding domestic security situation, with more violent attacks rooted in civic grievances among its citizenry and ethnic conflicts. Lately, China has experienced a new wave of terrorist attacks, including the Tiananmen Square attack and the killing at the Kunming train station. To address the worsening domestic security situation, the country needs a more centralized system.
Over external affairs, when China is further integrated with the globalized world, the number and type of pressure groups involved in security and foreign policy making has expanded substantially with most ministries at the national level, the military, the intelligence, big business entities, media, local governments, non-government organizations and even individuals playing increasingly significant roles in the whole process.
As final arbiters of foreign policy making, the paramount leaders before Xi tended to become more consultative than their predecessors due to their decreasing authority within the Political Bureau in the post-Mao era. Meanwhile, facing a much more complicated external and internal context, the core leader today has many other responsibilities and depends on others to help plan and implement Chinese foreign and security policy, which further reduces personal influence while magnifying institutional and pluralistic impacts upon the whole process. Two of Xi’s predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, had contemplated forming an overall coordinating body, like the US National Security Council, but bureaucratic resistance, particularly from the military, had prevented its creation.
Xi is now strong enough to formally set up such an organization. The new National Security Council is expected to raise Xi’s position as first-among-equals in the PBSC to an all powerful leader that has absolute authority in handling domestic and external affairs. The move grants Xi a level of authority that eluded his two predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, and reverses the trend toward a collective leadership since Deng Xiaoping.
After these two bodies, in February 2014, a third important organization, namely, the Central Small Leading Group on Internet Security and Informatization, was also established. The latest development in March was the establishment of the Small Leading Group of the Central Military Commission to Deepen the Military and National Defence Reform. Xi is again the head of these two organizations.
With these newly established bodies, Xi now enjoys unparalleled power. This could undermine the CCP’s mechanism of “collective leadership.” Such power concentration on the one hand will facilitate bold reforms and forestall policy deadlocks, while on the other hand, it may break the existing power sharing and balance among competing political camps and lead to extreme policies. Moreover, without a sound system of the intra-party democracy, the high concentration of power could lead to resistance from other powerful leaders, and thus power struggles among them. For Xi, the biggest political challenge is on how to solicit cooperation from other leaders while concentrating all powers in his own hand. How this will play out is expected to drive the dynamics of politics in the Xi era.
It is worthwhile to mention another important feature of China’s political party system, namely, its conduciveness to prompt policy changes. In theory, the obstacle to policy change in multi-party systems should be smaller than that in one-party states, since policies can change with the alternation of ruling parties. When a new party comes to power, it can discontinue policies initiated by the former ruling party. However, this is often not the case. In many democracies, opposition parties no longer perform constructive roles; instead, they oppose merely for the sake of opposing. Political parties veto each other and no political party can make a decisive decision. Under such circumstances, substantial policy changes often become very difficult. In China, this is not the case. Although the Chinese society often complains that the ruling party is too slow in making policy changes, they are implemented on a more rapid basis than in other political systems. From the 1980s to the 1990s and to this century, China has achieved several significant policy changes. It will be difficult to understand the huge changes in China in these decades without taking into account the ruling party’s immense ability to respond to situations with appropriate policy changes.
All these changes have so far enabled the CCP to remain open. Through all these newly designed institutions, particularly a ruthless meritocratic selection process, China may well have the best leadership team in place. It is worth noting that while the CCP continues to oppose any Western style democracy, namely, a multi-party system, it has accommodated different elements from democracy, such as intra-party voting, decentralization and political consultation.
Equally important is that drastic changes have also occurred at the societal level. It is true that the Chinese people do not enjoy Western-style political freedom. But this should not blind us to the fact that there has been an explosion of personal freedom. For instance, under Mao, the Chinese people could not choose what to wear, where to live or work, what to study and they certainly could not choose to travel overseas. Today, they enjoy those liberties. Hence, about 100 million Chinese choose to travel overseas and about 100 million Chinese choose to return to China without any restrictions.
Another example is the widespread use of new information and communications technology (ICT). The ICT has brought great freedom to people but greater challenges to the CCP. Today, nearly half of the Chinese population is considered to be Internet users, and among them, 75% access the Internet via mobile phones. Public opinion formulated online have increasingly had an impact on the party-state and led to policy changes on some occasions. There were 180,000 cases of protests, strikes and other mass disturbances in 2010; some of them were organized with the aid of the Internet — blogs, e-mail, online forums and weibo (a Chinese word for micro-blogging). Public opinion formulated in cyberspace has translated into public pressure and on many occasions, brought down corrupt officials or forced the party-state to adjust policies. Compared with traditional media, the Internet in China enjoys relatively few controls from the CCP Propaganda Department and is even more driven by the commercial interests