Ever since he eliminated China’s two-term limit in 2018, Xi Jinping’s rule has produced a proliferation of articles and studies that compare his rule with Mao’s. The comparison is true only at a very superficial level, relating to the cult of personality that surrounds Xi and the increased inclusion of his name in the official documents of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Thus, in its 2021 resolution “on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century”, Xi is mentioned 25 times, Mao 18 times, Deng Xiaoping six times, and previous presidents Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao just once.
These similarities may be useful to gauge the internal party power of Xi, but they tell us nothing about his economic policies or ideology. While Mao’s ideology during the Cultural Revolution was directly anti-Confucian, Xi’s is pro-Confucian. While Mao’s great economic turns — “the Great Leap Forward” and the Cultural Revolution — were motivated by ideology and disregarded stability, Xi’s policies are motivated by the opposite desire: to produce a more stable society.
This reflects evolution over the past 40 years. Following Deng’s sharp pro-market turn that placed economic growth centre stage, first after Mao’s death in 1976, and then even more decisively after the Tiananmen crackdown, China grew tremendously (at an average annual rate of more than 6% per capita between 1992 and 2012), while inequality increased (measured by the Gini index, from 36 to 47 points over the same period). The new China made many people rich, reduced poverty, changed the structure of the elite by having it much more private-sector oriented, and made the country “moderately prosperous”.
This trend was overseen by Jiang Zemin, the General Secretary of the Party from 1989 to 2002, and then by Hu Jintao, who held the two highest offices (head of the Party and head of the state) during the following 10 years. The embourgeoisement of the Chinese elite had to be given an ideological veneer — and Jiang Zemin provided this in 2000, when he introduced the policy of the “Three Represents” which allowed rich entrepreneurs to be more easily accepted in the nation’s governing bodies. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, the Chinese People’s Congress became the richest legislative body in the world, exceeding even the US Congress in the number of dollar millionaires in its ranks.
Both in personnel and ideology, then, a party whose claim to legitimacy was largely rooted in equalising chances and outcomes for most Chinese was gradually becoming the party of the rich. Based on micro data from household surveys, one paper I worked on with Li Yang and Filip Novokmet found that the top 5% of Chinese society had dramatically changed: in 1988, less than one quarter of the elite was linked with the private sector; by 2013, the year after Xi’s ascent to power, that share was close to 60%. We also found an increasing split between the social composition of the party overall and the party’s own elite: while the Party in 2013 still had a majority membership of the “old” (state-related) social groups, the top 5% was increasingly dominated by the “new” social groups (private-sector entrepreneurs and professionals).
The rich not only became more important, but were more visible too. Conspicuous consumption and disregard of public modesty — recall the story of the black Ferrari crashed in Beijing by a son of one of Hu Jintao’s top allies in 2012 — added to the perception of the Party as condoning many of the worst displays of nouveau-riche arrogance. And it seemed very possible, whether for better or worse, that the CPC might continue to evolve into an outwardly pro-rich party, defending the interests of a monied oligarchy, stimulating capitalist development, and holding power similar to the ruling South Korean party during the period of General Park’s rule. The term “communist” in the name of the Chinese party should not make us think such an evolution is impossible: North Korea’s communist party runs a monarchy.
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