Day: March 11, 2018

President for Life

‘PRESIDENT FOR LIFE’ XI RISKS REPEAT OF CHINA’S MAO-ERA MISTAKES

A reliance on the strongman model of leadership poses dangers not only to the Chinese president – but to China itself

BY CARY HUANG
11 MAR 2018

An effort to clear the way for President Xi Jinping to stay in power indefinitely, by amending the state constitution to abolish term limits on the Chinese presidency, could become the most controversial political development of modern Chinese history – not only since the establishment of communist rule in 1949 but since the founding of the republic in 1911, when the last Chinese imperial dynasty was overthrown.

By eliminating the two-term limit, Xi will ensure that he can stay at the helm beyond 2023 when his second five-year term ends, enabling him to become president for life, if he so chooses. In political science, a president for life is regarded as a de facto monarch.

Xi has already achieved near-absolute dominance over the Chinese political system, having accumulated more power in his first term than any of his predecessors since Mao Zedong. Xi, nicknamed “China’s chairman of everything”, has taken personal control of policymaking on everything from politics, the economy, national security and foreign affairs to the internet, environment and maritime disputes. His political theory – “Xi Jinping thought” – has been enshrined in the party charter, an honour that puts it on par with Mao’s doctrine and superior to Deng Xiaoping’s.

In making constitutional changes to ensure his indefinite rule, China is morphing from one-party rule to one-man rule, backtracking to the Mao era. The development has in effect overturned the party’s most important political norms and rules regarding governance and power succession – rules that were agreed by post-Mao party leaders led by Deng. Apart from being the mastermind of China’s market reform and opening up, Deng also implemented major reforms aimed at preventing the revival of Maoism and particularly one-man dictatorships.

In setting up age and term limits, Deng’s aims were to avoid the excessive centralisation of power in the hands of one leader; to prevent personality cults; and to scrap the practice of lifelong service for senior officials. Deng also established a “collective leadership” system based on consensus building, power sharing and a mechanism for orderly successions.

While Xi has largely inherited Deng’s pragmatic economic policies, he has shown a determination to rewrite the rule book and revive some of Mao’s philosophy of rule. His fiercest critics accuse him of building a personality cult and indoctrinating the masses. Xi has expanded his clampdowns on corruption and political dissent into a broader crusade to root out anyone disloyal or who fails to comply with his orders.

A more centralised and top-down system might have the merit of allowing for expedited decision-making as Xi aims to lead China’s national rejuvenation at a critical historic juncture.

However, relying on the strongman model is risky, both for Xi himself and the country. It puts the steering wheel of the world’s most populous nation and second largest economy in the hands of one person, spelling danger when that helmsman gets old or ill – as was seen in Mao’s later days. The model makes it harder for Xi to avoid misjudgments and policy mistakes as few will dare to speak out. Removing term limits will help prevent future challenges to Xi’s authority and legitimacy, but the resurgence of strongman politics could intensify internal power struggles as factions will compete for the powers and resources once shared among all.

History has shown many political leaders who sought lifelong service have not managed to realise their vision. Some have been deposed long before their deaths, others have even been assassinated by political enemies. And even if Xi succeeds in becoming a lifelong leader, he would in all likelihood then face serious challenges in selecting a successor to continue his legacies after his death and guaranteeing a smooth transition of power. Mao repeatedly failed in this regard. The stakes could not be any higher: renewed hostility among political rivals and the repression of political dissent puts China at risk.2

Cary Huang, a senior writer with the South China Morning Post, has been a China affairs columnist since the 1990s

Can we define “populism”? Perhaps, but what is gained by this?

What is populism? The most serious mistake with this question is its (usually unspoken) assumption that where we have a single word there must be a single corresponding concept and that when we use the word to refer to a diverse number of things they must share a single common property however different they may look. Thus, when we call all kind of things and all number of people “populist,” you can be certain that they all have one and the same property in common. We are dealing thus with a single concept that, with some ingenuity, can be defined. We can call this the Platonic fallacy. In his dialogues Plato regularly proceeds in this way. He asks “what is justice?”, “what is holiness?”, “what is beauty?” and assumes that in each case there is a single thing – the idea of justice, of holiness, or of beauty – in which just, holy, and beautiful things participate. An alternative to this “essentialist” view holds that general terms mark similarities between the things to which they are applied or, in more complex cases, that they mark overlapping series of similarities between them. In the latter case we can speak of a “family resemblance” between those things. Two things called by a common name may belong to the same family – and thus be called by the same name – without having any significant similarities in common as long as they are part of a chain of overlapping similarities. Terms applying to social phenomena are best understood as family-resemblance notions.

We should resist then also an essentialist account of populism – or more correctly of the term “populism.” Two recent attempts at providing such an account can help us to illustrate what is problematic in essentialism. In an already widely published book (What is Populism? 2017) the political theorist Jan-Werner Müller offers us an intriguingly simple characterization. Populism, he writes, is anti-pluralism. But this will not do for a number of reasons. We might say, first of all, that anti-pluralism is something wider than populism, that populists maybe anti-pluralist but that anti-pluralists need not be populists. The great dogmatic religions, for instance, are inherently anti-pluralist since each one of them demands total acceptance of an entire set of doctrines. Exclusive social castes and classes, like the Indian Brahmin and the European high aristocracy, are also typically anti-pluralist since they will accept only those who are like themselves. But there is a second and deeper reason for questioning Müller’s formula. It is that human society is inherently pluralistic. This is true even in the most doctrinaire forms of religion. The novelist Peter DeVries once pointed this out when he wrote humorously of the Dutch evangelicals of the American Midwest: “One Dutchman a Christian, two Dutchmen a church, three Dutchmen heresy.” Closer inspection will always bring out that the adherents to the same dogmas will nevertheless interpret them in significantly different ways. The reason is due to “the indeterminacy of meaning” (as philosophers have called the phenomenon) which brings it about that two speakers using the same words will inevitably give them different meaning. If that is so, then what Müller calls “anti-pluralism” is in effect not opposed to all plurality, since that is effectively impossible; it is, rather, a discriminatory view which quietly accepts some kinds of plurality and rejects others. The important question will then be which differences serve as the base for discrimination and which do not. So, defining populism as anti-pluralism is always possible, but it leaves us with a notion that is more or less empty and thus not very useful.

In Populism. A Very Short Introduction (2017), Cas Mudde and Cristόbal Rovira Kaltwasser define populism with another simple formula. They define it “as a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonist camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” This is a little more substantive than Müller’s definition but not by much. Both definitions are, in fact, too formulaic to be of much practical use. Mudde-Kaltwasser seem to realize this because they are well aware of how open-ended the notions of “the people” and “the elite” are. But they assume that in different contexts, these notions will be fleshed out in one way or another and we will then have different substantive embodiments of populism. By calling populism a “thin-centered ideology” they mean to say, moreover, that “populism in itself” has little ideological content; but they assume once again that in its various embodiments it will acquire such content. All forms of populism have thus in their view one essential quality in common, but in actual reality they will vary though only in supposedly accidental characteristics. We can say in addition, just as in the case of Jan-Werner Müller’s formulation, that this leaves us with serious questions concerning the adequacy of the formula. The fundamental idea of a confrontation between a pure people and a corrupt elite is so general that it seems to fit many kinds of situation that we would not necessarily want to describe as populist; it seems to apply class conflict as conceived in the Marxist tradition but, in fact, also to every other form of revolutionary conflict. It fits, for instance, Nietzsche’s account of the slave revolt in morality in his Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche is writing there of the collapse of ancient classical Greco-Roman civilization. Nothing can stop Mudde-Kaltwasser from insisting that the rise of Christianity was also a populist event. But we need to ask ourselves whether this way of using terms is illuminating. To treat all confrontations between a lower and a higher social class as populist appears much too broad to be of interest.

We should admit, instead, that there is no simple formula that can help us to understand populism. Populism is a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon. We are, perhaps, better off trying to describe characteristic cases of populist politics. I