Foreign Policy Magazine Predicts End of Chinese Communist Party

“Here today, gone tomorrow.”

That’s what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will be, according to an expert prediction published in Foreign Policy magazine this week.

In a special 35th anniversary edition of the magazine, 16 leading thinkers identified “endangered species in our midst”—16 institutions, values or ideas now taken for granted but whose days are numbered.

The list includes items ranging from polio to auto emissions. The CCP was the only political party singled out.

“Inexorable forces are arrayed against the long-term survival of the Communist Party in China,” wrote Minxin Pei, the director of the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of the CCP prediction in Foreign Policy. “Today, the world has no septuagenarian one-party regimes—and for good reason.”

The CCP has ruled China since 1949 when it took power in a civil war with the Kuomintang nationalist party, which fled to Taiwan. The CCP has maintained its rule through dominance of all media and channels of information and by a series of political campaigns that have terrorized the Chinese people and culminated in over 80 million unnatural deaths.

Today, the party survives on claims that it has brought economic growth over the last couple of decades as it has relaxed economic controls following the Cultural Revolution, a devastating political campaign that left the nation in economic shambles in the late 1970’s. In the 1980’s the party adopted market reforms and allowed outside investment in China. The reforms, however, have brought wealth to an elite group, while the gap between the rich and the poor in China continues to grow.

Pei argues that whether or not China sees economic growth in the time ahead, the Communist Party will not survive. He describes a party lacking institutional capacity to weather economic shocks. Added to this, Pei says, the party lacks legitimacy and is marred in corruption.

“Even its own elites are growing increasingly disillusioned, cynical, and fearful about the party’s future,” Pei says. “It is telling that many senior officials, including one provincial governor, regularly consult fortune tellers.”

On whether the CCP will be able to reinvent itself and postpone its demise once again, Pei argues, “A party capable of reinvention and regeneration might be able to skirt these looming dangers. But the Chinese Communist Party is growing arthritic.”

“One-party regimes have no intrinsic incentive to reengineer themselves and little capacity to correct course. Accumulated strains and ailments are left untreated until they precipitate larger crises.”

The CCP has faced a growing number of peasant uprisings in China recently, as grassroots Chinese people are no longer willing, or able, to tolerate the corruption and unfairness.

Moreover, since December 2004, nearly 5 million Chinese have renounced their membership in the CCP, which has brought about an internal disintegration of the party and shaken the CCP at its core.

Pei concludes, “If the fortune tellers are being honest, they’ll tell China’s leaders the future isn’t bright.”