News analysis
Months after a handful of high-ranking Communist Party officials called for Chinese leader Xi Jinping to be considered the “core” of the regime’s leadership, several Party-controlled media are repeating the message.
According to experts, and given the overall political game Xi finds himself in, the media signalling suggests preparations for an extra degree of recognition as paramount leader of the Communist Party. The move would break with the status quo of over a decade, while matching with Xi’s recent actions to centralize power and fend off rivals with their own designs.
In an Oct. 9 editorial that appeared in Guangming Daily, the newspaper of establishment intellectuals, Communist Party theoretician Fan Dezhi argued that the “core” leadership was a fundamental feature of the Party, supported not just by previous leaders Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong, but in the teachings of Marx and Lenin. The article was widely republished in other mouthpiece media, including People’s Daily and Xinhua.
That so much energy would be poured into the matter of simple wording initially seems like a distracting footnote — but in fact the question of whether Xi Jinping is, or truly becomes, the “core” of the Communist Party is a crucial one. All previous Party leaders, except Xi’s immediate predecessor Hu Jintao, were granted the distinction. The title is a kind of official unofficial designation of having reached a pinnacle of power, meaning that less time must be spent in the endless compromise and consensus-building implicit in the alternative to rule by a “core leader,” which is “collective leadership.”
This style of collective leadership reigned during the era of Hu Jintao, though in hindsight many observers now believe the phrase is merely a useful expedient to conceal the influence of the former leader Jiang Zemin. If Xi Jinping wishes to break through the constraints of Jiang and his allies, three of whom still surround Xi on the Politburo Standing Committee, he himself needs to be crowned the “core” leader.
Fan’s article, titled “On Maintaining Core Consciousness From Three Dimensions,” asserted that indeed Xi Jinping is already the “core” of the Central Committee.
“With regards to the undertaking that is socialism with Chinese characteristics, the Communist Party of China is its core; regarding the Communist Party, the Central Committee is core, and regarding the Central Committee, the core is the General Secretary,” a tract from the winding piece reads.
Fan, who serves as in disciplinary and executive positions in the Party History Research Center attached to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, warned against divisions in the Leninist regime.
“Without centralized leadership, with each Party branch enjoying ’sufficient autonomy' to act as they please, then the Party has no option but to sink into disintegration,” he wrote. “It cannot become a solid and united organization or carry out unified action to achieve results in various types of struggle.”
