Mainland China’s “new civil war” was not resolved with the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th Party Congress, which ended on Oct. 22. It just began its move to a new and globally significant phase.
China’s return to Maoism, mass suppression, and—as a tool of suppression—starvation, and internal focus moved into a major new phase with the reelection of Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping. Still, it was a close-run thing for him.
Xi was purging senior security officials up to, and into, the start of the Congress, and delayed the release of damning economic officials until after the event in order not to cast shadows on his final seizure of power.
Now the civil war within the Party moves into a new phase of fairly open suppression of Xi’s opponents and the broader public.
The damage to the international economy will be immense. The cost to the Chinese people will be immeasurably more severe.
The only parallel can be seen in Mao Zedong’s own suppression of opponents in the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and the earlier Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). Many tens of millions of Chinese people died—estimates range from 30 million to 60 million—in Mao’s efforts to suppress all opposition.
The enforced mass starvations of Maoist times can be seen as the progenitors of the current start of urban starvations caused by Xi’s “zero-COVID” lockdowns in the cities. And Xi has called himself—and is proving to be—a devoted Maoist.
The 20th National Congress ended as most people suspected it would: Xi secured a third term, and all of his opponents swept from the powerful posts in the Party. Xi’s certainty that he had defeated his opponents’ attempts to thwart his reelection was evident when he was able to purge a main symbol of opposition, his predecessor as general secretary, Hu Jintao, in a deliberately humiliating forced removal of the 79-year-old from the closing ceremony of the Congress.
Jiang Zemin, 96, the Party’s general secretary before Hu, did not even appear at the Congress. That was the first clue that Xi had triumphed, even as the Congress began. In the end, Premier Li Keqiang was also dropped from the Politburo Standing Committee, as were Standing Committee members Han Zheng (the Shanghai Party chief, loyal to Jiang), Party advisory body head Wang Yang, and Li Zhanshu, a longtime Xi ally and the head of the ceremonial National People’s Congress.
We may not hear from them again.
There were signs up and down the line that Xi had won this immediate phase of the “new civil war” within the CCP. The once fiercely independent South China Morning Post newspaper, in Hong Kong, published a slavishly pro-Xi piece by columnist Alex Lo on Oct. 24, titled “Unhealthy talk about mini-purge by Xi Jinping could not be further from the truth.”
Xi’s only divergence from old-style Maoism was in form, not in substance: He abandoned Mao’s “Little Red Book,” which was used to sloganize the masses. Xi replaced it with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, also known as “One Belt, One Road”). He knew Mao’s slogans could not rouse the world so he would transform the world with cash. BRI became the “little red checkbook.”
But it only worked until mainland China’s sudden mountain of wealth—created by Chinese entrepreneurs, not by the Party—was there to sustain the BRI’s often illogical loans and “investments,” all designed to buy friends rather than to guarantee a stable return on investment. So the initiative is now collapsing, along with the internal economy of the BRI.
So what happens now?
The purge of Xi’s most visible opponents—such as Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, Le Keqiang, and Han Zheng—was an attempt to “kill the snake by cutting off its head.” But massive opposition to Xi continues, some of it within the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Much of it will be driven underground by the removal of the visible opposition leadership. But there have been expressions of concern within the PLA that Xi might jeopardize everything through reckless actions abroad, including a military assault on Taiwan.
One particular question is whether Xi, now that he has achieved absolute dictatorship, would still feel an urgency to attack Taiwan and end the original Chinese civil war between the Communist Party and the Nationalists. That civil war, begun after the Republic of China (ROC) emerged from the Imperial era collapse in 1911-12, was never resolved. The ROC government retreated to Taiwan and other islands but was never conquered.
Xi wants to end that civil war—the “big” civil war—to ensure that there is no question that the CCP was the unquestioned victor over all of China. But with absolute dominance now over mainland China, he may ease the urgency on the highly-symbolic bid to destroy the ROC in Taiwan. A lot will depend on whether he can contain unrest within the mainland, where economic decline has dramatically motivated the urban population to protest.
A war with Taiwan might distract from that, or it might just drain massive military resources that would be needed to further suppress the domestic population.
But whatever else happens, the economy will now plunge even further, given the reality that Xi’s assumption of draconian power—even apart from his specifically anti-market policies—will drive away foreign investment and depress domestic consumption. Chinese demand for raw materials worldwide will continue to decline precipitously. The dreamers in Australia and New Zealand, North America, and Europe must now face the fact that the cash that China injected into the global economy has evaporated.
And Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, South East Asia, and Oceania all will see an end to China’s cash, even as Beijing steps up its threats and demands through “wolf-warrior diplomacy.”
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