China’s Xi Deflects From the CCP’s Failures, Warns Against ‘Defective Western Thinking’

Chinese leader Xi Jinping waves during a ceremony to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party at Tiananmen Gate in Beijing on July 1, 2021. (Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

News Analysis

An important philosophical article by Chinese leader Xi Jinping was published on Feb. 16 in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) official ideological journal, Quishi.

The timing of the piece’s appearance is not random, but rather comes at a critical time for Xi. It will expand upon the development of “Xi Jinping Thought” on the advancement of socialism in Chinese society. This occurs in the lead-up to a key Party congress in which Xi may seize an unprecedented third presidential term, subsequently laying the groundwork for his potential indefinite hold on power in China.

Xi’s governance concept was first articulated at the 19th National Congress of the CCP in 2017 under its full name, “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.” Building on his predecessor Deng Xiaoping and the incorporation of free market principles to build the Chinese economy, Xi announced the country’s return to a more directed socialist economy under the stewardship of the CCP.

Deng’s introduction of policies that facilitated a partially free flow of private capital in Chinese markets was heralded by many as a triumph of capitalism and economic globalization. By opening up the country to the world, Deng encouraged both foreign direct investment (FDI) into the country, as well as outgoing financial capital flows toward foreign markets. Combined with the operation of state-owned enterprises, China was able to accelerate its growth and simultaneously build a large middle class while becoming the world’s second-largest economy.

(L-R) Former Communist Party leaders Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin. (John Giannini, Feng Li/AFP/Getty Images)

Xi has subsequently clamped down on this system. Beginning with a cooling real estate market as well as a desire to address significant inequality in the health and education sectors, Xi has sought to assert tighter control over capital allocations in the Chinese economy in order to limit the power of private capital. He has additionally sought to direct resources toward sectors deemed to be matters of national security, such as chip and semiconductor production.

The general consensus is that this is primarily because Xi needs to account for the lower levels of economic growth in the Chinese economy, and reduce the inequality that could lead to civil unrest and potentially threaten the CCP’s hold on power. This only partially frames what is actually happening in CCP policy.

Depressed levels of economic growth are indeed the cause for systemic change in the latter; however, in addition to considerations of preemptively quelling any civil unrest, lower growth rates are additionally a likely signal to Marxist economic planners that the current stage of economic development is “birthing” a new one.

In Marxist philosophy, each stage of societal development—dictated by the prevailing mode of economic production—holds the seed from which the next stage will grow (for example, socialism will grow out of capitalism). The type of state capitalism, begun under Deng, was intended as a temporary stage in the economic development of China.

According to the dialectic forces that progress society in the Marxian historicism undergirding CCP thought, Xi must now reign in the free market forces that allowed the country to grow as precipitously as it has and direct the country’s resources toward facilitating the transition to socialism.

Xi’s article is reported to state that the country is now at a “critical stage” on the path to socialist development and must divert its attention away from unrestrained economic growth and toward “the rule of law in consolidating the [country’s] foundation.”

How will the CCP accomplish this?

“Staying particularly sober-minded and steadfast on major issues such as upholding the Party’s overall leadership and guaranteeing the running of the country by the people, and guarding against being misled by defective Western thinking.”

It is no coincidence that Xi is penning this piece in the wake of the widespread anti-Xi article that recently went viral in mainland China. The article pointed to the CCP’s human rights abuses and suppression of the private sector, among other condemnations of Xi’s leadership. The CCP subsequently has a growing incentive to discredit any criticism of Xi Jinping Thought and the clamping down of state control as “defective Western thinking.”

The need to discredit any criticism of CCP policy as fundamentally flawed will increase as the Party attempts to accelerate the socialist transition. Rules and regulations to constrain the free flow of capital will further diminish Chinese economic growth levels.

If Xi is able to overcome any internal Party opposition to consolidate his position at the helm of government for the foreseeable future, Beijing’s capital controls will counterintuitively stifle innovation and further depress growth levels. This will coincide with increased state control in all other areas of Chinese social life, as well as an economic shift from exports to domestic consumption.

People wear protective masks as they walk by an ad for French luxury fashion brand DIOR outside a new location set to open at a shopping area in Beijing, China, on Nov. 24, 2021. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

By following the Marxist playbook, the capitalist mode of production has created the necessary technological development and fixed capital acquisitions that are supposed to precede the emergence of socialism in China. Traditional orthodox Marxism predicted that this state would emerge as a natural result of the capitalist mode of production and its necessity for ever-greater capital accumulation and subsequent worker exploitation.

Like the Bolshevik movement in Russia, Beijing attempted to jump the development of its agrarian-peasant society through the necessary historical stages to socialism under the direction of a vanguard Communist Party. However, where the USSR failed to understand that the capitalist stage could not be bypassed, the CCP learned and adjusted.

Instead of unfettered private capital in traditional Marxism or ignoring capitalist accumulation in lieu of an entirely state-planned economy in Russian Bolshevism, the CCP chose a third way: the Party allows for a space in which free market forces create the necessary accumulation of capital, subsequently facilitating a sort of state-directed worker exploitation.

This process has allowed China to build the necessary productive forces that the USSR lacked. As Xi states his intention to hem closer to the socialist vision moving forward, the country will likely be entering a phase of significant income redistribution. This directly correlated with Xi’s stated goal of reducing inequality in the country.

The illusion of free capital in China untouched by the CCP was always that: an illusion. The Party crafted a system in which it has the final say in capital allocations, and subsequently the power to dissolve the capitalist class. This is the stage of development that it is attempting to enter. As the mass (lumpen) proletariat has failed to accomplish its historical role in the Marxist dialectic, the CCP co-opted the system in order to occupy the proletariat’s place in the latter process.

However, as the history of the CCP proves, forcing society through transitions comes at the cost of destroyed lives and rivers of blood. The Party has forced reality to correspond to philosophy, not the other way around. The coming “evolution” from capitalism to socialism will mean increased centralized control over not only economic, but all other societal processes as well.

Marxism’s failure to produce a socialist government that leads to a viable communist end-state has taught its adherents that Marx was wrong to believe that altering economic relations are enough to change the entire sociopolitical—for example, parliamentary democracy, religion, and culture—superstructure built upon it. Mao knew this when he entered China into the original Cultural Revolution; Xi and the current CCP know it as well, as evidenced by the increasing push for social and cultural control.

As Xi stated in his recent article, “The [coming] reform in the rule of law shall not blindly take the Western system or practices as a ‘benchmark.’”

Is Xi attempting to preemptively insulate himself from Western condemnation over the inevitably painful birthing process of socialism from China’s current state capitalist system?

Only time will tell.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.