What’s New?: A Discussion of the CCP Sixth Plenum | Jude Blanchette, Diana Fu

[Music] this is steve orleans president of the national committee on u.s china relations and we've recently seen the conclusion of the sixth plenum of the 19th party congress where there has been a resolution with the very catchy title called major achievements and historical experience of the party over the past century so what we've done is gathered two of the leading experts i should say in north america since one of us is in canada on this and jude blanchett who is the freeman chair in china studies at the center for strategic and international studies and diana foo who is associate professor at the university of toronto in the monk school of global affairs and public policy what's most important of course what i should say about both of them is they are both members of the national committee's public intellectuals program where we spend an enormous amount of time selecting the outstanding young academics in north america mostly in the united states to serve in the program with a view of getting them to be public intellectuals that is getting them to participate in the public dialogue on china and on u.s china relations educating america about china and being a voice for education and this program today is a perfect example of exactly what our public intellectuals uh should be doing so i welcome you both uh and thank you for giving us so generously of your time and let me start out with diana so this is in the 100-year history of the chinese communist party this is the third time that we've had this kind of historical resolution talk about the first two times and what that tells us about this yeah thank you steve for that question and also for inviting me to join the program so what we've seen with the third uh historical resolution is that it basically sets the vision and tone for a new chapter in china's history which is the next hundred year of ccp rule and i would say that it's not necessarily um a surprising document but it is an important one it is an important resolution because of its timing because as you mentioned this is a historical juncture between the first centenary of the ccp the first 100 year 100 years of its rule and the second one and of course xi jinping is the helmsman leading the country into this new chapter and in doing so um has elevated himself to sort of the same uh pantheon of leaders as the two giants who issued the past two resolutions uh who are mao zedo and king and i don't want to go too much in the substance of the two past resolutions but i will say that the difference in this third one compared to the previous two is that there's a difference in substance and a difference in purpose so in terms of substance it's different from the other two historical resolutions because it is not trying to tackle a historical problem um and it is also instead of tackling a historical problem it basically centers on the major achievements of the party um and in the historical experience of the party and so it's different and basically it's summarized by you know a global times report that i was just reading basically that the party has proved to be great the party is glorious and the party is correct and i would i think that's a very good summary of what the substance of this the general gist of this resolution is but talk about the first two and why they actually occurred and then talk about why the party felt the need to have this one was it simply just an anniversary obviously the first two didn't occur on anniversaries of any sort they were driven by other factors so try to contrast those first two with this one i might kick that over to jude um and then i can speak more uh circle back to the his uh why why the communist party cares about history dude yeah sure um so the base assessment is a historical resolution is is meant to be used by a leader to solve a problem they have in front of them and so if we go back to the first time that a the history resolution had been utilized it was by mao zedong in 1945 when it came out at the seventh plenary session of the sixth central committee and and this is a really important time mao has just come off of a three-year rectification movement where he has been attempting to essentially beat off various lines of communist party thinking and strategy and so mao had essentially consolidated power after fending off some foes but now wanted to institutionalize that in in ideology and theory and thus comes in the history resolution which he passes where he now looks back on the party's experience but with a very precise goal of essentially declaring that there is only one line and it is mao zedong line and so he was fighting off there was a right up opportunist line there was a leftist deviationist line and mao was essentially saying there's only one way and it's my way the 1981 resolution was doing something fundamentally different in terms of its substance but still it had that same underlying purpose of being used by then deng xiaoping to essentially um forge a path forward by by quote-unquote dealing with the past and and very simply what dung understood is um you know after assuming power in 78 79 he knew that there was a lot of lingering baggage of the mao era that was weighing down the the reform and opening agenda and so what mao excuse me ferdinand slip what dung wanted to say was look okay i hear you we're going to deal with this maoist pass we're going to draw a line under it and then we're done it's time to move forward and this of course was when um i shockingly at the time but dung did admit some of the major mistakes that mao made but the aggregate conclusion was in the main mao was a a figure of of um of great importance to china his his achievements far outweighed his shortcomings and what's interesting just quickly is if you look back at mao excuse me dung's notes as he was reading various drafts of the 1980 resolution he's always pushing back against some of the more hard-line revisionist rhetoric against mao saying don't go too far here if you tear mao down too far the the foundation the ideological foundation of the party may be threatened so again resolution number one intraparty rectification and fighting setting the right ideological line resolution number two is about drawing a line under the maoist period and saying all right folks we're done with that time to look forward yeah i was living in china at the time of what i guess was the third plenum of the 11th party congress when this when dung engineered this this resolution and there was palpable tension that that people would almost be afraid you know i was there as part of reform and opening that people would be afraid to almost talk with me because the if they were they were fearful of a comeback of the cultural revolution of the maoist and that they would be taken down for having association with them at that point in time a foreign lawyer so there was need for this resolution but today why wait i don't know sadly none of us can go to china these days but i don't have a sense of this tension am i missing something just quickly i would say that every so the because we start with the baseline assessment that a history resolution doesn't have a a generic purpose it has a specific purpose based on the leader's needs at the time and i think quite clearly what xi jinping is trying to do is to say the challenges that lay ahead of the party over the next 15 years through this 2035 goal of building a modern socialist nation are fundamentally different from the challenges that the party has had to deal with and overcome over the reform and opening period and so we need to fundamentally reshift the way that we're looking at the role of the party but critically because these challenges are so great we need a steady hand on the tiller um i am the one to lead this era and i think at a more grandiose level xi jinping has been saying since the 19th party congress we're in this new era you know this is if it was if it was standing up under mouth is getting rich under dung it's now getting strong and so i think he sees the resolution as a way to really orient the troops towards that new goal but finally of course he wants to stay in power and you when we get the final text of the resolution we've just gotten the communique but you see within that clearly he's positioning himself as the the only man for the job who can lead this country uh over a longer time horizon so i think it's both personal preservation and expansion of power within the system but also about orienting everyone in the right direction which is what the previous two resolutions were needed to do why has the resolution not been published in full i don't think that's that unusual when you come out of major party convenings it's often a few days a lag time before you get the final text as a functional matter i agree it's a little curious obviously as they told us this was already well approved so the final text is sitting there um i i don't know functionally why they have these delays we um but it's not uncommon to have them i just don't know what functional purpose they serve to wait till early next week to release it one idea might be especially with the resolution you want the plenum to have its own time to soak in the messaging coming out of the plenum communique which is distinct although overlaps to some extent with the resolution then you have the resolution come out early next week so that way you're not essentially crowding out the the top line narrative from the communique which was one xi jinping is in charge and he's going to be in charge for a very long time if i might just jump in there uh steve just to go back to your question about why now and why this emphasis on history i think to extend on what jude has said about galvanizing the people to really be behind the next you know centenary and and be behind the next part of xi jinping's rule his third term there's also i had also been reflecting on upon this question of what purpose does revisiting history and making sure that everyone is digesting and propagating the correct history what what is that why why do that you know why i look to the past and i think that the answer to that is that it's very important for the party and for xi jinping himself to secure legitimacy not only through securing economic growth but also through securing people's hearts and minds and i think this is something that is um that has challenged me to think about chinese politics in a different way because a lot of people a lot of commentators at least previously have said that all china's ccp's legitimacy rests on gdp growth rests on continuous gdp growth and if that gp growth you know sort of stops or slows down then you know they're going to have a riot on their hands or social movement on their hands but i think also that that's true that economic growth and delivering material benefits to people is a very important part of legitimacy but i think what you see from this um emphasis on history not just in the plenum but in general on in xi jinping's broader political um agenda is that he really believes and the party really believes that people have to buy into their ideologies buy into the party's ideologies from at a heart level and i think that's why you see you you we should read the plenum in the context of a number of other kinds of uh references to history that that the xi jinping administration has really emphasized and i'll just give you a very very few quick examples that i think might help us um contextualize the plenum's focus on history number one is that the party is attacking historical nihilism which is basically any sort of critical narrative about the party's rule and so there's actually as of april of this past year there was actually a hotline set up for people to report on historical nihilism and so it's a tip line that allows people to report fellow citizens who distort the party's history and attack the leadership and basically says anything that's kind of off you know off off the books of what the official history is and there's also apparently a new law implemented to make it a crime to defame historical heroes um and besides that historical nihilism attack there's also what we've seen under xi jinping a reinvigorated drive for patriotic education now education is important civic education is important for any regime but the importance of patriotic education under she cannot be overstated because it's captured by the slogan instruction in revolutionary traditions must start with toddlers so you got to get at them young basically and you've got to make sure that people are learning the history of the party young and then thirdly this patriotic education has been accompanied by a push for red tourism you know touring red museums and memorials and she really makes a point of going to such places during his travels so i think what that all this is telling us is that history is important not just because you know the party wants to tell a good story about itself but it's important to consolidating uh she's power and to place himself as a historical figure within this broader narrative of china and that's that's one that's a central part of his consolidation of power for the third term do we know how many drafts this resolution went through and was there any kind of have we learned was there any resistance is there any resistance to this we will um the short answer is no but we what we will likely get as we got um after uh uh 19th party congress for example is we'll get some sort of report about the the drafting process so right now really what we would go off of is our nearest best example which is the the 81 resolution which in deng xiaoping's collected works you can go read what i think is actually arguably more interesting the red than the resolution itself is it's dung successive comments on the drafts of of the resolution which was then being written by huchaumu and that shows us that at least for dung the process started in march 1980 and the document was then released in uh what was it june 27 81 and i think it went through eight or nine major iterations dung also said that they put the draft to the full central committee now of course the thing with xi jinping is he doesn't always operate by the same procedures or standards and i suspect that timeline for dung's resolution was based on as you mentioned steve just the extraordinary sensitivities around dealing with mao that as you say xi jinping isn't dealing with i don't suspect that this was went through a year plus of of drafts and we don't know who the lead uh architect of this although you may imagine someone like wang would have been intimately evolved as well as the the internal historians in the communist party one final note though is we we saw as diana just mentioned a proliferation of historical writing and narratives coming out of the party over this past year including a major work on the a short history of the party that came out earlier of this year i have no doubt that these were going on in concurrence so i would imagine when we finally hear the timeline for this it would have been over the past you know six nine months it will undoubtedly say that xi jinping personally supervised this although in reality what we would know is it would be historians within the party apparatus probably with someone like wong hoon ning overseeing the sort of regular drafting with with occasional drafts being kicked up to xi jinping for for his uh for his input i think it's fair to assume that he read this quite a number of times and read it thoroughly and he did have his own edits i think that's that's a very fair uh if i might jump in again steve um you asked about you know resistance to it and it's hard to know it's hard to read internal you know party conflicts unless you're right there in the room but i think my sense is that um and aside from elite politics that normal people um that are consuming this story of china consuming this history of china in the line in the lead up to the centenary there was a huge propaganda uh boom uh of films right that accompanied the the party centenary and my sense is that at the grassroots level that ordinary people really do buy into to some of the storytelling and i and i think and i mentioned this because some of our audience might be interested in some of these films um these series i started watching a series called mining town i don't know if either jude or steve had a chance to to read uh to to not read it but to watch it but it got a huge like really really high support um uh from people like in terms of thumbs up um it was a huge hit with chinese audience and it basically describes the hardships of the party's most grassroots officials in the villages of tinhai which is a very underdeveloped region it was so poor in the 1990s that men in one family had to share a pair of pants so like one of the first episodes without spoiling it is like they have to actually take turns to wear pants and in this poor village you have this protagonist motherfu who is a young you know aspiring grassroots cadre who has to convince all of his fellow villagers to resettle the village to a region with better development prospects and it really shows the painstaking process through which grassroots officials um grassroots ccp members that cadres had to go through to pursue persuasion politics to persuade each and every one of these 60 families 59 families to move to a different part of um of of the of the province and i think that basically through these kinds of storytelling that's very vivid it connects to the ordinary people you know normal people are not going to be reading plenums uh neither americans nor chinese are going to be reading these draft documents so they're going to be digesting it from from these kind of you know propaganda films and really showcases the party's achievements through of poverty alleviation and of course this is something that she has um you know trumpeted as one of the successes of the of the first centenary which is that extreme poverty had been ended eradicated in 2020 so i think basically uh to the listeners who are not going to be reading the tea leaves um or don't don't read chinese that these these kinds of films with english subtitles available on youtube are a very good way to understand how the party wants to portray itself in its history those movies sound more interesting than reading through the communique i'm not sure how many people have had to plow through it but it's a it's not a gripping read um how should we what what are the policy implications for this either of you uh i think these are likely to be profound in part because this is undoubtedly trying to further consolidate or or put initial you know additional momentum behind some of these policy shifts that we've been seeing from xi jinping over the past year i would say that the history resolution will be the master narrative that will provide the sort of ideological sort of framing for whether this is common prosperity we've got things like the new development concept dual circulation and indeed in just the communique you see a lot of the themes that that are coming out about the world that china is now engaged with right so profound changes unseen in a century this complex and grim international environment the need to um shift the focus to qualitative growth over quantitative growth so when we get the full history resolution that master narrative will undoubtedly facilitate um policy implementation and i would say you know i was just rereading franz sherman's you know marvelous book on ideology in the communist party and you know he makes the really interesting point that you know part of the point of some of these documents sometimes when you have these vague communist-sounding slogans is they're designed to be discussed and debated over and over and over and over again in your party organization your party cell such that you start internalizing the message and it sort of interlinks with policies that are coming down from the top so you know i one way i'd think about this is about sort of greasing the skids for the policy moves that xi jinping is looking to be making and i think right now we're already seeing a pretty clear articulation of that policy agenda right now started at the 19th party congress by shifting that principle contradiction to this this this focus on on on qualitative growth and now you're really seeing the party emphasis behind it doesn't mean the end of capitalism doesn't mean the end of capital markets but it does i think usher in a more redistributive um era of chinese growth and that's why you're seeing a focus on let's say tax reform starting to starting to bubble up uh corporate tax property tax reform projects um various elements of of of a sort of immature welfare state that they're going to try to address i think all of these will flow from this new master narrative and just to pick up on sorry steve did you have a no go ahead okay yeah i was just gonna pick up on what jude was just talking about in terms of um common prosperity and now to circle back to something that you asked earlier steve about whether there's any contradictions or conflicts or debates within the party sort of the one indication we have of sort of a public debate um about you know one of xi jinping's landmark i wouldn't even say policy i would say it's a campaign for common prosperity is around it is around this common prosperity notion which is basically uh you know this redis calling for redistribution of wealth or at least the optics of redis redistribution of wealth so that the common people the regular law by have a good and prosperous life and they're not um they're not seeing you know the wealthy one percent grab everything and and that's sort of like one of xi jinping's major agendas for the next um for the next term and so he wants to basically tell people that this ccp this party is not just a party for the jock maws it's a party for the common people but the way he's gone about his administration has gone about it has really um sort of shocked some parts of the population and shocked observers right and hear i'm thinking about the crackdown on tech that we saw in the summer right that all of a sudden these these tech companies that had enjoyed a lot of priority and have been pushed forth to the um to grow by the communist party became the targets of the party all of a sudden and so earlier this year um you saw this fall you saw this a glimpse of maybe what was called the debate between a little known journalist like who wrote you know maybe this is ushering in a culture revolution 2.0 and then you had a response by uh of the global times attacking him and so maybe this is a indication of that there is tension within the party um we just have a glimpse of it from the outside but common prosperity and how that is achieved moving forward i think is something to be watching uh that we should be watching for yeah i think they're a bunch of signals that they're there's not a uniform view within the party one of the things we've been focusing on on the committee just in the last few weeks is kind of you know china has asked to join the cptpp they've asked to become a member of this digital economy partnership this is there has to be somebody who in the in on the party in the government who's willing to say this is good for china it seems so inconsistent with the laws that are currently being passed so it's almost as if they're speaking with two completely different voices and i think the voice of the sixth plenum is one which doesn't particularly side with cptpp advocates digital economy partnership advocates and a variety of other things which still seem to move ahead in in fits and starts i guess the next part is you know what does it mean for the home team what is what does this mean for uh u.s china relations um you know are there any implications do we just ignore it uh do we just take into account that obviously we're gonna be dealing with xi jinping for many many many more years i think that the the you know initial assessment is yes what you just said right we're i don't think anyone was baking in a leadership change anytime soon but this this well nye confirms that i think this the second thing too is you know there's this debate in the united states that somehow you know xi jinping is um uh is being boxed in by opposition or or he's he feels like he's running out of time because evergrand and you know energy crisis and and you know i think looking at the the rhetoric coming out of the the plenum i think it's pretty clear that xi jinping is sitting pretty good and so for the u.s that means we're dealing with a fundamentally confident leader i think this will be on display you know we're taping this just ahead of the the um uh the virtual tech attempt with biden and she and i think this is well understood by the binding administration that they're they're not dealing with a um with china from 10 years ago this is a much much more confident um and assertive china i also think you know to your point steve about thinking about some of the policy implications of this um it's it's really hard for me to see again with xi jinping now so so so commandingly in charge and now seeing the set of objectives that he has that china needs to achieve over the next decade which he thinks are going to be aided and facilitated by china's state capitalist model he's not walking away from that given the stakes you think about the conversation going on right now between leo and catherine ty i imagine it's easier on the tariff front when you once you start pushing through that which she has said one of their concerns is what she called it a state-centered economic model as being one of the primary concerns from the united states china ain't backing down from that by any stretch of the imagination in a very core way and xi jinping has been saying this over and over what's interesting to me is what you just said which is i almost feel like there's a bit of a bifurcation here between domestic and international policy and and the interesting space where i i sense xi jinping is more open to some technocratic input and a little bit more flexible is in thinking about international trade and investment regimes i don't sense that same flexibility from him in the in the domestic front great diana yeah i i mean i agree with uh pretty much what uh jude has said but i also wanted to point out that in addition to the us now dealing with this she that is more confident than ever i think you could add to that that the us is also going to be dealing with a chinese public that is more confident than ever in the achievements of the ccp and also in um in the achievements of of a strong leader that has led them out of uh covet in a way that you know that chinese perceived the us had leaders did not so um i think one of the interesting things that i've been looking at is a recent survey um which says that you know chinese citizens hold a very dismally low view of the us so it's not just that americans and canadians and you know other people whole western populations hold a dismal view of china that chinese also hold a very dismal view of the us and interestingly that china they believe that china is positively perceived by the world now that's a really interesting and surprising finding right that not only do they believe that the us is uh you know the bad guy but they also believe that other people outside of the uh us actually think that china is leading so i think what you're seeing is this increasing sort of divergence and public opinion increasing divergence and sort of the information bubbles that people get their information from and so and to the extent that public opinion does matter even for an unelected government in china i think that what you're seeing is that it's going to be very hard for people to see eye to eye when you have the public just going away polarizing views uh i'm polarizing you know opinions about the status of china and of america so i think it's gonna be it'll be interesting to see what comes out of this meeting um i think that there's low expectations um between uh biden and xi but it'll be interesting to see how they reconcile that if they can make any reconciliations based on given that there's such divergent views from the two different populations what did you make of the minor um and mild comments on hong kong and taiwan in in the communique um um yeah interesting um i guess i wouldn't have thought that the communique would be a document at which you would announce any sort of substantive change again this is where we're again we're recording before we get the full text on this um i don't suspect that there's going to be any any market shift on language on taiwan from what xi jinping forget the action but what xi jinping has been stating which is fairly consistent with the previous leadership but that will be they'll be very interesting to put under a magnifying glass especially on the taiwan issue because of course the big question right now is trying to get a sense of does xi jinping still feel like he has enough time um is there still a window here and we didn't get enough of that glimpse in the communique just had a line on you know crushing separatists but it did end by saying essentially we're we're in a position of strength vis-a-vis taiwan and i think in a way that's that's almost good to hear because it signals that they're still again officially assessing that they've got time on their side when they start declaring that tides are turning against them i think we'll we should start to get worried the communique talked about holding the 20th party congress arshad in the second half of 2020 22. uh what is that what does that mean when is it like would occur what are the uh contents going to be of the 20th party congress i'll take a stab first um i thought the the the vagary of that announcement was interesting i don't know if that's actually just a quirk of party language um um i guess they could have said the fall of of 2022 i think it's partly i would imagine that's just building in some flexibility and maybe getting to something we were talking about which is their concern over covid their extreme concern over covid on the zero tolerance approach they may have the equivalent of having a growth target of you know around six percent they may just be giving themselves some buffer but clearly if we're going by precedence we'll see it in october or or november which is which is the likely uh time here so i think on the timing i wouldn't read too much into it i think we're pretty well assured it'll be you know late it'll be um it'll be sweater season next year when when the plenum will occur in terms of what the substance of it will be i mean this is the big one right i think this is this is not an ordinary plenum excuse me an ordinary party congress this is a very specific purpose which is xi jinping is a student of party history he knows that that taking a third term in in china in 2021 is a pretty extraordinary event i suspect what he'll do is two things number one i think continue the momentum that he's building now about the the direction china is going um you've seen some of the the i think the verbiage already in the communique a man of determination of steel of excellence the wisest of the wise um but really what he's trying to say is now is not the time to swap out you know not to to hand over the tiller but i think more more importantly what he'll try to do to tie something that diana said is this is as much a public justification about the great glorious time ahead for china and so i think it will be trying to balance a little bit of look now is a challenging time let's not swap out the leader that's why i'm staying in but more importantly it's brighter days ahead and so i think this will be a celebration of how much china has achieved but this will be forward-looking into you know the next the 20 21st party congress or 20th party congress period of five years um in which we can expect bigger brighter shinier things from from a third term she administration diana yeah i i actually um don't have too much to add on that front in terms of predicting what will happen in um 2022 because you know the risk-averse side of me being a scholar says don't make predictions in case you're wrong however i do have something to say about hong kong and that's not particular to the plenum but i think that in terms of um you know circling back to this theme of you know the public justification of the ccp and of xi jinping i think hong kong is um is something to watch for in terms of being the most important um ideological battlefront for the ccp as we're as we're heading into 2022 2022 because the party in the past has tried to introduce patriotic education to hong kong they failed to do that in 2012 because of weeks of protests by parents and students over beijing's what they saw as beijing's attempts to brainwash children now following the 2020 national security law it'll be interesting and important to watch for how beijing is reintroducing patriotic education in hong kong because they need to they and this is captured and their goal in hong kong is captured by a a um quote by a beijing official that you know students educated in hong kong must not turn into individuals who only have a chinese face but do not carry a chinese heart and so i think the next goal in terms of you know securing support not just in mainland china but also in hong kong is that they got to make sure that the in the next generation there's going to be no more josh wong's or agnes ciaos or other young people that are going to be deviating from the party and they're going to start very young in hong kong so i think that's going to be something to watch for on the societal front and in the communique they said they want want to make sure hong kong is ruled by patriots exactly so it's precisely what you're saying we have run out of time but you have upheld the tradition of pip and done a fabulous job in educating our listeners on something that has i think been very difficult for americans to get their arms around which is the sixth plenum of the of the 19th party congress and looking forward or looking forward with interest at the the 20th party congress um in around a year from now but thank you both for being pimpers and thank you both for giving so generously of your time thank you steve

Channel: National Committee on U.S.-China Relations

Views: 11,675

Keywords:

Id: WBmf2qpFewA

Length: 38min 4sec (2284 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2021