'Xi Jinping Thought': China's Post-Communism Ideology

you know it's often said that china's president and secretary general of the communist party xi jinping is the world's most powerful man but given how much time we spend analyzing and thinking about china we still understand preciously little about the world view of xi and his inner circle what exactly is xi jinping thought which has been promoted in schools universities and the public sphere in china and how does it influence china's view on the world here today to help me answer these questions is professor steve zhang i'm thrilled that he is joining us today he is the director of the china institute at the school of oriental and african studies in london professor tzang is also an emeritus fellow of saint anthony's college at oxford and an associate fellow at chatham house he's a widely published offer on china's politics history and foreign affairs among many many other topics and of course his current research project is on the political thought of xi jinping professor tang thank you very much for joining us today well thank you very much nicole great pleasure and thank you for inviting me thank you very much we'll divide today's conversation into three parts first we will discuss the core tenets of xi jinping thought then we will evaluate how xi jinping thought influences china's global strategy and last we will discuss a few concrete examples of how this may or may not play out in the future to jump right in professor zhang we've been obviously hearing a lot about xi jinping thought you know over the last months and years it's something that has taken on a certain amount of prominence uh at least in in chinese domestic life but i found myself wondering as i was reading up on xi jinping thought that i wasn't quite sure of what it was how we would define it is xi jinping thought best thought of as a political philosophy is it a state ideology is it basically just a collection of things that xi jinping has said at some point what's the best way for us to conceptualize xi jinping thought well xi jinping thought was introduced to the world at the 19th party congress by xi jinping and the communist party in 2017 what i think it is meant to do is to eventually completely replace communism and become china's ideology at the moment i would call it perhaps a kind of a total ideology it's nearly there but not quite completely there and xi jinping thought is not just the ideas and thinkings of xi jinping himself um unlike mao zedong thought when mao jodong uh proclaimed it and pushed it to the communist party he had been leader of china for quite a while and had a long period of time to develop his concepts um jimping hasn't really quite done that he's not the kind of thinker that marjorito was but he has a very strong team of uh supporters led by huang hunning in the political standing committee who would essentially guess what xi jinping really wants and draft all the major statements that xi jinping had to make so even though a lot of the words were dropped by others they were adopted and approved of for issue in his name so they do effectively amongst what xi jinping want china and the rest of the world to think of as his ideology for the country now i'd like to dive a little bit deeper into you know what xi jinping thought actually says sort of the the beliefs and ideas that it promotes given that xi jinping thought is also as i mentioned at the beginning been promoted you know towards the chinese public in schools and universities i wanted to start by asking you do you have a good sense of what the average chinese person knows about xi jinping thought so if we were to make a survey and perhaps somebody has even done that um in you know like say a larger chinese city asking people what they think xi jinping thought is what kind of answers would we presumably get well we don't know i am not aware of any independent survey on what people in china think of xi jinping thoughts and how much they know about what xi jinping thought really is there there is an app in china that previously communist party members were required to download onto their mobiles and practice and therefore learn about xi jinping thought practically on a daily basis now others are being encouraged to do the same a lot of people don't take it very seriously i think we have to take it very seriously xi jinping meant what he says but we are also in a situation where we have in xi jinping a leader of a very very powerful authoritarian state who is very thin skinned he doesn't like anybody saying anything about xi jinping thought that is potentially embarrassing xi jinping is on a pedestal and he must be respected and admired as far as xi jinping and his close colleagues are concerned now if you had to briefly summarize the the contents of teaching being thought and i understand from what you said before it's in a way also something that's still developing so we may not know exactly of what xi jinping thought comprises but still you know there's certain things we can we can start to tease out so what are the main the main pillars if you want of xi jinping thought and how are they maybe different from uh you know from from most of the prevailing thinking in china before that so what are the new concept that xi jinping father is introducing well the first things to acknowledge about xi jinping thought is that from around 1989 onward old-fashioned communism effectively had collapsed as an ideology in china and even though leaders like zhang jimin and wu continues to refer to the party's commitments to communism or chinese socialism or socialism with chinese characteristics very few people in china took that seriously xi jinping changed that and a very important part of xi jinping thought is that this is now the new ultimate synthesized version of marxism which combined both what xi jinping understood to be marxism together with what xi jinping understood to be china's traditions and history and merged together into one so unlike your orthodox or older fashion marxism which is meant to be universal this chinese socialism of xi jinping is meant for china it's not for export it's a very synthesized to pull it politely or not so politely is a cyanocentric version of some form of socialism it's something which karl marx would not have recognized is something that confucius would not recognize neither would it would not be recognized by confucius as chinese it would not be recognized by karl marx as marxist but it is the chinese socialism that china will have to embrace everybody in china are required to do that the second important part about this social chinese socialism is the centrality of the communist party and is top leader xi jinping made it very clear in china doesn't matter whether it is north south east west or in the middle it doesn't matter in what life of what walk of life one is talking about the party needs everything no gift no but no exceptions the leadership of the party is absolutely at the center of it that it is only with the communist party and this is where that chinese socialism incorporates a party-centric nationalism into the whole thing that everybody in china gets to where it is because how the communist party has made china great again and through xi jinping thought it will guide china to reach the promised land when china will be truly great again when china will restore its rightful place in the world when the china dream of national rejuvenation would have been achieved when china would be in the center of the universe admired by all but there is that socialist street however imperfect which is genuinely there which guides the directions of trouble for china moving forward there's also the incorporation of the technical uh innovative technical science of it that china will want to be focusing on before we you've already talked a little bit about sort of you know the the the international global dimension um of xi jinping thought before we get there i do want to briefly given it's given the fact that it's as you said very sort of focused on china itself i do want to briefly talk about recent domestic developments and how they are connected to xi jinping thought so um a lot of things have happened in china over over recent months and i think maybe the one thing that we could pick out from that is the introduction of the concept of common prosperity which has been you know floating around for a while but i think has now really taken center stage in which depending on how it's interpreted kind of advocates at the very least a a distribution of wealth that is less unequal than the one we have today i think the the interpretations i've read sort of stopped short of like you know calling this communist it's still very much rooted in the kind of market oriented thinking that has dominated china recently how how is how if at all is common prosperity linked to xi jinping thought is it an outflow of xi jinping thought is it a part of it is it sort of a parallel concept how should we connect these two well it is of your xi jinping thought now um and the common prosperity is really actually a very interesting concept because if we are talking about um a true socialist then a basic expectation is that's the core socialist concept of from each according to one's ability and to each according to one's need will have to be there it will have to be the starting point of it and given that china is a londoness political system where as xi jinping would put it everything is under the leadership of the party how could you have allowed such great disparity of wealth and incomes to come into existence to begin with okay xi jinping inherited that but why can he not simply use taxation and administrative means for the redistribution of wealth and income and therefore achieve some element of that social socialist ideal to which in the context of the 21st century the most basic would be some form of a welfare state now xi jinping does not accept a welfare state as something which china under the communist party should aim to achieve in the foreseeable future i don't think he has completely read out totally forever but it is simply not on the political agenda at the moment that redistribution is more for reducing the gap of the disparity and making the party look good because after all requiring steam really super rich to give to charity but not specifically requiring which charity and how much is a very inefficient way to redistribute unequal wealth and income the party has the means to do that much more effectively as chosen not to because ultimately the priority for all that is being said about xi jinping thought being the new ideology is not the ecological commitment to socialism but the commitment to keep the communist party in power and able to command the support of people in china and common prosperity delivers that at least in their conception because it makes the party looks good it comes across as a kind of the 21st century populism which xi jinping actually rather likes let's move on now and talk about you know what xi jinping xi jinping thought can tell us um about how china's global strategy will look like maybe first you know you've talked about sort of the the ultimate goal um of teaching thought and and china's current leadership you know sort of achieving um rejuvenation uh and sort of interpreted that as you know china being at the center of the world and and well liked around can we dive a little bit deeper into this and can you maybe tell us in your view what does xi jinping thought tell us about how the chinese leadership obviously including xi jinping sees the world what kind of world view is embedded in xi jinping thought okay um xi jinping thought aims to achieve the national rejuvenation of china encapsulated in the idea of the china dream the ways to achieve it is to secure the uninterrupted rise of china in contrast to under fujian tao the peaceful rise of china now under xi jinping it is the uninterrupted rise instead of china requesting and requiring the rest of the world to pay it due respect xi jinping now simply comes out and demands the rest of the world pay it due respect what kind of a world does xi jinping want now xi jinping does not want china to replace the united states as his sole superpower in the world with all the packages that it also imply because the u.s positions much whether you like it or not whether you find it positive or negative carries a lot of packages including a lot of international obligations which this sole superpower has to show that xi jinping has no intention to see china being put in that position xi jinping's concept is a kind of a return to that mythical traditional chinese concept of a tensha all under heaven when china was that mythical celestial empire that china by its superiority both of its political systems and is culture and civilizations became practically the center of the universe to which every other country would look up to respect and admire because when he talked about the um points of reference for china's greatness we are looking at the high chain the height of the empire of the manchester imperial dynasty in china empire of the manchester ching dynasty or going back a bit then you have your town or you have your han or indeed the very first chinese emperor the first emperor of china chinchi wang di i mean those were the kinds of morals that xi jinping would look up to there's a bad interpretation of history history was a bit much more complicated than that and that um all under heavenly concept with the rest of the world all looking up to and admiring the the emperor of china simply was more of a mythical construction than historical reality but xi jinping has to have monopoly of the truth and history his version of history is now that is being taught in china what i find very interesting and and wanted to pause them for a minute is that what you're saying is that if we look if if we were to try to place china's ambition um on a spectrum you know where on the one end you have you know like wanting to rule the world becoming a u.s style hegemon and then on the other side of the spectrum we'd have you know just just being content with having domestic stability but not wanting to exercise any influence um internationally at all what you're saying is that china not so much is seeking not so much is seeking to place itself somewhere in between those two polls but it's actually seeking to go like almost on a on a different dimension of what you described kind of as this mythical place um where it's you know where we have a situation of kentia where china kind of like rules but not by sort of uh by exercising direct power but just by sort of being the focal point of the world is that is it is that sort of would that be an accurate summary of what teaching thing thought encompasses um pretty much i think i think what we have to bear in mind is that often we look at china using western intellectual methodologies and western concepts and western experience as benchmarks china under xi jinping doesn't do that china engages the rest of the world on china's terms doesn't want to engage with the rest of the world on western or other people's terms so you have this concept of china actually to playing a sort of two level games on the one level it does engage with the liberal international order that we have since the end of the second world war make the most of it and use it to the advantage of china which china has done spectacularly successfully in the last 20 years or so and it will continue to do so but at the same time it also wants to make sure that it does not get into inquisition mass the trap or simply having to follow that so it wants us different ways eventually to engage with it um on the basis of the existing order modifying it rather than completely changing it but if it modifies sufficiently then you get into a situation where china can be the top dog in the world without having to carry all the packages of the previous top dog or the existing top dog which happens to be the united states of america and and that's why i think that's sometimes uh u.s u.s centric colleagues looking at it as china just trying to squeeze america out replacing america or your physicist trap concept gives a slightly distorted impression of what the chinese government wants to do which also provided basis for the chinese government to say that no this is not what we are trying to do which in a sense they are right that's not what they're trying to do they're trying to do something else where you have pretty much this similar result would be that it means ultimately that china expects and wants to be the top dog now whether it will ever get there it's a different story i'm simply saying that that would be something that xi jinping would be rather comfortable with professor zhang one thing that i wanted to ask you about is there's often this conversation about china being a reformist or a revisionist power and you've also written uh about that and i think it sort of fits neatly into this uh conversation which is having now because these terms are sort of being used a lot i think it would be helpful also for for people to get a quick definition so what do we mean when we describe china as either reformist or revisionist what's the difference between these two states i think when we talk about whether whether china is a revisionist power um we on the one hand is contrasting it against whether that is a status quo power china is not a status quo power but a revisionist power would be expected to go and change the rules a reformist power does not necessarily wants to completely change the rule it wants to adjust the rules modify it to make it work to its own advantage or in a different kind of way which we have seen the chinese government doing uh as i say quite effectively in the particularly in the last decade but i would say a bit over the last decade it goes beyond xi jinping in fact it really uh is closer to more likes 20 years let's before we before we then turn to to audience questions i do want to we sort of talked about this sort of in a way sort of on a theoretical level of looking at what xi jinping thought um sort of says in in theory let's apply this now maybe to a few examples and let's try to play through or think through um you know what an application of shishan thing thought the way you have laid it out um would really mean and and i think the one thing that we certainly talk about which because it's on a lot of people's mind of course is the case of taiwan now one could say you know since you use this term of uninterrupted rise that given that you know there's there's there's maybe under this logic a heightened risk if you want of a military conflict involving taiwan because leadership of the chinese mainland would not have won its rise to be interrupted by not being able to reabsorb taiwan on the other hand you also laid out you know that it's necessarily for not necessarily for china about exerting direct force instead of you know acting as a hegemonial power so in the case of taiwan how should we think um about that what is the sort of what is the logic on taiwan as it's being dictated by xi jinping thought it doesn't mean that that's necessarily what's going to happen but sort of if we if we take the ideology seriously what should we expect to happen very very worried i think we really need to be very very concerned about uh taiwan with the articulations of the china dream of national rejuvenation and the underlying of the descriptions of taiwan as the sacred territory of china how can xi jinping claim that he has delivered the china dream without securing in his terms the return of this sacred territory of taiwan now there are huge amounts of contradictions inherent in what is being said and with history because believe it or not um one of the earliest and most vocal advocate of the independence of taiwan was the communist party of china itself and it did so all the way through from the 1920s into the 1940s and even at the sixth party congress held in moscow in 1928 it even issued a clear document saying that the communist party of china united with the third communist international to come in turn um truly support the independence of taiwan and his people struggle for independence so there's nothing to stop jinping going back on that uh his historical position of the communist party but it's not going to happen because of that particular uh presentation of taiwan and also because of the geo-strategic importance of taiwan's uh to china today and the change to the political system to how the political system operates in china in the last five years for about 20 years after the collapse of communism in eastern europe and then the soviet union which happened in 89 to 91 the communist party of china had managed to avoid one major policy avoid making one major policy mistakes that could potentially destabilize the system so it was an enormous achievement and they achieved that by having a collective leadership and steadily increasing the scope of internal policy debates all those change at the 19 party congress of 2017 when xi jinping effectively put it closed to collective leadership and internal policy debates now the politburo standing committee the public bureau and essential committee or echo chambers who amongst the military and other political leadership in china would dare to contradict xi jinping and challenge him over taiwan so there's nothing now to stop xi jinping going for taiwan so that is something which is going to be very risky and if that should happen it means putting china and the us on opposite sides of a military confrontation it means completely disrupting the global supply chain china and taiwan both independently and collectively are the two most important parts in the global supply chain so even if the rest of the world are not involved a military confrontation between china and the united states over taiwan is going to cause economic upheaval globally so this is something that we have to make sure that we can effectively deter xi jinping from trying to do so if not then we will be looking at a crisis the like of which we have not seen since the end of the second world war thank you very much let me now turn to some audience questions and and again to the audience please keep those questions coming um we'll make sure that we can answer as many of them as possible over the next 15-20 minutes or so let me start by one asking about what xi jinping thought means for the chinese tech sector and the way the question is phrased here is that obviously the tech sector has been under pressure um references here checkmark being of alibaba being effectively silenced um but also mentions that sort of the let's say stronger global adversity that we often see vis-a-vis china is a little bit of a problem for a chinese tech sector that still you know sees vast potential in you know expanding globally and globalizing its products and standards so how should we think about the trade-off between these two things of sort of a state ideology that tries to be more assertive that sort of tries to focus um everything towards china but also its economic need in the tech sector but maybe also elsewhere of um not just continuing to engage with the world economically but trying to export to a certain extent on own products and services do these two things eventually end up in conflict with each other well innovation and kind logical advancements are very important parts of what xi jinping wants to promote in china and here he also wants to make sure that the innovative and technological advancement capacity of china are not at the mercy of the west or other foreign countries he wants china to be both independent and indeed a leader in both now the difficulty here is that while that is very much a priority a very very top priority in xi jinping's china or under sieging thought is to maintain the communist party's leadership and control in china across the world nobody no company no sector is allowed to challenge that so we had in fact a situation where the tax sector were being given a lot of scope it was if you like the equivalent of the wild west for a long time in china for development and you had the emergence of giants like alibaba and tencent and huawei and the rest of them now among all those huawei was a model company for the chinese government it doesn't it doesn't do anything the chinese government disapproval alibaba got into trouble when jack ma make that infamous speech in front of global luminaries in the financial sector talking about the chinese banking regulator financial regulators having a pawnshop mentality nobody is allowed to embarrass the communist party or his top leader internationally like that that's triggered a response from a leadership in china until xi jinping basically authorized that jack ma could be taken down a knot or two jack ma was untouchable but once that was being done the whole regulatory regime in china started to do their job because the chinese regulators have been uncomfortable with the way how a lot of the tech companies and particularly the fintech companies have been operating in china because while they were innovative they were also reckless they were doing the sort of things that if they were happening in the uk or the us or switzerland our regulators will have problems with once that opening was allowed we saw that regulations being pushed very much ahead but yet at the same time there are limits being put in there and xi jinping is not allowing those companies to go bust so he's trying to maintain a kind of balance of continue to support the tax sectors to uh be innovative and flourish but within the lead the limits of coming under the leadership of the party and not challenging that let me maybe follow up here with another audience question that i think is a good is a good add-on to this um the question asks about essentially acceptance of the communist party and you know implicitly through that xi jinping thought within the chinese middle class so on one hand you know we've as you very well described we have this uh state ideology that strongly emphasizes centralized leadership by the communist party that you know centralizes uh that the parties sort of above everything on the other hand you know the last decades of economic growth have created a wealthy affluent middle class which may or may not you know at a certain point resent sort of that kind of um that kind of all-consuming um stage rule is there any reason to believe that at some point sort of this current ideology of xi jinping thought would be subjected to stronger criticism at home it doesn't seem like it right now but is that a possible future scenario well anything can happen in this world i think with covet 19 we have all learned the lessons to never say never um but having said that i think the prospect of xi jinping thought or xi jinping himself coming under criticism in china in the foreseeable future we're talking about 5-10 years time kind of tampering is almost inconceivable unless we are seeing something very dramatic that happens in china a kind of disaster scenario when the economy was in a nosedive and could not be stopped that whatever the government says in terms of government statistics of how well china is doing people simply cannot make uh ends meet and are hugely suffering so much so that they don't care any longer about what the repressive uh machines of the party states can do to them but unless we are looking at that kind of scenario no um xi jinping is not to be touched xi jinping is not to be criticized if something goes wrong in china it is because somebody lower down the food chain some card rates were corrupt or some countries were not responsible enough who makes some mistakes which the top leadership under xi jinping would fix xi jinping is demigod in this conception it cannot be wrong what in your view or is there anything within xi jinping thought that would tell us about uh the current leadership's view on other other forms of political organization such you know as like a liberal democracy again i understand that very likely that's not a main a main aspect of xi jinping thought and certainly not something they want to move towards but is there anything within uh the ideology that can tell us why the chinese leadership thinks that this would not be a good model for china beyond the fact that it would uh it would it would impact the absolute rule of the party is there is there an effort i guess is what i'm trying to ask and what the question from the audience is is there an effort made sort of ideologically to explain why that's not a good uh form of political organization for current day china well xi jinping or his advisors will simply say that seek truth from facts are you blind can you not see how superior the chinese system under xi jinping is have you not noticed that western capitalism under western democracies took the world to the global financial crisis for which it was china under the communist party that saved it have you not seen how your so-called leaders of western democracies the united states behave under donald trump and the americans still don't know whether they are going to get trump back or not and have you not since the mother of democracies the united kingdom getting something like boris and what do we have in china we have xi jinping and the communist party when was the last time we make mistakes like boris or donald trump and a whole lot of others they genuinely believe that the chinese system now is superior to western democracies they just need to educate the people in china to fully understand that and appreciate that and they will be very proud of china under the communist party i mean that is an important part of xi jinping thought and that is where this chinese depart from traditional socialism which was fundamentally a universalist concept the communist party of china and this egyptian does not seek to export chinese socialism because you have to have the communist party of china and the chinese people to make it work others may not be able to ah but then we can still be an inspiration for the others we will share china's experience to form the chinese solutions to problems in the world without exporting chinese socialism as the soviet union used to do during the cold war now you mentioned a few times as just now you know sort of this i think very important distinction of this not being a a thinking a philosophy an ideology that is designed for exports so to speak it's very sort of if you want indigenous to china and supposed to be there um at the same time as we've discussed it does have certain ramifications for how china interacts with the world and given this sort of idea of china being the center of everything under this um under this ideology what is the best strategy for other countries other nations to interact with china right we are still we're in an interconnected world there are global problems that need to be addressed and they can only be solved if china is a part of the solution of course climate change is um is first among those but pandemic response is probably going to be a close second um there are many others so you know assuming you know sort of understanding xi jinping thought correctly what would it tell us about what the best way is to productively collaborate with china in areas where productive collaboration is a necessity well i think there are two things here one is that diplomacy is needed the most when we need to engage with people or countries that do not agree with us diplomacy is less in demand among friends it's more in demand among non-friends so the more that we see china as being competitive with us the more we require diplomacy to engage with our eyes wide open because they have the same approach they are not naive they are not stupid they know what they want to do and they now have built up a huge amount of capacity to support what they try to do the second bit we need to bear in mind is that we are not in a new ideological confrontation with china as we were during the cold war between the so-called capitalist world of democracies and the socialist world of communism under the soviet uh leadership that era is gone we are not getting to return to that but we are in a beauty contest the beauty contest is between whether the democratic systems are in the long term better for people or whether the kind of very efficient autocratic near new nailed totalitarian system that china has is more able to make things better for people um china is not exporting chinese socialism but xi jinping's foreign policy is to make the world safe for authoritarian states a world that is safe for authoritarian states is a world less safe for democracies and let's also be realistic that vast parts of the world are neither democratic in the way that western europe and north america are nor are they very efficient uh autocratic system like what china is most of them are somewhere in between which which size they see us better for them is something that they will make judgments on the basis of what they see so if western democracies continues to be in the kind of trouble with the producing uh irresponsible and very bad leadership like the donald trump administration or the boris johnson administration we are not going to be able to compete successfully with china and we would not be able to engage with china on terms that we would like to in order to resolve some of the shared global challenges and problems we will only have that leadership role if we can persuade the rest of the world and indeed china that we are worth listening to so we have to win that beauty contest we have to put our own house in order we also have to acknowledge that this very sinocentric approach of xi jinping's to uh both domestic politics and foreign policy will fundamentally weaken china's efforts to build up his soft power and we have to allow scope for that effect to play out i mean hypothetically think about this if china did not have a foreign ministry no diplomat in the last two years none nothing that chinese diplomats has said in the last two years were said will china not today enjoy a higher international standing than it actually does today the unleashing of wolf warrior diplomats has done far more to damage china's standings than anything any western political leaders has managed to do in the last two years we should learn that lessons too i think let me just say before we move on i think that's an excellent thought experiment i had never thought about it this way but i think that is a that is actually very good way to think about it also as we know sort of continue to observe observe china's china's diplomatic behavior i wanted to put another audience question towards you the question asks about the probability of china moving into the direction of what the questioner calls a 21st century probably less disruptive version of the cultural revolution now i'm not entirely sure how that would look like so let me maybe broaden the question a bit to asking [Music] what are the chances what's the likelihood of xi jinping thought and the changes it brings with it of seriously and and possibly adversely affecting everyday life of chinese citizens because one could argue that so far xi jinping thought has had preciously little impact on you know the daily lives of people in china uh life is going on the economy is still growing so why should they care about uh xi jinping thought is there a chance that this will change at some point but due respect i i disagree with that i think xi jinping thought or xi jinping rule or the two together are already changing how people uh live their life in china the overall atmosphere in china is getting a lot more restrictive curriculums from kindergartens to universities are being changed the way how the party operates is being changed the scope for individual freedom has been changed an entire breach of human rights lawyers that we saw in china in the in the in the 20 years before xi jinping have been practically wiped out descent is gone so people's life are being changed businesses now realize that they have to be prepared that if and when this the parties they want their particular business they will need to know what to do they will need to be in quotation marks patriotic and be willing and happy to hand over their business to the to this day now all these are significant changes but will xi jinping bring back a kind of a cultural revolution in a 21st century context now that i would say no um this is where xi jinping really is very different from mao zedong he is not attempting a maoist restoration mao was could be very undisciplined and uh willing to accept and embrace indeed chaos and mao did destroy the communist party uh in the cultural revolution because he basically threw a tantrum xi jinping is a very highly disciplined arguably perhaps the most disciplined londonist in the communist party's history in china the leninist is about party and party discipline the party is right at the core of everything xi jinping wants to do he will not turn on the party and risk destruction of the party and therefore the instrument with which he needs to deliver his china dream and the cultural revolution was a maoist attempt to achieve maoist vision for china at the expense of the party not a kind of prospect that xi jinping would even contemplate you mentioned at the very beginning of our conversation you know that xi jinping thought may be named after one person but it's not necessarily all coming from this one person in fact it's kind of a team effort uh you mentioned uh um who's sort of usually credited as being sort of the the chief ideologue um within china's inner circle but but there are others so given the fact that um xi jinping thought is not you know flowing from this one person how should we think about the often discussed fact that xi jinping is very likely to be reelected for a third term um in a little less than a year um and there's no clear view on how a succession um should it at some point become become necessary would play out so is is you know the centrality of xi jinping thought in uh chinese political thinking and increasingly also daily life gonna make it eventually harder to have an orderly succession um after xi jinping leaves well i think that's a reasonable projection that you are making on current trajectory um the one words that i would be slightly more uncomfortable and comfortable using is the word elec uh xi jinping will not be elected the leader for the third term xi jinping will make himself the leader for the third term and the rest will simply fall unite cut their hands and applaud that and the elections implies that people actually have a kind of a free choice and it was by the popular will of those in the electorate that result in it i i think that is sort of a misleading use of the of the term now once xi jinping effectively broke the constitutional convention of two terms 10 years as leader then there's nothing to stop him staying on as leader indefinitely with every um party con congress cycle as a formality to reaffirm his rule that is of course unless something happens dramatically that would allow others to come up and challenge his authority and remove him so sort of that kind of scenario he is going to be leader for life in china and in this kind of political system the most dangerous place to be is to be the annoyed successor nobody would want to be put in that position and we already saw that um a glimpse of that in the nineteen party congress when huchenhua who has been widely tipped as a potential next generation leader of the communist party was in the runnings to become promoted from the public bureau to become the public standing committee member and at the 19th party congress he let me belong belongs that no he was very happy being a political member and wouldn't like to be a peripheral standing committee member because given his age and profile the mere risk of being seen as a potential successor to xi jinping would be politically so risky that he was smart enough not to allow himself to be put in that position you are not going to have a lot of others moving forward who would want to be put in that position at all so i don't think we are going to see a really credible succession plans being put in place whatever xi jinping may thought of others wouldn't be keen to be put in that position it also means that if everything goes according to xi jinping's planned there will be no successor when biology finally dust is worked and we and when xi jinping sees being leader of china we will see a rather chaotic situation for succession the death of stalin movie i think would probably provide the best projections of what might be the most likely scenario something that we really don't want to see happened in a country of china's significance but having said all that my uh caveat is that linear projections in history never work particularly if it goes beyond 10 years if you go back to 20 years nobody's prediction of what where china would be 20 years from 20 years before materialized from today well uh professor zhang your statement that linear projections in history never work i think is a very very good point uh to end this fantastic conversation i think that's something that we should all write down and remember every time we talk not just about china but about many uh many many things that happen in our world this was incredibly enlightening and fascinating there would be so much more that we could talk about but let's end the conversation here thank you to you professor zhang for spending your time with us and for all your insights thank you to everybody who's joined us today um for being here and for all your fantastic questions i hope we we could answer at least some of them um i know there were many many more

Channel: Asia Society

Views: 47,316

Keywords: current affairs, program, asia society switzerland, taiwan-china relations, ideology, china's economy, china, china's influence, xi jingping thought, xi jinping, nico luchsinger, Steve Tsang

Id: cMvRxxkXnQ8

Length: 54min 19sec (3259 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 14 2021